Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - January 2023 With Nina Matsumoto

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Recorded on the eve of our first live show since 2020, we're joined by Nina Matsumoto (check out her Sparks! Future Purrfect graphic novel) for this month's community podcast! We're recovering from the new year celebrations with some reactions to Simpsons news, deep dives into all the movies and TV we watched over the holidays, and we respond to some of our favorite Patreon comments. So listen here as we carefully read from a teleprompter! Support this podcast and get over 100 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Mackie still holding out hope for still Nash and Young who's here with me today as always it's Henry Gilbert still not nominated for a WGA award yet rats who do we have also on the podcast as well hi Nina Matsumoto I'm here because Bob and Henry you like me a lot not because I am married to one of the hosts is that correct yeah

sure okay even if you weren't married to me you would have me on right it's it's been proven in the past uh Uh-huh. Yes. And yes, this is our weekly, or sorry, monthly community podcast. Every month we talk about what's happening in the Simpsons world and in our world. And then we go over the questions and comments from the most recent round of episodes. If you're on the free feed, this is happening at the beginning of the month.

If you're on the Patreon feed, it's happening at the end of the month. And welcome to 2023. And it's been an eventful year so far in terms of tragedies i guess uh yeah though also we hit the ground running again after we got back to recording but also yeah as as for uh the holidays and new years they were also full of uh travel uh hijinks uh but eventually we we had a good time yes and yes nina is here because she's a simpson expert first but also wife second also had to be in town hello uh and that third yes i'm i'm here deal with it yes what i say and nina will be uh so we're we're like a day before our live shows that i'm sure went incredibly well yeah it's uh you're hearing well actually if you're hearing this on the patreon we

haven't done it yet on the free feed we just did it and you're gonna hear it next week but yeah we're uh all excited for our delayed by an entire year uh sf sketch fest show we're doing with matt chrisman and uh yeah we've also we we we had a little fun uh before yes we just came from a pizza and beer dinner so it's gonna be it's gonna be a looser show uh by the way sketch fest shows we we sold out our first show. So thanks to everyone out there for buying tickets. And yeah, two shows. I can't wait to do them. I'm sure they went very, very well.

I predict they'll go well. 13 standing ovations. Just like Dumbo's clown show. I thought they shut down the venue because of you guys. We were so good. They decided no more comedy. It's going to close forever. Let's get into news, The Simpsons news. Like I said up front, a few sad news items and one

from someone who might not be notable to you or like, I mean, was kind of below the radar for us or off the radar for us, was a very important member of The Simpsons family. And that was Chris Ledesma. He was The Simpsons music editor from episode one he was from the very beginning until episode 734 he left the show last year uh we assumed you know well you know early retirement he's just moving on to different things it turns out he was a little sick and he did pass away uh recently at the age of 64 but yes music editor for like almost the entire run of the simpsons up until recently it was sad to find out that that's why i left the show you know last year there were those very sweet pictures i i definitely saw selman uh matt selman and carolyn amine share the pictures of it of them buying him a nice like retirement cake and cutting it with other you know simpsons characters and music notes on it it was out of nowhere like it was the obituary came out later but it was

announced via the post credits on that week's episode of simpsons that it said rip chris ledesma and it was him drawn in to uh sit between the rest of the family and i was like wait i thought he just retired no like yeah i mean until we started doing research on the pot on the show for the podcast we didn't really know who chris ledesma was either but he's he's a key part of the simpsons history yeah he's one of those guys like uh travis powers who is just essential to how the show sounds but is uh to most people just like off the radar because he's not a voice actor he's not a writer he is a member of the production. And Nina is taking lots of photos of us.

For the Insta. Yes. I'm in my typical podcasting posture, a.k.a. Mr. Burns stance. No, I mean, yeah, the Ledesma thing. There were some fun stories shared afterwards. One of my favorites was seeing Mike Scully. He mentioned it on the commentary back in the day day but it was funny to hear me tell it of when you two came in to sing their part of the the garbage man can that they weren't feeling it and that Chris Ledesma who is not a rock guy and wasn't like starstruck by them just kept going like come on guys smiles like to say that to Bono and the Edge two of the biggest rock stars alive

and if you want to know more about his career he kept up a blog until 2020 called Simpsons Music 500 just it's just SimpsonsMusic500.wordpress.com you can also search for like Chris Ledesma blog to bring it up and it's an account of his time on the show and yes it's probably the most uh you know personal account from his own voice you can read about like his time on the show and what exactly he did which was an instrumental role on the show. Yeah, I'm thankful that we have his blog to go by. It's not just about the composer for most of it. Alf Clausen

music editor does a whole lot on Simpsons and I'm sure the person who replaced him is doing a great job but RIP Chris Ledesma. You did great, great work for the entirety of the series up until last november from the very first episode and yes r.i.p chris ledesma you'll be missed uh

we're still roaming the graveyard in terms of news items and another simpsons connection uh passed away recently and that is a two-time guest star david crosby of course of crosby stills nash and young he was a guest star in both margin chains and Chains and Homer's Barbershop Quartet. It's when, like a few times in season four, they got a person in and they were on like two episodes. Like, hey, as long as you're here, David Crosby. But yeah, he passed away at 81. And I forgot that he is the biological father of two of Melissa Etheridge's children. That's right. He's the

donor for the... Yes, I forgot. Many a joke was made about this. I bet. I think people said like, what, of all of the... I mean, he's a musical genius. Not the most attractive man, but... He was very Brimley-esque, let's say.

Hey, I hope to look as good as him when I reach his age. But he had some great tweets. He was a good tweeter. Now Nina's standing up. We're going to narrate what she's doing. Unprofessional, off mic. No, no.

And I think I learned who David Crosby was because of the show and the multiple jokes they did about his alcoholism, which he overcame. They were not mocking a man who was suffering from alcoholism they were they were doing jokes about his uh sobriety but the gag of like that he is lionel hutz's sponsor on the phone or that barney only knows him for his drinking you're a musician yeah that was more of a yoda voice i'm sorry it's been a long day it's pretty close yeah and uh yeah rip David Crosby and Chris Ledesma so in happier

news there was at least one new episode worth talking about my life as a vlog another interesting high concept episode where the family they all become influencers and it's all told through interrelated YouTube videos and it features two notable drag queens now Henry and Nina

are part of the... You're in the drag queen fandom. I'm not. Not because I'm full of hate, but because I have too many interests. I've heard what you said about drag queens. Maybe you can talk more about... Well, I think they're too mean to each other.

Yeah, that's all you said. That's part of the bit. That's part of the bit. Let's all get along, drag queens. But what's going on here with this episode? Well, Nina knows Monet X Change and Bob the Drag Queen a little better than me. I've watched every season of Drag Race. Wow. no my my husband is the bigger drag race fan but i i've gotten

into it a bit through through my husband but yeah they it was funny seeing them they've been doing this a lot this season though of like oh we have a big guest star in the last 30 seconds like you're waiting the whole i was reading the whole episode for monet exchanger Bob the Drag Queen and it's at the very end of the episode. Okay. Yeah. But the episode itself is an interesting one of every, the most interesting episodes to me this whole season are all of these stunt episodes or like

style ones where the entire thing is there's no opening and it's basically like you're in the first person view of a person going to YouTube and going on a bunch of interrelated videos. And by going this, this person's travel through a YouTube rabbit hole is how they learn the story of how the Simpsons became an influencer family and then hit their peak and then fell back down again. And it mysteriously disappeared as well. Also, strangely named after the 1985 movie my life as a dog oh

yes yeah it's a that's that's the aljean connection right it has to be the uh i think it's a a selman app but i think aljean still names everything he's in the naming department but uh also do we still call them vlogs do we i think well some people must still call them vlogs right though uh if i was to say what my favorite bits in it were i did uh obviously as professional podcasters i did like seeing lenny having his own uh rogan-esque podcast where he has on mo and carl and they talk about uh they're they're saying like oh i used to know homer and then there's also a funny bit of them going to an influencer house where the whole family is moved into and they're and it's incredibly fake like there's some there's some fun stuff in there but i think the most interesting thing was just that it really was

like what would a character do if they had their own youtube channel like what would martin prince's youtube channel be what would jimbo jones's youtube channel be it's or Or Millhouse. Yeah, it was a fun conceptual episode. Do any of them have mukbangs? Man, no, I don't think... Homer should. I think there is a side... Homer does eat stuff in one of the videos, I think, but there might just be a mukbang joke on the side.

By the way, mukbang or mukbang or whatever you want to call it. It's mukbang. It's mukbang. It's like an eating video where someone's eating a lot of food, just in case anyone doesn't know what that means. Yeah, the initial, when it was first on YouTube or whatever, the idea was like, oh, if you're eating alone, you can watch this video of someone eating with you and you don't have to feel so lonely anymore. But now it's more like, watch this person eat like 12 plates of food all in one sitting. It's gotten much more disgusting. Yeah.

And fetishy. But yeah, that was the only new episode of Simpsons this month. Well, there were a lot recently. Yeah, yeah. There's more coming in Feb though. Yes. In other news, the official Simpsons Spotify account just uploaded the full Simpsons Hit and Run soundtrack.

Some people are getting their hopes up. In case you don't know, Simpsons Hit and Run was the 2003 Grand Theft Auto Simpsons game. Very good for that time. I think if it's ever re-released, people will think this was a good game for 2003. They're going to learn their lesson, just like Mario Sunshine. Once they got to play that. Oh, it's not that bad. I still think this game is better than Mario Sunshine.

Oh, damn. I think so, too. Oh, it's not that bad. I still think this game is better than Mario Sunshine. Ooh, damn. I think so, too. Oh, wow. Well, yeah, maybe I'll feel that. I haven't played Simpsons in a real long time. You know, I mean, Tap That is still an ongoing concern, but it's been 10 or 11 years. An ongoing concern?

