Talking Simpsons - Talk to the Audience?!? - January 2024

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Happy New Year, listeners! We had a very eventful January to reflect on, not just with Simpsons news about Emmys and toys. We also did a ton of traveling to New York City, Tokyo, and San Francisco that we are so excited to share with all of you. Plus, tons of podcast news for the start of 2024, and we reply to some really great Patreon comments to start the next 12 months right! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, hoy, everybody, and welcome to Talk to the Audience, where this is always death. I am one of your hosts, the guy who will be forever waiting for the Super 7 line of people who look like things, Bob Mackie. And who is here with me today, as always, Henry Gilbert, the San Francisco Treat. And yes, this is our community podcast. If you're new to the network, welcome. On this podcast, which launches at the end of the month on Patreon,

in the beginning of the month on the free feed, we cover what's happening in the Simpsons world and in our world. And then we read and respond to your questions and comments from the last round of episodes. And it was an eventful month. Finally, at long last we're jumping on planes. We're seeing people in person.

We're going to New York and other countries. It's been a whirlwind month for talking Simpsons. And thank God we worked ahead a month in 2023, or we'd be very screwed. We'd be posting apologies all month if we didn't work ahead. And that's even with posting, you know, Incredibles for one week just to buy us one extra week. Yes. Yes. Thank you for suffering through slash enjoying our week off. And we hope maybe some of you are new because you got a chance to check out what's behind the Patreon paywall, like the Incredibles or Talking Futurama and so on.

Yeah. We don't have Andrew Jupin every week, but we can't say he won't be back. Yes, we're still on good terms. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, Bob has some updates on that, even on good terms with him. Yes, in our star snoop corner. So we have unfortunate news to kick things off. A few Simpsons-related deaths have happened in the past month,

and the first one was Reed reed harrison who was writers of the episodes the springfield files and then much later the episode papa don't leech he was also a producer on disenchantment the unmade season three of the critic duck man the mullets pinky in the brain and we interviewed him back in august of 2017 for the patreon i believe he was the first writer we interviewed after bill oakley he was the first writer we interviewed after Bill Oakley. He was the first writer we interviewed once we started the Patreon in June of 2017. Yes. Yeah. I believe the history on our interviews as we slowly gained confidence was we did Bill and then we did the Paul Provenzano, who is a producer on the acclaimed Simpsons games, and then the Fox Interactive Simpsons games. And then Reed Harrison, because he had just gone viral talking about how

on Twitter, and that's how I reached out to him on Twitter, I think it was, that he saw a t-shirt that was a parody t-shirt of Speed, but it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down. And he was like, oh, I never thought I'd see a joke I pitched become a silly T-shirt. And if you want to check out our interview, it's way back in the archives. But luckily, there's a search bar on Patreon that a lot of people don't notice. But you can just type in Reed Harris and you'll find the interview immediately. But it was back in the days when we were getting the tech set up. So it's one of the early things with some slight audio problems.

But he gave a lot of great answers we learned a lot about uh things like his work on the springfield files the the tiny room he worked in for that episode and also a few tidbits about what could have been the critics season three yeah and even how he got hired on pinky in the brain in its late years when they wb thought could this be our simpsons and but then he couldn't write it too dirty, but he wrote an episode all about the 96 election. Yeah, it's a fun one. And we didn't cover that one for our What a Cartoon, I'm Pinking in the Brain, but we did cover a good one if you're interested in checking more about that. Yeah, but sadly, the news came via Bill Oakley. Well, that's how I learned anyway. He tweeted, you know, rest in peace, good friend, Reed Harrison, very funny guy. He's also even mentioned in the Bob Odenkirk memoir because they've tried to write a show together. and Frank Mula, but then you can't even find an obituary online. And then another writer has to

say, oh, this person passed away months ago. In this case, it was semi-recent, but I wish more of these were publicized so we could celebrate them instead of just having a writer saying, oh, by the way, this person is no longer with us. But thank you to Bill Oakley for breaking the news. Yes, very much. And yes, rest in peace, Reed, a really nice guy. Another Simpsons-related death death is john bush he was an executive animation producer who worked on the show from 2000 to 2002 across three seasons he won an emmy in 2001 for the show and yes a non-writing producer it's one of those roles we're not really sure uh how that functions but they are very important yeah based on his imdb credits when i looked him up it seemed like

he started on uh like in animation as an artist and then moved up into the more managerial and producer aspects of planning things which you know very very important and underrated position but i think he's uh yeah it was it was a it was a good obituary in the the hollywood reporter i saw that even mentioned to that he was a big gay rights advocate as well, which was interesting to see. But yeah, that one made the headlines. I guess he does have, maybe he has a better publicist or had a better publicist than Reed Harrison did. Could be. Could be.

He's got that Emmy. Maybe as soon as you get an Emmy, you're put in some category where if you pass away, Variety has to write about you. It's a pact they make with the Creative Arts Academy. Yes. That's why you're trying to win an Emmy, so you don't die forgotten. So yes, RIP to Reed Harrison and John Bush. So there were no new episodes of The Simpsons in January. Because we recorded right before Christmas, we didn't get a chance to discuss Do the Wrong Thing.

And I forgot about it uh but i looked it up this morning and i saw that uh one of the guests is ken marino who somebody who i met at an airport it was very nice to me when i said hi to him about 12 years ago yeah also with ken marino was brett gellman uh who i used to like and we won't talk anything else about that on this podcast you know his new stand-up is not so good it's but he's going in a strange direction so good it's i don't know but he's going in a strange direction with sketch comedy that i don't agree with um but no yeah i completely forgot about this episode too until i did research well because it aired while i was on vacation but when i was making the notes for this i was like oh okay i i watched it while doing

my my morning exercise and it's it's okay it I watched it while doing my morning exercise. And it's okay. It's an okay one. Basically, Homer connects with Bart over cheating. And I think the best jokes in the episode are about them cheating at redneck sports. Or basically like axe throwing, stone skipping, even the face slap competition that has been started in his further degradation of society that's okay but yeah ken marino plays like a uh a college admittance guy in the kind of crummy final act of the episode you know this reminds me i never got around to watching the third season of party down the new season they made oh yeah and i'm sure it's wonderful lizzie

caplan couldn't be in it because she was doing other things i think she was i think she was busy filming the uh the the streaming series version of misery like the misery prequel yeah that's right but uh i love i love original party down uh the first two seasons uh and i i was really curious about that third season in the comments let us know is it good i don't know some of these reboots are i'm just too afraid to check them out because i like the original stuff too much well hey are you excited for clone highs coming back for its next season in a few days oh in a few days i think it's february 2nd i think okay uh thanks for the info yes i did love the reboots i i think so far beavis and butthead has has had the most successful reboot in that it's sometimes funnier than the original but clone high it's like a solid b plus in terms of what i want it to be i also didn't know as long as i'm talking

about new animation things i didn't know that it like came out yesterday peacock has a new mike judge animated series that's about npr did you know about this uh no but it sounds like something a streaming series would do which is you know spend 20 million dollars on an animated series and then don't say anything about it yes which was the it's the state of most netflix things including every disenchantment season after the second one it's it why spend all the money and then not promote it but i watched a trailer for it yesterday it's a stop motion show though also seems to be kind of space Ghost Coast to Coast in that they interview real people in their live action, like, say, you know, Mike Tyson. Then they show them as live action, but they're being interviewed by the parody NPR hosts who are stop motion. So it's kind of a high concept.

And we should say the name of this show in case anyone wants to know what it is. It's called In the Know. In the Know, yes. Yeah. show in case anyone wants to know what it is it's called in the know in the know yes yeah yeah i i hadn't i i should okay if anyone should know about a new mike judge program it should be a guy who loves mike judge and has an animation podcast so they clearly failed with their messaging here i know what i saw is like wait it's that there's four episodes on p and i only found that out last night because i was like hey what even is on peacock i haven't looked at my peacock app that

i have have as an xfinity member a begrudging xfinity member and then when i saw that i was like wait has this been out for months and i didn't hear about it or did it premiere today and i didn't see any ads for it yeah we don't get peacock up in canada so i might have to find other means of watching this uh if it's any good and oh yeah it could be on like max right? That's got to be like on Crave or something. One of the things over here has Warner Brothers stuff on it, but I'll find a way. Wait, it's Paramount, right? Is Clone High Paramount or Max?

No, it's Max or Hero Tax. Well, I have my connections. I've been online for a very long time. Don't you worry, everybody. So I guess this counts as news of a death uh we have the death of plastic because super 7 is no longer continuing their license with the walt disney company of course super 7 they made a lot of fun and interesting action figures based on the simpsons on obscure characters most of the time or variants of characters we like but unfortunately they're winding down their deal

they will release everything they've announced so far they blame oh some people blame this on uh you know obscure characters leading to lower sales my own take on this is i understand it's got to be a very expensive license these toys were way too expensive for what they were uh were they between like 30 to 40 dollars well if you were getting i swear i spent 80 on poochie i but that's like was she yeah okay so yes that is too much yeah and i understand there are better quality than the old playmates toys from the early aughts but those were i want to say under ten dollars at the time um i i don't know if i'm being unfair yeah go ahead i mean you're paying the obscurity tax i feel a little bit with that but also like every single super seven line up to the one that hasn't been released yet,

they all take longer than they say they will, which it's hard to make plastic toys. I get it. Like, to mass produce them takes a long time. But I hate to hear that they're blaming the obscure characters or that some are because for me, but this is, you i'm i'm probably an outlier of a toy collector because i really am not a toy collector if they just made it's the whole family and i'm sure they would have been great if it was just the first set was all five members of the family there's been a million regular homer and regular bart toys like i i want the itchy and

scratchy robots you know i want Kang or Kodos. Yeah, and I feel like these, I mean, I feel like they were targeted at collectors, which explains the obscure characters. These are not things you're going to find in Target, you know, or even at a Toys R Us. This old Simpsons toys, the Playmates toys, where they would have things as obscure as like resort smithers and, you know, variants on characters like that. They would be in Toys R Us they'd be at GameStop they'd be in Target these I feel like some comic book stores probably have them but they

are targeted towards people who are 40 and older and wants every version of Troy McClure that was Super 7 correct yes yeah that was in their more affordable less posable line but I think I love those even more the Poochie is amazing all the ones i've got i i've seen are amazing but for the same price you can just get all three of the troys and i mean just look at the box and those graphics uh i agree but they should have made a different box with new graphics for each toy that's that's my only my only qualm about those the troy mcclure line wasn't in the budget wasn't in the budget no no i know someone who could have drawn all of those characters but let's not go there but then she'd have been taking work from bill morrison

and he's uh oh did bill morrison um do the i believe she should underpin bill morrison on that stuff though well the last thing we want to do is take away work from a 60 year old white man she should go in there and say just like, hey, whenever you're paying bill, 50 bucks less and I'll do it. I'll settle for less. Yeah. It's a good attitude to have about your work. But yes, no more Super 7 Simpsons toys are coming. Who knows what Disney will do?

