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

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

We've reached the end of the month, which means it's once again time for another installment of our community podcast! Join us as we discuss the dawn of season 35, new Simpsons-themed shoes, the legendary caramel on the ceiling of the writers' room, a real-life Moe's Tavern in Austin, and more.  And, as always, we read and respond to your questions and comments from the most recent round of episodes. It's all happening on this month's Talk to the Audience—the only podcast more entertaining than a movie starring Liza Minelli and Mickey Rourke!

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 man once again protesting a post-Halloween Trias of Horror special, Bob Mackey, who is here with me today, as always. The second biggest Simpsons fan after Ed Sheeran, Henry Gilbert. Wow. And in case you are new to the program, this is our community podcast. It launches at the end of every month on Patreon, the beginning of every month on the free feed. And what we do in this podcast is talk about what's happening in the Simpsons world, what's

happening in our world, and then we respond to your questions and comments from the last round of episodes. And it is another slowish news month as the entertainment wheels started turning again. Well, at least the writing wheels are turning. The SAG wheels are still gummed up. Writers can write and directors could direct were actors able to act. But, you know, it's I feel like because the Wga one ended and there's been other news going on in the world there's been less talk of the sag strike but i still wish them well and getting all of their uh demands met despite the fact that you know the famous people really

wanted to just end so they can get back to work but it's the poor actors who need the money on in this deal guys yeah i'm wondering uh i mean we do see strike updates every month now and i'm wondering just when uh it will be returned to the status quo hopefully in favor of the actors uh that's what i mean they're uh i mean writers were concerned about ai and so are actors so uh it seems like the writers have solved their issues but the actors are still things are up in the air for them i mean especially for background actors i've you've seen a number of uh posts the lately of just like here's what they're here is a scene from like some new disney plus show that has ai people in crowds or you know well that ai digitally replaced it's like a video game that's like calling video game characters in a madden game in the audience and ai yeah it's

essentially they filled the crowd with Sims. Right, yeah. And it's not convincing at all, believe it or not. No. You can see, like, did this guy fall out of a Tony Hawk create a character mode from like 2002? And they'd rather do that than pay,

you know, 100 people $300 each or whatever the background artist, you call them background artists, not extras anymore. That's the respectful term they are talented folks uh so we're going to be talking about the simpsons news and season 35 has now launched and uh unfortunately i am between big trips uh and i was just coming off a pax trip uh right before these two trips so i've been uh out of the loop here but i know

henry has seen these the season premiere was called homer's crossing which was uh their allegory for police violence i take it uh basically yes yeah it's it's not the one i would have started the season with and it's a it's a clumsy it's another of those ones we're feeling a lot right now in season 14 of like oh you guys kind of want to do a south park style thing, which in Simpsons defense, they did satire in the South Park style before South Park existed by a number of years. So I get it. But basically, Homer becomes a crossing guard for the school and he is drunk on power and he is able to guilt the local government into giving him an insane budget for a huge you know military grade

uh tanks and stuff to defend crossing guards and then they have scenes where Wiggum is like hey you guys can't be untrained violent and overfunded that's our job and there's some okay jokes in there but most of the time I just go like yeah it's uh simpsons trying to be less conservative than it was before yeah it feels like a real swing and a miss uh and then there was an episode written by carolyn omine a mid-childhood night's dream about uh basically i i believe she was tweeting about this during the airing of the episode it was her talking about her own empty nest syndrome and her feelings when her son went off to college although bart's i'm not sure what the uh what the story was here because obviously bart is not going to uh

graduate high school in our lifetimes yeah no it's uh it was a much better episode i would say where because it at least comes from like a real emotional core and some marge episode uh and also though it's the most i've seen that barf on screen in a non-treehouse episode but basically marge has a food poisoning nightmare and uh is dreaming that her kid you know bart's growing away from her there's a very touching moment uh that omine pulls from her real life where she realizes her son's hand got bigger than hers when he's like 10 or 11. And she's like, oh, no, his childhood's almost over. And I'm just losing it. And yeah, it's just, and again, when I'm watching it, I'm like, well, don't worry, Marge, your son never grows up.

He's a cartoon. But it actually felt like it came from a real sweet place about parenthood that I actually liked. Yeah. Yeah, actually, i remember the framing device and i think we need to talk more about uh food poisoning based hallucinations because the two times i was severely food poisoned i was hallucinating like crazy because my fever was so high wow yeah you don't want to mess around with food poisoning it's not just like my tummy hurts uh the last time i it, I was hallucinating the same cake lyric playing over and over in my head for hours and hours as I was just sweaty and 105 degrees in bed. My only memorable incident of what I self-diagnosed as food poisoning, but it had all the symptoms of it. I didn't go to a doctor about it.

I don't remember any fun hallucinations. Not fun. I don't remember any hallucinations. I just remember being on the toilet every 30 minutes. Oh, that happened too, yes. As I was fighting off the cake man, I was running to the toilet as well. This is a real gross start. Hey, you know what?

Halloween is right around the corner. Maybe it already happened when you're listening to this. I forget when this is going live now actually i think it goes live for free people on the uh unlike our enslaved patrons goes live for free people on the on actually on halloween i believe right yeah but they still won't have seen the next treehouse of horror yes oh and also uh the second episode we talked about was uh there was a tribute at the end of suzannemers who just passed away she was in the day the violence died in a very small role yeah she lived a

long life I learned a lot more about her reading her obituaries unfortunately she was pushing a lot of pseudoscience in her last decades because of her own struggles with cancer and it's really unfortunate but it seems like I mean she did live a long life

but perhaps if she wasn't getting into these kooky woo-woo beliefs she might have been able to uh live a bit longer and that that episode mcmansion and wife uh it was the third of the season i've watched is again it's another like all right one but it's also it reminds me of how we're talking about now in season 14 there's a lot of like rich guy problem stories where basically the simpsons get a new neighbor tell me if you heard this one before and they're not played by famous people it's just they want to build basically it's two rich yuppies who trick homer into agreeing to allow them to renovate their house and so it's just it's rich people complaining about how other homeowners renovate their houses in the wrong way and are very loud with it it's uh yeah so home homeowner issues are popping up now yeah and hey you know what nelson b story the kids the kids are always talking about mcmillan

and wife so it's about time we have a reference to that program that tell that told me it was an algae and show run yes and i saw that title what what a clever reference uh so yes uh season 35 has started unfortunately for reasons that i'm not clear on uh trios of horror this is going to be 34 is going to debut on november 5th even though the season has already started you know uh when they did the later tree houses it would always be the season premiere it always be like november 3rd because baseball took over the entire Sunday night block for weeks and weeks here. They have no excuse. So I'm just confused.

I am very confused because there will be a new episode on October 29th, the day that tree house should be airing. And I mean, do they just want November to have the tree house for bigger things? It just makes. And I mean, you know, the producers on the show know this is dumb, too. So I have no I hadn't seen any comments yet as to why. Why are you airing on October 29th, a non treehouse episode and then treehouse a week later into November? It's upsetting. And i'm again it but it'll have an in it whenever it airs it'll have an nft based horror story is one of the uh the segments well it'll go great with uh that night's viewing of cropopolis yes the nft show that's i haven't heard much good about that

there's too many shows to watch as it is but i haven't heard very many positive things about i've heard nothing about it. And I think it's hilarious that Fox bought three seasons sight unseen. They're like, yes, Dan Harmon, Rick and Morty guy, NFTs, the biggest thing ever. Three seasons, go. And the enthusiasm from everyone else is just like, what? And I saw WGA people pointing out it's one of the non-WGA shows on Fox Primetime. So it's also kind of gross in that way, too.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. No wonder they wanted to order so much. It was probably pretty cheap. And past guest Super Eyepatch Wolf released another video on The Simpsons called The Simpsons is Good Again. And, Henry, you have seen this. Can you comment on this? I apologize for not seeing a lot of the relevant topics this month i've been very very busy yeah no our our pal john who's who's been on the show we'd love

to have him back uh but yes he one of his big videos uh early in his youtube career was uh on the zombie simpsons scenario which you know was a very many people saw it and it gave uh look if you're a talking simpsons lister that's baseline discourse of simpsons is the zombie simpsons it's just like you need to graduate past that uh in the talking simpsons world yeah i mean we were all there at some point and i believe that video is why we had him on the show in the first place yeah yeah and he's and he knows the simpsons and this new one is basically his response to several pieces that have been going on lately about how, like, is The Simpsons in a renaissance? Is The Simpsons much better? And he did, you know, a personal review of watching seasons 29 and 30 and then seasons 33 and 34. 34 and his view was yeah they are slightly better uh or they are even generally better except for the episodes that aren't good uh but that he also makes a point of like hey you're not nothing will be as good as the classics of your youth nothing will be as good as season six again you're also

old too and and my the most interesting to me in the video is that he makes the point of like hey people are telling me now that i'm like the simpsons and that why don't you do the things you used to do on your channel why aren't you doing like it he makes a good point as a creator these things happen to everybody yeah as a creator i mean we will never make the simpsons obviously but we've been doing this for so long that uh we do experience some the things, the writers behind that show experience in terms of people saying like, oh yeah, your show really lost all its momentum or you good luck with that idea.

Things like that, you know, just people that are just immediately dismissive of everything you're doing because you've been doing it a very long time. It's a, it's a, it's a good little, it's a good hour long video.

It's a, but you know, it's a many things we've talked about before uh if if i had a chance to to talk with uh eyepatch wolf about the video i would say and i'd say this to many people who do the are is the simpsons good again or the simpsons good again thing like talk to somebody who isn't a writer or talk about someone who isn't a writer who works on the show any animator like nobody talks about the animation and how where it is comparatively and and the directors like i

really and we're i say this is somebody who is as guilty of this as anybody who mainly talked about the writers on simpsons for such a long time but the animators are why those classic episodes are classics as well just they i'd put it 60-40 animator versus writer these days. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you can see just how at times lifeless the animation is, even though a lot of work is being put into it, it's really unfortunate. And I think there should be another YouTube video that is just looking at how the animation has changed. There are basically three phases of Simpsons animation there's the classic analog animation there is the digital coloring and then there's what we've been stuck in for the past uh i don't know a decade plus it's the like digital

tool sets basically puppeting uh animation and i'd like i mean if i could make videos that were longer than uh five minutes I would do this. But it's not on me. Somebody else has got to do it. Now, as you pointed out, I remember this is a great point you made, Bob, when we did Podcast the Ride, is how you mentioned that the Simpsons ride, that's nostalgic Simpsons now. The animation in the line, the new animation in that. Like, the show doesn't look

like that anymore and couldn't look like 2009 simpsons anymore if they tried because the systems are not in place and that's not how you animate stuff anymore at that budget apparently you're just you're not allowed to and it's yeah and it feels like with the modern animation style not to go too long uh about this but you don't get those unique drawings and slightly off model poses and expressions that you really remember from classic episodes like we're covering some of the earliest rough draft episodes for uh talking simpsons like um uh itchy and scratchy the movie and uh mr plow correct the mr plow's rough draft as well and um we're seeing like oh just because homer is drawn like five percent different

if this makes this scene so much funnier because it's this artist's own like take on homer with it working within the guidelines of how the character should be drawn but because there's just the human touch there it sticks with you a bit longer i i do think the animators try in the current season to get more expressiveness or breaking model poses in the show but it takes so much more effort to break because i you know this this is again like we know only slightly more than a layman about the animation process but it does seem like to get to draw a new version of homer that isn't starting from the base model is even harder than it used to be like on model is just like no this is the element in the uh in your digital folder of like this is homer and you draw that yeah and i feel like oftentimes they overcompensate as if to say

see we could still do it and you know sometimes it looks good oftentimes it's like a little too smooth and weightless for me. And I can see they're trying to capture a more hand-drawn look at times, but I just feel like it's impossible given what they're using right now. Yeah, and I don't know how to fix it other than just trying to go back to the very least, the you draw it in pencil and then scan it into a computer system. Well, the way to fix it is to fire all the actors replace them with ai and dump all that money in into animation but we know if the actors were fired that money would not go to anyone except for like bob eiger yeah yeah it would only like oh finally we made it cheaper for uh my my newest bonus yes yes of course i i don't

believe that we should replace any character with ai uh Maybe at one point, Julie Kavner will step down graciously. Yes, yeah. No, so I've heard, I mean, a common complaint about the show lately is Julie Kavner sounds pretty rough. And I'm hearing it like more than ever with these recent episodes. And I don't know if you can comment on this, Henry.