Yes. What are you concerned about? It's been a concern for Fox in that it's like, we have too much money to count. Yeah, EA makes way too much money off of it, too. Or, sorry, Disney now, I guess i guess yeah you're right yeah yeah but uh i think the time has come for at least re-releases of old games they're not going to make new ones of course but let's bring out some of the older ones again at least get it on steam you know yeah yeah i so the fact that

it's now on the official simpson spotify is leading folks to think it's finally going to happen. Also, there was that fan-made remake that got a cease and desist, which sometimes that means that something's coming, or sometimes it's the publisher just protecting their copyright. But we shall see. And in other news, we've got some award nominations coming in. So Treehouse of Horror 33 is nominated for an Emmy Award, and Girls Just Shawna Have Fun got a WGA nomination. in so treehouse of horror 33 is nominated for an annie award and uh girls just shauna have fun got a wga nomination and i guess the emmy award noms are not in yet well that's in the fall so

we've got a way to go i'm sorry i'm thinking of oscars we just had oscars but yeah that uh that wga one i think uh nina didn't you like that uh girls just shauna have fun one the one of lisa uh befriending shauna i've never seen it sorry i thought you like that one i'm sorry no i haven't seen it let's just pretend she has okay well that was the fun one where homer befriends uh chalmers who's shauna's dad and they like beer uh brew beer together but lisa befriends shauna and she's like wow i've never had an older sister before but some people were saying like oh maybe it's also like lisa doesn't understand she has a crush on shauna instead of like uh just wants an older sister type you know three of the six nominees uh at the wga for animation are the simpsons yeah it seems wrong i think they should watch more tv i mean maybe one or two is fine but half the noms being the simpsons i think there

should be more shows on there also you know since you mentioned the Oscars, I forgot to add to this. It's not really Simpsons, but the Best Picture Animation nominations came out today. And yeah, it's okay. The nominees are Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On movie, Puss in Boots, The Last Wish, The Sea Beast and Turning Red. Okay. Sea Beast? I've not heard of this i've never heard of this

before either no uh it's it's uh cgi one as well i'm i'm not sure about it though everybody keeps telling us we've thank you to everybody who's telling us to see the new puss in boots movie i'm gonna i'll wait till it's on peacock but i'm gonna see it to know how to handle a panic attack it's it's funny that that velma show is also about panic attacks too like it's just uh everybody's suffering panic attacks and now that every cartoon character showing us how to get through it but no i mean uh i i'm rooting for turning red but i do need to see pinocchio and oh it's so good uh and uh and also now puss in boots to really judge what should win though it'd be funny if'd be funny if Turning Red won animated best picture

and Everything Everywhere All at Once won best picture because both are just movies about like, my mom apologized to me. At long last. At long last. Moving on, New Analytics Reporting says that The Simpsons is still among the most watched stuff on Disney+. Yes, very popular.

This is something that Al Jean likes to cite a lot, which is true. I would be a feather in my cap if I was running The Simpsons in that it's a very popular show on Disney+. We're creeping up to the renewals in February, right? It should be pretty soon. I would think that analytics getting put out definitely helps out Gene in their pitch to get renewed again. Yeah, the question is, does Simpson gets renewed on Fox just as usual? And then they keep going with this? Or, you know, could Simpsons move over to ABC, which Disney owns?

Or will it just go straight to Disney Plus? But certainly there will not be a stop to new episodes. I feel sure of that because they are just doing so well even though there's that great joke in the crusty becomes ellen episode where lisa asked part like hey aren't you mad about this he's like hey you know when there's 700 episodes of crusty already well why even get mad about what the new episodes are like i can just re-watch those 700 over and over and over again it's true so So congrats to the Simpsons for remaining popular 34 years into your run. So on The Ringer recently, there was a recent interview with Conan O'Brien about Marge vs.

the Monorail, which is coming up on its 30th anniversary, I believe like this November or something. And Alan Siegel wrote it, who he's one of the best. I cited him a lot for our Lisa the Greek podcast as well. He does some really good Simpsons interviews with fresh coverage interviewing people. He doesn't just go by the commentaries. He actually looks them up. So, yeah, I want to spotlight that, that he got in touch with Conan O'Brien.

And a lot of it, if you are me and Bob, you've heard these stories before from Conan. But there's a couple new little things sprinkled in there and it's it's fun to hear Conan's fresh eyes as a man uh who I think is what in his early 60s now yes uh what how he remembers writing uh Marge versus the monorail today oh sorry January of 93 we are at the uh the 30th anniversary yes Well, there you go. Yes. 30 years old this month. I apologize for my vast ignorance. So yeah, check out that on The Ringer by Alan Siegel. So let's go over our news that's happening in our world. So we're going to be posting this month's What a Cartoon a little bit late because right

now we're in the midst of dealing with a live show. We're catching up with a lot of travel that we've been doing over the holidays. So we're a tiny bit behind, but we're catching up with uh a lot of travel that we've been doing over the holidays so we're a tiny bit behind but we're catching up so this month's what a cartoon will be about the fleischer superman cartoons mechanical monster and the arctic giant and uh yeah so look for that at some point in february as soon as it's ready and we apologize for the delay but we're very busy right now with our our double live shows we're doing and some other things as well and but we're going to give this to you in February. So look for it then.

Yeah, both are very easy to find on YouTube because of the public domain of all of the classic Fleischer stuff from Famous Studios. I've already started a little research on it. It is the first Superman cartoon that had influence on pretty much every superhero cartoon that followed it. And because there were cartoons we're doing the safe ones oh yes one of the titles of the cartoons you can't say oh yeah yeah that's right yeah it was there was a war on you know that's that's the excuse but that's what's happening

in february for what a cartoon again uh look for it when it goes live uh it'll be happening in sometime that month uh moving on for five dollar and up patrons of course there's talking futurama and talking to the hill talking futurama will be covering less than hero their superhero pastiche coming in just before superhero movies take off again so it's mostly parodies of the old batman series we get to talk about the work of one of our favorite directors suzy dieter yes she's great and then on talking to the hill we're covering a pregnant pause the beginning of the very short uh could peggy get pregnant again arc and uh yes technically peggy's headache is the next episode in the run but we covered that for what a cartoon in 2018 we're not going to be covering it again we're just moving right on to pregnant pause so that's our explanation for that

nearly five years ago we did it so yeah let's if you want to stick to the, uh, stick to the chronological thing. If you're on the Patreon, it's easy to just search for Peggy's headache. You will find the old, what a cartoon we did back in 2018. Yeah. And there'll be a link to it in the show notes for pregnant pause. So you can just click on that and find it,

but it's, it's very available. Uh, and moving on our, what a cartoon movie for February will be, uh, tying into our, what a cartoon for that month, batman superman movie world's finest and you can find that on hbo max as three distinct

episodes so episodes 16 17 and 18 of season 2 on hbo max are the superman batman world's finest movie yeah and it's season two of superman uh just to be clear not not uh it's not even though it should be in the Batman section, they technically were produced as Superman episodes, so they're in the Superman section of HBO Max. But yeah, World's Finest was released as a full movie on VHS back in 97, and this was the first meeting of Batman and Superman in that universe. I loved it when it first came out.

I think it holds up pretty good and it is full of lovely TMS animation. I can't wait. And a programming note for February. So we'll be posting separate vocations next instead of the next season 13 episode because that way we're going to finish season 13 and season three at the same time.

And I Am Furious Yellow will post after separate vocations. So yes, we just want to end them at the same time. Yeah, so the order right now is you're hearing this. Next week's our live show. Week after that, separate vocations, also with Nina. And then the week after that is I Am Furious Yellow, also with a really great guest, too. And so, yeah, we're...

And also, later down the line, in a couple months, we're also going to have to double up a couple season 3s just because season 3 is three episodes longer than season 13. So it's just how it works. We know you like it. No one's going to complain. You know what? Do you want us to start season 14 before we get to season 4? No.

I don't think so. So now we're going to be talking about what we've been playing and watching that is not related to podcasting. We do some things on the side people and as for me in terms of playing things uh only a few things because i was doing a lot of traveling and playing uh one very long game that i have played before uh so uh in terms of new stuff i've been playing uh vampire survivor an amazing game that's hard to explain unless you play it but the good thing is it's like four dollars so you can just download it and play it. My description of Vampire Survivor is, what if Hades fell down the stairs?

Because it's Hades, but like kind of stupid. And that you are, it's a roguelike in that you have like a little character, lots of weapons, lots of attacks. But you actually don't control your attacks. You just move around and your character auto attacks. And it sounds like it'd be boring, but it's somehow not. And it's becoming a phenomenon right now. It's like the most played game on Steam Deck. Man, I, you know, we now have a Steam Deck too.

I was meaning to play it when I visit, but the Steam Deck's with my husband. It was my gift to him for the holidays. So I'm going to be playing it the next time I am in uh in town with him for sure it's lots of fun so also i bought a steam deck and i was so busy i barely got to touch it except when i started traveling and we'll get into that later uh and it's like okay i need to play a long game that i can just like you know like uh lose myself in so i i started a new game of fallout new vegas which i played when it was new in 2010 in in fall of 2010. But now I'm playing the DLC. I'm getting super into it. I don't need to tell you this is a good game.

Hbomberguy has a great video about why this is a great Fallout game. But I'm so into it. I'll probably be playing it for the next two months exclusively. I'm just waiting to Fallout New Vegas. And it is now a retro game. So there you have it. And also, Nina and I were playing together in Vancouver Escape Room Simulator, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a co-op game in which you are in a number of different escape rooms and you do escape room style puzzles together to solve the puzzles.

And you liked it, right, Nina? Yeah, I've never done an actual in-person escape room, but you said the experience is pretty similar. Yeah, I mean, you can obviously do more with like uh actors and you know things on video monitors and stuff but in terms of like the logistics of how an escape room works it's pretty much the same yeah it's a lot of fun like the puzzles are fair i would say they're challenging enough and they're satisfying like once you figure things out you feel smart yeah my only complaint is you have to do math outside of the game sometimes like get out your calculator a little bit yeah well you know if you're in an math outside of the game sometimes. Like get out your calculator. Sometimes, a little bit.

