The Bechdel Cast - Tangled

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

This week, Caitlin and Jamie let down their hair and discuss Disney's Tangled. (This episode contains spoilers) For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast. Follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP on Twitter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose. This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine,

known for his research on brain function, behavior, and neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to adapt and rewire itself. The expectation on us is not perfection, it's being able to toggle between these different states. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Trust me, you won't want to miss this one. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years.

I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister, or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the Bechdelcast, the questions asked, if movies have women in them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effin' vast, start changing it with the Bechdelcast. Oh, Jamie, let down your hair. Wow, Caitlin, my hair is so unhealthy okay um we're gonna get about do you need to travel from my shoulders to my scalp because that's about as far as we're gonna get at this point in time oh great well then yeah absolutely no problem it will hurt a lot but like rapunzel i'm extremely

self-sacrificing for no reason so sure it hurt me oh do you actually we just met but should i like die for you you know um yeah welcome to the bextel cast we both have pretty short hair uh not like short short we're both we're both medium right now mine used to be much shorter i used to be the baldest woman in charge and then i know and now i would say we're we're about right now it's a real equal leadership we're both kind of medium right now which is which i think is a fair and just way to rule a podcast i think so i love parody, equality, etc. I wish I could do. I get nervous about having a shorter haircut because I have a weird head shape and I have a lump on top of my head. And I just don't like calling too much attention to my head.

Jamie, don't say those things about my friend, Jamie. Look, I've known her for a long time and she has a lump on her head. And I don't have the confidence to embrace it at this point in my life. Someday I'm going to be calling attention to this damn lump because that's where all the good shit's happening. Right in that little golf ball on top of my head. Oh boy. Welcome to the Bechdel cast. My name is Jamie Loftus. My name is Caitlin Durante and this is our show where we examine movies through an intersectional feminist lens using, of course, the Bechdel test simply as a jumping off point. Oh, for sure.

Oh, yeah. That Bechdel test. Let me tell you about it because there's some things about it that you're not going to expect. Just kidding. If you listen to the show, you know what it is. We use it as a jumping off point for discussion. It is a media metric originally created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test. Many versions of this test.

Our version is this. Are there two characters with names of a marginalized gender who talk to each other about something other than a man for two lines of dialogue. And very often it doesn't happen very often, you know, in this day and age, in this economy, very often it does. Either way, we're going to talk about it for about two seconds in one and a half hours. So don't worry about it for now. and today we are covering on the main feed i think what this is we've been kind of making a concerted effort as of late to uh knock out some of our top requests that have literally been on our request list for at this point more than half a decade yes because look enough is enough we understand There are certain films, films, pieces of cinema that you, pieces of cinema?

No. No. Yeah, no. Go with it. Commit. Oh my God. I just in my head heard a shattering glass sound and I'm just like, you could interpret that as my brain breaking or you could interpret it as me punching through the glass ceiling

coming up with a new incredible phrase, pieces cinema i choose the latter wait what happens at the end of saw what does he say at the end of saw and then he slams the door he says game over slam that's what's happening uh in my head 24 7 anytime i encounter something that is confusing to me and i just take a nap no i'm kidding and i educate myself i learn okay wow jamie hang on are you okay no no no no no no of course not of course not doing really weird lately but that doesn't mean i'm not ready to have some discourse about the movie tangled with my friend caitlin this movie has been on our list forever yes it has our listeners want this episode and we decided you know what it's time it's time and so that's what we're covering today 2010 disney animated film starring I didn't really I knew it was Mandy Moore because

same I was a childhood fan of Mandy Moore I know I've talked about this on the show before I haven't had a haunted Mandy Moore poster right right I didn't know Zachary Levi was in this movie which is interesting to me because he's handsome that he is and that's all i have to say and also paul f tompkins shout out to paul f tompkins yeah there's some fun voice acting in this movie zachary levi mr shazam himself i do confuse him with zachary quinto sometimes due to them both being named zachary and being handsome yeah but this is zachary this is shazam zachary not star trek zachary correct and that is how we distinguish them that is that is famously how we do that there's shazam and there's spock podcast and there are two kinds of zachary's shazam and spock we're on sprouse

there's three kinds of zachary's anyways oh right oh you don't know the Sprouse is off the top no wait oh my god I got it wrong it's Dylan I was thinking of his character Zach from the Suite Life of Zach and Cody I'm wrong okay glass shattering game over slam well Zachary Zachary listeners please let us know which of the two Zachary options you are are you at a Spock or a Shazam? We're back down to two. Yeah. Sprouse is not an option because that was a fictional character. I'm more Spock, I think. Oh, I am definitely more of a Spock than a Shazam.

Yeah. Well, because you didn't like Shazam, as we talked about recently on the Matreon. I really broke some young man's heart that day. Sorry, sir. Anyway. Okay, Jamie, what is your relationship with Tangled? Oh my gosh. I did not see this movie when it came out.

I was in high school and I was like, I'm too old for this. I don't need to go see Tangled. Ew. So I did not see it when it originally came out. I think I saw it a couple years later. My vague memory that is completely useless and irrelevant about seeing this movie was I saw it on DVD at a woman's house where I was modeling t-shirts for her? Question mark.