Is she getting worse at doing the voice? Again, we all love Julie Kavner. And at the heart of this i i fear it sounds like we're just being mad at someone for aging as a per as people do but yes in this new season she has sounded extra bad and i don't know why like especially in the third episode i think it helped in the second episode they wrote a story where marge is just sick the entire time so if she sounds raspier it doesn't matter or it maybe you think it's acting but in the third episode it starts with a dream sequence where homer uh

including passes by um the uh dick van dyke on the chitty chitty bang bang vehicle which i'm just like boy this tells you algin uh executive produced this one. But then when Homer wakes up, Marge just says, hey, you missed the bit. And she sounds so rough. I was like, whoa, what the hell is going on here? I mean, to be fair to Julie, this voice is something she came up with when she was in her mid-30s, not thinking she would have to maintain it into her mid-70s because she is 73 right now. Yeah, it's's rough I feel bad for and also like I don't know if she steps down she's giving up like beyond like whether she could

still do the job or not if I'm putting myself in Julie Kavner shoes those are very rich shoes as it is and incredibly comfortable but would I give up a job that probably is under 12 hours a week that pays me $100,000 a month. Like, no, I would not stop that job. Yes, frankly, I don't blame her for just holding on to this job for dear life. But I wonder how long she can do it. I think every month on this program, we're like, is Julie Kavner okay? I only want what's best for her. I mean, Harry Shearer turns 80 I think in a

few months so he is the oldest cast member I'm waiting for him to reach the age that Mr. Burns originally was which I believe is 82 oh yes yeah man oh also in the third episode man now I can't remember which character it was but they replay like they brought back a character who used to be voiced by Shearer and Azaria did, and it just felt like to me they decided, like, oh, Shearer doesn't want to do this incidental guy anymore. Like, it barely, and his speaking, just so it's not all cab drive talking about, there have been some lines where Otto spoke in the last few episodes that I'm like, ooh, uh-oh. Yes, Harry Shearer was a 45-year-old man playing a guy in his 20s originally.

Now he's like 80 and asked to do the Otto voice. I mean, they got rid of Marvin Monroe because Harry Shearer was like, I can't do this voice. It just destroys my vocal cords. And Otto isn't that far removed from, hi, I'm Dr. Marvin Monroe. It's a similar gruff voice. Hiya, mustard. Yeah. That feels hard enough to say as a 41-year-old.

And he started doing the voice when he was older than us. That's true, yeah. Yeah. So what we're saying out there is don't age, but we're living through an era in which the longtime voice of Mario has stepped down. He's now the Mario ambassador. He gets to retain some sort of status.

Maybe in the future, Julie Cavanaugh can become the Marge ambassador, you know? And she could just appear at events. I just worry about her health in her vocal cords just whenever they hand it off to whatever 28 year old person who will take scale for their role yeah disney is waiting for that moment i bet they're training multiple marges you know how they work they have the next uh voice actor waiting in the wings when a voice actor is getting long in the tooth uh so unfortunately we must report about ed sheeran for some reason because we all know conan o'brien invented the podcast and we thank him every day for it and on his podcast ed sheeran uh asked him about the simpsons and conan brought up a lot of the stories that we've talked about because when we talk to

writers in our interviews we make it a point to ask about the caramel on the ceiling of the writer's room at least for that core group of writers and I'm happy that they name check that caramel in the title of this article for Entertainment Weekly and I tweeted as such and Al Jean replied to me one time I took a bite out of that caramel so uh i think that's the one time al gene actually uh responded to me uh when i wasn't making fun of the simpsons yeah what maybe someday we'll get him but yeah that's uh yeah that it's funny that he has now admitted he's the guy who after losing a bet or something i believe the the tale goes that they said if it's if we get this caramel on the ceiling it stays up for a year or something i believe the the tale goes that they said if it's if we get this caramel on the ceiling

it stays up for a year or something i'll take a bite out of it and he did to do that but yeah i when i saw the headlines i was like yeah it's conan telling the stories we've heard before but it was funny that it all came out because conan went to england to do a live podcast, the format he invented, and interviewed Ed Sheeran. And Ed Sheeran was like, oh, hey, mate, I'm a big Simpsons fan. What was it like writing all these Simpsons episodes? And at least Conan is like, yeah, I worked there for 11 months. I didn't do that much on Simpsons. I'm going to guess Ed Sheeran is Irish because he is like, I mean,

if you look at him, he looks like he could be British for all I know, but he looks like the Irish peasant while Conan looks like the Irish aristocracy. But yes, it was funny seeing, basically it was Ed Sheeran asking all the old stuff. I only know Ed Sheeran again as, oh, you know what? The Wikipedia says is an english uh singer songwriter so uh yeah uh raised in farmingham suffolk in west yorkshire hey you know ron weasley that kid's probably british too so all these fucking gingers but yes uh my whoa whoa you said the g word no sorry uh but uh no i did like the quote i got here where he did not name swartz welder but he did say there is a writer who smoked all the time who sat next to me so when i die it will be because of him

which is pretty great to hear he's still looking healthy though it was funny to hear uh bill oakley mentioned at the trivia night we went to the like when asked about swartz welder that and i know this is getting ahead of ourselves. But the he mentioned to the Schwarzwalder like didn't just smoke cigarettes all the time, but unfiltered as well. Like the worst brand type of cigarette you could smoke that. And he had like a dress shirt with two pockets in each pocket, had a hard pack of Lucky Strike in them. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. He's still alive again. Mr. Burns syndrome is based on him, I think. I'm sorry. Three Stooges syndrome. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. He's still alive. Again, Mr. Burns syndrome is based on him, I think.

I'm sorry, Three Stooges syndrome. Yes. Yeah. Moving on. The Austin, Texas bar, Nickel City's turned into Moe's once again for Halloween. And Bill Oakley went there and did a meet and greet like right after we hung out with him the weekend in Portland to do our live show. So, yeah. Actually, a friend of

mine from my hometown uh sarah i'm not gonna say her last name but she's probably listening she got pictures with bill oakley and she said she uh she told bill oakley oh bill oakley stories about me doing karaoke and she tried to embarrass me in front of him so um yes uh hometown pride that's really nice no i mean the i feel like this is now a thing i i put this one here because i i was like oh our pal bill went there but as i it seems like it's a thing now of like somebody is touring around the country going like hey i'll turn your bar into mose for a month and it's a it's all legal and all that and now but the austin one did it for for the treehouse of horror so it's also like it's a scary version of Moe's with the love tester and posters and everything in there.

And even a Nuke the Whales poster and all these other things. But it was great to see that Bill got to go there and then do a meet and greet in between eating some delicious looking Texas barbecue and other tasty treats. I've been following his travels. He's eaten well. Yes it's a good i mean he uh i trust the food opinions of bill oakley more than any food reviewer who works for like the new york times or la times or whatever yeah i mean we'll get to it we followed his food opinions uh in portland and we were not steered wrong no way and now because it's a slow news month, we have what we call Simpson's Shoe Corner, or

as I like to call it, Mad About Shoe. And yes, there are new Simpson's Shoes, and you can buy them for a lot of money. Yep, Adidas, get ready to not buy them at full price or at the regular price, but these ones are more of like a tonal style, as in like

you know, there's one with like, it's the Homer Simpson. It's the clouds one that looks like the opening. And then there's the one that if I could get anyone, it would be the pink and teal living room ones that just they fit the tone of the living room. They're not like a picture of the living room. They just look like it. But obviously, they're going to be sold out the second you get it you can't walk into an adidas store and buy them no no no now now henry you recently moved have you done an inventory of your simpson shoes how many you have

um yeah i did uh you know yes i've i've laid them out in uh an easy to look at place but so I would say I have eight Simpson shoes I think including two Mr. Plows one for collectibles and one to wear to events which I'm sad I didn't bring my Mr. Plow shoes to Portland I should have done that how silly oh yeah yeah I mean I think your feet were actually visible during this live show that's. People would have appreciated the Mr. Plows shoes even more. I was wearing sensible shoes to support my little piggies. I mean, I wasn't going to go on my, you know, I did some fun walking around the area, but I wasn't going to do that in my Mr. Plows. But at the very least, I could impress Bill with them. But you'll hear about those mr plow shoes though on an upcoming episode because we learned or we spot lit it's a horrible inaccuracy inaccuracy i can't believe it you

have to go in with a magic marker and fix that henry i do think vans makes better has has made better simpson shoes than adidas and i wish vans was getting more of the rights to sell stupidly expensive simpson shoes than Adidas did. I think I'd rather they have it. I want just more free shoes sent to me, like what happened in 2020. We'll talk about them. We'll interview the shoemakers themselves. Come on. You know what? Vans' PR team had more respect for us than the Adidas PR team. That's for sure. Step up your game, Adidas.

So that is Simpson's News. Now, as for our news, we're going to talk about the schedule for November. And to kick things off in November, we're going to be talking about the cartoon SWATCATS, the Radical Squadron. And the episode will be A Bright and Shiny Future. This is a Patreon pick. A classic, pretty good action cartoon, definitely inspired by Batman the Animated Series. A couple of good seasons and it's something that we've neglected and this was also one of the early cartoon network

shows correct yes yeah it uh it was uh you'll learn the long history of how it began under a pre-turner uh hannah barbara and by the time it gets to the second season ted turner does not like this show existing and it doesn't fit in with the planned cartoon network portfolio and so despite being a moderately successful and good show uh it had some uh some problems so you learn all about that as well as it's uh the the very uh excited furry fandom of Swatcats as well. We enjoyed it. It's very anime. So that is the What a Cartoon for November. Now let's talk about what's happening for patrons of Patreon.com slash TalkingSimpsons.

Of course, we have Talking Futurama and Talking in the Hill. For Talking Futurama, we'll be covering Bend Her. That is the episode in which Bender transitions to a different robot gender to compete in the Olympics. And yes, in 2023, that sounds like it could be a very bad watch with our modern eyes. But we revisited it and we found that for the most part, they dodged a lot of pratfalls or pitfalls, rather. Yeah, yeah. There were some collar tugging moments we talk about on our podcast about it, but I was prepared for so much worse. Yes, especially when it is a room of white guys in 2001 writing an episode with that premise. So nobody worry. I was very worried jumping into it, but it was actually very funny.

And I like John DiMaggio's feminine voice for Coilette. It's a fun, the way he voices Coilette is very fun. Yes. And for Talking of the Hill, we have Deconstructing Henry, the first really con-focused episode. I know he's had a few stories in the past, but they're digging into what makes him tick, the class issues between Con and Hank, and also looking at the model minority myth, which I think was rarely explored on TV at the time, especially with a sitcom like King of the Hill. Yeah.