Yeah. Well, you know, if you're in an escape room, you can also, sometimes they let you pull out your phone and do a calculator app or something. Well, like I am a huge math dummy and I've been able to figure things out. I only did an escape room once and it wasn't good, but it was a forced activity with coworkers that I wasn't enjoying at the time. Team building? Yeah. the co-workers that I wasn't enjoying at the time team building yeah so and of course the fractures

in our our co-working relationship come out during that where I just go like I just no I'll figure out this stuff on my own you guys just do your own thing over there I'll do my thing it's not how it's supposed to work you gotta escape together well we failed we did not escape I've done like I think I've only done one of them but I did get out but it was fun anyway I watched a ton of movies because we recorded the last talk to the audience early. This one's coming like right under the wire and I can't talk about all of them. So maybe I'll mention a few of them and you can chime in because she watched a lot of these with me. Yeah. During the holiday break, you guys said, I also watched a lot of movies too.

So maybe some of ours cross over then. I finally saw The Magnificent Ambersons, the Orson Welles movie. And my thoughts are more like The Magnificent Blandersons because it's a troubled movie that was massacred by the studio. And the original footage is just gone forever. So we don't know what it could have been. But it feels like it would have been a better movie if it wasn't 86 minutes long or whatever. Cinematography and directing is fantastic. Welles should have been in it and not just the narrator that pops up occasionally but uh i'm glad i finally got to see it but uh it's not

good it's not a good movie it dragged so much it does yeah that's what always scared me about giving it a shot because i i love orson wells and i've watched i think most of his other movies including a long time ago i watched his falstaff movie uh but or at least clips of it but yeah i've just always been scared of like i know how much it got hatcheted down it'll just make me sad to see what could have been or to imagine it's not a huge investment so i think it's if you're just curious it's worth watching but it's not i don't think it's very good um moving on uh to name a few other ones i finally saw Klaus the 2019 Netflix animated movie I was very impressed by it even though

it's like Christmas Emperor's New Groove it's still like very good and I mean that story has been done a lot it's like the Doc Hollywood like guy of high status forced to work among low status people as punishment but then he learned something from them very common story but it's done very well with a Christmas veneer and the animation is very very good yeah that was surprisingly good i i heard like

high praise about it i heard a lot of high praise about the visuals especially which i agree it looked great but i didn't know the story was gonna be so good as well yeah it was one of those uh every time i've seen i've not i haven't watched it myself either but all the clips i've seen are like wow they're really showing off what you can do in 3D now. Characters do not look lifeless at all. They have so much energy and character to them that you would expect from 2D more than 3D. No, I thought it was in 3D. It's 2D.

It's 2D. Oh, it is? Yeah, it is. A lot of people thought it was 3D because of the way they shaded it. Yeah. But the magic trick behind it is, yeah, it is. A lot of people thought it was 3D because of the way they shaded it. Yeah. But the magic trick behind it is, yeah, it's 2D. It's like the inverse of Spider-Verse.

Instead of it's like 2D looking, sorry, instead of 3D looking like 2D, it's 2D looking like 3D. Of course, there's like 3D assistance throughout the movie, but the character animation is 2D. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Also saw Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. Now, it is not, now go back to our Pinocchio podcast from last year. I read the original book. It's very dark. It's very weird. It's kind of bad in some ways. This is not in a direct adaptation that I thought it would be,

but it keeps the same tone in that there are no spoilers here, but Pinocchio does die more than a few times in this movie. That's not a spoiler, is it? I don't think so. I don't think so. I didn't know about that going into it. But it's irrelevant because it doesn't matter. Yeah. But it keeps the dark and twisted tone it does have uh well i mean guillermo del toro does also like attacking fascists in his movies there's aren't

there there's some italian fascists in this as well yeah they bump the story forward about like 40 or 50 years to world war one era uh italy and uh it's a bit different in that respect but they do that for more interesting story ideas so even though it doesn't adapt the book i think it's a better version of it than the disney movie and of course the stop motion is amazing we're fortunate enough to see it in theater no i'm very jealous of that i i couldn't i'm gonna have to watch it on netflix uh i've been seeing everywhere though that that like every place Guillermo del Toro wins an award for this, he makes sure to say animation isn't a medium or isn't a genre. It's a medium and all that, which is an important thing to say for normies who don't know this.

But I did see a couple people on a couple animation professionals I follow on Twitter just like, I'm getting mighty sick of seeing this shared all the time with me. I get it, Guillermo. We know it's a medium. It's not for them. It's not for them. I also, I've seen this movie like two or three times when Nina saw it for the first time. Rope, the Hitchcock movie.

And the entire gimmick of it is it's made to look like it was filmed in one shot. There are a few major cheats. There's one complete fade out and fade back in. So it's not seamless. But I am over that part of the movie, but I think it's a very good, intense play, basically, you're watching on the screen.

And I love Rope. Aren't there two guys in it who are sort of gay, but they can't be on their Hays Code? They're not actually gay? Yes, because it's based on Leopold and Loeb, who were gay for each other,

and also the two actors are gay. Oh, hey. I don't know if they were gay for each other. Have you seen actors are gay. Oh, hey. I don't know if they were gay for each other. Have you seen Rope? No, I have not. My advice is don't be a dope.

Go see Rope. And it's also like 87 minutes long. It's very short. Yeah, I rarely rate things five stars on Letterboxd. I'm very, very sparing with that.

And that rating usually goes to movies I've seen like several times. This was my first time seeing it. I immediately gave it five stars. Wow.

And I also said it's a really good episode of Frasier. That was my review. And it i immediately gave it five stars and i also said it's a really good episode of fraser that was my review and uh no spoilers but jimmy stewart does say you're gonna die in a very threatening way jimmy stewart's gonna take it to those gay guys it's a very dark role for jimmy stewart yeah all right i i'm fine i'll finally watch it sorry i'm getting through these very quickly uh i will say to jump ahead of things my pick of the month is a movie about a little donkey called eo this song goes out to eo uh eo is a great movie it's not one i want to see again because it was so effective of uh towards me but um it's about our relationship with animals and how as humans it's a very messed up relationship because we

think in terms of capitalism and animals aren't on board with that all the time so it's about this sweet little donkey who's not anthropomorphized in any way but it's freed from a circus after some laws are passed that you know prevent animals from being in circuses and oh the donkey is free no every new owner it finds it's like well you're an animal and you're a donkey so let's find you a job and it's about how uh with every new thing he does it like exposes our view of animals more and more and it may might challenge your own thoughts about animals i dare say it was really good it's a polish film right it is polish yes and it's by this very old director what he's like 80 something yes and so he loves donkeys it's like his favorite animal yeah and and when he got his uh awards for

this movie i forget what award ceremony it was uh he came up and said i would like to thank my donkeys so if i ever win an award i just want to say that and then he just listed all the names of the six donkeys that played eo in the film it was very sweet yeah i i just saw that's nominated for best international film at the oscars yeah uh i was very surprised by this movie apparently it's a remake of a much older movie but people say this one is the better one so yes eo uh i really recommend it it is a very tasteful depiction of uh our relationship with animals uh and it may be shocking and depressing but i think uh you get something out of it by watching it and we got to see that

in a theater too which i'm glad because like i wanted to see it while i was in the local independent theater because i don't think it's streaming anywhere yeah i don't think it is i don't think it is right now not very big distribution of this one and it should be widely distributed i think everyone should see it i'm so jealous because i spent my holidays in in a northern california suburb and so i not, they didn't have, I got to see one movie in a theater, the biggest movie of the year. That's the only movie I saw in theaters. Just to skip through a bunch of these, Nina and I saw The Shining in a theater. That's my second time seeing The Shining in a theater. Really great. Now I got to say something, Nina, you were

there with me. People, and I talked about this with another guest on a recent podcast that you'll hear in the future. People are getting a little too comfortable. The pandemic made us all go a little feral. And people don't know how to act at the movies anymore. And it was the one time in my life, maybe the second time in my life, where I had to yell at somebody in front of me or near me saying, hey, shut up. Well, you didn't say it like that. No, I said, hey, both of you, keep it down or whatever. Or you said be quiet.

Be quiet. You didn't say please. You just like be quiet yeah yeah and it was like just a couple like it's very comfortable with each other like just having casual like oh look at that guy and well what about that and just like having just it's running commentary was driving me insane I couldn't believe it yeah what do you

just what do you have to say about the shining the entire way through like the whole 30 minutes of it what's with the running commentary they will not stop yeah and you know what i would have suffered through it because i'm slightly a coward and but also it's canada so you can yell at someone in a movie theater and they won't shoot you probably uh but i reached a new level as a husband and i didn't want to tell you until this podcast nina where i was like oh these people are so annoying and i look over at nina and she looks

so mad and like my husband energy like you made my wife upset I was mad like I was about to like get up and go to a different seat yeah oh man see like my wow that's I was like are they gonna do this throughout the entire film and and there was like a woman behind us who was also like

asking questions like it's like the tweet that you bring up all the time where it's like you know if you watch the movie more information will be revealed to you. So it's just like, Wendy, we've seen The Shining. It's not a spoiler. Wendy needs to escape the house. And like throughout every part of this movie, the woman behind us is like, well, what's happening now? Where are they going?

And it's just like, well, how's Wendy going to get out? The snowblower is all, the snow cat's all messed up. How's she going to get out? The movie will tell you. You can ask yourself those questions. Just do it inside your head like everyone else. Yes. People have lost internal monologues.

It's insane. I want to, you know, this type of interactions happen in theaters before COVID, but I do think it probably, the movie going experience at home probably made it worse for people that they just think oh i can just talk all the time i mean everything's my living room yeah and i guess one other thing i will say it's a trend i noticed it's happened three times now and it's like i feel bad complaining about people in movie theaters it's an old man thing to do but i feel like it's the third time this has happened it happened with uh seeing vertigo it happened with seeing suspiria it happened with seeing Suspiria. It happened with seeing The Shining.

People in a theater to see an old movie enter the movie thinking, I'm better than this and I'm smarter than these people. And I know everything this movie is going to throw at me. I'm going to laugh at things that are foreshadowed. I mean, The Shining is a funny movie. But when Jack Nicholson is like, my family and I is going to have a really great time here in the hotel. Huge laughs.