Okay. At some point in college. I made money in a lot of shady ways in college I sold my blood uh and I did that too right I mean it's kind of a a time-honored tradition in the grand uh in the grand tradition of late capitalism of course we both sold our blood and I also would do these like weird modeling gigs where I'm pretty sure you're getting super ripped off but you would wear like these ugly ass t-shirts that would say like you know like corny early 2010s t-shirts that would be like I'm trying to think like good morning is an oxymoron something like that

kind of I kind of like those better I feel like auntie t-shirts are fine with me, but this was like sassy millennial, like egg, like bacon humor. It was bacon humor, ultimately embarrassing. I hope they don't exist on the internet anymore. But anyways, this random woman was doing my makeup at her house and we watched Tangled and then I'm pretty sure I got my, got my image exploited. I see. But I liked it.

And then I've, and I've, and I've watched it a couple times since I think it's like I've never thought very hard about it but I knew a little bit about the production around this movie and I'm excited to talk about it because it feels like 2010 a very particular moment in time for princess energy so sure yes what's your history i don't think i saw this in theaters but i do remember seeing it probably within a year of it coming out i was living in boston at the time brave me too and we oh no wait i was still at home never mind oh geez well uh i was living in boston i was not um a supermodel like you were yeah yeah people were uh taking pictures of me in ugly shirts on their point and shoots so uh sounds to me like you were doing some like runway

high fashion runway modeling it was really sexy what I was doing for sure uh-huh um no I was um just kind of chilling in Boston probably saw this with my friend JT. I remember liking it, but not enough to be like, oh, this is like going to be in my rotation kind of thing. So I didn't watch it again until I want to say 2019, maybe 2018, sometime around then. I went to a Friendsgiving celebration at friend of the pod sammy junio's house love it and we decided that we were going to watch a bunch of movies and that those movies could only start with the letter t so we watched three t movies the first one of course, being Titanic.

The second one being Terminator 2. And the third one being Tangled. Wow. So I saw it again. And I was like, oh, this movie, this is cute. This is better than I remember. I like this movie. But then again, I didn't see it again until prepping for this episode. So re-watching it, especially through like the Bechdel cast lens,

was an interesting journey. I feel like there's a lot to discuss. Yeah, this movie really is, it's messing with you. And I think when the first, like maybe one or two times I saw it, it didn't really click for me because it is, for its faults, which we will be discussing, I think it's a really click for me because it is for its faults which we will be discussing I think

it's a really fun movie it's like a good engaging Disney movie that doesn't feel like most other Disney movies but not because it's you know amazing and progressive it's just kind of different it's actiony I like it I like the chameleon Pascal that was the chameleon from the minions test wasn't it yes it was so so listeners famously we all jamie and i both took a which minion are you test on your birthday of course i swear to god i texted that damn quiz to every person i've ever met and was like i need to know what mini you are right now because like is this friendship gonna sustain or not uh-huh let's share our results shall we mine sucks okay yeah caitlin name your awesome minions quiz results i got stewart is that right i don't even remember now

stewart one eyeball the rock star oh unbelievable classic me you know classic caitlin a bunch of people in my life got kevins which is like okay that's if we're getting a kev we're pulling a kevin or a stewart result friend for life yeah meanwhile i pulled grew i got grew i don't see it if if it makes you feel any better thank you so much i don't know how i got grew but it lowered my self-esteem immeasurably i can't and on your birthday it happened to me on my birthday while we got the minions menu at ihop which was gross disappointing oh my god okay last thing before we jump into the discourse the minions i first of all i don't think i hop is one of our sponsors our sponsors listeners are randomly generated and so we don't

really know but uh hopefully not i hop because the minions menu we were so looking forward to it caitlin brilliantly decided we should go on my birthday and then we get there and what is the menu it's just existing menu items with minions characters yeah like pancakes but with yellow and blue sprinkles literally minion comes sorry but like that was that was the consistency it was gross are you suggesting that minions come yes yellow and blue sprinkles okay no no no no i was i was talking about the yellow goo oh the yellow okay so there was banana flavored goo and then sprinkles on top of that yeah the goo was cold so i do think that minions come cold yellow banana goo okay here's the thing what not to derail this conversation even further but

similar to the does beetlejuice come wet or dry scabs yeah you're in the camp of minions come that cold banana flavored goo yes i'm in the camp of minions come yellow and blue sprinkles see that's a fun kind of changing of the narrative because with Beetlejuice, as we're going to be debating come October, as we do every year, I always say he comes dry scabs. Sounds like card shuffling. You always say he comes wet scabs like a laser jet printer. Yeah. And in this case, I'm team wet and you're team dry. Exactly.

Wow. What we know for sure is that Minions, they do not sexually reproduce. So all of their sex is strictly for pleasure. And I celebrate that, which I think is kind of amazing and progressive. Right. Minions, progressive text. Okay. Transitioning into our discussion around Tangled.

So we both have light, you know, light appreciation for this movie prior to prior to covering it. I don't think either of us have a particularly strong attachment. Right. But I was thinking as I was watching this movie for you. What like as much as I was enjoying the movie i'm like what is this movie doing that shrek had not already done yes a question a legitimate question and i will say i well you know my thing is like i do think that rapunzel has more, certainly more screen time than Princess Fiona. Certainly has a more distinct,

well, I don't even know there. I think that Fiona might do more with less screen time in Shrek 2001 is the thing. Oh, interesting. Because she is, I mean, look, did I rewatch Shrek before this? No. Should I have?

Of course. This isn't a comparative study. I just, there's obviously, because Shrek is this? No. I should I have, of course, this isn't a comparative study. I just, there's obviously because Shrek is a rip off of literally everything. Princess Fiona kind of has a Rapunzel thing going on. She is trapped in a tower against her will. And needs to be rescued. Right.