Yeah. I, uh, we're just about to record that one. I, I, I like that one a lot. Uh,

and again, it's another one of those, not unlike Ben Her, I suppose it has its own, most Khan episodes also have its own baggage to deal with, uh, in today. But yeah, I think it's a great episode.

How can I not like an episode that has my name in the title? Oh, that's right. Yes. And I guess it's a reference to Deconstructing Henry, which has nothing to do with the title. Yes. A film best not thought about. Oh, you know, I never got around to watching that. What's the deal with that movie?

Well, I mean, it's just a Woody Allen movie allen movie is oh well we can just forget about that put it in the trash pile it's one of the it's one of the julie cavner woody allen ones where it's uh she's like she's when you really care about someone you shout it from the mountaintops so on behalf of 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?

She kept, she stood by her friend after that her friend Woodsy Allen yep yeah so moving on for $10 and up patrons we have the what a cartoon movie for November and hey folks let's congratulate ourselves because we have just completed five whole years of what a cartoon movie and to kick off our sixth year of what a cartoon movie we're not going to be talking about cartoons at all. So in a way, these things are kind of cartoony. But the movie is going to be, for the holidays, The Muppet Christmas Carol.

We're going to be talking about The Muppets Return to Form in cinema. The first real post-Jim Henson project on the silver screen. We love it. we love the songs we love the movie i think it's probably the best adaptation of the original story which i read for the first time last year i think i'm going to reread it again for this podcast so yeah very excited about this i love this movie too i love i've i've re-watched it several times uh it's now a regular like when i visit my mom and stepdad for the holiday season, it's what I put on in the background,

especially now that the Love Is Gone version is now on Disney+, so you can watch the full song in its proper context, not as a deleted scene. Every time you watch that song, Henry Katzenberg, sorry, Harvey, sorry, Katzenberg. I forgot his first name. Jeffrey Katzenberg. It's Harvey? No, no, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Jeffrey.

Why did I? I'm thinking of Harvey Weinstein. Sorry. Every time you listen to that song, Jeffrey Katzenberg gets ready to roll in his grave one extra time. He's not dead yet, but he's getting ready to roll. He's like, OK, that's one more I got to do when I'm in the ground. But yeah, looking forward to that and uh hey yeah i'm very excited that we've done now like 60 episodes of what a cartoon movie again it's available for patrons uh at the 10 level so

please check that out the second you sign up you'll hear all of them and there's been so many over the past five years just three years and four months and we'll get to our hundredth one is that nuts yeah yes and that's uh then we can tout even more content so one special announcement uh full transparency here we owe you folks uh two episodes of blabbing about batman the animated series one was supposed to go live in july and one was supposed to go live in october uh We lost a ton of productivity this year with our moves. We lost about like five weeks because I got sick immediately after moving and it took me a long time to recover and set things up and everything. So we are, you know, keeping our heads above water, but we're not working ahead as much as we usually do. And then we had a PAX trip to go to. Then we

have a Portland trip to go to. Then I'm finally taking my honeymoon, going to Japan, more on that. But I'm leaving for Japan in two days for two and a half weeks. And then Henry's going to someplace at the end of the year. You can talk about that yourself, Henry. Yes. But we are like constantly between trips and moving set us back. So, you know, obviously we announced in July what we would be cutting for the summer and

everyone was cool with that, but Batman kind of had to slide off the schedule. And I do want to make up those two episodes. Uh, but, uh, we'll talk more about that in 2024. So I apologize for,

you know, not letting people know ahead of time, but, uh, we've just tried to keep up with the content that is the most important for everyone subscribing you listeners know we love a blabbing about batman we love talking about it it's a it's a shared interest in us that's almost as deep as the simpsons but yeah it's just it uh it's been so hard just getting ahead for everything else or getting

back on schedule and everything so uh and we we know all your listeners are very understanding but yeah we we just want full transparency to let you know we're we're not pretending like uh blackmail batman what was that well we didn't oh it's up you didn't see it yes yeah well look a little harder hey what's over there there's a bob shaped a cloud of dust in front of you When that happens But yes I want to get around to it because the two episodes we have left to do Are ones I really want to cover So I think we'll get around to those in 2024

But we'll talk more about that later A few people have been asking about it So yes we're not trying to hide anything from you It's just that for the past three months I feel like every hour of my free time has been accounted for Between this, traveling And setting up a new home and retronauts so i feel like things are going to calm down a lot when i get back from my trip

and we can start being a little more productive but uh yeah again that'll be for the future everything's going to be cool and uh yeah we'll talk more about that uh at the beginning of next year so now it's time to talk about what we've been playing and watching unrelated to the podcast i don't have too much because i've been very very busy but i'm keeping up with monster hunter now henry i recommend you give that a try it's a good thing when you're when you've done all your pikmin homework for the day uh pikmin bloom you can switch over to monster hunter now and do the homework that game wants you to do and it's very rewarding but uh i've i've uh i've got my wife into monster hunter she started playing rise a little bit she played uh i think a bit of iceborne before this but we're playing

a lot of now together it's been a lot of fun because i've to date it's been impossible for me to get any friend or girlfriend or or even wife into monster hunter but now it's finally happening you know i gave i played world until the uh the end of the prime game you you i and that was, well, my husband also really wanted me to play, but you, that's the, you sort of got me to play Monster Hunter. Yes, but we never played together.

That's true, yeah, but. And because I played now, oh, sorry, Henry. Oh, I was, it's funny that the apps are actually getting people into playing these games, the real, the core games as well. Like we've, i've heard nina mentioned that you know at least one friend of hers who never played a pikmin game before played all of pikmin 4 because of uh bloom i believe this friend even 100 percented pikmin 4 and i'm at 99 on that game that that last percentile takes another like 10 hours of play

i i know there's there's something like that in Pikmin 2. This is so nerdy, but there's like one treasure I never got in Pikmin 2 because you basically need to farm a ton of the purple Pikmin to carry a bowling ball. And it's just like, here's the amount of time you really need to set aside to do this. And I thought, screw it. I'm not doing this. But because of Monster Hunter now, i went back to monster hunter rise because i have not i did not finish uh sunbreak so i i played a lot more of sunbreak i rolled

credits on sunbreak that means you have 100 hours more to play essentially but i still played it for like 60 hours so i feel like i've gotten my fill and maybe i'll jump back in but i really wanted to see all the content in that game and i'm excited because next year is the 20th anniversary of Monster Hunter I feel like there's going to be a new game announced uh one of the first things I'm doing when I go to Japan is going to the Monster Hunter Cafe and whenever that new game comes out I want to form a group within our listenership a regular Monster Hunter group so I'm calling my shot now we got to do this guys I need a Monster Hunter group within my lifetime I'm always like playing alone or with randos it's got to happen so also because I went to Portland Retro Gaming Expo I brought my 3ds with me which I always do the street pass there

and I played a little bit of a game that I think nobody played which is hey Pikmin and I thought it was it was very good I actually want to go back to it and finish it. It's basically, what if a puzzle platformer had Pikmin in it? And it does very well within those terms. It's not like a real Pikmin game, but it was basically the Pikmin game that was keeping the series treading water until 4 could come out. But I really liked it. I was expecting nothing of it.

I just wanted it because I knew it was a late 3DS game. It was going to be 900 if i didn't buy it from amazon for 40 even i even i have not played hey pikmin that's how like uh un uh played it was among pikmin phantom yeah and i'm not i'm not a fan of these nintendo games that are farmed out like uh the wario master of disguise orise or New Yoshi's Island or whatever. Star Fox Zero. Star Fox Zero was one that they made, right? No, it was Platinum, remember? That was Platinum?

Yeah, yeah. Now, that one is fine. I do like that. And Luigi's Mansion 3 also farmed out. It depends on who it's going to, but... Well, nobody should... I mean, R2 made those fucking Yoshi games and that was the mistake. You don't give it to R2.

Yeah, yeah. And I think this is like RZest or something, which is related. Oh, which is they did a lot of the me plaza games i think yeah but uh i i think it's a lot of fun and uh you know it's honestly still available new in some like online marketplaces so give it a try and also uh super mario wonder uh loving it i feel like the past 17 years we've been gaslit into thinking these new Super Mario Brothers games new meaning the word new is in the title we've been gaslit into thinking those are good but I walk away

from all this thinking is something wrong with me do I not like Mario anymore and this is the game that proved me right I was right to dislike those games this is what they should have been doing the entire time. And I think we need to keep developing on this formula here because, boy, it's such a breath of fresh air.

The 3D games have been good, but those 2D games, outside of a few minor instances, they've been pretty rotten since 2006. No, I'm 100% with you, bob i'm uh three worlds into super mario wonder another game took precedence because i don't want things spoiled in it but super mario wonder i am loving as well because they the new games and i beat all the new mario brothers games me too yeah i spent like 200 in all games. I have the right to complain. Go ahead.

Sorry. But only occasionally would you see a little of the cleverness or the creativity that you know that the Nintendo developers are capable of. But I feel like they thought, you know, the winning formula that's selling 40 million copies of these games is being the lowest kind of not lowest common denominator but a game everybody could beat you know and have it and creativity I think they feared that'll get in the way of people enjoying the game and we need it to be just fully enjoyable I think just like how I think the Dark Souls games being popular in America gave the Zelda team

permission to actually challenge people with Zelda games again with Breath of the Wild. I think Mario Wonder is where the teams at Nintendo can finally give a presentation of like, do you see how popular, difficult, challenging platformers are now? Like we can challenge people again and be weird like we can also be weird and still sell 14 million copies and uh i'm gonna do a whole podcast on this but my my major thoughts are that this is the first major 2d mario game in a post mario maker world and they are definitely inspired by what they made in mario maker and what other people made in mario maker because some of the levels i'm playing i would would think like, oh, I played so many levels like this in Mario Maker.

And if you like Mario Wonder, I recommend you check out the single player content in Mario Maker 2. There's some really, really good 2D Mario levels that I think a lot of people didn't check out because they were into Mario Maker 2 for the user created content. So I knew they didn't lose it when I played that game,

and I'm happy to see that same kind of inventiveness in Mario Wonder, which I'm savoring. I'm not anticipating the end. I'm playing one level at a time, getting everything I can out of it, and moving on, because I know it's going to be an 8-10 hour Mario game,

and I want it to last as long as possible. So yes, that's all I've been playing for this month. As for watching stuff, again, not a lot of time, but I have finished Yellow Jackets so I can finally tweet about it online. And I'm upset because this show features a character that has an African gray parrot and she loves African gray parrots

and she's played by Christina Ricci and nobody told me about this show. I had to discover this on my own. And I recommend, it's a really good show Henry I recommend you watch it I will say that I'm wondering where it's going to go because it is making a few stops in stupid city along the way along it along

its roots and I'm just curious like where they're going to move the show but I'm really enjoying it so far it has a great cast of female actors and Elijah Wood is in the second season in a fun role so uh it's basically like remember the 90s that that's kind of what the show is but then there's like a survival and horror element to it as well interesting oh that makes the Christina Ricci casting also pretty interesting too then I like

that yeah yeah I mean like basically all of the people in the show uh who play the grown-up versions of the teenage characters you see are uh women who were teenage stars in the 90s okay man all right i'll i i have a long i'll get to it in my section i have a long list of things to watch but i that'll move uh higher up in my to watch list and the things you watch are they all star men, Henry? Well, there's shows called The Boys. Yes. Or it's a show mainly starring male pirates.