I don't think Disney cares about this market very much. I mean, yes, they license things to make statues with and plush animals. But I don't know how the Simpsons characters will fit into that realm of Disney marketing. But the company is so huge, I'm probably missing something obvious. They will make deals, but yeah, I feel like they never let these deals last long because they find a new person, they find a new company to work with, and the license is last short term. I mean, I probably will in the comments see much more insightful things

from the bigger toy collectors in our group who know more of the ins and outs of this stuff. But a downside to Simpsons toys, too, is that unlike, say, some other cool IP that I love, like, say, Spider-Man, Simpsons has no popularity in Japan. So you won't get cool Japanese toy companies licensing it over there that you can then import unlike awesome spider-man toys that you can see from japan and you know if you're still curious about the old simpsons toys a lot of them are still available for fairly cheap like when i first started dating my wife five years ago i got her a smither sorry i got her a chalmers i believe just from amazon uh new oh so people still have these old playmates action figures, and I think they're good for what they were

and what they cost at the time. And I wish we could see more things like that, more of a mass market, like here's every character, and they're like $15, let's say. You know, I need to move on that Bill and Marty play set because that was like, you know what, I should get the one of the two guys at microphones. That's the right one for my job.

As long as the machine is there for them to praise. So let's talk about the Creative Arts Emmys, where Treehouse of Horror 33 won Outstanding Animated Program, beating Bob's Burgers, Enter Galactic, something I'm only hearing of now. I think it's a Kid Cudi project. Is it Cudi? Oh, Kid Cudi. Kid Cudi, yes. Thank you. I'm showing my age here i only know his name because he was uh co-host on the comedy bang bang tv show for a season i don't know don't know his music yes that's correct genndy genndy tartakovsky's

primal and rick and morty and yes that is the one with the segments uh the puka duke which was the baba duke parody death tome which was obviously the death note parody comics did it better and simpsons world which was the west world parody so there you have it congrats to the simpsons still the number one emmy winner in this category although they've won a fewer times than i've thought in the last 15 years i thought it was they were like constantly sweeping these emmys but uh rick and morty and south park have been stealing their fire somewhat regularly yeah yeah it's it seems like it's more like every three to five years they they win it but i mean especially congrats to previous simpsons uh talking simpsons podcast guest carolyn omine who i think was like the showrunner of that particular episode and she was very invested i mean that we were just watching a clip of that simpsons world one, and that's the secretly, we all love the animation in the Death Note parody.

I think it was a cool, big swing they took. But Simpsons World, I think, had the best point about Simpsons fans are annoying, and it traps them in their old references. That was my favorite segment, because I felt seen, and also it was them, in a very Back to the future too kind of way playing with old scenes and references and i did i did enjoy that and if you're like wait what the emmys have for the emmys for a episode that's over a year old happened in january it's like yes the the strikes delayed everything they weren't going to do award shows during the strikes so yeah you know as i was reading this new story i thought well this seems off but then you know when i got to the end, I was like, oh, the strike. That's right.

Nobody was working for six months and it was very fraught. So, yes, that has been Emmy news. Finally, our last bit of news here is there are now rumors, unsubstantiated, but there are still rumors going around, that the Simpsons ride in Orlando and Hollywood are in danger of being replaced by Pokemon in the coming years. And Henry's done his research on this i believe the deal began in 2008 and it is good until 2028 and the ride was 2009 correct they needed a little more time to get the ride open yes yeah that's the uh that the facts were the deal was made in 2008 and i believe i don't know if it's ever been it was literally said when you

saw when they signed the deal that it was 20 years but it was definitely not an in perpetuity deal with Fox and and most universal rides do only last about 20 years before they're replaced so that all would make sense and if it's going to be replaced by 2028 the wheels kind of would start moving four years ahead of time and then the other fact is that officially announced was because super nintendo land has done so well for universal that they then made a deal for the next big nintendo adjacent property the pokemon series and so there's going to be a pokemon ride but especially in hollywood they need space to put pokemon where are they going to put pokemon if i've been to nintendo

land in hollywood it is a tight squeeze they barely yes it seems like they were working with what they had there we were just talking with our live show guest chris wade about this topic and we realized the math here in that simpsons world was built 17 years into the simpsons and now we are 15 years after the building of simpsons world so there's almost as much time between us and that as that in the beginning of the show which is frightening yeah the the simpsons ride is now the middle era of simpsons not new simpsons middle era and uh yeah that's a scary scary thought i'll miss the ride if it goes away i don't think it's quite i think it's a win not an if i because i don't think disney wants their competition to have one of their biggest ip whatever disney does with the simpsons ride

won't be as good as the simpsons ride i don't think and you know if it if the simpsons ride lasts just a few more years it will have been there longer than the back to the future right i i don't have the numbers in front of me but i think the back to the future ride was 1991 to 2008 i believe you're right yeah i think it was like opening day well it was opening day in orlando i don't know when it got there in hollywood but yeah it's uh oh yeah sorry i was thinking of the um the california one no it's uh it's really too i mean also it's a sad cycle that like you and me love back to the future we didn't want the back to the future ride to go away and then it goes away because of the other thing we love more than back to the future the the simpsons oh it's not a

competition but now here it's like i would like to experience a pokemon theme park that sounds fun now that's at the cost of a simpsons ride so i do have the hard numbers here because I have a quieter keyboard now. Opened in Florida in May of 1991. Opened in Hollywood in June of 93. So I feel like the Simpsons ride very soon will have been there longer in Hollywood than the Back to the Future ride was there. Time sucks. I don't like this. That's the thesis of Back to the Future. Time sucks. back to the future time sucks it also well it also is sad that like it would mean the end of

the springfield area around there which i love the specifics of it the people who worked on it clearly cared a lot about the series could they do even more and do even better theming today if they were making a brand new probably but i mean just walking down the street and seeing like look there's the aztec theater that That's the facade of Moe's. And here's the Bumblebee Man food truck. And even the, we talk about it on next month's Duff Gardens episode, but all the Duff Gardens stuff, like it's so much cool stuff is there. Yeah.

I do wonder that if, you know, this goes away and eventually, you know, by the time we're 60, they build a new one. I wonder if it's still going to be, well, yeah, all the references are from the first 10 years because that's all people are here for we're not going to see like oh there's a walk-around version of bart's new teacher let's get our picture with her my last thought on this too is like the big pink donut is got to be one of their biggest sellers there it could well they just turn it into the pokemon donuts and still sell the same donut but it's now pokemon branded it'll just be a pokeball and uh you'll you'll eat it the just the same i think but yeah that is the end of our simpsons news slightly slow january with uh i guess technically three deaths so

hopefully february will be more merciful to this ip so let's talk about our news and our schedule we're back to a normal full schedule for february and we're back to doing what a cartoon podcast and our what a cartoon podcast for february will be the avatar the last airbender episode the blind bandit and this is one of our patron picks and it's been a long time coming in the six years now of what a cartoon yeah avatar is a big one for the zoomers and also like we when it was airing, like we were like, Oh, anime is finally going mainstream.

It's anime is much more mainstream than it was then. And it's, is it anime? Isn't it? It's made, it's animated by the same people overseas. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's anime enough for me. And I saw a few episodes of this when it was airing and I thought, Oh cool. This, this really hits where it, what it needs to hit,

but I have real anime to watch. But then the little thing called the pandemic happened. I don't know if you guys remember it. It was a couple of years ago. But when it did happen, I watched all of Avatar with my wife. And I'm happy to have the experience. So I'm looking forward to finally podcasting about this. And it was our patron's pick that it's the episode that has Mick Foley, aka Mankind, in it.

I didn't pick the wrestler episode. He did. He did. Our guest. Let's blame the person who gave us money. No, I'm not blaming. I'm happy. No, I'm blaming them. I'm sorry. I'm shifting the blame here. So, yes, that's what we're doing in February for What a Cartoon. And then for

our $5 and up patrons at patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons, obviously, you're going to get your miniseries episodes this month. For Talking Fut talking futurama we're coming towards the end of the fox run we'll have more news on what we're doing after that much later as for now february's episode will be covering 300 big boys it's about the most monumental thing that happened to george w bush in the fall of 2001 and it's not what you're thinking about it's the this is exactly what our podcast is for a history segment that explains a thing that makes no sense if you didn't live through it. And even if you lived through it, you probably forgot it.