Like, yes, I know what happens in the shining. I know what happens in the show. Like even the people who saw it in 1980 were supposed to laugh at that. Cause you, everybody knows the concept of shining when they're in the theater. You're not better than, no,

that it, that all, I agree. But it's like, it's like the 2023 or 2022 snobbery. It's just like, uh, you know,

Wendy, the mom is smoking in front of her child. It's just like, you know, Wendy, the mom, is smoking in front of her child. It's just like, when you see that, there's like tittering in the audience. Like, yes, it was 1980. Yes.

Parents smoked in front of their children. Can we just get, put yourself in the place of when this movie was released? By the way, that couple, you shushed, they still kept talking throughout the movie

after you did that. They were just way more quieter about it. So we couldn't hear them anymore. That's good. But still, if you're going to gonna do that just watch it at home yes I should be like I'm an American shut up I brought a gun with me yes

anyways that's old man corner please be quiet if you're in the movie theater it doesn't need to be said but so I saw some other things like I saw the natural but you probably heard about that or will have heard about it heard about it in Homer oh right right and i just watched willow for an upcoming podcast not for this network uh last thing i'll say is that nina and i watched uh brigsby bear which is

the kyle mooney movie uh he co-wrote it i think he wrote it sorry yeah he wrote it and it's the director of saturday morning all-star hits too so it's kind of like a brother program to it yes um I don't want to spoil what the movie's about but I really enjoyed it and I think our listeners will enjoy it because it's about our relationship with television and how essentially it's that uh tv was a thing that made us feel safe in the past but now we're kind of captive to nostalgia and it's an exploration of that in a very interesting way but i don't want to describe what the movie's about because there's a very fun twist in it after the first like 15 or 20 minutes yeah again if you if you like saturday morning all-star hits after we talked about it on what a cartoon a freaking year ago can

you believe it you should definitely check out brigsby bear as well yeah i think it's on netflix i think uh no i had to i think i had to rent it or it was on hbo max or something i think well wherever it is yeah it's worth seeking out i feel like we should just assume from now on nothing's on anything nothing's on anything no unless it's a brand new movie yeah uh i saw napoleon dynamite for the first time last night but it was on hbo max oh wow it doesn't have a lot of baggage for you as uh having people meanly compared you to the star of the film they should have told me i look like john heater i would have been less insulted like hey napoleon dynamite like what well yeah because you

don't look like the character napoleon dynamite you may be when john heater's a normal looking guy you maybe look a little like him but we've talked about this with the beck thing it's just like you're you know you're a skinny white guy yeah i don't think they were being mean about like shaggy hair they just should have specified no you look at the actor who plays napoleon dynamite not napoleon dynamite this is going on for a while but i saw it for the first time and what surprised me the most is that uh it's a movie from the early aughts where uh it's a comedy from the early aughts and the humor is very gentle and for the most part non-mean-spirited and there are no like gay jokes there are no rape jokes the worst thing that happens from a 2023 standpoint

is that the main character says the r slur but he's also a teenager in 2004 yeah and as a teenager in the early 2000s i'm sure i said that word and he's a little jerk too yeah yeah he's a hero but he also is a teenager yeah did you know in real life John Heater is fluent in Japanese because of Mormonism? Oh, was he a missionary? Yes, he was raised Mormon and his mission was to Japan. So he learned fluent Japanese to proselytize. I wonder how much luck he had converting anybody to Mormonism in Japan. He's like, become a Mormon.

Gosh. I learned this because in that Blades of Glory movie he's like become a Mormon gosh I learned this because in that uh Blades of Glory movie he's in with Will Ferrell there's a joke where a Japanese reporter asked them a question in Japanese and then he replies in I I would say sounds like very good Japanese and then I was like wait can he actually speak Japanese and that's how I learned I'm slightly curious about that animated series Fox made in like 2010 because I know like Tom Gamble and Max Pross worked on it. And Mike Scully.

And the character designs I think are by like a guy who worked on The Critic. So like there's a good pedigree there, but I thought it came too late. But now that I know about the characters, I might want to see it. It did come too late. Yeah, it really did. And I was just thinking about early aughts comedies because former guests of the show Brian Quinby does a lot of fun stuff on his Patreon covering a lot of bad comedies from the early aughts comedies because uh former guests of the show brian quinby does a lot of fun stuff on his patreon covering a lot of bad comedies from uh the early aughts he's cooking these days yes uh he did a recent podcast series called now we're cooking about like the hit the

career of dane cook and i was i was listening to his uh good luck chuck podcast and he's like the the the funny friend of the main character is just a rapist and the joke is about how he's raping people and that was the year 2006 in comedy but it's not like napoleon dynamite you just drank cum gross there's nothing like that in the movie i hadn't seen in a while and i was i was very like oh how how well is this humor gonna hold up and i was pleasantly surprised like there are like a few iffy things but it was for the most part like, like Bob said, it was not mean spirited. It was like oddly heartwarming. And I miss this kind of cringe, awkward humor.

Because nowadays when people try to emulate that, they have to have another character, like a cooler character going like, well, that was weird. So that just happened. Did you literally just say that? Yeah, they can't just let the cringe happen. Is that even a thing? What are we in the video game Forspoken now available on major consoles? Did you literally just say that? Yeah, they can't just let the cringe happen. Is that even a thing? Yeah. What are we, in the video game Forspoken, now available on major consoles? I have a little aside about that.

Forspoken and the Final Fantasy game from last year, Strangers in Paradise, or Strangers of Paradise? I think it's in Paradise. In Paradise. Maybe. Both of those are totally feel like Square enix got sick of being told that their um writing was like too stilted or too japanese or like especially after kingdom hearts everybody's like why do people talk like that so they made this real effort of like okay we're gonna write

american style dialogue of like deadpool style humor and all this and then once they do it then everybody's screen capping going like, this sucks. This isn't funny. You're right. It's strangers of paradise. And watching the Forspoken clips made me think, I really miss when a video game dialogue was like the first rough translation

of another language and they just had to go with it. I mean, look, this, it seems fine. I don't, I don't think it does. And you know,

it's no worse than i mean it's again them trying to write deadpool dialogue that's how it feels to me we should we should really try to prevent this well i feel like the critical response is going to prevent it i think but i just feel i feel bad for square enix because i feel like their localizers can't win because they they got made fun of for stilted dialogue in the past in games like Final Fantasy XIII or the Kingdom Hearts series. And now they try to make something that feels natural and American style. And instead, it's just like a Marvel quip machine. They're having a lot.

It's gone mad. Square Enix is having a really bizarre couple of years with all the different kinds of games they're putting out. But I support it. And the NFTs, though. And NFTs, yeah. I don't support those. I want to bring up three things i saw real quick first was when bob was watching the natural i was watching top gun maverick and i think i won this round oh yeah because absolutely it was so much

more i'm sure it was so much more exciting than what the natural was the natural was just summed up in one quote from the main character god i love baseball well top gun maverick is god i love flying it is but done really really well like i'm not even like a big top gun fan i saw it like for the first time with bob actually um in vancouver uh at a theater not too long ago and i was like yeah it was fine but this one like i wasn't expecting that much from it and it was like amazingly well done yeah no it's uh that was one i did see in theaters and it was actually. I wish I'd seen a theater. Yeah.

No, it's I mean, the in cockpit stuff is amazing. Like especially I am so sick of the green screen in most movies these days that having the natural lighting of them like just flying around and having the sun move naturally on them was like, damn. While I was watching, I kept thinking like, wow, this looks so real. How do they do it? And then I found out, oh, they were actually in the in the planes no wonder it's how films used to be made yeah but it's only because tom cruise is like a crazy guy who's like i'm no we're getting in the real planes but but it works i also saw skin in my rink and i gotta say thumbs down on that okay uh it works it either works for you or it doesn't and it did not work for me some people were like

scared to death by it whereas some people were like this is the most boring thing i've ever seen in my life i kind of i give it two stars in letterbox because i kind of like the audacity of what this filmmaker did by putting this on screen and because it was so unique of an experience i also saw this in a theater and i think a lot of people like once he uh the movie was done and the lights went up some people were like what the hell was done and the lights went up, some people were like, what the hell was that? Other people were like, oh, my God, it was so scary. I formally apologize to my wife for making a Sharon Lewis and Bram joke about Skinnamarink. It's OK.

I had to bite my tongue there. I was like, no, it's probably. Everyone makes the exact same reference. And I hate that show. I liked it as a kid. I thought it was awful. And the third thing I saw uh this month is ai artificial intelligence i avoid this movie for a long time because i thought it's gonna be like a super sappy

slow family drama and it was not like at all yeah i went to it like totally blind i was like why aren't more people talking about this like i know it didn't do very well when it came up people were like what is this like they didn't really understand it or they expected something different and they were like kind of blindsided about what it was but i was i thought it was really well made except for i gotta say i did not like the ending i know it's controversial uh i wish it ended 20 minutes earlier it's the one thing i know about the movie is that people hate the ending ah well i've come around again on the ending i i i actually like the ending well because like well bob hasn't seen it yeah I won't spoil it but but yes I also do agree I know exactly where you mean it could have ended 20 minutes earlier I

you could have the credits roll there and it would be really great too but also I I've I've come to like the anymore I I re-watched it a little while ago and I I do really love it too I didn't I was too young and stupid like when it first came out I was like 19 and I didn't get it. Like same with like when I saw Eyes Wide Shut in theaters when I was a kid, I did not get it. Like. I really liked how creepy and dark it was. And that's why I wish it ended sooner. It would have been darker, you know, but, but also like the end, the actual ending like

fits narratively and thematically. So I get why in that way it's fine the line that's really struck with me lately is when teddy it's early in the movie when he's eating he's gonna eat to prove he's as good as the other boy and the way teddy goes like don't you'll break like the way teddy says that is like haunting teddy was really cool yeah they made like an actual robot yeah for that movie ah so cool man it's like seth mcfarland's ted he pretty much yeah this looks better than ted i would say because ted is cg he says like raunchy things and smokes cigars he's like brian

from family guy but you know a bear anyway uh bob one day when we have two and a half hours to spare for a movie we'll watch it okay Okay. It's a good time. It's good times. Maybe in your local theater it'll get replayed too. It did get replayed recently for the 20th anniversary. Oh, really? Because it came out in 2001. Well, you know, also, Bob, you went through a lot of travel problems too.