I would argue that Rapunzel has in this movie, at least in this version of the narrative she has more agency than Fiona she there's no far quad there's no far quad right so there's not like a rival man right the humor of the movie does not rely on punching down in the way that Shrek's humor often does excuse me or just like kind of outdated references the way that Shrek tends to do I truly did not mean to start this as a genuine conversation but finish it was a joke I know but but I think still a legitimate question um donkey better than maximus certainly oh yeah for sure but i do like maximus's the max the horse's arc i don't like max the horse's arc i say we cut max honestly because just my my central issue with this movie is that

it's there's so much flynn there's so much flynn Yes. And there's like, why does even Flynn's horse have an arc? Why not give that to Rapunzel's animal familiar, who is mostly just very adorable, which I love. But I'm like, we're giving the horse an arc, but we still don't have any empathy for the villain. I was like, too much Flynn. As much as I think Zachary Levi is handsome, he's a cartoon in this

so what why am I watching this yeah no I agree my very scholarly opinion I had yeah I say Max take him to the backyard and put him down that's what I say about Max wow you want to send him to the glue factory the look that came over your face yeah we gotta turn max into glue i think he's he's mucking up the story i don't care about flynn's rivalry with his own horse well it's not his horse sorry i just not to get into semantics but as much as i love love a good horse we just went to medieval times i love a good horse oh my gosh i went to the kentucky derby this year i love a good horse yeah okay well i think that brings us into the recap because let's talk about it here's the story of rapunzel or the of tangled of tangled oh which is also a

huge thing why is the name different we'll talk about it yes okay so we open by learning about Rapunzel's backstory, which is told to us by Flynn Rider. We will meet him later. For what reason? Good question. And we are in, you could say, medieval times. Shout out to your recent birthday celebration. Shout out to the Red Knight. Oh my god, Red Knight.

Red Knight. Red Knight. the king of medieval times okay when a park a a drop of sun fell to the earth and a magic golden flower grew from it that had the ability to heal the sick and injured if you sing a special song to the flower put a pin in that there is a kingdom with a king and a queen and the queen is gregnant and she is about to have a greg but she gets really sick so the king's people like the kingsmen go out in search of this movie was missing a Rasputin yeah yeah where was Rasputin where was Rasputin entangled in there I'm gonna start asking truly nonsense questions please start pivoting into extremely bad faith analysis and being like so um I thought this movie was feminist

but then where was Rasputin um another fair question. Yeah. Okay. So the Kingsmen go out to look for this golden flower to heal the queen. But there's this woman, Mother Gothel, who had already found the flower and has been hoarding its power for centuries to keep herself young this whole time. But the Kingsmen find the flower and take it to the queen to heal her. She gives birth to a little girl with golden hair. And this, of course, is Rapunzel. And to celebrate the birth of their daughter, the king and queen release a floating lantern into the sky. Adorable. Love it. Cute. But then Mother Gothel shows up. Rapunzel's hair has the same magical properties as the flower and gothel thinks she can cut some of the hair off and use it to keep her young but she discovers

that cutting this lock of rapunzel's hair takes away its magical properties oh. And turns that strand of hair that's still attached to Rapunzel's head, renders it unmagical and brown. Ooh, gross brown hair. Bad. Yucky, yucky. You and me found dead in a ditch. Like, unbelievable. Uh-huh. So basically, the hair needs to be attached to Rapunzel's head in order for it to retain its magical properties.

So Gothel kidnaps Rapunzel so that she can always have access to her hair. Gothel keeps Rapunzel locked away in this tower hidden in the forest and raises Rapunzel as her own daughter. So Rapunzel thinks that Gothel is her mother. Time passes. We see Gothel singing this special song, which activates the hair and keeps her young. We also learn that each year on Rapunzel's birthday at the castle far off in the distance, the king and queen release hundreds of lanterns into the sky, hoping that their lost daughter will someday return this is something that rapunzel always like watches and sees and loves this event of the the lanterns floating in the sky um okay so then we cut to rapunzel as a teenager she's still living in the

tower her hair is like a hundred feet long since it can't be cut because it'll lose its powers and i've watched um i've watched shorts on how i mean i knew that like it's extremely extremely hard to animate hair and after under fully understanding that process and working in animation i was like wow this i wonder if if we wonder if, if we have, um, like legit animators, uh, listening to the show, does watching these things with the hair give you a panic attack because it stresses me out and I don't even understand computer animation. Um, but you're like, wow, wow, wow. This was like the most expensive, um, Disney movie produced to date partially because of development stuff that we'll talk about but

also because like the budget like how many people you need to have on hair duty alone is just like wild yeah anyways yeah the budget shout out to hair animators the budget for this was i think 260 million dollars making it one of the highest budget movies ever and the highest budget animated movie of all time i think i don't know if that record has been broken since then but it definitely has there okay but it's just by other disney movies right i don't think we need to give them more airtime ink but one of them was Zootopia the movie I dislike the most right okay so we learn about Rapunzel's life which is pretty uneventful basically she just spends all day trying to keep herself occupied so she cleans she cooks she reads she paints she plays guitar she puts together puzzles she plays chess

she does all these things to occupy her time and her only friend is a chameleon named pascal she gets regular visits from gothel but gothel doesn't seem to live in the tower with her so rapunzel is pretty isolated the point basically being that she wants much more than this provincial life all the way down to like the i feel like that had to be a beauty and the beast reference for when she gets out of the tower and there's that little what do you call those goddamn poof plants um with the seedlings that fly into the air those are like dandelions like a dandelion it's something about dandelions we're botanists so we should know this um but yeah that do you remember that that's like a very specific image in beauty and the beast that i always remember and then rapunzel has the same