Whose flag means death? Oh, the men. Yes, yeah. Well, this show is loaded with chicks, as I would say. But yes, a very, very fun show. Again, I'm concerned about how stupid it's getting. I also saw the entire new season of Castlevania, which I believe is called Castlevania Nocturne.

I would say it's merely okay. It's a fun Halloween watch. It is exploring like the Rondo of Blood universe, which I never thought there'd be an animated series based on that. But they're basing, because there's only so much Castlevania content, they've always pulled from like what I consider obscure sources like oh these characters who are

major characters are from the ps2 games you never played and this one is from a game that like didn't come out in america until 20 years after it was uh released in japan but i i'd say i believe warren ellis was the original writer of the, right? The lead writer on the first two seasons at least. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I know why he's not doing that anymore. And I feel like something was lost when he left. So I feel like the season is mostly okay. But it does end with a cliffhanger because they ordered another season already.

They're doing the splits to make you think, like, it's been renewed! Hooray! I hate that. But something happens at the end uh the first set of episodes where i'm thinking like this should have been in this set of episodes earlier what are you doing you know i felt that with that was my ups and downs with the first two seasons of castlevania that i did watch uh all of which is like when the first season season of Castlevania ended, I was like, well,

wait, the show just began. Like this is where you should start with Alan card waking up, you know? And then, yeah. Well, the first two seasons are,

it's basically like one story and they really should have ordered more than four episodes to begin with. But, but man, that is the animation still sometimes in the first two seasons, what kept me going was they would have some of the best action animation you'd see on a Netflix budget. Yeah, I would say that the action scenes are still really fun, really cool to watch.

And it did remind me of this tweet. I'm going to mangle the tweet, but there was this very funny tweet about the differences between broadcast TV in the past and prestige TV now where the tweet says you know if there was a show called surf Dracula he'd be surfing in the first episode if there was a Netflix series called

surf Dracula he would get his surf board in the final episode and there'd be like a five minute surfing montage in this in this series I'm not going this is not a spoiler i don't think it's like episode six where richter puts on his headbands and it's like a big moment like yes he put on the headbands like he could have just been established wearing the headband guys it's okay no i uh i was thinking of that that is a great tweet i was thinking of that too with when i

re-watched the first episode of Deep Space Nine a few years ago. I thought, and it's all about, it's a two-hour debut episode, and it's about how the main character, Avery Brooks' character, gets over his trauma and hate for Locutus that Patrick Stewart played when he got taken over by the Borg. And it seemed, by the end of it, he's in a better place and he's gone through it all i was like and i thought this two hour premiere that tells a full story that would be two seasons of a netflix show that entire arc yeah yeah in general i feel like the story they're trying to tell in this new season could have been told in the eight episodes they provided me with. But I don't know. I guess it's just a Netflix model.

But I'm not a big fan of that. But merely okay, but a fun Halloween watch. But I'm not going to talk about all these movies. I did watch nine horror movies so far for Halloween. And the month is not over yet. And horror or horror themed. And I guess the standouts for me were believe it or not i watched the tim burton version of sweeney todd having zero knowledge about the original musical

and uh outside of a few like things that are obviously products of the time like terrible cgi and a few burtony choices that i didn't like it got me interested in the musical and now i really want to see it uh i thought it was a lot of fun and you know I realize this is not the ideal adaptation of the of the musical but it's the one we have and I did enjoy it for what it was I haven't seen it since it was in theaters and I liked I remember Rickman being really great is the as his vile character and also I remember feeling like tim burton's really luxuriating in the r rating for some of like brutal violence i really enjoyed how violent there's so many like a throat slitting prosthetics on characters the blood is flying or a corpse

being dropped directly on its head yeah the head just explodes yeah into like red goo and i guess like i'm looking at my list on letterbox i guess i would say so i re-watch return of the living dead for the first time in like over a decade uh had a lot of fun with it i go into that movie thinking it's gonna be like a sam raimi movie with that level of energy and it really doesn't but i like it being like a fun horror comedy that was playing around with the idea of zombies when zombies were a new idea because this movie was made like 16 years after Night of the Living Dead so in the movie they're talking about have you ever

seen that movie Night of the Living Dead wasn't that crazy well here's what actually happened so it's just it's fun to see it playing with meta horror at that time and it's very 80s and it's a lot of fun if you still have Halloween time left I recommend watching that first one and I think the second one is good too.

It's been a while since I've seen that. And I guess the last one I would deem worthy of talking about is the movie Ready or Not. And that came out in 2019. It reminds me of The Menu, which came out a lot later. But there is like a new genre of film I'm enjoying in which the premise is a normal person is invited to the world of the rich and they find out oh rich people are all nasty sickos and I'm going to die how do I escape the situation I think like even Get Out was kind of like that I think Get Out popular right not that

it invented that genre but I think it definitely you wouldn't have movies like Ready or Not if Get Out wasn't a huge success for sure but i did really enjoy this movie uh i didn't like it as much as the menu i thought the menu was like incredibly tense the entire time because the main character was pretty powerless uh no spoilers obviously i really recommend the menu this is sort of like a riff on the most dangerous game in which like uh a bride is hunted on her wedding night based on like a ritual this family always does so it's just like it's a bit like a

deadly game of hide and seek and it's pretty brutal and a lot of fun and the ending is I went from thinking this is stupid to this is amazing within like 30 seconds it's very innovative what they do with the ending so I recommend it I noticed no horror movies on your list henry sorry what's going on at the gilbert compound uh you know it's it's a very

prestige month when it comes to move well actually my movie you saw a movie with the word killers in it yes it's true yeah well it it is a horrifying movie but about uh about the mistreatment of america's uh insatiable lust and greed and racism so so no zombies right no no somebody gets almost zombified i'd say honestly and i guess other stuff like i said i'm heading to japan for 2.5 weeks my plan was to start duolingo like a long time ago but uh that was waylaid and now it's me going to be asking my wife what's that say what should I say to this person because my wife is fluent in Japanese so that's going to help me a lot

maybe I'm going to cram on the plane who knows but in two days I'm going to Japan for two and a half weeks going all over the place staying in Tokyo for one leg of the trip Kyoto for another leg and then back to Tokyo and we brought we bought the fancy pass to let us use the Shinkansen for unlimited times within a certain

span of time so I'm going to be seeing a lot right before the price goes up right yes we got in right before the price went up but I'm going to be seeing a lot more Japan than I did the one time I went which was about one third of a work trip for Retronauts so I'm very very excited to go back and to have a lot of

fun and I've just been working non-stop to build free time for this trip so I can't wait for it to happen but I guess now we can talk about our time in Portland Henry because I went there for Portland Retro Gaming Expo and we piggybacked the

Bill Oakley show on top of that or vice versa and it was great like I did two live shows within like four hours of each other and so did you Henry you were on my retronauts panel and it was so much fun I did a retronauts panel about the many adaptations of Mario and it's funny

that when I accumulate all of these clips to show people I'm so online that I always think like everyone has seen this right is it low hanging fruit to show Mr. Belvedere as King Koopa or the Mario clip where Lou Albano is saying, if you do drugs, you go to hell before you die? But it turns out most people have not seen those things, and they find it very delightful. So that panel was so great, and the live show to follow was even better.

You would think that at the Portland, at a retro gaming expo at the retronauts panel there would be more people who had seen that before but at the very least though you go to hell before you die but the the reaction in the room i mean we didn't ask the many people in there you know hey that was the first time you saw that right but i it definitely to me sounded like the shock of recognition of just like, whoa. Or it was like, whoa, I've never seen that before kind of laughter. Yeah. Very happy with that.

Also, I love going to Portland Retro Gaming Expo. It was like, I think it was my ninth time at the convention, maybe eighth or ninth. I think it was eighth RetroNauts panel, but ninth time I've done it. So I love going back there. My book was on sale for the first time there. It sold out at the convention. I was very happy to see that. I signed a lot of books

And then we before Like it was such a busy weekend Because before Portland Retro Gaming Expo We met up with Bill Oakley And we did a trivia night and costume contest At a bar in Portland That was a lot of fun too Yeah it's the

If you want to do it It's every I believe it's once a month at Tomorrow's Verse Tap Room. And it was a great, that was a great way to start our trip there. And I'd never, you've been to Portland way more than me. I'd only been there for about 36 hours the last time we did a Portland show because I was, you know, five years ago, pre-pandemic, I was like, I'll come back to Portland another time. I don't need to take a long trip. But this time I was like, I'm enjoying this. Yeah, I'm glad you got to see more of Portland.

It's great, a great food city. I'm spoiled because I kind of live in like a Portland-ish city now. Sorry, I said Portland is shitty. I didn't mean to say that. I live in a Portland-ish city now. So going to Portland is not like a huge change of scenery for me now that I live in a portland-ish city now so uh going to portland is not like a huge change of scenery for me now that i live in vancouver but i still like to go to all my local haunts and then bill oakley recommended us some great restaurants i ate a ton of pizza i went to uh ground control of

course and the great arcade quarter world which is not as popular but i think is a better arcade and i had a lot of fun uh that whole weekend it was just so jam-packed bill oakley is so nice and so great when each of us to ask for like hey where should i eat pizza around here he has like seven suggestions and in like five he's like these are all my favorites and then two that he's like you know i've heard these are great i still haven't had a chance to try it out and so yeah i i ate amazing pizza i had pizza i drank so many delicious beers and I also went to that that biscuit place the the U.S.

Biscuits yes yeah yeah that was great too I was gonna say if you're in the area I because it was right by Quarter World I was like oh it's a place but locally recommended let's go in there was called a pizza Scholl's we went in there it's like oh it's some of the best pizza in Portland well after we eat there I'm like looking online it turns oh, it's some of the best pizza in Portland. After we eat there, I'm like looking online.

It turns out it's considered some of the best pizza in the entire country. And I'm going to say those claims are not wrong. So I'll be returning to that pizza place for sure. And thank you to Bill Oakley for pointing it out. And also I learned how wonderful the train ride from Seattle to Portland is, at least for me on those two days. Like it was you just walk on a train you can i was able to bring the beer with me from having uh bill oakley's beer and just bill i was like well you can't take that on the plane i was like i'm taking the train mr oakley no that's right we had steenham's

lager you brought home a can have you drank the beer yes yeah we we both enjoyed it we ordered uh we ordered burgers to have with it to eat it the proper way as Bill Oakley instructed. And yes, it was really good with it. It's a lager. I think I'm more of a, you know, I have more of a sweet tooth when it comes to alcohol, but I prefer ciders and seltzers. But I thought it was very, very tasty. And we got to sell it, or not we sold it, but the bar was able to get some of the last cans from that run of steamed hams lager and sell it during our show.

And it sounds like that lager is spreading because I just saw tweets from Bill Oakley about how it's in Cincinnati now. So, yes, I recommend it. It's a nice, reliable lager. You don't need to eat a burger to enjoy it I had a fish sandwich with mine at Kelly's Olympian where we did our live show it was really good oh and by the way Kelly's Olympian

they were great too some of the best folks we've ever worked with at a venue so understanding and nice and recorded our show perfectly everything was great about kelly's olympia i i would love to go back there again and not wait another five years to do it yes great great venue uh really recommended they were great bill oakley was great it was so nice

to meet everybody again after the show sign a lot of posters see some familiar faces it's great to see the same people at a lot of our live shows some people travel uh that we're sort of like they're grateful dead in a very small way except we do like two live shows a year yes that was that was great to see some familiar faces and some new faces that including there were some great we saw several people there who just said i bought tickets because i saw the poster at the bar that said they were doing a Simpsons thing. I was like, wow, you didn't even know who we were. It was just, I mean, if you see Nina's amazing posters, you want to buy tickets because they're that good. Yes, another great poster by Nina.