Oh, yes. I mean, people had it much worse than me, but there was like a, I mean, we were caught in like the polar bomb or whatever, the goku spirit winter bomb or whatever happened in the in the vancouver area in the pacific northwest i don't want to go over every element of this trip it could have been much worse so it's like i'm supposed to leave on the 20th of december i'm on the train uh one stop away from the airport my my flight is canceled i go home i buy a ticket for the 22nd i get to the airport my connecting flight is canceled i have to get my luggage back that i checked. I go home. I buy a ticket for the 22nd. I get to the airport. My connecting flight is canceled. I have to get my luggage back that I checked and I go home.

Finally, on the 26th, I'm able to go. So it was like I was supposed to leave on the 20th. I ended up being there like basically on the 26th. So that's why we're a bit behind because my vacation started almost a week later than I had planned. And this is because Vancouver was hit with an unprecedented snowstorm. And people always say like, oh, you're from Canada? You must get a lot of snow, right? It's like, no.

Listen to Homer Simpson. Vancouver, the warmest city in Canada. We don't usually get this much snow. We have very temperate weather. But climate change and all that, because we don't get that much snow, we aren't prepared for it when it does come. And so when people are like, why wasn't the Vancouver Airport prepared for this like they should have known was coming to call we don't spend that many resources

on like the I see I think stuff because we don't have to deal with this normally like we don't know not to deal with this and so when we were hit with this like polar bomb or whatever he called it uh so many people were stranded in vancouver like like for days on end yeah yeah and i mean like i'm happy that i was able to buy new tickets but the thing about uh you know airline refunds is that you don't get your money back instantly so uh with three different airlines i am chasing down at least like 1500 worth of refunds at the moment and i'm going to get to those in about a couple of weeks. So I need to set aside a day to call three different airlines

and be on hold and explain my situation and say where's my money? Give me it back. We technically missed Christmas together. We did. We had a lot of holiday plans. Days of like post Christmas activities that were still lingering afterwards. Yes. We made up for it and I was very sad initially because we

were making our thing that we see It's's a wonderful life in the theater every christmas eve we did it for a few years in a row but we broke the streak but next year next year next year we'll always have mother christmases yes man i was i count myself very lucky lots of people had travel problems and we were also flying with southwest but we we were able to do all our travel as planned so husband came down here for about a week then i went up to seattle for about a week and then every we missed horrible weather the entire time while while we were all while me and you bob were not in the bay area there was like torrential downpour rain like well i mean it happened for monsoons but very heavy rain for

here it was still happening for about a week and a half after we both got back, though. Yes, that's true. We still had it. As for me, video games, very light on video games. I played a little more of the Mario and Rabbids. I can't stop playing Marvel Snap. I love that game. I just unlocked Todd McFarlane Spider-Man variant for my Spider-Man card, which.

Oh, cool. Yeah, it's it's they took the cover of spider-man 13 which is him uh in the symbiote suit the black suit uh in in the classic uh pose it's in the circle right yes yeah i know that one it's a really good one uh but i have been waiting until after the live show to start it up but the new fire emblems out and definitely the thursday after our live show i'm gonna be playing that new fire emblem all day fire emblem engaged can't wait uh as for movies i also saw a ton i'll i'll speed through a few finished mr show full mr show rewatch my husband uh he'd never seen it before he's like we should watch run ronnie run and i had never seen an hd before i paid four bucks to watch it

on amazon and hd i was too nice to that movie. That movie just isn't good. It's bad, isn't it? It's really not good. I remember watching it in the aughts. I eventually want to see it just out of curiosity, but I got it on Netflix in the aughts when they sent the disc to you back in the day.

And it was so scratched up, it stopped playing halfway through. And I thought you saved me. You saved my night. The big mistake is that the Mr. Show team, instead of being allowed to make a sketch movie they could make good, they instead are forced to make basically

an Adam Sandler-like Happy Gilmore type movie, which the character of Ronnie Dobbs is not Happy Gilmore, and it doesn't work. It's crap. I never liked the Ronnie Dobbs character that much either. Yeah, also I don't like it. It's not the strongest thing they've done.

In the base of the movie around it, it's weird weird and also to make the title like a forrest gump parody yeah it's also strange yeah it should just been a sketch movie but uh and i did see the avatar the way of water saw it in the theaters uh it is like one of the best looking movies like special effects wise you ever seen uh it's weird to watch a movie at 48 frames per second a lot of the time like it can be very distracting i'm not going to join in the group of our many podcast friends who are fully blue pilled into being avatar fans but i will say the stuff with the giant whale type creature piacon was really cool and I like Piacon a whole lot. I think he's a really neat character.

Can I order some sort of Carvel ice cream cake based on him? There should be a Fudgy the Whale for Piacon. Yes. Yeah, no, I mean, hey, the way I saw it was, I want to see what James Cameron can do in a movie theater because I do still think he is the best action director there ever was. And when the action starts, that's the thing. It's just like the first

avatar your first hour some action second hour you're like almost looking at your watch like all right when are we getting in that fireworks factory but that fireworks factory really is pretty great once you get to that it's uh it's really good maybe one day i'll get around to seeing the avatars i'm sure they'll be not watching them i mean we could have seen the recent like uh 3d re-release of the first movie we missed it yeah you're better i mean you see it in a theater if you're gonna see it though that's that's the way to see it uh i just every time i see the navi i'm just like this is aggressively not my thing i get it i get it i mean yeah i they they look it's a weird thing And also hiring predominantly white actors to affect your made up Native American style voices. A little sus, a little sus.

But I also watch The Fablemans, which I can't stop talking about on every other podcast. I love The Fablemans. It's a love letter to the movies. And also a man's weird relationship with his mom. And that man is Steven Spiel spielberg yeah i was gonna ask about that yeah is are there any spoilers like is this turned into like a pornhub video no no no no but it is i'm kidding of course uh it is spielberg was very close with his mother and it's him kind of investigating like i guess that was kind of weird that i like

filmed my mom dancing in a see-through uh nighty one time that was weird i and i shouldn't have done that or there's there's some odd feelings to it but it's also about like loving the movies and also wanting to be in it i mean judd herschen it is amazing his his one scene is just amazing i saw the glass onion just like you guys did uh sorry one second i was looking it up on my computer here and uh uh will miniker former guest of the show uh i liked his review of the fableman's having never seen it his review is on letterboxd through the magic of movies you can fuck your mom and now that made me really curious about what the movie's about well yes he's it's about her it's definitely a mother-son movie that's that's for sure but they'll also if you see it especially bob we did a whole

podcast uh retronauts thing on the indiana jones movies after watching and i'm like oh indiana jones is spielberg's most personal movie series i think like there's moments in the movie i'm like oh wait indiana jones does that in a movie including the one of the dumbest things in um crystal skull is that monkey that swings around with shia labBeouf like Shia LaBeouf meets the monkeys and they all swing on vines together. It's so stupid. After watching Fableman's, I was like, oh, maybe the monkey makes sense now. And there's actually like a personal reason Spielberg put it in there. It's your key to unlocking the bad Spielberg movies.

It is. It's really, it's a really good movie. Watch Glass Onion. It's all right. It's right it was it was okay like i gave it 3.5 on letterbox i might have given it a 3 maybe but i just like murder mystery so much that's why i made it higher than i would have otherwise but it wasn't as good as the first one and uh like i mean bob had a good observation of how it was like a criticism of like billionaires but it was so like toothless yeah i mean bob had a good observation of how it was like a criticism of like billionaires but it was so like toothless yeah i mean uh the targets were obvious and these are not spoilers by the

way but uh one of the characters in the movie is like a uh mark zuckerberg type and elon musk type see in him what you will it wasn't nearly mean enough and i i mean uh ryan johnson obviously a very well-connected man in hollywood he directed a fucking star wars movie and it like it was a fun distinction where he's like oh rich people are so vapid and useless except for my friends and i love them very much who are all in this movie and they're going to they're going to appear in the movie and we we appreciate them in their time and and there was one okay there was one time in the movie in which there was a cameo and i'll just say it right

now it was serena williams it's not going to give anything away but she is present in a movie where she's overhearing a lot of vital information and it's like should she be hearing this i mean i know this is a fun cameo but she could spread this information outside of the like the bubble you're in for this mystery exactly exactly i really didn't like all the cameos in the film and like what i said about it in my review i think or maybe on twitter no i think it was letterboxd i was like i just hope this isn't what the rest of the glass not glass in the knives out series is going to be just an excuse to have a bunch of cameos and references and something the audience can point at and go oh i know what that is i know who that is i know what this is referencing i think the cameos were encouraging people to think they could vote on who's going

to be in the next movie because people are like oh make a muppet movie and he had he had to write like an article like yes yes i like the muppets too but i have my own ideas and thank you for your input no i i think one of the worst things about ryan johnson is that he's too much on twitter and after the knives out a bunch of i, if a bunch of famous people came to us and said, I want to be on your podcast, we'd be like, yes, you'll be a guest on our podcast. Absolutely. I get why he does it. But yes, it takes away from the film.

And also, I'm stealing this from Jack Allison. This was his thought on the movie. And he liked it kind of too. But he did say, the message of the movie is he well he liked it kind of too but he did say like the message of the movie is the billionaires are too mean to millionaires yes that's that's really what the movie's that's the real problem I saw Elvis I liked a whole lot of that I saw that too I thought did did you like it more than Moulin Rouge I know you hate it oh well I hate it Moulin Rouge it's not saying much for me to say I like this more than Moulin Rouge

I still I can't get used to his editing style. It just felt like a very long, like nearly three hour long trailer. It was cut like that. I got used to it eventually, but part of it was a bit much. Like I love to use the bathroom a few times and each time it felt like I didn't miss anything because like the editing was so frantic that even though like I missed a scene or two, it kept coming like flashing back to like a few minutes before. So it's like, oh, it's just showing me what I missed before. Oh, and as a Stranger Things fan, it was I was shocked to see Billy in this. I was like, wait, Billy's in this like the the older brother of Max. Like he's like one of the producers of his of his special in the movie.