image but this time it's computers uh-huh wow and she's in the middle of singing about how much she wants much more than this whatever tower life based life hashtag tower life i just know gross okay so rapunzel has decided to ask gothel if she can go outside and see the floating lights especially because tomorrow is rapunzel's 18th birthday and she feels that these lights which we know are the lanterns that the castle releases she feels that they're kind of meant for her somehow that she has some connection to them and gothel is like no way i know what's best for you it's not safe out there you can't handle yourself out there you're not strong enough to go into this like dangerous world yes she's doing quite a bit of nagging poor rapunzel oh there's a lot to discuss with this

uh mother-daughter relationship for sure yes and also with just like gothel in general because for all of this movie seems to think it's subverting some of which it actually is a lot of which it isn't i feel like gothel's like glaring like we can have sympathy for everyone but Woman over 40. Right. Yeah. Okay. So meanwhile, Flynn Rider, the narrator guy who is a bandit, steals a crown from the castle and is fleeing the castle guards along with his two kind of like thug buddies, the Stabbington brothers. Great name. Gotta hand it to him him it sounds a lot like paddington also that's his evil cousins there's paddington and then there's stabbington um

do you think that that'll be an element of paddington three oh my gosh god that sounds like honestly uh robot chicken pitch that would have been rejected from me. From you. Yes. Specifically. Well, that's free for someone. Uh-huh. So they're escaping.

There's this horse named Maximus, one of like the castle horses. He's chasing Flynn and Flynn escapes but sabotagesages the stabbington brothers along the way and then flynn stumbles upon rapunzel's tower he climbs it and goes into her room and rapunzel startled by this intruder bonks him on the head with a frying pan there's a whole chat to have about that yeah classic a subversive bonk wow hilarious um i actually have some you know some unexpected thoughts about this perhaps well i think i i'm excited to have this discussion because this was a frying pan that uh didn't super bother me. Same.

We'll unpack. But on first glance, you're just like, well, there it is. There it is. Right. Yeah. There's no weapons in there. So Rapunzel bonks him on the head and stuffs him in her closet. And then she's like, wow, wait a minute.

I am strong enough to handle myself. So she lets Flynn back out. She ties him up with her hair hair she hides his satchel with the crown that he stole and she's like i will give you your satchel back if you take me to see the lanterns tomorrow night he reluctantly agrees and then she finally leaves her tower for the first time goes outside she loves the freedom but she's also wracked with guilt for disobeying her mother, which I really thought was different. And I liked that.

Yeah. Oh, they showed that emotional struggle for sure. Meanwhile, Flynn is trying to get out of taking Rapunzel to see the lanterns because he's a wanted man and he can't just go you know gallivanting around so he takes her to this kind of like rough and tumble tavern with a lot of scary ruffians except the twist is but the twist is they're nice they're nice especially after Rapunzel inspires them to sing about their hopes and

dreams kind of cute that song that they sing where they're like i actually have dreams okay can you guess can you guess what other disney song that uh heavily reminded me of um is it the one in beauty and the beast with Gaston singing in the tavern? No, it is Stick to the Status Quo from High School Musical. Because it's about like, I seem like one thing, but here's my secret dream. I want to break dance. I like baking. I'm a skateboarder, but I play the cello.

Anyways, that I was just like wow it's better it's better the high school musical song I liked this song but I was like kind of a flagrant ripoff I totally see what you're saying same premise same premise incredible yep okay thank you so much that's why they pay me the medium bucks for insights like that. So they're singing about their dreams and Gothel is following them, as are the castle guards, as are the Stabbington brothers. So Rapunzel and Flynn have to run off. And during this chase, Rapunzel and Flynn get trapped in a mine shaft or something it's pitch black it's filling with water but then rapunzel remembers that her hair is magic and it glows when you sing that

special song so she does that to kind of light the way and allow them to escape uh she then uses her hair to heal a cut on flynn's hand and he's like oh my gosh wow and then they're vibing and they're like flirting and then he goes off to get some firewood much like Shrek goes off to get some firewood after he and Fiona have men really do men who uh help you out of the tower do be getting firewood don't they it is a trope at this point yeah so he's off and it's just rapunzel and then gothel shows up and she's like what the hell rapunzel and rapunzel's like flynn likes me and i am enjoying this freedom and gothel is like no way he's just sticking around because he wants that crown that you have. And he'll leave you as soon as he gets it.

And she gives the crown back to Rapunzel. And Gothel disappears with like a plan. You can tell she's like plotting something. Yeah. So the next morning, Rapunzel and Flynn set off for the castle. And they befriend Maximus the horse along the way. They get to the castle. Rapunzel gets her hair braided.

And then she livens up the place with dance and music and drawings. And everywhere that Rapunzel goes, she just kind of inspires the best in people. She's not like other girls, Caitlin. She's nice, question mark. She's nice. She and Flynn also seem to be vibing more. And then he takes her out on a little boat. And across the way, the king and queen release hundreds of lanterns.

It's very beautiful and romantic. And Rapunzel and Flynn almost kiss. But oh no, the Stabbington brothers show up. And they want Rapunzel because Gothel had told them that she and her hair are very valuable. So they try to kidnap her, but Gothel shows up and knocks them out. While this is happening, it seems like Flynn has taken off with the crown and like betrayed Rapunzel.

Much, well, not much like, not to keep comparing this to Shrek, but it's like that second act point during Shrek where Shrek thinks that Fiona is like saying that he's not good enough for her when really she's discussing her own insecurities. So a misunderstanding is pulling the couple apart. True. Yes. Then Gothel takes Rapunzel back to her tower, where after examining all the art that Rapunzel has made over the years, she realizes a pattern. The shape of the sun always appears, which is like the symbol of the castle and kingdom. And she realizes that she is the daughter of the king and queen. So she confronts Gothel, now knowing that she was kidnapped and that Gothel has been using Rapunzel's magic hair all of these years. And they have an altercation.