One of the last things that we have to do in our condo is like truly decorate and hang things. And that's all happening when we get back. And I feel like this podcast room will have every poster in it and uh yeah soon we're gonna run out of wall space because we're doing more live shows obviously in the future so I'm gonna have to move some posters to the bathroom that's true yeah I'm thinking about that as well I once I have a couple more bookshelves built in here that's when the the my my posters as well uh my frame posters that Nina did, as well as a couple more of my Simpsons cells are going to go up on the wall. Which, by the way, I did.

I'm telling this to Bob for the first time here. I did successfully get a new Simpsons cell. I'm going to be getting in the mail soon. Oh, my Lord. Is what I told you about. Every Simpsons cell went for too much on a recent auction, including, look, who wouldn't want to have a cell of the itchy, or sorry, scratchy's arm cell? But guess what? That went for $5,000.

Yikes. And I'm not doing that. Are you going to show it off on the air when you get it or announce what it is now? I'll show it off on the air, but I told you about it before. Okay. So it is finally a cell of Homer's semen. I will have a sell of that. Oh, okay.

Yes, we talked about this on that episode. Yeah, it's the shot of it actually was on sale. And I think because most people, I got it for, look, not what anyone would call cheap, but it was the lowest a simpson cell went for in that grouping and i was like man i want to display homer seaman on my wall and be able to say no it's listen it has to be the first thing people see when they come into your apartment it's it should be near the front door you're right okay just so they know what you're into yeah but by that i mean the simpsons yes yes yeah it's but yeah it's the cell from brother can

you spare two dimes where smithers is showing burns homer's semen to show that he has lazy sperm but well after we are done spending uh thousands of dollars in japan and uh can just sit at home and and recuperate our financial losses we'll we'll eventually get around to uh getting a cell we've just been traveling too damn much and uh we we have not found our dream cell yet uh nina and myself so it's going to happen at some point now i mean you gotta it's it's also the the cell business for simpsons is heating up unfortunately it's just like the friggin uh the business for for uh games for retro games retro games yeah expensive yeah i mean there's only so many of them and uh they're made out of material that can deteriorate so uh it'll happen within the next year i swear there will be a simpsons cell somewhere in our palatial mansion

that we live in here uh so that's it for me henry what's going on with you uh well other than super mario wonder which i talked about that when bob was mentioning it, the other game I've been playing has been Spider-Man 2, or Marvel's Spider-Man 2, I suppose is the official name of the game. I'm surprised that they put a 2 after the name. It was interesting. They just went with like, no, the direct number. Like, yeah, they don't do that with their other games, you know. Or I guess, you know what, they did number the Uncharted games, but usually, you know, it was God of War Ragnarok, or it was Horizon blah-biddy-blah, whatever. Forbidden West?

Yeah, that's it, yeah. Zero Dawn, yeah. Yeah, two, like now, I love the numbers, but I think they consider, oh, a number is gauche. But I guess, you know, it has multiple meanings because you do play two Spider-Men in the game and you switch between them at will. And it's, yeah, no, it is a very good look. I say this as somebody who enjoys.

Wait a minute, Henry. There have been several no look asides in this podcast so far. I want all of our listeners to count them. Okay. So I love Spider-Man and I will love any Spider-Man video game. But this is the best version of a Spider-Man video game. All that being said, I grow weary of the PlayStation mega-budget story tube. They all follow a certain formula, and this is hardly any different. It is a prestige game, and part of the fun is seeing like wow you spent

this much money nobody spends this much money on this kind of game in the in the ways of just like oh i'm walking through a crowd of people they all have specific actions and designs to them and this like when i go to coney island in the game or whatever i'm just like this this is needlessly opulent but in a in a way you appreciate but it's just fun to be spider-man and beat people up and swing around yeah i'm still i'm playing ff16 still i put it on hold to do a few other things but i'm interested in it and it's like really my first story tube game in a very long time and it's nice to jump into one of those every 10 years and it's honestly a little more advanced than like Uncharted because you have like skill trees and you know quests and things like that and oh sorry one thing I forgot to mention is I had plans to get a new gaming PC because of some like postal system things that fell through and I have to reorder

it when I get back from Japan but I really wanted to play Resident Evil 4 Remake and I didn't want to wait to get a PC. So I've been playing like about eight to 10 hours of that so far. And I really enjoy that. I was kind of late to the party because I was afraid it wasn't going to be good. But I've been getting into that right before my trip

because I won't be able to play it on my trip. I also really like that Spider-Man 2 feels like an actual PS5 exclusive. Like I have played two games that I felt like, oh, I could only do this on a PS5. Everything has to be cross-gen and thus limited in scope. This is one of the few where I'm just like, wow, this actually feels like a real new game. And then meanwhile, there are just too many more games coming. I also don't want to spoil any Spider-Man 2 by talking in specifics. There is is stuff to spoil it's got twists and turns and a lot of different acts and all that but i'd so far i'd give it an 8 out of 10 it's not the revelation the first spider-man

game it was but it is a great great video game and i also want to speed through it so then i can play mario wonder and without having to worry about having spider-man 2 spoiled for me if i go with mario wonder for what like can you can you explain like what a spoiler in the game would be um like what would that entail certain characters get introduced okay and that some certain characters are in it that were not advertised to be in it and you're supposed to go like oh that character's in this or stuff like that or there's definitely there are twists and turns in the plot and narrative that in the first the first game also had moments of like oh you wouldn't think that would happen in a spider-man game like you didn't think in the first spider-man game you didn't think miles morales would have powers by the end of it but he did and there's there's certain stuff like that i mean they advertise the game based on venom

but it takes a lot of so saying venoms in the game is not a spoiler they're selling a venom uh a statue 19 inches of venom that comes with it but you know i feel like people have been uh pretty conservative with sharing mario wonder spoilers at least on my timeline i i have not really seen a lot of video share which is great because i'm i i want to savor the game like i said and work my way through it very slowly uh but but also there are too many video games right now because i am also having to not play i wanted to play alan wake 2 i really enjoyed as silly as it was in some ways i loved the first alan wake i've been waiting for alan wake 2 for 15 years and now it's finally out and i literally have no time for it i cannot play it as well and same with yeah the new assassin's creed if i wasn't playing a better version of an open world game of spider

man i'd probably be playing that new assassin's creed yeah i mean time is the real currency we need to spend on these games you know i was thinking Henry I never saw you mention this this is not a call out this is me being curious I know you love Fire Emblem and I know there was recently a new Fire Emblem game and I saw that it went on sale lately and it made me think like did Henry ever play this it's the one with the person with like red and blue

hair the VTuber yeah that's a real Fire Emblem game right it is real and I did play the first three hours of it, and I think I would love it, but it just kind of fell to the wayside back in January of this year. I can't really explain why. It didn't grab me the same as Three Houses,

which, though, was a mid-July 2020 pandemic game. That explains it. Yeah. was a mid like a july 2020 pandemic game that explains it yeah that you know hey you know what i'm hoping for and this may sound evil i want another pandemic that doesn't kill anyone or hurt anyone financially it just lets me stay at home and play video games well now we have a much better setup of like uh you a pandemic that happened where you can just be at home with your wife all day instead of distant from her. Maybe it could be some sort of supervillain guy who's like, if anyone goes to work, then I'll blow up the entire world. So it's like, well, I guess I have to play video games.

Oh, and also the friggin' Yakuza game comes out on November 9th as well, the next one. And it's going to be on yeah yeah I mean we just recorded a Retronauts that's gonna go live early November where we we went over like a dozen remakes that are coming out that I want to play all of and also as of this recording today all the metal like a huge chunk of Metal Gear games have been re-released for the first time in over a decade it's like god I I really want to play Metal Gear Solid 1 again and some of the other ones. But again, the time economy. We're getting screwed on time. Yeah. If only there was more time.

Okay. As for watching things, a few things I want to talk about. Movies. I watched two very different movies this month. I watched Killers of the Flower Moon, the new Marty Scorsese movie, which is as long as The Irishman, but does not feel as long as The Irishman. It's all about the murders of the Osage people in the 1920s. It's a true crime type movie. It's full of the great acting you would usually see in a Scorsese movie. De Niro hasn't been this good in a long time.

He's great as his character, De Caprio, also really great. But the revelation in it is the actress Lily Gladstone, who plays Molly in the film. She is so great. It was Scorsese casting. I think he tried to get the Osage people very involved, devil-y people. There have been some criticisms of it from indigenous people that the film centers around the white people too much in it, even with all of those considerations.

And I think that is worthy to listen to and not untrue but i also think it is a a really really great uh movie that still is you know some people are like if it's not about crimes i don't care to watch a scorsese movie i want him talking about crimes and real crimes this is like goodfellas in that way that it is about like uh real life crimes and telling those stories yeah this looks interesting i'm a little behind on my scorsese movies but i also thought that martin uh sorry uh robert de niro uh 80 years old you've got a little baby at home you should be at home taking care of that baby and not being starring not starring in these movies uh it's uh he's he does a good he's i was real up and down with bobby d and yeah you're right he is 80 he's looking good for 80, but he's 80.

Sorry. I was just digging into the just whenever you remember, like Robert De Niro has a new baby. You just have to look at all the timelines and the ages and just sort it together. And it's like he's got a new baby. And also one of his children is 52. And also and I was like, he didn't he didn't like impregnate some young lady. It seems like his his current girlfriend or partner is 65. And I assume some kind of surrogate was involved.

There was like the freezing of eggs happened or something like that. This is not an accident. Man, you assume different things from like, well, also like with pacino's uh new child uh his his uh partner is you know it's a woman in her 30s which is uh and also people assume like oh it's probably like some model or whatever it's like no it's a woman who's actually like richer inherited wealth than al pacino is so it's not even that she like is is a gold digger like If anybody, he's stealing from her. He's coming out in the positive here. And I hear she's got a great ass, as he would say. That's my Hal Pacino impression.

I'm doing Andy Kaufman right now. The other movie I watched in the theaters this month was Dix the Musical, based on the play or the musical uh identical fucking twins so basically um two gay guys in the ucb new york theater did a very silly musical uh and dirty filthy musical uh that was basically their adaptation of the lindsey lohan version of the Parents Getting Together movie. Freaky Friday. No, no, not the... Oh, Parent Trap.