Oh, OK. I didn't recognize him. Yeah, he's under... My husband had to say like... Well, my husband actually says that's the Red Ranger from the Power Rangers 2016 movie. But yeah, it's Billy from Stranger Things. I didn't care about Elvis Presley at all going to it. Interesting life. Like I looked up later to see what parts were fictionalized, what parts were true. Colonel Tom Parker's ridiculous in it.

God, I couldn't. He's like a Norbit style character. I couldn't accept that character. It was a little too goofy. You and I are the same. Just hire a good overweight character actor. Don't get Tom Hanks. I thought that way about the penguin in the new movie, which I saw.

Yeah, his prosthetics were better. Yeah, they were better but still that's right we did see the batman finally uh me and my husband did our duty as homosexuals and watch bros uh it's fine it is a bougie though gay movie like it's about the problems that like rich gay people have more so like the main thrust of the movie is will he get funding for his gay museum in new york city can he get it like and all but i mean it is truth to power but mainly it's my favorite stuff in it is billy eichner pretty much just being himself saying yeah i got too old to cast in movies because hollywood decided they weren't homophobic anymore after i aged out of starring

in movie age and though the movie is a fucking lie in the trailers and the first five minutes are like he's a successful podcaster he doesn't podcast once after the first five minutes of movies it's so tacked on bullshit yeah bullshit I our lives are consumed by this uh I watched the first Hotel Transylvania finally it's really good it's really good yeah that was uh one of our picks for november but uh paranormal one i still want to get around to seeing those movies i think well maybe this year i i really liked it uh and i watched uh stepdad television of 1923 uh which uh yes it's it's taylor sheridan makes the shows for conservative america it pairs well with the Miller Lite.

Stepdad TV should be a channel or a streaming network. I guess pretty much that is Paramount+, because they have like 17 Taylor Sheridan shows. And last two hits, HBO Max I watched, I'm finally watching White Lotus. Me and my husband felt embarrassed that the show, which is by a queer creator bisexual man mike white who i love all stuff he wrote school of rock and a ton of things he wrote the

show it's a great show we were so embarrassed to find out my parents had watched the whole series before me and my husband had i i don't even know what it is about but i know a lot of people can't stop uh oh yeah it's bougie vacation comedy. You would like it. Honestly, it's what Glass Onion thinks it is about making fun of shitty rich people. And I watch Velma. Everybody's like, chill out. But also, I'm not going to watch any.

I watched the third episode. I ain't watching more. But there's work shows. You and I and Nina have been talking about this but like it's only a scooby-doo show you shouldn't be that mad at it and yeah some of the things it does are cringy and i'm not here to defend like a multi-billion dollar property but the complaints went from like oh these lines are cringy to uh velma shouldn't treat her friend like this and i'm offended like this is not how you treat someone that's having a panic attack and uh i don't like where this is going like people were taking like it the people were acting

as if the characters were real people no i i agree with people say like mindy kaling doesn't have like some plot or whatever she's just she's an annoying person who went to dartmouth like that's who she is like just an ivy leaguer who writes annoying comedy that feels like 2006 still like that's all the one uh clip that i was tweeting about well like a tweet got a ton of reaction and it was um velma essentially on trial i don't know what the you know the context of the scene is but to prove that freddie is not guilty of something she has to say in court like he can't even feed himself and he's so rich he can't even cut his own food and there's an entire like bit about how he's like

food is presented in front of him and he can't cut it and that's the joke and i was like oh that's that's kind of funny i wasn't like laughing out loud and rolling around but i was like that's a funny scene but the response to this tweet was like outrageous like how dare she treat her friend like that and and so on and so on it's like it's her making it's punching up, if anything. I think there's some performative dislike of it for fake reasons. I think there are some people who say they don't like the show for woke reasons when they actually are anti-woke and they're trying to attack a show that, you know, has racially blind casting on it or whatever. But that said, I mean, Scooby Doo but fucked up has been done literally our entire lives. Like it's not special. I think lives like it's not special i think they think it's more special than it is conceptually but because they weren't paying

attention to the past uh the post zombie island you know yeah and run of shows and it does have the feel of minnie killing uh the style of writing she came up in like the office of just joke joke joke joke joke joke joke like it's the joke machine and some it and some don't and so that also is why context free you can take out some scenes like well that's not funny that joke sucks but occasionally you will still go like yeah that's good yeah but also it's like i don't know i've seen gay velma in other places it doesn't shock me the velma kisses a girl in the show now like oh like oh wow velma kisses daphne shockeroo like you i mean i think you made a thread about this the very popular thread a very popular thread the the other takes on like fucked up scooby-doo and like i forgot that in jane silent bob strike back there is a

velma and daphne like lesbian scene kind of yeah it's been done eight trillion times when when james gunn was hired to write the scooby-doo live action movie he wrote it as an r-rated dirty film that then warner brothers lost all their nerve and made it a pg film but they were already doing that then like adult swim did it in 2001 it is old to do this the the only updated thing about it is other than the than the changing of the ethnicities of some of the characters, is that they style it like Riverdale where it's like a murder mystery and there's like sex and nudity and stuff in it. It's fine. It's fine. Look.

And also, I say this when I know artists on it who get no recognition. You wouldn't know who directed the damn show if you read a review of it. There's good artists on it who I really like, including one of my favorite gay artists online was a storyboarder on it, Drew Green. He draws some of the cutest, huggable, sexy guys you'll see online. Check out Drew Green's work. He's a boarder on it. I know there were great people animating on it. They don't even get any damn coverage. It's just about Mindy Kaling.

Even the other writers on it don't get other coverage it does uh it i mean i have enjoyed things she's done before but it does feel like a show gifted to a celebrity pretty much and that's essentially how it's being marketed yeah but anyway it's it's fine yeah it's fine okay now we're getting the questions and comments for talking simpsons and this is nina's time to shine because she is going to be reading the questions for us on this episode as she has done before and up first we have Bart the Lover and what does Tyler M say we had plenty of borderline illegal assemblies at my school yes we had guys ripping phone books in half but it was for Jesus even though I went to a public school various presentations like Pepsi presents how to handle peer pressure but my favorite was some old dude who would narrate Super 8 footage

of his various trips to parks. I grew up close to the Ohio border, not far from Youngstown, so I am super curious if this guy came to Bob's school. I believe his name was Tom Diaz or something like that. No, I never encountered this guy.

Although, while thinking about this, I thought of a few folks I didn't mention on that podcast. One of them was, I want to believe he was a native american man who came to our class and he was called mr tp because uh tp of course is not i mean it's what cornholia wants for his but it's also a place where you can live it's a tent style enclosure and i remember something odd about him is that on his thumb he had like a second thumb growing out of it. So he had like a finger deformity.

Okay. And he taught us about Native American customs. I was in first grade. I just remember because of that, I was on TV because they just like they brought. Oh, so they filmed the event and then you or the kids were on the TV with it? It was like slow news day coverage. Like West Boulevard Elementary had a fun surprise as Mr. T tp came and taught the kids about blah blah blah and then it's like a pan across all the kids looking vacant at this one man talking in the middle of the room and i also thought because

nina and i recently watched singing in the rain uh in 2022 it was the first time i saw it i know nina loves the movie and the only context i have for that movie is an anti-drug presentation in which they would rewrite classic songs and show tunes to be about, you know, not taking drugs. And one of them was singing in the rain. So the presenters would be like, I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain because I'm clap, clap, stomp, stomp, drug free. Clap, clap, stomp, stomp, drug free. And of course you'd be and then stomping drug free. So when I hear singing in the rain, I just like, when do I clap and stomp and say drug free uh and of course you'd be and then stomping drug free so when i hear singing in the rain i just like when do i clap and stomp and say drug free oh my god yeah i had one other one that that had just unlocked which was it was not a guest it was the guidance counselor

of the school lady and my elementary school a nice older southern lady she was very nice so that's i say this because i'm gonna make fun of her she wanted to write a rap to get kids to not do drugs and her i remember it still to this day kids have a right to say how they feel just say no say no say no just say no kids have the right to say how they feel that was that's all i remember so she rhymed feel with feel and no yes yeah i think i brought this up on another podcast before so apologies but the one other That's all I remember. So she rhymed feel with feel and no with no. Yes, yeah. I think I brought this up on another podcast before, so apologies. But one other thing I remember is that an ex-con was brought in. And yes, he was a very good convincing public speaker because he was talking about how not to have problems in your life, how to avoid the road he took.

And then he ended the presentation with a story. And the story was the trolley problem in which you pull the switch to the side, but he made it into a real story. And people in the audience were in tears. And I was like, no, this is like a philosophical question. This didn't actually happen. But people were very upset by it. And that's my story. But yeah, no weird footage of trips to parks.

I bet he was looking for couples making love in the woods, this guy. And this is his community service for it after getting caught. Rowdy Roddy Peeper. Alex Forsythe is up next. And what does he say? The timing of this Gordie Howe episode is pretty good. Alex Ovechkin is currently sitting at 800 goals and will pass Howe any day now. Lots of people are goalposts moving with,

you have to count how's whl goals at the moment as well edder's note says this did happen on december 23rd there's a link oh okay yeah so uh over uh over check over check ovechkin ovechkin he did surpass gordie how so yes we before when we covered it gordie how died the second time we covered it, Gordie Howe died. The second time we covered it, Gordie Howe is now no longer. He lost one of his records. So he's closer to anonymity. Take off your skates, Gordie. You're going out.

It's not happening anymore. But I appreciate that Alex Forsyth keyed into this thing with sports that was going on then that obviously me and Bob were not aware of when it comes to hockey. While we're on hockey news, I wanted to say RIP to Gino Ocek. I was very briefly into Vancouver Canucks in the 90s, and he was known as the Algonquin enforcer. He was a goon. Oh, just like that whole episode of The Simpsons recently.