Meanwhile, Flynn is about to be hanged for his like thievery. But all the guys from the tavern show up and save him so he gets on max the horse and races to rapunzel's tower but oh no gosl stabs flynn when he shows up which is i honestly i kind of forgot that that happened and i was like whoa i know i i feel like you don't usually get that i didn't hate it like I I feel like I'm always complaining about how uh Disney villains aren't allowed to be like absolutely evil anymore um and I was like oh she literally stabbed Zachary Levi that falls under the column of evil yeah it's it's more overt violence than we've seen in Disney movies in a long time like usually there isn't

like if if violence does happen it's only very suggested or it happens off screen or someone falls off a cliff but like i honestly did not i mean if i was a kid i probably would have been pretty scared but like make kids afraid again well the so okay what happens after this is rapunzel strikes a deal with gothel if she lets rapunzel heal flynn with her hair she will go willingly with gothel but if not she'll basically fight every waking moment of her life to try to get away from gothel so she goes to heal flynn but he chops off all of rapunzel's hair making her the baldest woman in charge so that gothel will die and rapunzel will be free of her but like gothel's death here is very scary for a children's movie because like yes the horror imagery of it all like

if i was a kid and i saw that they well they body horror the shit out of this character from moment one yeah but you're i totally agree where the ending is like brutal the only thing that they you know i guess relieve you of is you don't have to see her go splat because she turns into dust before she hits the ground I kind of love when someone turns to dust. But it is also a very witch canon to turn, evil witch canon to turn to dust, because that's what happens to the witch from The Wizard of Oz. She just... Oh, yeah, she just kind of melts and disappears.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, we have... There's a whole discussion around Gothel, but that is a pretty... Even by, like, Disney standards, 20 years before this movie came out, that's a pretty scary ending totally yeah and then the rapunzel's whole being ready to die for we'll talk about that too

because i was just like yeah i felt like that was we're so close to like a really cool exciting you know princess subversion and then her agency is like taken from her at the very end of the movie. Right. Especially because like he cuts off her hair rather than like her cutting off her own hair. It would have been much better. This is unrelated, but like he cuts her hair off into a perfect pixie cut. Incredible. Well done.

But whatever. That's that's fun movie nonsense but not fun movie nonsense was yeah i felt like her then we'll talk about this in more detail in a second but like her agency was completely like ripped from her at the peak of the movie's action where she was like you know you have to be a self-sacrificing person to be considered, you know, a legitimate woman. And then he made the decision that ends up saving everybody. Yeah. Great.

Woohoo. And then we get closure with his fucking horse. I'm sorry. I'm anti the horse. Get the horse out of here. Yeah. I see your point. Yeah.

That was very frustrating and we'll we'll unpack that shortly but basically the movie ends with rapunzel and flynn professing their love for each other as flynn dies and desperate to save him she sings the song to you know heal his wound but it doesn't seem like it's going to work because her hair has been chopped off and it's not magical anymore. But then her teardrop falls on his face, aka a drop of sunshine, perhaps. And her magic works and he comes back to life. And then they kiss. And then they go to the castle. And she's hi mom and dad it's me your daughter but i have brown hair now and they're like they're like well yeah i guess it's you also right why is there okay another like just another too much flynn moment get flynn out of that scene i don't need flynn

in that scene this is like and also their reunion is wordless, question mark. Oh, between her and her parents? Yeah. Yeah. Why no words? And why is Flynn there? Great questions. Yes.

Woohoo. So Rapunzel returns to the kingdom. The kingdom celebrates. Rapunzel and Flynn get married, and they live happily ever after. So that's the story. Let's take a quick break and come back to discuss. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the

culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad free subscribe to the iHeartTrue Crime Plus channel available exclusively on Apple Podcasts

I've been thinking about you I want you back in my life it's too late for that I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours. BPM 110. 120.

She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything?

You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I felt too seen. Dragged. I'm N.K., and this is Basket Case. So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown.

I was crying and I was inconsolable. It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of

conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a basket case. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. And I've let down my hair. Wow. I haven't. It's a mess today. Where do we want to start? I mean, should we just start with Rapunzel herself? Yeah, I would like to talk about, you know, her as a Disney princess and the way that

as we've hinted at, like, there are some subversions to the kind of classic Disney fairy tale princess. There are tropes that get, you know, reinforced in this movie. There's a lot to unpack. I would say overall, and I guess it depends on kind of what era of Disney princess movie you compare this to. She falls into the very classic like you know she's kind of stuck in the beginning she wants much more than this provincial life she's not motivated by love or romance the way that like Snow White is she's more she's yeah she's definitely doing laps around the early Disney princesses yeah it's more it's closer to

like Belle from Beauty and the beast where she longs for kind of yeah just to see what's out there in the world she's a prisoner for a large portion of the movie yes much like bell so so there's that um she i would say is more active and has more agency than most disney fairy tale princesses of older generations. I think so. Up until a point. At least for a good amount of the movie. And then there's a point where that comes to a screeching halt

in a way that I was really kind of bummed out by. Yeah, I really like Rapunzel. I can see. It's like the sort of thing where you're like, I can see where they were trying to go with her. And also like the shut off of where they were willing, like how far they were willing to go. Because I do think that there are Disney princesses that came and whatever. Here we are comparing a group of fictional women to each other.