Parent Trap. It's their version of Parent Trap. It's full of great musical... I love the songs in it. My biggest negative on it is that the movie wouldn't get made if Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally and Megan Thee Stallion weren't in it,

and they're fine. But they do have the energy of SNL hosts in it, not actual actor in a movie. And it feels a little off in their scenes. But it still is a very funny comedy that also is like, I mean, I haven't seen that raunchy of a comedy in a long time. It's very filthy and gay so yeah you know i always i really hate when it seems like an actor is guest starring in a movie my stance is always like well you're an actor this is where you you you belong in movies don't act like this is a special thing i'm seeing i thought that when i talked about this a few months ago i thought that

when i re-watched peewee's big holiday where it's like joe mancinello's here what yes and now he's like who cares who he is i didn't care then yeah manis t3k would make fun of like and guest star of your movie is yes i'm kind of sick of that but i'm glad you enjoyed that i've seen people on my letterbox uh giving that high reviews and i've heard the uh like it's a it's another comedy uh bottoms i heard it's another comedy, Bottoms. I heard that's very funny too. Yes, that sounds like the lesbo side of the homo movie that Dicks the Musical is. One's for gay men, one's for gay women. But both are good reviews and they just feel like, oh yeah, a comedy should only be like $30 million

and not be insanely expensive and full of special effects. Hey, speaking of homosexuals, I've been watching the new season of our flag means death uh still a really good show my least favorite part of it is taika waititi which again the show wouldn't exist without him and he is like an executive producer and a lead in it uh but he's like yeah he's fine and all that and it's not that i don't think he doesn't want to kiss men, but his gay stuff in it feels faker to me than the other homos in the show, which I, but I love, especially,

I really need to learn this actor's name and remember it. But the actor who played Hodor in Game of Thrones, who is an actual gay man, he is great in the show. I just wish he had more part, a part in it i love him i i've lost my max privileges since moving here but that possibly might be on crave or something similar i i do enjoy pirates uh obviously so uh i i will check this out at some point i'm glad there's a second season though it is fun watching the homosexual pirate show and then at the same time being now almost a chapter 500 of one piece to be oh

nice yes yeah the straightest manga that ever was i know it's the but also it's like it is extremely hetero uh but also the fan service is is light comparatively for the same at the same time as like uh that series to love rue was being uh published in shonen jump you have this where it's like i feel like i can count on one hand the number of times like nami has had like a bath scene or whatever in it which is conservative for a jump comic yeah it's it's uh it is actually it's not as horny as it could be i think i think it's like uh not as horny as Dragon Ball but it's definitely it's for the straight male gaze G-A-Z-E yes yeah but

in general I'm having a good time in One Piece I know some people don't like Thriller Bark is that right or Thriller Park yeah Thriller Bark I don't know what the stance is on that that's the arc that I'm currently at on the manga that I left off at. So now you're ahead of me.

You've lapped me now. Wow, wow. And also, last thing I'll talk about is I'm really looking forward. It's coming out two days after this comes out. Pluto on Netflix. I've been waiting for the adaptation of Naoki Urasawa, his adaptation of the Astro Boy comic Pluto for such a long time. And it seems like Netflix is doing the entire thing

as eight hour long episodes. I have no clue why they're doing it this way, but that's how they're doing it. I didn't know this. Yeah, he is pretty stingy when it comes to adaptations. Hey, the monster anime, I think it's still on netflix it is it is in japan at least and that's definitely here too yeah it's a really good one and it's it's very thorough but uh outside of that and did he do like yawara the judo girl is that one of his

there was yawara in and which got full adaptation in japan and half of it got put on dvd in america by animago and then uh it's out of print so well hopefully this will uh you know encourage more enthusiasm for english-speaking people about his work because so much of it has not come over here yet and he's one of the greatest manga artists of all time writing stories for adults yeah wasn't wasn't that cruel uh four years ago and we all went to that uh urasawa uh you know exhibition in los angeles that we looked at and it was full of things of like that mina had read and that i was like wait why has that never come here why does that never come here why do i gotta learn fucking japanese to read this stuff and the answer turns out to be yes we cannot read billy bett i'm sure there it's been scanlated for a billion years but i want to give the man money for his work and i want the

official thing but you know maybe people will look more at him and buy his books because i know like monsters being reprinted i'm sure 20th century boys is or has been reprinted since the original run great reprint by yeah yeah no i uh yeah i also uh yeah i think well i do think monsters all on netflix is part of their advertisement for pluto they're like well if we can't get you know yawara perhaps i i wonder how what he feels about yawara being out in america but because the comic's never been published here legally either uh but yeah i'm anyway i'm really looking forward to pluto netflix and uh and yeah also in my Japanese prep for my New Year's trip to Japan, I have now gotten far enough in my katakana learning

that I can read the word anime in kana. I know what it says. Let that be your guide. Just follow that word wherever you see it. Though also, man, why is the letter, why must Su and So and Shi all look so similar to me? Why can I really, that is the wall I'm hitting with Katakana. I get it wrong every time in Duolingo, those four letters.

I know, I know the N sound, it's very unmistakable because of just like the little curvy lines on it. But I only recognize like four or five symbols offhand but you know I guess I didn't say the things that I'm doing yet on this podcast which again I'm about to leave I'll report back next month but Monster Hunter Cafe I'll tell you about all the nerdy stuff we're doing actual cultural things and seeing actual sites

but in terms of nerdy stuff that listeners might care about Monster Hunter Cafe Final Fantasy 14 Cafe we're going to the game center cx 20th anniversary event in japan a huge auditorium event where ari knows going to be playing some games i watched uh one of the other anniversary events it looks like a lot of fun and nina designed merch for the event she designed a t-shirt so her merch will be there uh at the show which is really cool to see i'm going to meet the people behind the show i've

been catching up and really enjoying Game Center CX never I mean it was available legally here once in a heavily edited fashion so you kind of have to seek out the fan subs but they're easy to find and yeah so that's that's that's mainly what I've been doing just again I want to say like Portland was

beautiful and wonderful I look forward to going back there just on like a weekend trip that I can pretty easily do now from where I live. And thanks to all the many, many cool people who came out and we met in Portland. You're all wonderful. If you watch cable news like an insane person, you might think that Portland is full of murderers, but it's actually really great. We were the murderers and that we killed that one night oh sorry i just want to give my last japan update oh yeah just to let people know what i'm doing

maybe you can tweet your uh friendly suggestions to me although nina's been to japan a billion times and is fluent in japanese so i'm sure she knows what she's doing uh so yeah other things tokyo disneyland and disney sea not going to universal um and then uh you know kyoto and tokyo and uh riding all over going to osaka we're just going to see a ton of people see a ton of things i'm going to get the the full japan experience outside of like uh okinawa and other places that are a little further out of the way and hokkaido yeah that's so cool so yes looking forward to that let's move on to comments and questions for talking Simpsons. The first ones are for Special Edna.

And wait, what says, so I'll explain this person's comment. The beginning of this comment is about seeing Homer cubed in IMAX within the Cyberworld anthology film. And wait, what goes on to say, at the part with Homer falling apart echoing crap, they cut to the original commission wraparound segments with the host voiced by jenna elfman dealing with homer's black hole invading her home world it's lost media now but for some reason that version of the treehouse of

horror segment stuck with me due to the imax version of it using the final crap homer yelled near the end to transfer into this corny action sequence for cyber world 3d of jenna saving the cyber world just felt humorously mismatched in terms of context to stick with me like that uh that's interesting i know this is like lost media now um but uh jenna elfman pu is what i gotta say about jenna elfman uh i haven't really seen her in a lot but uh i was in Looney Tunes Back in Action, right? Yes, yeah. She's the female lead in that one, for sure. Completely miscast.

Them thinking she could carry a film, absolutely wrong. And I think, was she in the Ben Stiller and Edward Norton film where one's a priest and one's a rabbi? I hate that movie, too. I just am not a Jen Elfman fan. Edward Norton in his most challenging role yet a heterosexual priest yes oh wow wow very rare yes um but yeah uh keeping the faith i think is what it's called but yeah the cyber world thing was a collection of shorts in the year 2000s like all these fun 3d shorts you can watch but i guess there was a jenna elfman framing device

bill oakley didn't even know about that when we asked him like hey did you know that got aired in an imax thing he's like no i was uh there was new there was recent news to him so yes thank you for the info on cyber world uh what does reese say henry reese is up next reese says also the romeo and juliet thing made me laugh because we watched it in my freshman high school year by By then I was at a private Christian school. The whole class insisted on seeing the Baz Luhrmann version, but our teacher acted like it was inferior, inaccurate, and dirtier. Totally not true.

And even got mad at us for wanting to watch it. So she showed us the old one with the underage nudity. Instead of doing the much better solutions Bob and Henry's teachers had, she just paused right before the scene, held up a big blanket during the scene, and continued to let it play so we could hear the audio while she kept peeking behind the blanket to check if the nudity had finished. I get she's a Christian, but she also let my emo ass do a research paper that year on Kurt Cobain, so I don't know why she got so weird about the movie. I'm sure her thoughts were like, self-harm who cares seeing one breast absolutely not yes yeah well and that dude's that dude's butt is very prominently displayed too that's true that's true i was more focused on the breast when i saw it at 14 yes yeah it's no uh since we recorded that uh there

was a whole new article on the um the attempts at suing Paramount and the failure, but they're trying again. And just the mistreatment both actors felt on the set from the now deceased director. And it's a bummer to hear about how terribly they were all treated and the suffering and troubles that young actress went through into adulthood after her experience on the movie. Yes, it puts that scene into a whole new horrible context. Unfortunate. So we're going to move on to Itchy and Scratchy the movie. And Tiny Crow says the Itchy and Scratchy movie trailer

is a perfect parody of trailers for 70s and 80s American animated movies. Trailers from this era had the same cadence of we don't know how to market this movie, but we have to release it, so I guess here it is. This is still a sentiment that rings true today, but I don't think Hollywood studios know how to advertise a cartoon movie, especially ones not released by Disney. I only knew Rudy Gilman Teenage Kraken came out thanks to Twitter,

but the trailers for the Looney Tunes compilation films are exactly like Wittichy and Scratchy are parodying. The overactive narrator trying to be whimsical about very milquetoast material. I'm convinced someone on the writing team might have seen this specific trailer and used it for fuel for the trailer. bite than jaws 2 what packs more punch than rocky 3 what's up duck it's bugs bunny's third movie a thousand and one rabbit tales the greatest movie sequel of them all that wascally wabbit bugs bunny is back in a brand new movie he's up to his old tricks hello daddy and so there we have it uh yeah the 1980 1982 movie uh a thousand and one rabbit tails which i assume is a bunch of old cartoons and then like a badly animated framing device with an aging mel blank yeah i've i feel like i'm having light memories

of that that it's framed like the you know the arabian nights original story that like bugs is being held captive and he has to tell stories that just happen to be his old shorts to prevent his death oh how how lame i mean and also it's like fuck you rocky three eat shit jaws two watch old cartoons you've seen on tv well now it's in a big theater but uh yeah well actually that that's funny yeah that trailer is so much the spirit of that i feel like it might even be the the specific one they were referencing if not the same style yeah with the whimsical narrator it sounds like he's there saying coming this christmas you know yeah and also a thad kamarowski our old pal gave us some more context for those movies regarding the compilation looney tunes movies

got to remember these were done in an era when home video and cable tv were brand new concepts and these cartoons were just starting to be taken seriously they were also a means of those directors to showcase their best work Bugs Bunny Superstar was Bob Clampett's weird attempt to spin himself as the center of the Looney Tunes universe buy the Warner Archive DVD and listen to director Larry Jackson's commentary which I did that once I read this comment I was like all right I mean it's it was nine bucks I want to I want to hear this commentary how was it no it hasn't come yet oh okay uh please report back yeah i guess i guess i mean uh kids have been watching these cartoons on tv for a very long time there were so many of

these package shows but the theatrical releases were interesting um because they got people like leonard malton writing about you know uh let's reevaluate bugs bunny cartoons he's like a silent comedy star you know all of the fun interesting on Bugs Bunny when he was being taken seriously by the boomers who grew up with him. But I guess the context in which I saw these was it's a video on a shelf and I rented it. It's like, well, I've seen these so many times before. And this was falsely advertised to me as new content. Yeah, the compilation movies, I had a love-hate relationship with them out of that context. Because, like, i watched the the bugs

bunny roadrunner movie eight million times and i think it's why chuck jones was and i think still is my favorite of the directors even though i think he's really full of himself um or was but but then i watched the other ones i thought they felt kind of flat but now i wish i could have seen them i wish i was you know 10 years younger and could have at least seen them in the theaters because some of the best times i've had watching those old cartoons was seeing them in a movie theater as they were meant to be seen laughed together by a big audience that yeah that truly was special um and uh yeah i just uh i wish there were more opportunities like that i i'm always looking

around for screenings of classic cartoons but they don't really happen outside of la no it's it's pretty rare i we honestly we wouldn't have gotten to see the ones in san francisco if uh if chuck jones's uh grandson didn't live there and have the archives to show off yeah something like that it was it was a relative Yeah, who made us watch a, who very stubbornly made us watch a Pepe Le Pew short, even though that was not reading the room correctly. Hey, you know, it's part of his legacy. So I understand why. At least it wasn't like a Pepe. But so was Roadrunner, they didn't show us a single Roadrunner. That's true. Yeah, I mean, like, talking about these compilation movies, I mentioned I like Quackbusters a lot. As a kid, it's because I had seen like every Warner Brothers cartoon by the like Quackbusters a lot as a kid it's because I had seen like every