Yeah, he was real good at fighting, and he did it all the time. He was very exciting. He was my favorite player back then. He died recently because of a cardiac arrest. And he was like diagnosed with a terminal illness like a while ago. But then like the hashtag died suddenly people on Twitter took over the news and they're like, oh, it's because he got vaccinated for COVID. It's like, no, he knew for a long time his health had thought of decline and this is this was not surprising yeah it was like days after it was days after the golden globes where elvis won something and lisa marie was there

and then she passed away and people were like oh it was the same deal people saying i bet it's because she got the vaccine it's like her family her entire family has a history of heart disease and they all died of heart heart issues like uh like in their mid 40s to early 50s so yeah and uh i mean we just recorded a different episode today uh i brought up julie and julia the movie yeah and uh the the woman uh julie i can't remember her last name sorry the real the real julie she died last year uh late last year um of cardiac arrest i think and again like people like the died suddenly people were like oh it's because she got vaccinated for covid it's like yeah just lay off these people like seriously and we're on to uh gump roast and alex ir says, This marks my first and only time seeing a Simpsons clip show live when it was newly aired. Within a few minutes, I didn't realize it was a clip show until the clip from The Way We Was.

I hadn't yet seen Homer the Heretic and I forgot about the flashback scene in Kidney Trouble. So I didn't know where the story was going. I also didn't see Forrest Gump until months afterward, despite it being the biggest movie of its year. So Homer's costume and affectation was sort of lost on me. I loved it at the time, but I guess we're supposed to hate it now because of its maudlin nature and baby boomer self-love? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it's a well-made movie. Zemeckis is a great director, but I mean, yeah, it is boomer.

It's boomers celebrating themselves you know it worked on me at age uh 12 or 13 because i i didn't see it in theaters but i read the book and by the time it came out on so on video i was so gump pilled i thought we had to own it on video so like uh i told my stepdad like uh forest compass at the video store we have to go and he takes me there and i hand him him the new VHS tape. And he's like, what, we're buying this? I thought we were renting it. I was like, no, this is an important movie.

We have to own this movie. And I think I only saw it once. But I was convinced, like, Forrest Gump is the most important movie. Because I think as a kid, like, before the internet, you were more, like, intrigued by, like, what happened before I was alive? And this movie will tell me. We had very few vhs tapes growing up in my house and that the forrest gump was one of them and that's how i saw it too no i mean the soundtrack also was so shocking to me or not shocking but like exciting to me like i'd never heard most of those songs before or in that context at least like maybe i knew a couple from the oldie station including

elvis is in the movie now of course fortunate son cannot be played in a movie now after this after forrest gump yeah how come in the movie elvis he didn't show elvis getting his idea for leg shaking from forrest gump they really let that out yeah baz lerman uh papering over history there but no i mean then when i watched it as a mature adult, I think the thing that made me saddest in watching it was just that, well, one, that like

Forrest Gump takes no stance on anything in American history, even though it's about a very turbulent, awful time in America, probably because that's why it wouldn't piss off boomers who wouldn't have liked it

if Forrest Gump took a stance on segregation, perhaps, or the ending of it. But also, way jenny is treated in the movie like she's she is a harlot who dares to like be sexual and is damned for that with she's horribly beaten and she's like molested and then dies of aids like it's just horrible it happens the the book is uh the book is better to not be that guy but uh winston groom's book is much more cynical and less like schmaltzy although there's a bit of darkness in the zemeckis movie but i think uh winston groom's point was way different than the point the movie wanted to make well yeah in the movie it's just like the past was nice or it was fun if you were

like a dumb guy yes yeah oh by the way i gotta, I got to say, when I was a kid, I loved clip shows. I absolutely loved clip shows. You guys bring it up like it's like the worst thing ever. Like you hated it when you were kids. One of you, you found out an episode was a clip show. But I was like, oh, man, I got to see my favorite clips again. No, I'm sorry. That's always cheesed me off because I was like, no, this isn't a real episode.

I mean, I think cheated out of one. I mean, we went over this like way in the past but like before the Simpsons was in syndication the first few clip shows were novel because it's like well I can't see these anywhere else I can't see these clips again and then when it went to syndication like well I can watch the whole episode like every couple months so it's not special anymore I just like seeing a montage of all of them and I wanted to see what clips they considered good what scenes they liked and want to show again how do you feel about gump roast uh it was okay okay i thought so uh up next on gump roast bradford a barker says the closing song was really funny on a rewatch

for the podcast but i remember feeling unnerved by it during its original broadcast like i was getting an official okay to move on from the show the The season ends with a self-reference with a gunslinging Maggie so the running out of ideas song really did seem like an admission of defeat. Seasons 14 on are going to have some familiar episodes and some unfamiliar ones. Glad the show has some new legs 20 years on. Yeah you know the Simpsons spinoff showcase ends with a similar joke but i think it's about um tv in general but the joke at the end of gump roast and song form feels more about uh the show itself in like the depths it can sink to if allowed to continue we'll never stop we have jumped the shark uh here's stupid ideas we're gonna have we're gonna have worse stories like

just them and it uh it's a dangerous thing like it is another of those moments where they signal to the audience of like yeah you know what the show maybe does kind of suck more now and you and what are you gonna do huh like what you gonna do like we're just gonna sing about it i also remember the song being actually set to the song they wanted to set it to we didn't start the fire fire. So when I heard it again, I was like, wait a second. I thought it was supposed to be like the same tune to that. So that drove me crazy hearing it again. Yeah, I mean

like... They should just pay for the rights. They tried to, but it was too much money. Billy Joel. Surely they could have afforded it. There's a certain, I mean like we saw it like in one episode in season 13, Algy and License, like six songs I think in the Artie Ziff one, there were like seven songs. So I think they only had so many for a season.

They ran out. Oh, and in Homer Getting High too, there was like eight songs in that one. And I feel like the clip show budget is lower. So instead, yeah, they have to go like, you'll never stop the Simpsons. Instead of, you'll never stop, like we didn't start the fire, you'll never stop the Simpsons. Yeah, it never stop like we didn't start the fire you'll never stop

the simpsons yeah it could have been better if they got the rights but alas uh moving on to homer at the bat matt solis says this is definitely my top 10 of all time maybe even top five funny story my dad and i used to go to arizona every march for spring training we were big fans of the oakland a's and we would catch as many pre- games as possible. One time they were playing the LA Angels and we went to the game early to catch batting practice. Mike Socha was the Angels manager at the time and when we got to the field he was near the backdrop signing autographs for a small crowd of people. I came up to him and said, hey Mike, loved you on the Simons, man. He responded with a hilarious blank stare and then stammered something like, uh, thanks. Then as I was walking away, I said,

glad you got over that radiation poisoning, bud. I like to think he spent the rest of the day extremely confused, possibly having no recollection of ever appearing in The Simpsons. We just covered this, but he was the best actor. Yeah, he was great. He was dying and going, oh, man. And I like to think this is before he came back to the show to reprise his role.

Because if I ever met any of these guys in real life, if I was sitting at an airport and Wade Boggs was next to me, well, I'd have to recall who he was in the first place. But then I would say, oh, like on The Simpsons, right? And I would hope that that would spark some memory. But Mike Socha had a very busy career. And I guess maybe he was unaware of the legacy he left behind via that appearance. I definitely read other of the guys, maybe not Socha, but like Mattingly saying or Clemens saying like if they get a number of Simpsons fans for it, like, you know what?

I would bet they can tell the difference between a baseball fan and a Simpsons fan for it. Like, you know what? I would bet they can tell the difference between a baseball fan and a Simpsons fan walking up to them. Yes. I bet they can tell who's who. Absolutely. Who's the guy that got punched up by Barney again? That's Boggs.

Yeah. Okay, I bet he gets Lord Palmerston like all the time. Oh, God, yeah. He's like, what? I bet he enjoys a drink, so that's why it was probably best he was cast in there.

Moving on for Homer at the Bat, Some Bloke says... This is one of the few Simpsons episodes where I've gone out of my way to watch it in different languages just to see how it's handled in countries where baseball is barely a thing. Which is all to say that in German, Madeline's line about preferring Burns to Steinbrenner is changed to Margaret Thatcher, which is kind of random and ruins the joke about acceptable forms of facial hair, but is an appreciated dig. Any attack on Margaret Thatcher is appreciated.

Yeah, I agree. This reminds me of when I was at your place at some point, Nina. We were watching Treehouse of 404 in Japanese because it was on the disc as a language track. And we were comparing differences in joke construction and everything. You like donuts, huh? was on the disc as a language track and we were like comparing differences in um you know joke construction and everything and the uh you like donuts huh that scene uh in american in english

rather the uh the language we speak of course uh the line is james coco went mad in five minutes and it's like well that's a very obscure celebrity but in the japanese version it's a joke about elvis yeah which is like james coco feels like it's more simpsonsy but i barely know who that is even today uh yeah it's the i mean it's obscure in the simpsons way that like an elvis fat joke is more in 1994 was more obvious but i have elvis talk today yeah yeah that's funny uh man i again i said it last time but that's so funny to hear about the German language, too, because just like I have to think for most European Simpsons fans,

pretty much anybody on the other side of the Atlantic, this episode is the only thing they know about baseball. Baseball is simply not a thing over there. Moving on to King of the Hill. We covered Death of a Propane Salesman, and Joe Hodgson says... The time slot change was my falling off point with King of the Hill, we covered Death of a Propane Salesman, and Joe Hodgson says... The time slot change was my falling off point with King of the Hill as well. I never followed it to Tuesday, or wherever they put it, just like I wouldn't when they did the same to Futurama. The thing that sucks too is the executive who made the move probably just thinks it proves that the show wasn't really popular when the audience doesn't follow it but that's not true at all as a result i've seen little of this era of king of the hill we're heading into and i

really need to watch more of it yeah i saw a few of these episodes i think i saw the whole season eventually by the end of it like in reruns but there were definitely a few tuesdays i missed also i mean it was you know tuesday was a night. It is a little hard in my late high school at the time. It was sometimes harder to remember to watch something as opposed to a Sunday night. The part of the system was, oh, it's Sunday night. I'm about to go to school. So to comfort me into the next school day, I'm going to have the Simpsons to entertain me to get into that. Yeah, it is a shame because I think season three could be the best season of The King of the Hill.