But they are all built from the same mold like canonically right um and i do think that there are princesses that came before rapunzel that like were more active and progressive than rapunzel mulan i think as a person who really comes to mind there of like rapunzel's not topping uh mulan in terms of her agency and activeness and sort of fullness of story. But I do think that she is, especially because this is like a Disney fairy tale movie, she seems to be, you know, the most active of the European fairy tale princesses, of which there are a stunning amount. I like that she is involved in a bunch of action sequences

i like that she at least i think that a lot of them kind of come up hollow and kind of um ring a little i'm banning the word girl boss from my vocabulary because i think it's just like misused at this point and like sometimes people say girl boss when they say woman with agency and it's kind of like i think it's sometimes used in a misogynist way at this point and it bothers me but i i think that you know it's like i don't know the rapunzel stands up to her mom several times but it usually ends up being story-wise kind of a hollow gesture because ultimately what severs her tie from her mom something Flynn does whatever but yeah but I don't know there were definitely pros and cons to her

I like her a lot I like her a lot too I like how she's written I love Mandy Moore's performance I like that she like uses all of the skills that she has and like participates in the action, usually in about equal measure. She rescues Flynn a number of times. He also rescues her. But it does feel like I mean, even though whatever we've already said this and we'll continue to discuss like I think Flynn has an outsized presence in this movie in a way that is not you know I mean there's Disney executives that say that that was very on purpose but given that that is the choice they made I like that they are usually fighting and rescuing each other in equal measure like it's not like and that she you know she's using her hair she's like tarzanning around on her fucking hair it's

really cool she does fight and defend herself she chooses to deceive her mom she chooses to you know take flynn as her hostage and i i like it i like her yeah there's also like she's cool not only is she able to engage in like combat, she also like chooses nonviolence sometimes where like that scene in the tavern, which I think is also an interesting subversion of like, that was sweet. What you would expect of like, oh, all these like toxic men end up being like,

I want to be a concert pianist. I want to be a mime, you know, like all these artistic pursuits doesn't mean that you can't also be toxic if you're a male artist but i just the point is yeah you know she inspires like she inspires people to follow their dreams and she inspires the best in people um but i agree yeah there there is an outsized presence of the male lead in the movie which and just men in general men in general like there's so many ancillary men in this movie i i feel bad because i like this movie and i'm coming down harder on it than i'm expecting

to i was expecting to but i do i mean Rapunzel I yeah I totally agree with you where it's like she has moments of action and combat and then she also has moments where she chooses non-violence and it pays off in a big way I think that that's good I feel like often empathy and listening to people is regarded as a very like traditionally feminine trait and sometimes that's presented as bad as a weakness yeah when it's like when it the reality is like everyone should everyone has the capacity for that and everyone regardless of gender right can do everything right right and it's like everyone is capable of empathy so that's i like that she chooses moments and then the same as much as i can't stand the horse she negotiates with the horse uh-huh true true one

moment where and and it does feel like that's intentionally done because there are moments where flynn is choosing combat again and again and then it's rapunzel's talking and listening to people that actually resolves the problem right in the tavern and with the horse because flynn is also fighting his horse because why is this horse here um and that like on flynn's end his you know penchant for swash buckling is you know masking a lot of his own insecurities. Which we learn about. We learn his backstory. We learn that he has like kind of put on this fake persona as a defense mechanism, more or less.

He wanted much more than that orphanage life. Yes. So, you know, I liked that. I like that Rapunzel is like a more, I feel like she has like that Rapunzel is like a more, I feel like she had, she has traits that your traditional Disney princess has, which is like extreme loyalty, a lot of empathy.

Kindness, empathy. Inspires people to follow her, your dreams, like you're saying. But also those are traits that are very important to who she is, but it's not like all she's capable she gets angry she understands at least when her mother's disrespecting her she doesn't always

understand when Flynn's doing it but um Rapunzel is I like her I'm pro Rapunzel I just think that there are certain things that um undercut what a cool character they set up there such as and we hinted at this also but the big climactic moment at the end is her ending up with a man and like being in a hetero romance when the narrative that had been set up for her was i I want to escape this tower. I want to like go and see the lanterns, which could be kind of code for just like, I want to see the world and explore and discover who I am. She wants to be where the people are. This is Disney princess basic shit.

Right. She wants to, or and slash Quasimodo. Like Quasimodo also tower cannon, get me out of this tower cannon yeah evil person in the tower cannon exactly so so she has these kind of dreams to but then also like you could argue that like her wanting to go out and and and you know discover herself discover the world her you know find her place in the world part of a lot of people's like journey of self-discovery involves figuring out what type of relationships you want to be in and some of those relationships might be romantic so you know that is a thing for a lot of people absolutely but it just it still feels like here we are with another like Disney

fairy tale princess story and of course she has to end up in a hetero romance at the end right and it's like they I think it's interesting and very like of the time how they choose to skirt the fact that that's absolutely what they're doing i thought it was like i i caitlin i lol'd when they do this fucking like gymnastics thing at the end where they're like well we didn't get married right away and it's like all done in voiceover it's like we didn't get married right away but a couple years and we dated for a couple years and then of course we got married and then you still see the wedding like you do at the end of any fucking disney movie but they they do this really quick like oh no we get it that's like that's weird and you're like well in whatever royalty

that's not actually really that weird but they're like but no we dated we're regular we're just like you and then we and then the movie ends exactly like you know it's going to end right i just like that was like i think one of the many like 2010 like we're trying to do something but actually we are not uh courageous enough to actually stick the landing on doing it which is a lot of things in this movie i thought that like well actually before we get to Flynn, let's talk frying pan. Is it frying pan time? Let's let's we're pivoting to frying pan. Let's take a let's take a break.