Yes. It's just a very odd moment of the early George W. Bush presidency that they are sending up. But obviously something happened a few months later and that got all the attention, not these tax cuts. So that's happening on Talking Futurama. And on Talking on the Hill, we're covering John Vitti Presents Return to La Grunta. It's an episode about sexual harassment in which Hank is taken advantage of by a dolphin in a dolphin encounter experience. And yes, this month we have both Leela having a whale encounter and Hank having a dolphin encounter. We didn't plan this at all, but love is still in the air you know in in one episode when lila loses her her suit it is it is

entirely non-sexual when that happens that is true oh and also you know uh john i've been waiting to do this one ever since we interviewed john vd and asked him about this this title as well and i'll we could probably like dig up that clip for the episode too but yeah uh john vd years ago talking to us solve the riddle as to why this is named john vd presents and then our what a cartoon movie for ten dollar and up patrons will be uh the studio ghibli movie porco rosso yes uh we know anime uh some people like it some people don't like it but i think you'll all love this story of a pig who takes to the skies think of it it as tailspin, but instead of a bear, it's a pig. It's been one I've been wanting to do for a long time,

especially because there's a ton of cool history to it. Plus, after my vacation, I was porco-pilled because there was porco merch everywhere that was just reminding me of it. And on top of that, everybody's talking about The Boy and the Heron because it just got nominated for best picture or best animated feature and will i will bet likely win it and so everybody's talking about miyazaki and this is the first one i think where people realized oh this movie is autobiographical and it's about making cartoons and that's been every movie he's made since this one too you know

i'm kind of sick of it but i do like this movie and i'm looking forward to watching one of his movies i like after being very disappointed by boy in the hair and check out last month's episode about that and thank you to everybody for being calm and reasonable about my negative opinion on that movie no one got mad at me for disliking that movie so thank you i i love our audience and also uh special thanks to everyone who came out to our san francisco sketch fest show all about marge versus the monorail it just happened two days ago as of this recording uh we're both very tired and recovering but uh yes our guest was chris wade from chapo trap house it went great it was a 90 minute show compared to our normal 60 minute show

and uh yeah i couldn't be happier with how it all went down. And that was our fifth time at SketchFest, but our sixth SketchFest show. That's a tongue twister. And since for two years SketchFest didn't happen, we've been doing SketchFest for seven years now? Something like that, yeah. But yes, thank you to SketchFest for inviting us back. It's always an honor to see my name next to people i respect and have enjoyed their work for decades so that's a treat too but then getting to actually do a live show in front of i think our biggest audience to date was great yeah thank you so much to everybody who came out and and a big

thank you to chris wade who you know he he flew he had been in vermont like to the day he flew in from vermont the day before the show and uh him him and his wife just to be our guest, which was so great and so very nice of him. He was a great guy. As always, the Chapo Trap House people are very kind to us and very giving with their time, which is much more valuable than ours. The nicest guys in podcasting, Chapo Trap House. I'm saying it here. I say it every time. So, yes, that live show will be on the Patreon and on the free feed next month.

So please look forward to it in February if you want. If you missed it, it's basically we did the same format but in front of an audience. So we're not breaking format. And I think even if you weren't there, you will enjoy what we did on stage. We found some great clips. We found some great clips about the, especially for uh mass transit some really fun clips when you really care about someone you shout it from the mountaintops so on behalf of desjardins insurance i'm standing 20 000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you

home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? So yes, that is all of the Simpsons news and all of our news. And now is the part of the show where we talk about what we've been playing and watching that's not related to the Simpsons. And as for me, Henry, you can probably tell my brain is now much larger my my skull is very swollen because while you were in japan for two weeks more on that later uh i played finally the

2019 rpg disco elysium for the first time and i swear that's all i did for two weeks spending 37 hours in that game and i can't recommend it more My wife was pushing it on me for a very long time. Everybody was pushing it on me, to be fair, saying, you'll love this, you'll love this. And I thought, we'll see about this. Whenever people recommend me things, I am always skeptical. But fantastic game, the best writing I've seen in a game. And I heartily recommend it, although I feel like it is a game that is not for everyone, but it's definitely a Bob Mackie catnip. It's been on my to-play pile for a very long time.

It just keeps being, there's always something else to play. And when Nina was so big on it, that nearly got me to do it, but I'm sure I probably started playing some turn-based RPG for 100 hours instead. But I think I might finally do it this year. Yeah, I will warn people, it's not a game for everybody. It's very dense. There's a ton of reading, although now with the 2021 Special Edition, which is the default edition, everything is voice acted. But it is a game where you kind of have to roll with your mistakes because it's constantly like dice rolls. Like, oh, did I pass this check? Did I fail this check?

The failures lead to interesting situations and alternate routes. A lot of people, when it comes to situations like that, they'll just reload their save until they win. I feel like if you go in, know that failure in this game is fun and they find ways to make you fail without punishing you. And I don't want to spoil anything about the game uh like you can do an entire podcast series about it how great the writing is how much it has to say about ideology and politics how it's a really fantastic murder mystery and how much replay value there is in it if you want to go back in and play a different type of character but cannot recommend it more it is probably it probably will be in my top 10

games of all time i gotta let it sit for a little bit. Wow, that's big talk, man. So I've been enjoying finishing games. I've been playing a lot of little games because like you, Henry, I'll be playing a 300-hour game soon. And if anyone tells you they finished that game before March, they're lying.

Or they need a wellness check or they have bed sores because no one's beating this particular game for months. But as for me, I started it on my trip to Japan, but I finished The Case of the Golden Idol, a very cool mystery game where you're essentially presented with scenes throughout a story, and you have to decide what is happening in these scenes based on what I can see, what is in characters' pockets, what's in the environment, and so on. If you know about The Curse of the Obra Dinn, which was another mystery game that came out about five years ago,

it is like that, but more broken up into navigable segments instead of one grand mystery. And I really, really enjoyed that. And I also played, I've been playing a lot of 2022 games, I think, because these are ones I just missed because I was too busy. I played Norco, which is a point-and-click adventure game That's just was like very critically lauded. It left me very cold I'm not gonna go into why but check out the watch out for fireballs episode about Norco their thoughts echo mind Exactly and another weird little indie game I played was called betrayal at club low and the best way I can describe it is it's like a minnow a mini disco

Elysium in that it's it's like one super dense mission in which you're a pizza delivery guy trying to infiltrate a club and pull out one of your operatives who's clearly failing at their mission and it's a game about a series of dice rolls you're deciding like the every action you want to take is you rolling a series of dice and the greatest most satisfying part of the game is you see all of the dice roll on the screen and i could not get enough of that. It makes me realize how, like, no wonder people are gambling addicts. Watching dice rolls are fun.

But it's just, it's a fun, wacky game. You can play through it once in about two hours. And then it's like, you know, built on replay value where you're like, well, this time I'll talk to this person or try this option. There's a lot of comedy in it. Betrayal at Club Low. I think it's like 10 bucks or less on Steam. Very, very cool and i don't think i would have known about it unless i was following the something awful thread about mystery games because it's it's a very obscure indie game that's uh somewhat new does it work on the steam or is it good on steam deck oh yeah yeah there's no issues

there it's very it's very very lo-fi i'm trying to play like a lot of little short games like betrayal at club low was like a two-hour game I played it for like six or eight hours because I wanted to see more of it. I also played this fun little indie game called The Exit 8. And it's a game where you are sort of trapped in a subway inside like of a subway terminal in Japan. It's made by a Japanese guy. And essentially it's kind of like an endless walk to the exit. So the gist of the game, it's this simple. You keep walking forward. kind of like an endless walk to the exit so the the gist of the game it's this simple you keep

walking forward if you see something that looks off you turn around and walk the other way and you keep doing this until you eventually make it out and some of the anomalies you spot are very very subtle and you'll miss them some of them are very obvious but it's just a fun semi-spooky new kind of game that i i got everything out of it in an hour and I love that about these types of games. I saw a video of that and it was amazing. Well, because I just went to Japan, but it seriously did. The only time me and my husband did not have a good time in Tokyo was when we went to Shinjuku Station and normally we had fine time at the station. It was like, yeah, we go to this exit and then we go to the place we're going to but at shinjuku we're like okay we need to go to this one specific

place to pick up a ticket and we were following signs that said go to this for like 20 minutes and we were losing our minds like but the sign says it's here it's like i think we're going in circles but but the sign says this you know going back there and realizing just how large the underground subway tunnels are and terminals and how how long you could walk before ever seeing daylight again it made me realize oh this is why dungeons are such a big part of japanese games even non-rpgs like they always have dungeons to go into because people just to survive and get to work they're going into dungeons every day in in real life in japan i i had a fine time at all the other stations but shinjuku that was the one that broke us it is the it is the most complicated of all the tokyo

stations it's massive and i think next i've been playing all these little games it's a slightly larger game but still little i'm going to play the man who erased his name, the Yaxa Like a Dragon, Gaiden game, whatever you want to call it, mini game, before I jump into the next Yaxa game, the Infinite Wealth, which, again, if anyone says they finished it before March, they're lying or you need to get them to the's a new Ace Attorney collection that collects the next three games. And they've been giving a very good makeover. And I've only played all of those once. So I'm looking forward to running through those again. That's it for me for gaming because Henry was gone. And because I had a lot of like travel time, I was playing a ton of games more than usual. As for watching stuff, I'm going to skip the Christmas movies because I watched a bunch after Christmas as well.

So now you were all very nice to me when I said I didn't like The Boy and the Heron. I also didn't like Godzilla Minus One. My review is Godzilla Minus Fun because I didn't have a great time at it. I mean, people, you're allowed to like the movie. I give you permission and I understand why you like the movie. Me, I didn't like it. I thought it was so predictable I wasn't having fun. And there were, I mean, it's been weeks since I've seen it, but there are just like so many little things about the movie that were bugging me. And I can't believe that everybody is fawning over this movie because it's brought to us by the same guy who directed Dragon Quest, your story, which you, we did a whole podcast

about your lack of enjoyment of that. Now we're giving him a pass but you know uh i guess my thing is and i'm not going to spoil anything yes it's not like an intellectual cerebral movie yes it's a godzilla movie but the um i wouldn't even call it a plot twist what the main character intends to do at the end is shown in the movie to be a surprise like oh can you believe this happened when i thought like oh no i i know what happened i i've been thinking about this happening for 30 minutes and i was dreading the fact that it would happen because i've been so bored but well well also we know we've seen a lot of the way that reveal happens it's set up in a way of like oh this character saying this line means

that's going to happen like this is the groundwork you lay for that twist. Yeah. I mean, I love Shin Godzilla and people were like, Oh, this is even better. I don't know. I mean, I like, I like the different take on it. I like certain elements of it,

but it left me pretty cold. So it's, it's not fun. It's not fun to make it Shin Godzilla versus minus one. They're their own movies. And, but it's not, it shouldn't be about

which is better but shin godzilla is so much better and look am i an anos anaston stan it's hard to say yes yeah anaston yes i am but i mean yeah i also think that um i feel like this happens every 10 years where a serious godzilla movie is made and people who never watch tokusatsu films any other time they see it and like wow these aren't just like stupid it's like yeah there's lots of them that aren't stupid but this is the only one you watch every decade so you think this is the smart one like yeah yeah they occasionally will make the prestige godzilla film you know this feels like an attempt at that but i didn't say i don't think it was bad i gave it like a 2.5 on letterboxd which is like the median like the most average a movie can possibly be so yeah disappointed by japan lately in terms of movies with boy in the heron and godzilla minus

one i will say the title is is not good well i mean it is good but there are too many things named this i saw the japanese film monster and it's not the adaptation of the urasawa movie it's not a remake of the movie about the female serial killer. It's something entirely different. And I don't want to give anything away. All I will say is I heartily recommend this movie. I gave it four and a half stars on Letterboxd. The first two acts of the movie are not preparing you for what the third act will be.