And it didn't get noticeably worse. No, no. But most people missed it and I missed most of it. And so that's why these episodes are so special to me, season three especially, because I saw them on DV for the first time or on FX for the first time in the early aughts. So I didn't see them when they were live.

And God, they're so good. Up next, we have Kevin O'Reilly who says... Regarding gout, high-dose ibuprofen is actually my first-line treatment for acute gout flares in young healthy people. The other meds are expensive or higher chance of side effects. Also, diet modification can be helpful. But if you've had multiple flares already, you should be on allopurinol already.

That would do more than any diet change. Well, I guess... What is allopurinol already. That would do more than any diet change. Well, I guess that is maybe one of the prescriptions they give to people. But I'll say, you know, I ate some red meat over the holidays since recording that episode, and I did not have any negative reaction to it. So I think my diet change and supplements have helped a bit. So yeah. Uric acid levels supplements have helped a bit. So yeah. Uric acid levels are low. Hopefully so.

Yes. Yeah. Though I'm not, I'm not going to risk it with any more meat for a while. But yes, I ate, I ate bloody steaks

two days in a row and did all right. Good. Good. So, but thank you, Kevin, for your suggestions.

Red meat is a sometimes food. Everybody go CEO. You'll learn, you'll learn. Moving on to Talking Futur love and rockets and uh blake r says i was probably one of many who watched this as a youth way before 2001 had entered my cultural peripheral vision i remember seeing it for the first time with some friends and when dave was working on shutting down hell by pulling all those tabs out i went hey i want a free ticket to six flags to looks of bafflement this is the danger of watching the car the parody before the movie

yeah i i watched 2001 because simpsons did a million references to it so by the time this episode aired of futurama i was familiar with 2001 and knew the references that reminds me going back to the shining uh it's not ruined because of the shinning although i saw the shinning like 40 times before i saw the shining but it's hard to not think of the the corollary scene but also it makes you realize like what a great parody that is because they mined everything they could out of like the six minutes of that parody and the one thing i noticed this time was in the simpsons there was a joke of threes and that homer axes down three different doors to deliver a different line each time in

the in the shining he axes down two doors the first door he's like wendy i'm home and i'm sure in his head he was like god that wasn't good okay i got one more quip second door is here's johnny so they were they were doing a parody of that specific thing and that he didn't have a good quip the first time. I think it is probably the best parody in a treehouse length they ever did on the show. He also did like, little pig, little pig, let me in. Yeah.

Oh, you're right. There were three. Oh, wow. Okay. Third time's a charm, right? Yeah. I forgot about that. Thank you.

No, I mean, Silverman got all the angles right too in that scene as well like or in that old clip also the the hard the smash cut to the whole family frozen together that is such a great parody of that shot of Nicholson in the movie which is funny that is

after all the tension just to see him looking like a frozen caveman the frozen corpse just like the audience didn't did laugh at that. Yeah. I can forgive that. Moving on, a friend of the show, Drew Mackey, says... Okay, okay, hear me out.

P. Christ is, as you say, very edgelord. And there is an argument to be made that it was designed specifically to stir stuff up. But if you just look at the photo without any context, it's beautiful. It's an image of a crucifix in this beautiful golden color. And I think you can see this as being about natural beauty and God being in everything. Even something you might think is profane.

In other words, conservatives are more interested in complaining than they are in seeing the God they claim to care about. Hey, God made you and God made your pee. And to quote Life in Hell, if God is is everywhere does that mean he's in the toilet think about it that's a good one that did give me another reason to look at the piss Christ I haven't I haven't really thought about piss Christ in a while but yes thank you Drew

you have a very good point there and moving on to our final set of comments for the what a cartoon movie for December Tokyo Godfathers Nina will start us off with her own comments and also an editor's note about how good her What a Cartoon Movie for December, Tokyo Godfathers. Nina will start us off with her own comments and also an editor's note about how good her comments were about the localization. Yeah, I didn't want to make Nina reread the entire thing,

so I just took out two of the best paragraphs. Read it in your best Nina voice. Okay, so I said, this is part of what I said, I left a very long comment. I kept adding and adding to it, I'm sorry. I said a big one uh i wanted to bring up though is i don't think miyuki's mom is christian i guess the english dub decided to have her going jesus but in the japanese dub miyuki is definitely approximating a buddhist prayer compared with this and i posted a link to a buddhist prayer and the way her mom is posed in the flashback is a Buddhist prayer pose too.

I know the movie never strictly says what religion she is. I'm pretty sure about this. Making her Christian is an interesting choice though. Also, I was very happy that the new localization translated quote-unquote kusojiji better. Hana does indeed get riled up at being called jiji, which is grandpa or geyser. So the old subs making that quote-unquote fart

takes away from her being angry at being misgendered quote-unquote pops is way better yeah no nina gave a lot of great uh comments on the legislation thank you for the questions i yeah i commented saying like oh i wish i was like sitting in on this episode because there were so many things i could have clarified or corrected or explained. Yeah. Well, yeah, like when she's imitating her mother's prayer, like you said, in the English dub on the Blu-ray, she's saying Jesus, Jesus. But yeah, also the way she's like moving her legs is more, I guess, if you're mocking a Buddhist prayer, not a Christian prayer, I suppose, too, right? The legs? Well, yeah, she's like kind of shifting her legs back and forth uh the when miyuki is imitating her mom not not in the flashback when she's kind

of making fun of her mom's prayers yeah i don't remember what her legs did but it was just more like the the tone the cadence of her prayers definitely sound like a buddhist prayer to me and in the in the japanese language like you can tack the word kuso onto like anything to make it an insulting like version of that word and you see that a lot in like manga and anime and it's like impossible to translate yeah and like in one piece they do it literally which is not great but i guess it's just like the most like direct localization in which a guy is called like kuso gg like uh like hana's call but it's like hey shit geezer or whatever it's literally what it is crappy geezer or whatever it sounds weird in english it does sound weird yeah no

nina had a lot of great ones i appreciate again thank you for especially when i was asking about the translation for okama that was used in the in it and updated much better in uh the to the recent dub of it yeah it Yeah, you brought it up, but it's such a hard word to translate because there's no direct translation. I think if I had to choose one catch-all translation for it, it would be the word queer because that has been used as a slur in the past,

but also it's been reclaimed as well. So it can be good or bad depending on the context. And lately there's been some discourse about the word queer as well. A bunch of tourists saying like oh you shouldn't use this word it's bad but it's way more complicated than that and like every every decade there's like someone trying to say you shouldn't use the word queer and it's usually uh not for great purpose yeah no i on that topic i feel like if if i i can

understand if somebody says don't call me queer that's not my label but if you're trying to tell someone you can't call yourself queer or don't use that to refer to where you go on the kinsey scale let's say that that's wrong like you can't tell someone to not what the label they want for themselves and that and i'll say yeah i i personally like the label of queer like it's, I am gay. I say I'm gay. But queer is just a great umbrella term for, like, and a unifying term, too, for lots of different people.

The LGBTQIA plus persuasion. I prefer it to all of the letters, to be honest. It keeps getting longer and longer, too. And, like, for inclusivity reasons. Like, I said, like, tursts don't like it because, like, it includes trans people. Absolutely, yeah the the whole point of it is that and but yeah it was nice and and on that topic i really love that the new dub is much better with trans people the the american english dub than it was before in the 2003 version it really shows the how the baseline

understanding of trans people has changed in the past 20 years and that shows how the baseline understanding of trans people has changed in the past 20 years. Absolutely. And that's for the best. Moving on, our final comment for this episode, Kat Hegberg says,

Thank you so much for doing this. The podcast itself was such a fascinating listen and if this hadn't been the movie for this month, I probably wouldn't have watched it.

But my husband and I did on Christmas and it was one of the best movies either of us has ever seen. You literally gave us our favorite Christmas gift. Aw, thank you. I hope more people give this movie a chance because I don't think it's his most popular movie because it's the most down to earth. But it is my favorite and I love it more every time I see it.

And because of the new dub, I got so much more out of the experience. And for such a long time, at least if you're in the united states very hard to see like you it was relatively unavailable and now also i was like well people should watch you know check it out and it's free on youtube but if you can afford it the youtube version that's just hard subtitled that's not the best way to watch the movie if you're going to see it with english subtitles on it you know uh so i'm i'm really glad we we helped some new people discover it too i will say though if you can't afford a $30 blu-ray and you have to watch the youtube version just understand it's coming from 2003

yeah and go into it with that knowledge and i think you'll understand yeah i still can't get over i said it on the podcast but that google auto translate for the word Okama made it made it the F slur. I couldn't believe that, that I was like, Google translate. I expect better out of you. Automated machine. You racist robot. You're homophobic robot. It's awful.

But but yeah, no. I mean, yes. R.I.P. To Satoshi Kon and Keiko Nobumoto. Yes. Yes. Fantastic movie they both made. So, yes, thanks for listening to talk to the audience, everybody.

It's been a roller coaster of a beginning of 2023. We are 24 hours away from the performance of our first live show. 24 hours from right now. And I'm sure it went really fine. I'm sure none of us froze up on stage. No crazy person entered the theater and started screaming weird things about COVID. It was all fine and lots of laughs to be had and lots of posters were sold and

a good time was had by all and of course Matt Christman charming as always. I'm sure. Yes. Nina, any final thoughts? Well, I just hope that the venue piano fight goes on forever and ever and ever. No, we just received news like hours ago that it's going to shut down in March.

Well, hey, they've been a good venue to us all these years. I think it was like, you know, I think the understanding is after what, six Talking Simpsons shows? Five? They're like, the building can't withstand that much comedy. It's an old building. Any more live shows, it'll just fall apart. They're taking a big risk this year as it is.

Yeah, too many laughs. You guys did bring the roof down. Oh, no. I hope it stays up in that 113-year-old building when we were performing there in 24 hours. But, yes, thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you again next time for another episode of Talking Simpsons and or talk to the audience.

Take care. Wow. Infotainment.