Yes. And then we'll get to frying pan. So be right back. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere,

a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you

I want you back in my life It's too late for that I have a proposal for you Come up here and document my project All you need to do is record everything like you always do One session 24 hours BPM 110

120 She's terrified Should we wake her up? Absolutely not What was that? BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it.

That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence

is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I felt too seen. Dragged. I'm N.K., and this is Basket Case. So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown. I was crying, and I was inconsolable. It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl.

Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a basket case. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. We're back.

So, all right. Frying pan. Time for frying pan discourse. So, I mean, let's kind of, I think that this is kind of, I have a feeling we're on the same track with this. And I think it's an interesting, look, we've been doing this show for six years now. And I think that there has been a lot of development in ways to have feminist and intersectional feminist discourse during that time.

Certainly. I think perhaps we would have had a more kind of, I guess there's a very 2010s way to criticize some movies that maybe don't hold up as well now and i and i think frying pan discourse um is an area where there's been a little bit of shifting so yeah with that in mind let's let's talk frying pan so rapunzel for people who haven't seen tangled but are still listening and we celebrate that rapzel, her like go-to weapon is a frying pan. It's a frying pan.

Which we have said on this show before, and I think in some cases it genuinely is true, can be a sort of sexist trope. We've seen it many times. And I think in a lot of older movies, it is kind of a sexist trope where it's just like, well, what would a woman fight with but a very domestic object? That's the basis of frying pan discourse. We have talked about this trope a lot on the cast where what we tend to see in movies is combat scenes. If women are allowed to participate in the action, the story is written so that the women are made to fight with household objects and frying pan comes up again and again uh we we saw this in like raiders of the lost ark

we see it in who framed roger rabbit other examples that i can't remember off the top of my head i think a lot of horror movies this happens yeah i mean there's a lot of kitchen knife stuff the original halloween that makes more sense because that's a knife but um there's also disney cartoons this has taken place in like sure plenty of times i don't think by a primary character but i do specifically remember like a villager from beauty and the beast fighting with a frying pan like this has happened in animation live action for for generations yes generations so this is what women are expected to fight with whereas men in the same combat scenes in the same movie are equipped with weapons actual weapons that they fight with the implication often being, women can't slash don't know

how slash don't have the skills slash could never develop the skills to fight with weapons. But they do know their way around frying pans and other household objects, ones that are especially gendered, if you consider like, oh, well, women have historically been expected to cook and clean. So they know how to use like frying pans and brooms. Right. And those are their weapons now. Right. So, like you said, a lot of movies in those scenes do have those sexist implications.

But as with pretty much everything, context is very important. And when you consider Rapunzel's context, whereby, you know, whereby. Wow. Whereby. Wow. What can I say? Whereby. Gothel controls everything that Rapunzel has access to. And this is a whole separate conversation.

And she certainly wouldn't be giving rapunzel access to weapons of any kind exactly the only thing that rapunzel does have access to are household items yeah and if you have an intruder a cast iron skillet is a pretty decent weapon it's heavy it'll do damage it's got a handle so it's easy to wield etc i was kind of thing i was thinking of like just because the opening song is like rapunzel getting more and more bored of the mostly domestic-y kind of tasks and activities that are made available to her um which again like that context is important it's not like she has a choice of everything to do in the world and she's choosing sewing cooking cleaning like those are the only things she's given to do her life is very

thoroughly controlled so totally the only other thing i was like hmm get those knitting needles in the mix but it's like the cast iron skillet i i totally agree is like the most easily wieldable weapon and boy does she use it she uses it quite a bit to the point where it becomes a motif throughout the movie where so Flynn uses it himself as a weapon which I thought was cool so what happens basically the trajectory of the frying pan is this Rapunzel uses it several times on Flynn when he first comes into the tower and she like does damage with it she knocks him unconscious several times she then brings it along on the journey outside of the tower and brandishes it as a weapon anytime she feels she's in danger so that happens a number of times later like you said

Flynn uses it as a weapon when he's fighting off the guards in that scene when they're at the dam. And he loves it. He's like, wow, this is such an effective weapon. I'm going to get myself one of these. And it is. And it is. And then toward the end, when the ruffians are saving Flynn from being hanged, one of them uses the frying pan to knock out a guard. And he and Flynn are both like, woohoo, what an awesome weapon. So while this trope has

been seen again and again in movies, specifically with women wielding a frying pan as a weapon, I feel like when you consider the context and what Rapunzel has access to, and the fact that it then is used as a weapon by multiple characters across the gender spectrum. I feel like it's a little bit more nuanced in Tangled. I agree. Yeah. And I like that they kind of, it almost, it felt more like they were commenting on that trope that when it appears is often very baseless.

And like you were saying with the assumption that it's like this is all they would know how to use because women are pans but in this case they um i thought contextualized it well rapunzel wielded as a weapon over and over did we i mean and and i whatever i think that this is open for criticism but the fact that Flynn validated it as a weapon which like but fair 2010 I see what they were trying to do yeah so yeah I think uh maybe maybe a bit of a twist on the pan discourse you were expecting huh uh exactly so let's let's get into Flynn a little bit. So he's kind of, he's a bit of an Aladdin type, I would say. He's a stealer. He's a crimer.