You won't see it coming. You will think the movie is a different kind of movie until the third act. Perhaps is saying too much i think that's the broadest way i can pitch this to get people interested in the movie but uh very very good thanks to the rio for screening this i wouldn't have seen it otherwise and i think it's like a 2022 japanese film but i will say the actress in the movie looks alarmingly like my wife and i want her to post side by side i'm not going to do it but i want her to post side by side i'm not going to do it but i want her to post side by side pictures of her in this actress because i'm like that's it's nina i was like uh leonardo caprio pointing at the screen constantly so uh that's not why i liked

it by the way but i was just like wow uh i get comparisons to people all the time or i did when i was younger like john heater and wes anderson and beck but uh apparently it's never really happened to her until i brought this up you know i had not heard of this i thought you had watched the charlize theron movie for some reason no i mean monster is indicative of what it's about uh not literally of course but i feel like too many things are called monster name it something else i also saw because we just got the criterion channel and we're watching the most non-criterion movies ever on it uh we saw lady snowblood which 15 minutes into this i was like oh tarantino saw this didn't he and then as soon as we're done watching the movie i type in lady snowblood it's like well

obviously this is the basis for kill bill and i thought like no shit it's so obviously kill bill the first thing that was made and then kill bill was made but yes lady snowblood if you like kill bill this is just like the OG Kill Bill with great like 70s effects and great just fountains of bright red blood. It's so, so good. I didn't know about it because I've not seen most Tarantino movies.

Oh, wow. That's funny. Because since you mentioned Kill Bill, I went to one of our last stops because we're like, what haven't we done yet? We went to gompachi which is the izakaya that was the inspiration for the big lady snowblood style fight that happens in kill bill volume one the the owner of the place has pictures of him like with tarantino on the

front to just let you know like yes if you're a tarantino nerd you get but it's also him next to michael jackson and him next to johnny johnny depp all the greatest people nothing wrong there uh a wall of fame not a wall of shame but yes lady snowblood definitely recommend it and there's a sequel to on the criterion channel so watch that another criterion pick that i've seen before but it had been over a decade is ricky oh the story of ricky now if you remember the daily show for about what i feel is a decade they would use a clip of a man just exploding another man's head between his forearms and online people were trying to find the clip and then they found out oh it's from this thing called ricky oh and that's why i watched it i loved it the first time i love it even more now because it is just like an insane over-the-top uh violence fight but in prison it's

just like a series of boss battles between riki the main character and all of these dangerous prisoners some with superpowers and the it's extremely gory but in an evil dead too kind of way where it's clearly like puppets are being thrown around and like blood is being shot out of hoses have you have you seen this one henry i think you would really enjoy it it's been a long time but yeah i saw it and i saw it in um like i feel like right after high school because of the daily show thing as well and it was one of those like my friend's older brother was the type of guy who had the bootleg vhs of it like oh man like he's the same guy who showed us battle royale before it was you was as famous.

Yeah. Yeah. This feels Battle Royale adjacent and it's like wants you something fucked up. That's how a teenager would pitch it to you. But now I'm enjoying it as a 41 year old man. Yeah. It's basically a story about a guy punching holes through other guys. It's the violence is basically Fist of the North Star style, like extreme violence, but low, low budget puppets,ets blood hoses all the fun stuff and more

criterion channel pics for all of you out there i saw the 2004 movie take out it is a super low budget indie made for like a couple thousand dollars and it's all digital video and it's basically a day in the life of an undocumented chinese food delivery guy who has to earn 800 by the end of the day and you just kind of follow him around you cut back to the restaurant despite the source material seeming so mundane it is harrowing because like you don't know what's going to happen every time someone opens the door and this is before you know door dash in uber eats where you could just say leave it outside i'll come when you're gone you had to actually open the door and hand a man money and hand him

his tip and things like that so very short movie but I love it and uh I don't normally see those kinds of movies like like aughts digital digital video movies so oh yeah definitely uh yeah uh really fun and those are all my movies for this month and other stuff I don't want to take away from Henry's vacation but I took a trip to New York City. One of these days, it'll be not for work. I do this about every two to three years. I took some rare non-podcasting work. It was too lucrative to pass up and it involved a free trip to New York City. So hey, I took it. I also worked a lot while I was there, but because it was playing on Broadway, I saw the Back to the Future musical and because the tickets seemed alarmingly cheap to me, I sat in the front row of the Back to the Future musical and because the tickets seemed alarmingly cheap to me

I sat in the front row of the Back to the Future musical and I will say I don't know if I recommend sitting in the front row because you are too close and I like there to be some distance between me and the actors but often we would make eye contact

and I would think like no no no you shouldn't know I'm here you're seeing things You shouldn't know I'm here. You're seeing things you shouldn't sometimes. But at the same time, it was a wild experience to be that close to a Broadway musical. And Back to the Future, my favorite movie. The songs are good. I would say most of them are fine. Some of them are very good. They do make a few changes to make it more appropriate for the stage but they still find ways to do the big set pieces with stage effects and yes the delorean is there and it moves and it does things you would never expect the delorean to do in a stage version of back to the future oh all right it doesn't end up like the uh the cars trapped on the stage like in that

bye-bye greasy episode of home no no it is like It is the platonic ideal of the Bye Bye Greasy effects from that Home Movies episode. Yeah, I don't want to spoil too much. I say, you know, check it out if you can. If you're a Back to the Future fan especially, you'll notice like, oh, Bob Gale, who wrote the musical and who wrote the movies, he included things that were cut from the original movie.

There wasn't a lot cut, but it's like, oh, the reason why george mcfly is eating peanut brittle is because like a boy scout took advantage of him his good nature and they include the reason why he's eating peanut brittle in the play not important but i'm like oh the he wanted to work in that scene that was cut from the original and things like that i will say though i'm coming to terms with doc brown's characterization in the musical because they make him sort of a a beetlejuice style figure in terms of beetlejuice the musical where he's a guy who can like break the fourth wall and comment on things and i feel that christopher lloyd's

performance was so singular and so tied to that actor that they had to find something new to do with the role or else it would just feel off like well this guy's doing a bad impression of christopher lloyd so i understand why they need to give him something else to do in the movie and in the musical rather but i don't know if i like it but i did have a really good time awesome man that sounds i hope maybe it will uh do well enough to tour around and i can see it in the seattle area and i guess one last thing about it is uh you know i walk in i sit down i get my 40 I guess one last thing about it is, you know, I walk in, I sit down, I get my $40 glass of wine. Yes, $40 glass of wine.

And, you know, I open the playbill, a little leaflet falls out saying, oh, today, Marty McFly will be played by blank, the understudy. And I thought like, oh, I wanted to see the guy who does it, but, you know, I'm here, I'm having fun. The understudy, amazing.

He looks more like Marty McFly in Michael J. Fox than the principal actor for that role and i thought he did an amazing job and i even though the actor who uh played christopher lloyd's role wasn't doing christopher lloyd there were a few actors who were doing impeccable impressions of the characters like the guy playing george mcfly was doing an impeccable crisping glover impression just perfect perfectly studied. I don't think you could play it any differently because that was such a weird performance and you can't really do it any differently. And the guy who played Biff, he was doing Tom Wilson's

performance. But I guess a secret trivia about this, which is not secret if you go on IMDb or look in the playbill, the guy who played Doc Brown, I believe his name is Tony Bart. And I'm like, well, what has he done i'm looking he was the singing voice for hercules in the disney film hercules wow wow oh that's so cool and he has aged into playing doc brown 27 years later so there you have it that's so cool wow and here we talk we talked all about him in the uh in our what a cartoon movie about that two years ago two two or three something like that but uh yeah that's that's where he ended up and everyone was having

fun yeah check it out i recommend it also i got to hang out with a few of the we hate movies guys in in new york i'm only saying that not to drop names for all of you listeners out there but uh you know i was in a very touristy part of new york um at many restaurants a beer was like 15 dollars but they invited me to Brooklyn, a brief 20-minute subway ride away, and I got to hang out in one of the We Hate Movies dens of iniquity, this great little divy bar. We had a great time, and thanks to them for inviting me.