Warner Brothers cartoon by the time Quackbusters came out but I actually like the original cartoon in that one which was like the Duxorcist right right not having any idea what the Exorcist was sorry Henry go ahead oh I was I get that confused with the Mel Torme one is that that's part of the same

yeah because he sings he sings monsters lead such interesting lives in the beginning it's like a monster nightclub or something like that that's right yeah it's a lot more fun than some of the other ones let's move on to the dad who knew too little and uh Blake R says in regards to the mail in your kids information and get them featured in a special video blip of the early aughts there's an infamous episode of Arthur that featured such an offer where the entire episode was arthur hyping up to meet his new pen pal you it would include the arthur voice actor saying the kid's name in a way that didn't sound

natural at all as well as a photo of the kid superimposed over a generic animal body needless to say these never aired on tv and the animation and voice acting were done exclusively for this special feature one particular usage got online some time ago that's particularly incredible as it's some four year old making the most stoic unimpressed face constantly featured in scenes where the show's characters are having fantasies about all the cool things this new

kid is going to do you can find it on YouTube under Arthur's new friend Andy well worth a watch to more or less see the kind of service featured in this episode and I'm thinking like yes this was uh like a blip this this little thing that happened these you know uh these customized videos because it wasn't soon after that that we had the the jib jab renaissance where it's just like upload your photo now you're dancing with barack obama isn't that great yeah those uh yeah actually jib jab was the the grown-up version of those

things I I also I it hit me only later like this description is what AI art just is now like I want to hang out with the Muppets it's like well we'll make your own Muppet movie and it's all AI and it's like no it looks like shit like it's fake. I'm seeing people retweeting these AI freaks who are like, I fed the robot all of these prompts. And look, now I can create my own Calvin and Hobbes. And I look at this and I'm just like, you disgust me. Absolutely. Bill Watterson should come over there and slit your throat. Those are my real feelings about it.

I hate seeing it. I've even seen it from some people who i thought were against even jokingly sharing an ai prompt picture and now they're just like now i'll just share it it's just like you fucking pigs stop this this is awful i'm not going to give away who this is let's say an old associate of mine and it could be any number like it could be one of dozens of people uh i still follow them online and they are now in the ai biz uh and they like jump to a new industry like every couple of years i'm just like this this makes perfect sense for you i hate you i cannot uh i mean just in general

and i see any of those ai things and like and then people want to show up like no it's getting better it's like that should make you hate it more like if they if the pictures are starting to look better now that's even shittier and also it's like as every time and this is only going to be worse every single day but as crazy things happen in the news and you need information guess what ai can now generate a trickable enough image that is just like oh no this is what happened there and it's like it's just fake you can't uh this is what uh metal gear solid 2 predicted is that you can't believe anything you'll just be awash in information and hey now you can play it again on any platform you want yeah and you know like one last day i think i'm

seeing it integrated into so many things like when i when i load up photoshop to work on like a cover for the podcast or something else it's like let AI help you with this and I'm like no no no do not involve I just need to drag an image into an existing like template that's all I'm doing and then I go into Dropbox to upload my audio and it's like check

out Dropbox's new AI features and I'm thinking all I'm doing is dragging a file into you Dropbox how much more complicated does this need to be? It used to be the prompts would be like, sign up for an NFT in our thing. Now it's just, I mean, it's also, that's part of a, this is just a general gripe corner now,

but I also hate that every app I use that I just pay for a thing for, it's like, say, our accounting software we use for our business they keep going like but wouldn't you like to borrow forty thousand dollars from us and i'm like no no i don't want to do that yeah it's like it's like the thing i need i used to get a credit check to like uh own property is now sending me like uh deals every day like do you want to take out a loan do you want this do you want that just like please i only needed to use you for legal reasons. Leave me alone.

You just bought tickets from Ticketmaster. Hey, would you like to sign up for HelloFresh while you're here? Like, fuck off. Yes. They want everyone's last dollar. Yeah, it's sad. It's an insane desperation across all of capitalism. Yes. So our next show to talk about is the Halloween live show. I will say there were great comments, but all the comments were like, you guys are so funny and great. And, you know, I agree. But I'm not going to read those. That's very self-indulgent.

But thank you for thinking we're all very funny and great. I appreciate that. Yeah, definitely. And there will be future live shows, obviously. We've got some things cooking right now, folks. So stay tuned. Might hear about it in this next month maybe yes hopefully uh oh so now we're going to move on to uh what a cartoon comments and our what a cartoon for october was the phineas and ferb episode dude we're getting the band back together and i will say our listeners were very diplomatic about

a cartoon we didn't really enjoy and i thought the reaction was going to be much more negative but i guess i'm used to i'm so used to dealing with video game fans that i that i forget that cartoon fans are often more reasonable uh and we had one such person is uh tashmond dimps who said as the talking simpsons patreon's resident 23 year old i can confirm that people my generation love this show as much as they do Spongebob or Avatar the Last Airbender I also dug it at the time but it's not a show I really go back to that often of course I distinctly remember catching the post high school musical to preview at age eight and getting hooked on the weird yet intriguing premise but Phineas and Ferb never really stuck with me

like other childhood faves I guess the show's longevity is due to the strength of the premise you can basically do anything with. In an age of serialization and lore dominating the entertainment space, it is quaint to see a show whose main appeal is that you never know what crazy new inventions the main characters will create next. Well, thank you, Tashman. I didn't realize uh young people were listening to us uh so I'm glad that you will let us tell you what the 90s were like it's a very important lesson to learn and you know a portion of the 80s as well and we appreciate your youth and despite us saying that being born in 1982 is the correct year to be born in and

your those childhoods are the most important ones I I really do like hearing from people who you know like yeah i was eight when this came out and i did love it and uh that and the marketing worked on me part of i part of our journey on the show is realizing like oh yes i was successfully marketed to very well for teenage mutant ninja turtles you know for a long time i did consider 82 to be the perfect year but as i am looking at all the 52 200 hour games i have to play i'm thinking what if i was born in 2002 there'd be more time for this yes that's true but that but then again you might not have had as I am looking at all the 52 200 hour games I have to play I'm thinking what if I was born in 2002 there'd be more time for this yes that's true but that but then again you might not have had as many

uh as much free time you'd have had to start your podcasting side hustle sooner that's true I would have been like a nine-year-old podcaster I mean if I had had access to this equipment when I was 13 I would have I just talked into talked into a tape recorder a few times to be like, it's the Henry show. I could now just do that for real online. And upload it, and then millions of people could see your little kid radio show, which I'm sure is healthy, right?

Oh, yes, yeah. So Kaiser Beams comments on this one, and Kaiser Beams says, to answer your question, if the kids are still into the rock music, it's complicated. On one hand, rock has definitely fallen out of the mainstream as hip-hop became the dominant genre of youth subculture, and even that's beginning to change. On the other hand, as someone who runs in music nerd circles,

rock is still very popular with younger people who have more than a casual interest in music. Popular genres are neo-psychedelic rock bands like T impala and king gizzard and the lizard wizard as well as a post-punk revival groups like idols but the most interesting development among zoomer rock fans is the reappraisal of new metal bands like deftones limp biscuit and lincoln park are seen as way more important and influential bands than people like to give them credit for and were unappreciated in their time that's really interesting to know that new metal is going through a reappraisal like in our youths i feel like the movement was to rediscover new wave like to bring back new like early 80s music like in uh donnie darko's entire soundtrack is about that for instance and now to hear the new metal is getting a similar reappraisal

from a similar distance in time that's interesting right i mean i didn't really like it at the time and it was made for me uh but i you know more power to people if you're into it it made me think that like this it's two things i forgot to mention this has been a jam-packed october i saw uh two rock shows this month which is unusual unusual for me. So beginning of October, I saw Brendan Small as Death Clock and Babymetal in one night. And it was because Death Clock was touring or is touring because there's a new Metalocalypse movie

because Adult Swim released three movies, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Venture Brothers, and Metalocalypse. So that's what that was for. It was amazing amazing and then last night I saw the movie the Italian horror movie Demons with the Italian

rock band or rock prog band Goblin performing the score and then they performed a ton of other movie scores afterwards so it's been a fun month for spooky rock for me for some reason also we had so much going on, I forgot to even mention, I went to a wrestling pay-per-view as well at the start of October.

I forgot that too, in Seattle. Yeah, at the WrestleDream AEW event where Adam Copeland, a.k.a. Edge, debuted. And it was also a very fun night. That was a great night that I got to see one of my old podcast pals, Mike Grimm, who lives in the area we watched it together and also uh yeah it was uh there was there was some good fun wrestling though sadly our our guest previous guest and wrestler Dan Housen he's not back yet I think he's about

to return for Halloween he's having some very fun Halloween 3 themed vignettes about a comeback going on right okay. Okay. Yes. We're looking forward to that. And up next we have, what a cartoon movie, Corpse Bride. I'd like to say I apologize that we covered Corpse Bride. It was weird to discover like zero enthusiasm or really hatred of this movie. It just is a movie that simply exists. And then my wife and I were going to Tokyo Disneyland and we went to a Hot Topic to buy Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirts.

We want to wear matching shirts to be a cute couple in Tokyo Disneyland when we go. And I did notice there is some Corpse Bride representation. I was finally looking for it. It's like, here's a Corpse Bride backpack and Corpse Bride socks. I'm just thinking, I want to really truly meet the person who is going to buy this. Because I don't understand how this movie could garner any enthusiasm. I think Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton's Sweeney todd like washed all the corpse bride out of my brain finally where it's it's even like it's like not even the best movie ever but i was like well boy this is kind of what a spooky musical should be and corpse bride is just like two years before this by adapting a musical he doesn't have to think about the having the music himself he can

just be like i'll let uh steven sondheim take the the reins on that but but it was great to see again diplomatic patrons they shared our lack of enthusiasm even the people who liked it understood why we didn't but i believe this next comment is for you henry yes uh adam l moddy said another great episode i quite enjoyed the, but it's very slight. Always interesting as a Brit to hear Bob and Henry speak about UK celebrities. I think Tracy Ullman was quite popular here in the mid-80s, but she's far from a household name now. Paul Whitehouse is a big deal in British comedy,

despite his patchy film record. Johnny Depp was well known to be a fan. Richard E. Grant is most famous here for Withnail and I beloved by generations of student alcoholics he's recently been living his best life on Instagram and I did actually hear about Withnail and I I really need to see that movie also because it was Richard E. Grant or I believe the writer of the movie personally was talking about the was talking about having worked with the director of that Romeo and Juliet movie and also being mistreated by the director and

sexually harassed by the director as well so I didn't know this okay yes yeah I really need to watch it I it's it's been sitting on my criterion channel uh to watch list I'd say for a decade now but one of these days after like 20 plus years of not seeing a new tim burton movie i have now watched uh corpse bride and sweetie todd within the same month and it got me to listen to the blank checks about those and i forgot that he had a real like uh british period in his life he is such i mean a very likely being with helena bottom carter i think expanded his interest in the British world and British culture. But he is one of those like soft American dweebs who's just like, maybe America or maybe America is not for me.