I don't think I would have seen Brooklyn if not for the invite, so it was great to hang out with them. And the weird thing is I hung out with them, and we hung out with Chris Wade for the live show. And you immediately start talking about podcasts and podcasting. And part of part of me is like, should we just be talking about work? But then another part of me is like, no, these are the only people who are like us. We cannot have these conversations any other time. So we just get really wrapped up in the business of it, the politics of it the growth of it all of that stuff and it's fun but like at first i have reservations like can we talk about something else but then i think like no because i can have this

conversation once a year with someone who is not my podcasting partner there there's probably 40 people on earth you we could have these conversations with yes but yes that was it a lot of a lot of downtime a lot of travel uh i'm looking forward to not moving until maybe midwest gaming classic when i go there for retronauts in i think april or something like that but yeah uh that's it for me a busy month of travel and games and movies and henry has had a much busier time since we talked to him last oh yes well uh a quick rundown of non-vacation things i did i started up like a dragon infinite wealth last night and did the first two hours which i have a feeling it's going to be in what feels like the prologue for another like eight hours i think because that's

how like a dragon games go but i can't wait to get to hawaii in the game because i want to play it i always play him in Japanese uh because I really love the voice actor for uh Kiryu and uh Kasuga but also I'm really curious how in the Japanese language they deal with characters being in Hawaii around Americans like who speaks in Japanese who doesn't like I'm curious how they they dealt with that it's it starts off really fun does this game uh sorry uh does this game ship with the dub or is the dub coming later like with infinite wealth it ships with the dub it's crazy that the man who erased his name did not have a full english uh version with it but infinite

wealth comes with english dialogue option yes i will i understand why you'd want to play it in japanese but after playing like 500 hours of yaksa games in japanese i played yaksa 7 like a dragon in english and i thought the dub was great so they have been doing a very good job with the dubs no the dubs i they do very good work with it i'm just so attached especially to kiryu's voice actor like that's why with the man who erased his name i couldn't imagine playing it in english just because i love that voice actor so much but um and then still doing marvel snap and duolingo though you know duolingo just there's a thing that they've been firing a lot of people to replace them with ai uh which is not great i feel kind of turned off to duolingo i've been trying out other language apps while keeping my streak going and duolingo but i mean

we're we're in the middle of the uh end the fiscal year, and the layoffs are flying left and right, and it's very depressing. And I feel these layoffs are being done to anticipate advances in AI that will allow it to replace these jobs. We're not there yet, but I feel like, oh, it's the end of the fiscal year. Let's just let the bloodbath happen now, and then maybe by June, AI will be smart enough to do these things that's that's my like conspiracy theory about why despite posting record profits microsoft activision blizzard laid off like 2 000 people and like every online media company either laid everybody off or he's saying we're gonna lay people off like it's uh it's it's a very rough time right now but yeah that's all the games i've been playing but that's because i uh well, first off, I watched a real movie.

I'm going to start watching some more of the Oscar noms, catch up on the ones I haven't seen, because, you know, it's fun to engage in the discourse and all that. I watched Salt Burn. Now, I'm not saying it's homophobic, but when I look at the people's reactions, when I go to Letterboxd, the heterosexuals on Letterboxd dislike the movie more than the queers I follow on Letterboxd. But Saltburn, look, is Saltburn insanely predictable and have stupid politics? Yes. Yes, it does. But the acting in it and the queer stuff in it, I still give a thumbs up and enjoy.

But yeah, look, it's bad politics and it thinks it's really going to shock you. But if you've seen movies before, I don't think it will. I've seen a lot of movies. Yeah. On the anime front, I've been jumping into Delicious in Dungeon, which I didn't know until I saw Nina tweet about this,

that the localized name into English is an extra pun because I believe it's called Dungeon Meshie. Yeah, it's a Japanese pun. It just means dungeon food. That's all it means. Okay. Yeah. Well, in America, or in the English title, to make it delicious in dungeon, as Nina pointed out, that makes it D in D. Not D and D, but D in in D which that's what I actually am

watching the dub for uh because it's studio trigger animated it so it's great animation it's a release weekly on Netflix so I get to just have one episode a week which is nice too and uh previous what a cartoon guest Sungwon Cho aka Pro Z zd he does the best character in the show senshi the sexy uh bearded dwarf who does all the cooking are you saying this is the uh best character because you're hot for him no he is the best character though i feel like whenever i do feel like whenever you get into something you have to announce who you think is the hottest character look sometimes i i didn't say who i thought was hottest in salt burn but it's oh that's true it's very key kagan if you want me i know you see his his willy in that movie you see oh man do you yeah but well i'm gonna start announcing who i'm hot for from now on i do

like senshi but he's also just he is the best character the show yeah he is who all the plot turns around like it's him showing up that changes things he cooks all the stuff that is gets focused on and is all explained i enjoy the show it's it's a funny funny show i i read a bit of the manga years ago and i've only seen the first episode but i think it's a very good adaptation i'm looking forward to watching more very slowly thank you this is like one of the rare times netflix allows something to drop uh on a weekly schedule and i'm grateful for it i think they're finally listening to the Japanese partners for this because I do think it messed up Jojo

that they did Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6 as the regular Netflix drop of like 13 episodes at a time. I think it really hurt its ability to be talked about and go viral. Delicious in Dungeon is a weekly drop as is they're getting the new season or the new arc that just began in the One Piece anime and that's also getting a weekly drop as is they're getting the new season or the new arc that just began in the one piece anime and that's also getting a weekly drop instead of the uh the the big dump at once

speaking of one piece i'm current with one piece now i've read it all i have read all of one piece it's insane it took me six months but i did it all my question is what now henry what now well now like you know 400 500 chapters of berserk that's gonna feel like nothing you know berserk way different tone but i think you know just as enjoyable i guess i'm only halfway through one piece but i've been going like i i started and i stop it and i started and i stop it and my most recent starting of it was like in 2018 and now i'm like about volume 47 of i don't know 104 so uh i probably like i predict by the time i retire i will have caught up with one piece it's uh well you know my uh you you do like alternating

both i was pure comics and now that i'm current with the comics i actually feel like oh i can i can actually watch the anime now and see the weekly anime and see how okay now how are they adapting this chapter that chapter now i can finally watch the one of and see the weekly anime and see how okay now how are they adapting this chapter that chapter now i can finally watch the one of the episodes of one piece uh 1066 our pal ian jones cordy even animated a little moment in it oh that's right yeah they do incorporate some western animators i've seen them tweet about their work on the show and now i can finally watch more of the movies i watched stampede again which me and you watched in theaters when every single reference flew over my head because i had read like 50 chapters of one piece at that point henry was once a one piece hater he said one piece isn't that

stupid and i said no i'm kidding but i know i know that uh well we had podcasts about one piece and you were interested you bought all the manga you bought like a big briefcase of one piece manga that was before the jump app which is how i've been reading it now and i watched the movies z which i thought was okay and gold as well which i really uh really liked that was my favorite of the one piece movies i've seen though now i can watch red red's gonna be which everybody red was when i went to tokyo red stuff was it's a year old. It's still being sold everywhere. Red in particular was a huge, huge hit in Japan.

I saw merch everywhere. I bought 60 digital volumes of the One Piece manga before the Jump app, so I spent $300 on the manga so far. You should get Jump app for free for a couple years. Well, it's $3 a a month so it's basically free i did i mean yeah in comiXology i have like every volume of bakuman and dragon ball on there as well and then now it's just all on the on the jump app and yes okay i i won't i'll i'll try to keep my stuff as brief as i can here too but i did go to tokyo and it was awesome uh most important question what did you do on the plane i i read one piece i read oh that's it i got i played i did play about four hours of fire emblem engage i got a little farther into that yeah mainly i just read one piece

because we were planning to like go to one piece the the mugiwara stores in japan that's what they're called i don't like when i'm also on the side of like i don't like weebs who call them mugiwara instead of straw hat but the name of the stores are mugiwara stores so it's like hey if we're gonna go to those we should read as much as we can so it stuff isn't spoiled for us by like merchandise or whatever i i don't know what they could spoil outside of like well here's a character you haven't seen i'd like i said i've only read half of it i don't think i was spoiled by the story but at the same time if you read all the manga you can know like oh i want to buy this yes which was what

happened to us well when we were there maybe it's one of those things where if you hadn't read the comic then it would just look like nothing to you but if you've read chapters and then they have like hey here's a poster of a very important panel you know it's important because you read it but if you didn't read it maybe it just washes over your brain and you don't recognize like this is luffy punching out the the guy who he fought for 100 chapters or whatever yeah no the mugiwara stores my husband especially even more than me he was mr mugiwara at there because he bought the stamp book so he we went to like five different mugiwara stores in tokyo for him to get the stamp in every store so we had all five stamps

what was the uh the merch hall like how much uh it was so much that i didn't want to post it all out of embarrassment but no i mean well okay so at the mugiwara stores we probably spent i'd say three hundred dollars total between the two of us then disneyland on merch and this was also we we got gifts for for some of my husband's co-workers too so we went to at disneyland we bought a lot of fun stuff we had so much fun at Tokyo Disneyland especially we went on the Beauty and the Beast ride which was like the most gorgeous wonderful ride I've ever been on I think it maybe is the best Disney ride it's so good it's so worth the wait I mean I talked a lot about it uh November's talk to the audience I think but uh I'm glad you followed my

advice and uh I mean just the line is great i'll let you talk about it sorry no yeah and uh no it was the most gorgeous like line ever like every animatronic was the best animatronic ever it feels like you're dancing with the song when you're on it i and same with poo's honey hunt i loved poo's honey hunt as well that was really great uh and then i went to uh nagano for we did we did that for a day because it's just like a 90 minute bullet train ride. And we went to a couple other things, but the main thing we went there for was to go to the museum in Nagano because it was hosting the Hideaki Anno exhibition, which was like

four floors going over his entire career. And it was just incredible. Like it was, there was a main room of all the stuff he loved as a kid. Uh, like, like all of these props he had collected over the years from Tokusatsu or also like his collection of comics,

uh, that he'd, he'd made over time. And then you get to the next floor and you see collections of his original college animation that like, you can't find anywhere else and like sells from daikon 3 and daikon 4 though they can't really show you they don't show you the illegal parts of daikon 3 and 4 that have all the copyright breaking stuff

but that never happened still and then you go to another room and it's his work up to gun buster and then the gun buster room the one thing they didn't have though and i was telling my husband beforehand like is that cream lemon episode we talked about on project echo going to be represented here because he animated on that too no it was not unfortunately you know uh i did want to check that out it's funny because when you go to japan you're like oh i can do all these exclusive things that no one else can do because they're not here and then as soon as you leave a million new pop-up shop starts and you're like oh i wish i was there but then you did a bunch of things that people couldn't do unless they were there at the same time as you as soon as we left we then saw

like five new pop-up shops and we're like i don't want to do that but yes that is what tokyo is uh but yeah the the auto exhibit is amazing too like they have two whole rooms just about ava i tweeted out pics of it folks should go back through my twitter but it was like the entire storyboard for the opening and ending of evangelion and all the original designs also is like his storyboards for the super attacks of sailor neptune and uranus that looks great like there's and all of his like physical props he made for for the ava movies uh that you see in in those like it went all the way up to shin common writer uh in it so it's pretty much current and it had like his yeah there's just it was so great and at the gift shop there i spent i spent three hundred dollars as well those gift shops make

it easy to do especially with the exchange rate the guys behind the uh the register we all chuckled when i had a very very long receipt that they all they all they had a good laugh and then just uh the speed through a couple other things saw the life-size gundam in myokohama which was amazing like it was the rx78 they were playing the songs from the show and i was singing along with them to let my husband know like oh yeah this is this is the ending theme from the encounters in space like this is the encounter song like and then speaking of singing we went to the evangelion themed karaoke room which is where we sang karaoke with our good pal maddie cop she she came out we did karaoke

she joked that it was like the weebiest thing she had done since moving there of singing singing metal gear karaoke in the evangelion room were there evangelion style uh snacks and drinks or just it was just the room evangelion just the room no yeah unfortunately no no food or snacks but the the room was was uh fantastic and that's also we ate at the dragon quest cafe and the monster hunter and then final fantasy 14 ones and also the common writer cafe which i think you that's what the one you didn't go to i i really don't care about common writer that's why i actually didn't even know this existed i have to assume there's a cafe for everything but i you know when i went there i went to the dragon quest cafe the ff14 cafe and monster hunter my favorite one was monster hunter did you have a

favorite out of all of those three at least you know it was dragon quest i think i'll agree with you i do think the best food was at monster hunter but the theming of luida's bar was so good except it made it for like a bad experience we both times got sat on the barrel which that's how the bar is in the video games like people sit at barrels and eat off them but that's actually not a good place to have like three plates of food on and try to i don't know i mean that was that was a great experience i think uh monster hunter they there's like it's much bigger that cafe and so they can do a lot more with it dragon quest i did like that what made it charming i don't know if i said this last time is that uh a dad and his son were there

is like 10 year old son it was like a surprise birthday thing where they brought him out of thing they played like the level up music because when it's your birthday at the dragon quest cafe you've leveled up oh that's cute i didn't see a birthday there i don't know why a 10 year old kid now is playing dragon quest but he looked elated that when this was happening i was like oh that's so that's so sweet they still were selling themed drinks of the entire cast of dragon quest 11 and so me and my husband were like let's just drink every drink of the cast like which that's a big cast we drank 12 drinks between us i think to drink the whole cast did they serve you insulin afterwards no no though we well we walked a lot to to work it off and then the last place i wanted

to talk about was went to the ghibli museum first time there since 2018 got to see the newest short which was also released in 2018 burro the caterpillar it was really interesting it was the most feces that was ever in a ghibli movie i've seen but caterpillar poop hey there's a lot of bird shit in boy in the heron spoilers oh you're right actually that tops it in terms of fecal matter you're right but um but no the ghibli museum was great also because i think they cleaned up line system for the cafe and such. Like I never got to eat in the cafe before and this time I finally could, but it's because

they made it much easier to order. However, if you wanted to have the Ghibli themed beer or specifically the Nausicaa themed beer, which is like branded as beer from the Valley of the Wind, they don't sell it anymore. I went to the place to buy it and i didn't see it on the menu and i asked him and i asked in bad japanese unfortunately the the person buying the register spoke english and they were just like yeah no no more beer and i was like but you guys used to have beer right there like yeah but no more beer i was like oh okay you know when i didn't say this last time when i was there i thought it was funny because there are so many loan words in japanese

that are taken from english and other languages that often if you want something you just say it in a Japanese accent like uh beer is like beeru and then cheese is chizu there are so many things where it does feel like a joke where you're just like I guess I just slap a you at the end of this and and then point at something I was I was talking with Maddie a little about that because she knows Japanese very well. And she was telling me how if you are an English speaker, you really have an advantage in learning Japanese over, say, a German speaker or a Spanish speaker who learns it. Because when you learn all the loan words, most of them are from English, not from other languages. So, you know, say if you're a German speaker and you have to start learning like all of these words for like, you know, beer or cheese or smartphone or whatever, they're not the German words, you're learning the English

word, but in the way a Japanese person says it. Yeah, I found it very easy to order things when so many things were just english words especially if it was you know non-japanese food also is really neat that like google translate really is like we used it a few times of the google translate app of just you say or write something into it and then it spits it out in japanese and good enough that japanese speakers know what you're saying but we had it done to us too at places where the employee there would just have the google translate app and say things into it and then point words at us and we would just nod or or say yes or no it's being used on both sides of it and that we also went to a

couple gay bars that we had been wanting to see and we went to this one called bun bun if you're a if you're in tokyo and in shinjuku's nichome area and you want to go to it bun bun is one for for big boys and we were like let's check this out but when we got in there the people who work there were like uh no english and we were just like that's okay we just pulled out google translate and and we got along just fine oh that's great but yeah and i did eight million other things I'll talk about on podcasts for years to come in an annoying way of like, well, you know, when I went to Tokyo. But it was really good.

It was, of course, amazing. The second we got back, we're like, okay, when in 2025 are we going to go back to Japan and then go to Osaka and Kyoto and Nagoya? That's like the second we got back. We're like, well, yeah, we're going annually, right? Because we waited. I know you waited waited too we waited so long to go so magical but yeah i'm glad that we both had that experience and i'm glad that we can do this and work far in advance to build in space to take off yeah with no real interruptions and that inflation is crappy for the

japanese but boy is it nice for us that it uh 70 cents for 100 yen is pretty nice yeah well once again when you meet someone living there don't be like wow your money's worthless my money on the other hand worth a lot i'm gonna go buy things oh you get paid in that money oh too bad yes that maddie was saying that when when i was like oh yeah we'll pay for your drinks at the karaoke place he's like yeah yeah because your money is american money good for you yes you need to have some tact when you're spending your valuable ameribucks when you're in japan that is it for our personal stuff let's move on to comments and questions for talking simpsons the first round are from the episode i'm spelling as fast as i can and steven c nadal says and a hot plate is one of the

favorite lines of my life partner and i she and i are also proud products of the state edumacation system, but living in Massachusetts, we totally got the seven sisters jokes, especially the Mount Holyoke as a party school. I dated someone in high school and went there for summer college prep camp, and all she learned was which wine coolers had the highest alcohol content. Just last night, I was talking with someone about how lame it is that Lisa married Milhouse in the future canon. It's one thing if he had matured, but if anything, he's more pathetic as an adult. It would be more in character for adult Lisa to be single and free. And having been a total Milhouse when I was young, I wouldn't have wished young me on my worst enemy as a spouse.

Yes, this is Bob speaking. I agree with you, Stephen. And I think Lisa's wedding has the ultimate stance on Milhouse. Milhouse doesn't count. I totally agree with you, Steven. And I think Lisa's wedding has the ultimate stance on Milhouse. Milhouse doesn't count. I totally agree with that. And that it's like, if I choose to be married, remember, that's what Lisa said, you know, that I much prefer the vision of Lisa as like a single and free, but also like, you know, quiet. Well, not quietly, but like she's also like bisexual and it's not a big deal. Like, I'm also cool. I prefer that future vision of Lisa. Yeah. Never. I mean, I guess good jokes come out of it, but I just feel bad to see Lisa saddled with Milhouse in

the future. And look, I can also see that the writers on the show who are all Milhouses and have brilliant wives they love who feel like are trading down for them i get why they write millhouse with lisa i get it but yeah i don't like it either also on that episode all the trophies says i definitely have my own spelling bee moment and while it doesn't bother me anymore it seems impossible to forget i forget which grade it was but i was able to get first place in the spelling bee for both my grade and for the entire school. The winning word being aristocrat, which I knew how to spell because of the aristocats, the Disney movie. I made it to the District B, which was held in a convention center in the heart of the city. I was doing well, but I got cocky

and went way too fast. And just like Milhouse and Henry, I will never forget the word I faltered on, soldiers. I was spelling and skipped over the I and went straight to E. I immediately realized my mistake and paused, but a spelling bee rule is that you can't restart the word once you've started. So I hung my head and dejectively said R-S. And the audience laughed. Now as an adult, I know that they were laughing because I had realized my mistake, but as a child, I was distraught and it did stick with me for a number of years thankfully when the geography bee came around the next year i instantly failed to qualify so i didn't have to go through something similar again too too many bees is what i say these kids have got enough problems with you know

mass shooting drills now we we sick bees on them when you think about it in a in a mathematical sense you know only one kid can win out of dozens and dozens so it's like oh dozens of kids all go through the pain of that that they'll never forget like that actually is kind of rough i i feel like every kid should get a spelling bee trophy is what i'm saying it does feel like it's less about spelling and more about teaching humans how to be humiliated publicly and dealing with that how how to have a traumatic memory that's what it's for yeah soldiers is one of those complicated too complicated words despite all of my the many thousands of books i've read in my in my too much schooling whenever i have to write out restaurant i have to like think in my head okay rest around

it's like why is it spelled like that we need to fix some of these words there there were several other good spelling bee memories in the comments they're uh associating you know same same tough memories that i had and also lots of compliments for bob's gym neighbors impersonation too yes thank you uh i can't whip it out now but well sorry phrasing phrasing i'm not gonna do it now because my throat is very tired from performing. But maybe when he comes up again, I will slip into my gym neighbor's character. That's a promise or a threat. Up next, we have Homer's triple bypass.