Maybe England will understand me. And they move to a gigantic mansion in England and live there for a while. You know, I might regret this, but I feel like I should catch up with the Burtons, at least the ones that are semi-good. I'm not doing Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children or whatever. I totally forgot that one. Yeah, everybody forgot about that.

I was looking at the letterboxd entry for Tim Burton. I was like, oh, this shit. It's like, we'll give you a Harry Potter-style young adult novel. Have fun with this i remember thinking big eyes was all right not great but all right i remember liking it so uh yes moving on more what a cartoon movie comments uh jim mcpherson says amazing episode i was 23 when corpse bride came out and saw it when it was first on dvd maybe it would have been more

impressive in the theater the only lasting memory i have of it was thinking vincent was stupid as And I remember responding to one of these comments. and lives in a crazy weirdo ragtime afterlife. Why would he want to go back to that shitty world? And I remember responding to one of these comments. I just put, like, I think Emily should just date a nice skeleton man or date Mr. Bojangles. And somebody replied, let's just say his mommy won't let him come out to play. By the way, I'm glad we recorded that before new things came out about Danny Elfman. There's some new accusations. Hey, there were old things as well. But now it's just putting everything into context.

I'm not going to throw shade on everyone who is 70 and gets a ton of tattoos and gets incredibly buff, but you're going through something. Yes. Yeah, you're going through a lot of stuff and uh it feels like uh no i wish it'd be nice if like one person of that generation didn't turn out to be like a monster you know yeah it's it's very unfortunate uh but yeah that was also speaking very unfortunate the corpse bride so that was that and uh let's move on to talking futururama, The Sting. I believe you're up next, Henry. David Thompson says, I'm not sure if either of you have got a chance to finish Disenchantment.

You mentioned it in the middle of the podcast. Not sure if you remember, as I'm not sure how long ago you recorded and edited the show. But I do think that if the show was communicated at the start to be a 50-episode serialized show, I don't think it would have gotten as much backlash as it seemed to get. When I first started watching it, I assumed it would be episodic like Simpsons Futurama however when I realized it was serialized I was okay with it the main problem was with it being released in 10 episode batches so far apart I'd forgotten what had happened when the next batch

was released I also was hoping that some resolution in each batch but it never came i think if it's newly discovered by someone and that person knows it's a 50 episode serialized show i think they might appreciate it more than the people who followed it in real time yeah i mean totally accurate uh and i mean as i started watching it i got the gist of it being a serialized show but i think at the time uh i also thought the writers don't really know they're making a serialized show. But I think at the time, I also thought the writers don't really know they're making a serialized show or they don't know how much more of the story they can tell. So you get, we've said this a lot,

so I apologize for being a broken record. You get the stakes of a serialized show, but then you also get the very subversive Simpsons-y, like, who cares? And then that's unsatisfying in a show where they're trying to build something. But I also think the who cares jokes are more appropriate for this kind of comedy. I think that kind of comedy fits more.

And also, I think they still wanted to do the problems I had with up to the end of season three. And that's the most I watched. I didn't I watched the first two of season four and not the fifth season especially in two and three it felt like they would spend three episodes fixing the the cliffhanger of the previous season then do like four more regular episodes it felt like a a simpson style sitcom and then they'd have a three episode like serialized finale and so it just felt like it was getting two flavors at once you know that that was the problem yeah i think like i feel like the first two seasons were like that but the third season was just one very long story and i didn't like that either no no uh but

hey maybe maybe now as it is just a 50 episode just thing that you can just all watch it once on netflix maybe it feels different when you can see it all in one go. I don't know. Yeah, I think the commenter has a point where I would often forget what would happen between seasons. And I think they even stopped doing those recap clip show thingies like after the first or second season. So I just would go in thinking, well, I guess I kind of remember.

But I don't want to go on Wikipedia and read a summary of every episode to catch myself up here. So we're going to move on to Mike Mariano who says, great episode about a really terrific sci-fi story. In terms of a series finale, I think you need the sting first to make the devil's hands work. The sting establishes

that Fry's love for Leela means something to her. If you swap them, Fry's holophoner playing would be just another doofus means well episode. But making it the finale, knowing their mutual feelings turns it into love and yeah mike i think you're correct i think i just i i'm cheating because i have the knowledge of the devil's hands episode in my head so i'm forgetting about how this was laid out in order for viewers at the time even though i was one of them yeah yeah you're he's right that you know in the the why of fry you get to see

why fry deserves to love lila or how that his his attraction is much deeper than just he he's he's matured it's a more mature attraction and this episode you get to spend it all with lila and it's her coming to terms with like that she likes fry more than just as a friend and it it does get them closer together to make the payoff at the end of Devil's Hands feel a lot deeper. And I should say, I have now watched half of the new season

of the Futurama and I got up to the Amazon episode, which was a great, it's a really good episode. And part of what's great about it is that Lila and Fry's relationship feels like it has really grown over time by this season of shows. Definitely. I mean, we'll talk about it is that lila and fry's relationship feels like it has really grown over time by by this

season of shows definitely i mean we'll talk about it but if we cover a new episode i def i really want to cover that one i'll let you watch the rest of the season henry and you can weigh in but uh that's that's the number one episode for me of that season oh yeah it's been it's my number one so far i did like the dung one it was fun that was very good i did i did enjoy the the parody elements of that uh so up next we have talking to the hill three coaches in a bobby and henry you're up for jamie cooks jamie cooks says i'm paraphrasing what alton brown said one time but vanilla is one of the most complex flavors in the world made from the bud of an orchid that blooms once a year and then has to be processed for months to get the flavor

just right vanilla beans especially are super complex when you cook with them i'm a huge vanilla apologist too i like a scoop of vanilla and then a scoop of a really good fruit sorbet like peach or raspberry and then eating a little of both every spoonful so that makes a cream sickle in my mouth yeah it's just all the controversy with your cheese pizza and vanilla comments. Yes. All the vanilla stands came out of the woodwork to support me in my crusade. Crusade is a harsh word. Let's say battle.

But yes, vanilla rules and also cheese pizza. What I've been doing, I live in the little Italy area of Vancouver, and I'm just surrounded by pizza by the slice places. There's so many of them. There's probably at least eight of them within a short walking distance. What I've been doing is I've been getting the cheese slice at each one to evaluate which is the best pizza place because there's nowhere to hide when with a cheese slice.

There's nothing to put on top of it to disguise any kind of badness with the foundation. So that's my thing. And I do enjoy a a peaceful cheese slice just the basics of pizza there for me the simplicity of it is calming but i also like toppings i like crazy california pizza with potatoes and corn and like pistachios on it i'm all over the place i did take your cheese pizza talks to heart when i was in uh portland as well ordering pizza and had a i had a margarita pizza at the fancy um not that fancy but the italian style pizzeria uh m-u-c-c-a

mucha i think it's muka muka yeah yeah uh that that bill uh oakley had suggested and uh and i was thinking like oh yeah i could get something else on it, but I should just see what the cheese tastes like. And that also was funny, too, because then I got to hear Bill as well. Even him as a connoisseur, he was questioning like, you guys got anchovies on your pizza? He was asking you. Oh, yeah. Now listen to this to freak everyone out at home. Nina and I love anchovies.

If you go to a really good pizza place get anchovies it's like the perfect topping for your pizza just a little strip of salt and a little strip of meat is all you need to get yourself through that pizza and I if the media has really devalued anchovies I feel much like pineapple on pizza but you know try anchovies give it a shot make sure it's not like a fast food pizza place make sure it's a good one and i think you won't be steered wrong and i'm getting hungry because it's almost lunchtime we're talking about pizza uh so now final comment before i go off to eat uh my tuna salad hand rolls from the local japanese grocery store that's that's my lunch for today but matt ls says i'm just thinking about lunch hank is probably mixing up the plot of rud. By Hank, he means Henry Gilbert.

Yes. No, I got defensive of reading this at first because I do believe it's like, wait, I didn't mix up Rudy and the Brian song. But no, what the person means is the joke in the episode when he says that Rudy like dies at the end of Rudy. It's that he's mixing that Hank Hank Hill is mixing up these two. Oh, okay. So I was confused. I thought he was saying you were wrong. So I guess when we talk, when we do King of the Hill comments, you have to say Hank Hill instead of Hank.

Okay, so let me read this. Now I got it wrong. So Hank Hill is probably mixing up the plot of Rudy with the plot of Brian's song, a 1971 critically acclaimed TV movie starring Billy Dee Williams and james conn as real life chicago bears players gail sayers and brian piccolo respectively the movie focuses on their friendship transcending the american racial divide and ends with piccolo's death from cancer in 1970 this joke

totally went over my head when it first aired but i love whenever hank's confused by pop culture including pop culture he presumably know a lot about like inspiring football movies and so the one thing i know about brian song is that there was an entire pinky in the brain uh based on it called brain song in which uh pinky in the brain in order to make the world cry and weaken the human populace they were going to recreate the events of that tv movie and uh basically show it to the entire world because it was like the biggest tear-jerking movie that writers of that time were familiar with having grown up with it I totally for I definitely remember watching that one as a kid but not knowing what it was referencing and even though it's the title is very obvious if you're you know

an adult and not a child. Yeah. It's like there were these big made for TV movies that were referenced a lot in the 90s that we never really were exposed to like that in the Loneliest Runner. Oh, and the Bubble Boy movie as well. Boy. Yeah. These were all these were all TV movies that just like nearly 100 million people saw. But they were just like never that available to us. But Hank Hill remembers parts

of some of them yeah yeah it's fine so it's a good good joke uh a better joke as as Matt LS has finally described to us but yes also it's just funny to me that I I get slightly defensive when I go to the comments that I feel like wait is somebody telling me wrong and I I put up my dukes and then as I read the article, I slowly become the Moomin putting away the knife. I'm just like, okay, this is not... I hate Hank so much, especially when he's mean to Peggy, and you're putting away the knife.

But yes, this has been a jam-packed talk to the audience. We've had very busy Octobers, and November's going to be great. I'll be in Japan for most of the month, but also we have things like swat cats uh we have new episodes of talking futurama and talking to the hill for patrons and obviously at the end of the month we're going to be covering the muppet christmas carol can't wait to dig into that as soon as i get back i i can't wait to uh experience uh via your social medias and stuff bob seeing your your travels in japan i'm really looking forward to seeing it.

I assume there will be a half hour Japan segment on next month's episode and probably the January episode as well. Absolutely, yes. But that is it for this month's episode of Talk to the Audience. We'll see you again next month for another brand new episode

of our community podcast. Take care. Wow. Infotainment.