And Thad Komorowski says, Some of the best animation and posing in the series, and an effectively better and more emotional episode than the Blowfish one, simply because the drawing and humor and acting and everything has gotten so much better i know this is the anti-dad podcast but the final shot of homer haggard post-operation is incredibly well observed to anyone who's seen their old man in a hospital bed and adds to the realness and yeah i think i've i saw a few comments about that where seeing homer reminded them of like oh my dad was sick or my dad

you know was dealing with something and it was a good drawing to evoke those same kind of memories and emotions yeah no silverman and his team in general did some of their best work on that episode but yes that i i do agree that final shot of homer in bed it looks like it is a well-observed thing of a parent who's trying to put on a brave face of like the best thing happened i've survived this life-threatening operation but i'm still recuperating and still in horrible pain but trying to put on a brave face all of that like it it is a really great drawing and i you know i i yes that thanks for saying yeah we are the anti-dad podcast i think i i feel like i've tried to lighten up on look if i bring up my

dad it's not a happy story but i feel like i've at least tried to scale that back just a little bit these days i'll say my dad my real dad not around my stepdad fine fine guy i have no complaints maybe maybe it has helped in the last four or five years i've had a good stepdad and maybe that has also lightened my anti-dad comment oh yeah i, I got one of those when I was nine. They're pretty good. Also on Homer's Triple Bypass, Chris Burndit says, I can understand Henry's misconception about defibrillators. As a nurse, one of the first things we learn in school is that defibrillators don't work

the way that Hollywood almost always shows them being used. More often than not, and it still happens frequently, as in this episode, they show someone using a defibrillator to restart a flatlining patient that's not what they do they're meant to interrupt fibrillation hence defibrillator which are varied fluctuations in your heart rhythm to get them back to the normal rhythm if you use one on a flatlining patient in the manner you see every day on tv and movies nothing will happen aside from needlessly shocking a dead body henry henry did choose these and i think he was being cruel to himself by making himself say defibrillation so many times yes fibrillation defibrillation there we go i i both don't know how it works or how to say it but uh

you're so used to in movies, like, he's flatlining. Clear! And then they zap it. It's like, oh, to know that that doesn't do it at, like, that does nothing to a dead body. I just watched The Abyss. I think I talked about it last month. Rewatched it.

And there's like a very, very long defibrillation scene. And it's one of the many ways James Cameron inflicted abuse on his poor actors. The woman in that scene, I forget the actress's name, but it was one of those scenes she hated doing the most because they rip her shirt open. So they're fake shocking a topless woman with the paddles and just like pumping on her chest and everything. It seemed like a really hard scene to do. Oh, damn, that is rough.

Yeah, but I still recommend The Abyss. I haven't seen this movie in a long time. I forgot about it. We were just talking about that with a future guest, James Cameron stuff, and just how like, oh yeah, every James Cameron movie has to show somebody almost drowning. Every James Cameron project. Yeah, actually, you mentioned Evangelion, and I was thinking of The Abyss because they have this fluid you could breathe in, like it has oxygen in it.

And I was thinking, oh, it's like LCL. Otto saw The Abyss, and it's the same color in everything. Yeah, that's so funny. When I saw Evangelion, yeah, it was the very first time as a youth. I had seen the abyss. I was like, oh, that's why they do that. Like, yeah. Oh, fuck.

I did an Evangelion VR thing as well. Oh, I saw photos. It was so much fun. So if you go to the Kabukicho area of shinjuku in one of the big ass buildings across from the one with godzilla on top of it which is also cool namco's like hot new arcade with all this cool stuff they have a evangelion vr which is hard as hell we could not beat it we played it twice for 20 bucks each time we could not beat it but at the start of it you do the startup sequence of being in uh in the pod and the way they have lcl go over you they basically like blast cold air at

you as it goes up on over you and it it was such a cool cool vision the first part of that vr experience should be uh giving you depression yeah they expect you to bring your own depression to it we don't provide the depression or the traumatic childhood memories that's the deluxe package yeah maybe if we beat the game we would have gotten some fan service too as as misato says but we didn't win so but it was a very fun game and up next we have a star is born again and alex says as a former hotel front desk associate i can say that creative pseudonyms are only used somewhat often and the rooms may be under an assistant's name with notice given ahead

that a famous person is staying there instead. We were told from the time I started there that you'll sometimes see the famouses, but you have to act like they are any other guest, which was especially funny when they clearly were annoyed when they weren't recognized. P.S. I did check in Sean Penn once

and it was weird. I feel like any public experience you could have with sean penn is going to be just very strange and nightmarish he he has uh an intense energy it seems like but that that's so funny that like famous people you would think they want to be left alone that's why they use pseudonyms and everything but then to be like that to be mad that maybe especially they are mad staff is not treating them as very famous and being very, you know, obsequious to them or whatever. But that's so funny.

Like, don't you know that I'm, you know, Julia Roberts or whatever? She seems very down to earth, doesn't she? Yeah, all the movies. And movies are real. Yeah. Speaking of actually how fake movies are, our other comment from rob is regarding artificial stomach shrinking post-production uh this henry because i had mentioned that i had heard a funny story on a podcast about somebody saying that like their main job in special effects for fast

and the furious was to make the stomach smaller on vin diesel who he's in the news lately uh but all right resuming i personally have defattened russell crow de-pimpled duane johnson de-aged connie nielsen and created several variations on the arse size of brie larson these are only a few examples there are so very many more so you just have like uh on your work computer several brie larson ass models you can bring up and rotate around to get to give the director choices perhaps or maybe also brie larson's team number three in this scene i mean that's that again is why it's on like people should not be comparing themselves physically to any of these movie stars in movies now because i mean it's just like they have all

of this digital help there is there is real as Spider-Man swinging from ceilings as when you see them in their underpants in a movie. If I was on one of these teams and I didn't care about my job, in every scene I would make one actor one pound heavier and then just see if anyone noticed the gradual shift in weight to the end of the movie. The de-pimpling Dwayne Johnson, that to me sounds like um well you know when some people use certain products to be bigger it gives them acne so i'm wondering if that's what the de-pimpling sometimes uh like me when you're 41 you still get pimples and you question why like no puberty 25 years ago this could have been normal also that uh this was in the discourse this last month too i thought was funny that people were showing a pic of shirtless harrison ford from temple of doom

saying like you know this is what a hunky guy used to look like in movies people were saying yeah because he's a hunk in an incredible shape except he's not perfectly dehydrated for his shirtless scene like every actor is now yeah Yeah, he's lit and photographed well, but the little computer robots don't come in and chisel his abs after the fact. Oh my God. I feel like if you gave me two years to get in as good shape as he is in Temple of Doom, I couldn't do it. And yet, when you compare it to seeing Huge Jacked Man in movies,

as Wolverine with his perfect body you you think like oh that's that's what a good physical body is supposed to look like instead of like the peak of human body that is also heavily artificially changed yeah i guess that explains why vin diesel and the rock just look so weirdly smooth all the time it's just they're they're being spackled by ai or effects artists in this case so we're now moving on to comments for our what a cartoon movie for december the emperor's new groove and blandon says decided to give cronk's new groove a watch unfortunately it fails to capture any of the magic of the original and is deeply unfunny there's a diner scene that is

similar to the first that's good and teepo getting his old shoulder angels is funny but the rest just falls flat and yes uh like bambi 2 uh i did not give this a watch this is bob speaking by the way even though they're more available than ever it's still like in 70 minutes of my life that i'm not sure i'm willing to sacrifice on something like this quite yet i i saw another commenter point out that they'd heard david spade say on a interview like he didn't get good money for doing this movie because it was signed before Shrek changed the way celebrities get paid to do these movies. And they were guessing that on Kronk's new groove,

he was probably paid a good deal more than he was paid for the Emperor's new groove. Yeah, I saw that comment. I guess he was talking about that on his, I guess the podcast is called Fly on the Wall, the one he does with Dana Carvey. Yeah, I listened to, since you bring it it up i listened to a good seven minutes of that because they had conan on it and they were talking about monorail on it though it didn't help with any of

my monorail notes because i was like oh this is just him telling the story i've heard on eight other interviews but what was interesting was dana carvey and david spade had never seen that episode of the simpsons so he's having to explain the plot to two famous friends who don't give a shit about The Simpsons. I guess Dana Carvey busy filming Wayne's World to David Spade busy doing SNL. I could see how they could have missed this. They just go like, oh, and Phil did this? Is that what Phil did? He was so good at that stuff. I was like, wow, he's having to explain it to uh

to to people for the first time in probably a long time but also on that what a cartoon movie dylan says this movie shouldn't work but it's just so goddamn enjoyable and funny too it's kind of just a series of shit posts i mean that as a compliment with a loose plot connecting them but it's just so well acted and animated that you can't really be mad about the plot holes or inconsistencies it's a perfect example of why something that may sound bad on paper can be great purely on the basis of its execution this movie came out when i was super young and i've always been a fan of it and i was super pleased when it held up when i revisited it for the first time in ages back in 2019 with this rewatch and the podcast deep dive into it i think i love it more than ever yeah and uh i i think i'm the same way in some respects where

i knew it was good i hadn't watched it in a very long time and then revisiting it thinking oh like what a breath of fresh air that disney did not really pick up on as a trend they should be following to see i mean yeah i i said on the podcast but the that level of production values on a style of of comedy writing that is usually viewed as like well this is good for sitcoms but we're not putting our best people on it no on this they put their best people on it who did their best job and it's right before 2d animation dies so it is this insane peak that you didn't know when it was happening like oh this is actually a a high watermark in certain ways. Hey, you know, 2D animation might be dead for Disney theatrically.

But if you go see Wish and you squint, you take some mushrooms maybe, it might look like a movie from the 90s. But then you'd have to see Wish. And I can't recommend that. There were Wish ads everywhere in Japan when I was there, too, because it had just come out. Okay. They were paying for it. I think I got there before Wishmania began in Japan when I was there, too, because it had just come out. Okay. They were paying for it. I think I got there before Wishmania began in Japan. You were lucky.

Oh, I did love Urusei Atsura. I'd never seen toys for it any time I went there before because it was just an old-ass anime. This year when I went, because the new series was coming out, there were toys everywhere. There was merch everywhere there was even those you know the uh the chocolates that are shaped like mushrooms those had urusei atsura uh branding on it i was like wow i'm i'm in lum paradise here like all of the stuff i i love is it all based on the new series have you seen the new series yeah the new series is uh is good i've only watched like five episodes of it it It's good. It's not, the original is my favorite because I think Oshii and his team adapted it wonderfully.

This is more of a straight adaptation of the manga, which the manga rules. So it's good. And it has current production values. And it's really nice. I think they can finally give her the rainbow hair she has, right? Did they give her the rainbow hair?

That's one of the best parts of it, yeah. Nobody knows what we're talking about. Thanks to digital coloring, they finally gave her the rainbow hair she deserved and also while i was there i was gonna say uh we're talking about your urusei atsura or those obnoxious aliens if you bought the the two vhs's that were dubbed yeah the um i finally bought myself an expensive souvenir jacket this year too which because there was one with lum on the back of it that says love urusei atsura nina nina complimented me on my my souvenir jacket purchase online showing off her own cool one that she bought as well a couple years ago if you see henry wearing a jacket with a bikini babe on the back no it's a reference yes yeah that's i felt

weird buying lots of lum stuff with her and her bikini and and uh and other characters and i wanted to say like i just love this like you don't have you don't have merch of of kotatsu neko my favorite character in the show like so i'm buying the lum you should just pin a little photo of yourself and your husband under underneath lum on the back of your coat just to make it clear uh we're moving on to talking futurama the farnsworth pair box and joe hodgson says san diego comic-con has become such a big business for toy producers that the comic-con exclusive is now very easy to get most companies sell them online now and some aren't even available at the event i just got my mondo new york comic-con omega red from the x-men cartoon

last week because the exclusive sale was just a pre-order the san diego exclusive was lo. He hasn't even shipped. I think what has happened is that in the toy world, there really isn't a bigger covered event than SDCC, and that includes Toy Fair. Licensing rules are a bit lax for exclusives too. NECA found out they can make and sell TMNT stuff a few years ago that skirted around the agreement Nickelodeon has in place with Playmates Toys, so they would sell a unique set annually. The license opened up a couple of years ago which is why you can find that stuff in target now but neca still makes exclusive sets which are sold online and at the event and are pretty easy to get whatever is left over even gets peddled around to other cons like new york and such yeah this is bob speaking this is all a foreign world to me i assumed these exclusives you had to get at the

event but i guess that has changed yeah i didn't know it changed that much since that my last san diego comic-con i attended i believe was 2016 and that was when i did have an exhibitor's badge because the uh the horrible website i worked at had their own booth there so we got exhibitor badges and i got to see the like okay and the show floor is officially open and everybody shoves and smashes into each other to get in line for the exclusive. So I thought the exclusives were still that sought after or rare to know that they've opened up now and it's really just like, yeah, anybody can buy this,

but technically this was for San Diego or New York Comic Con. And then the resale value immediately skyrockets. I looked at those wooden benders, the golden bender, the wooden bender. I think the wooden bender, I can't remember. Wooden bender might not have been SDCC thing, but the golden bender was. The episode of the alternate universes should have just been called the toy variant episode. The chase figure episode. Is that right?

Is that lingo correct? Yes, that's, yeah. Sia Clark also said on the episode, sorry to be pedantic, fellows, but Henry was right when he briefly referred to string theory as science fiction before correcting himself and referring to it as real science. String theory is at this point fully debunked by serious physicists with only a few remaining outliers

like Michio Kaku, who still championed it as an alternate universe unified theory of physics. There was a lot of hype around string theory at the time of this episode's writing, and some physicists became rock stars and department heads at prestigious universities while also doing speaking tours. It was presented and sold to the public as the hot new thing in physics, but most mainstream physicists never took it very seriously, because ultimately it is untestable and thus it is unable to lead to any meaningful discoveries or make predictions i wouldn't go so far as to refer to its proponents as fraudsters but a lot

of people made a lot of money selling books and doing shows like nova if you want to learn more about all this youtube creator a caliostro has a youtube video titled string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard where she breaks down the timeline from her perspective as a physicist that sounds pretty interesting that video yeah i've not been keeping tabs on string theory uh to be honest but i remember when i was in college and taking all my general education requirement classes like math and science in In my science classes, the professors were excited about this. But this was like 2002 to 2004. So 20 plus years ago.

I bet it's because all the scientists getting excited about it was because they are all nerds who grew up watching Star Trek or reading DC comic books. And they're just like, oh boy, finally, all those alternate universe cartoon or comics I read, they finally are real now no we did the math turns out reality is boring you don't get to be an x-man this one there's i forgot to mention on that episode too that like they they had made fun of themselves for this on the commentary but they had done a joke previously that like nope there's only two universes this one and the cowboy universe i i think they find a way to explain it though because he creates the

universe correct oh that's right both universes they make the box farnsworth makes the box that make you're right okay that gets so they added an additional universe uh universe to the world our next set of questions is from or comments is from the king of the hill episode slight of hank i didn't say this on the episode it's a great pun because it's a pun on slight of hand like a kind of magic trick but it's slight of hank because hank is feeling slighted by the events in the episode so it's both a pun on slight of hand and literally it's slight of hank thank you for saying this bob like that uh the the second meaning of it being him being slighted did not hit me until you said that yeah i i thought about it but didn't write it down i was just reminded of it when i'm looking at the title again so uh credit to me uh moving on though sean ryan says oh man i was also raised catholic and had to attend ccd

the worst part was that those classes were held on saturday at my church so with that and being dragged to church on sunday my weekend mornings were ruined thankfully i was allowed to drop out after my first communion it did not have to go all the way to confirmation and this is bob speaking yeah i got first communion rather late just because i wanted to go up and eat the cracker and didn't want to feel left out i never got confirmed so i don't have a confirmation name there was uh i think like one of the sleepover friends i had that i get dragged to church ccd was happening while church was happening so we can go to that but it wasn't any better it was still like well i want to be watching ren and stimpy and eating cereal and this isn't doing

it for me the story about this guy who died i don't think so nicktoons being on a saturday did so much to damage church attendance that was sunday nicktoons was sunday oh that's what i meant yes nicktoons being on sunday yeah that made so many kids anti-religion because it's like do you want to see doug rugrats and ren and stimpy or do you want to learn about jesus oh man how cruel of his catholic church to do it saturdays and sunday that has to be the worst thing the catholic church has ever done to kids absolutely uh on record yeah and i don't know uh if i was a parent i wouldn't want to drive like you're making the parents get up on a saturday too this sucks finally our last uh comment from uh slight of hank and all of the podcasts this last month is from matt who says i love the

sort of meta narrative at play here this whole episode centers around a dumb argument and wacky hijinks that might come out of that on an episode of full house or step by step but it plays the argument realistically in that it's just petty and mean then after that it shows how unpleasant this kind of stubbornness would be without a studio audience and how bobby scheming to solve it only makes it worse and then it abruptly ends because ultimately the whole thing is too frivolous to be dramatic yeah that's a great takeaway because any other sitcom it would be wacky here it's just realistic and cruel and when hank tries to do a wacky thing which is sealing uh

peggy in the box you realize like this is awful and he immediately gives it oh i'm a horrible person oh okay like he can't do it for more than 30 like 90 seconds and same with bobby's plan even when the plan is revealed to them and they should just go like oh ha ha ha instead they just go like clouds no i knew and it just makes everything worse i want to go back to that first comment because i had a thought uh that uh is coming to me from like weeks ago where i watched beetlejuice again for the first time in a decade and i was just thinking god when i was a kid i watched this movie like 50 times i love this movie and i watched beetlejuice before I really learned about religion. So I'm wondering if the perspective on death in Beetlejuice colored me to be against what

religious teachers were trying to tell me about what happens after you die. Because in Beetlejuice, there's no like heaven or hell. There is just this other state that you exist in after you die. And having watched Beetlejuice like a thousand times and then learning about Jesus, I was like, well, the Beetlejuice thing makes a lot more sense to me. They have a structure. There's a management system there. There's an actual rule book.

Yeah. And hey, I'm getting ready for Beetlejuice 2, a movie I'm probably going to torrent because no way in hell am I paying for this. Well, maybe Tim Burton's found it again. Probably not. But at the very least, Jenna Ortega was born to be like these this movie only exists because she exists I really hope Michael Keaton can still bring it in that role because he is electric in that movie and I saw a saggy face in Batman in the Flash and I thought like maybe he shouldn't be doing these things anymore maybe grandpa needs to just like

hang out and do do another uh was he in Birdman was that him yeah yeah that's uh yeah do more birdman kind of thing you know but he was really really good as the vulture in spider-man homecoming i thought i agree yeah there's there were little moments in the flash where i was with there were flashes of oh yeah this is why we all love michael ke and still love Michael Keaton to this day. But that movie had so much bullshit and reshoots on top of it. I feel like anytime I see a scene where he's like so sick of being there, that's just a sign of the shitty production, not his acting ability. I just had rewatched a few Michael Keaton performances in Tim Burton movies. Beetlejuice and I saw Batman Returns in the movie theater last month and I thought,

God, they were just, they were both on fire and nothing lasts forever but goddamn Tim Burton. The 90s and late 80s, Jesus Christ. So yes, we've reached the end of another episode of Talk to the Audience. As we said earlier, it's going to be a fun February. We have covering Avatar The Last Airbender, talking Futurama, talking The Hill Return as usual and of course our movie is Porco Rosso. It's going to be fun back to our normal

schedule and no more traveling for months we're going to buckle down and make lots and lots of podcasts for you nice people yeah we've got a lot of cool stuff coming your way we've got especially it hasn't been uh fully edited yet so we can't say it officially but this month might have our longest talk to uh talking simpsons regular episode we've ever done. I'm going to one-up you and say it is. There's absolutely no way it's not. Okay, I'm just going to say this. I put it on Twitter. When we got to the end of the recording, I stopped my GarageBand file,

and it said three hours and 40 minutes. Maybe ten of those were a bathroom break, but this will be the longest one we've done, and it's happening. It's launching at the end of February. Get ready for it. Get ready. Set aside a good deal of time, folks. But it's also good.

It's not just long. It's also good. We had a great time. Long and good. That is our promise to you folks at home. But that has been another episode of Talk to the Audience. We'll see you again next month for another fun episode of our community podcast. Take care. Wow. Infotainment.