He doesn't have a mama or a dad. You know, he doesn't have a parent. So he's like Aladdin without the class stuff, basically. Sure. So he's kind of swashbuckling around. The thing is, like, with with Flynn for the most part I like don't dislike him as a character I do think there's a lot of things he does at the beginning of the narrative with Rapunzel where he clearly wants to get rid of her he just wants to get what he needs and go on his way and I get that that's his character journey he needs to realize that that's a shitty way to behave but he's pretty cruel to her at the beginning and like

notices her insecurities and fear of her own mother and instead of talking to her about it weaponizes it against her two times back to back at first he was like i've noticed that you are feeling a lot of grief and guilt and confusion about whether you should be like striking out on your own which to go back to rapunzel for a second i thought was i liked that they showed that in her where like it felt like you know for a Disney fantasy movie, pretty realistic of like her mom repeatedly guilts her for like thinking she would be capable of doing anything. So, of course, when she gets out and she enjoys it, she's like, I'm a horrible person. No, this is great.

Complicated feelings. Right. Which is a relatable feeling to some extent for a lot of people. But Flynn, you know, obviously like notices exactly what's going on and instead uses it instead of saying what is obvious, which is like your mom treats you really badly and like you should feel OK about striking out on your own like you're not doing anything wrong. He instead says like, wow, it looks like you like he does exactly what her mom does.

And he does that a couple different times and as much as I appreciate that you get context into Flynn's character you get some insight into why he is the way he is I felt like it was like a pointed thing that you get that for Flynn who treats her the same way as Gothel at the beginning of the movie, but you don't get that for Gothel. She is just a villainous villain who is old, but wants to be young. And that is it. There is no more context. We'll get into discussion around her,

but the whole like, you know, old crone stereotype that like an anxiety around aging for women is a personal defect and not part of a larger societal pressure it's like oh that's that's on you which i thought was kind of like incredible that they didn't like in 2010 i felt like come on but i but you know like flynn certainly grows as a character throughout the movie. Right. Whatever.

Like he has an outsized presence in the movie, which is why you get the context for him that you do. I think that context is pretty effective, but he never like, correct me if I'm wrong, he never really apologizes for doing what he does at the beginning, which very manipulative and cruel it's not nice that's not boyfriend shit to do yeah i was frustrated by the romantic storyline because you know that that's where it's going that they're gonna end up together for sure and we saw it in shrek we saw it in every fairy tale ever made but most importantly most importantly in trek where he starts out as a dick yeah he's manipulative he weaponizes her own insecurities against her he tries to like seduce her at various moments where he's like let me do this older you know he's just trying to like

use various manipulation tactics to get what he wants out of her and doesn't treat her well along the way. Of course, he does soften up as the story goes. I also don't really know why they like each other by the end. This is a problem I have with most romantic storylines and movies where it's like, well, yes, yes they're both attractive and they are near each other but what else why else are they drawn to each other in a sustainable way that would like sustain a relationship don't really see it here no at least and this is like giving the movie probably credit that it doesn't deserve but um because rapunzel has been locked in a tower for 18 years and has never ventured out into the world there was i thought a big danger of the born sexy yesterday trope being leaned into where she like wouldn't know anything she wouldn't know

sure what common objects were or like how to interact with people or things like that she does fall in love with the first man she meets yes that is part of that trope but she is able to hold her own as a person out in the world far better than you know other born sexy yesterday tropes i agree and i think that that is like contextualized by the fact that she interacts with her mom all the time who like doesn't seem to have a vested interest in keeping her away from very basic knowledge. And she reads a ton. So it's not like she wouldn't have any understanding

of how that works. So that all made sense for me in context. And I feel like saved us a lot of annoying tropey, like what is this um yeah yeah like I think the only moment you get that is when she puts her feet on the grass which I thought was actually kind of beautiful and made me tear up it was nice um but yeah so I appreciate that that wasn't a the story but Flynn overall it is especially annoying to me because and maybe maybe I could be talked out of this but her goal her desire that drives most of the narrative is to go see these lanterns which again you can kind of interpret as just a larger like i want to venture out into the world and see what the world has to offer and see where what my place is in the

world because she also like feels this connection she's like who am i what these lanterns happen on my birthday is it related to me and my backs you know she like wants to figure out all these things totally all works for me and i wish that that had been the actual resolution of the story in the big climactic moment rather than it's part of it of course but the big climactic moment having her recaptured recaptured and then like she has to save flynn and she's prepared to like sacrifice her freedom in order to save him and then like we said he's the one who chops off her hair thereby saving her which takes away her agency I saves her from herself like I I just really didn't like that I kind of forgot that that was how it ended I remembered that her hair gets cut off and that's how like the villain is defeated but I thought I was like certain that she cut off her

own hair so that so when he did it I was like what that's ridiculous well here here's Jamie's little hot take if she were the protagonist of the movie she would have but I don't think she's the protagonist of the movie I think it's Flynn because of all this other stuff that we'll talk about in a second but like if the protagonist in the movie is going to do anything it's gonna be defeat the villain she doesn't defeat the villain that she has the closer relationship with Flynn has never met this lady like there's no reason even like storytelling wise that he would be the one to defeat a villain he has no connection to we've seen like everything i kind of wonder at what like if there there has to be a draft of

this script where she does it because that's what the whole movie is fucking building leading up to we see her she has two or three i thought pretty effective confrontations and she keeps trying to escape her mother's grasp and then is not successful that doesn't even bother me like she's in this like abusive situation you don't always get out on the first try but it's a fucking kids fantasy movie she should be the one to remove herself from the situation at the end but she's instead ready to trap herself in that situation permanently in order to rescue the first guy she's ever met and it's just like i felt like it doubled down worse than disney movies that were coming out 20 years before this like it just

it really bummed me out like she doesn't get to kill the fucking villain. Especially. That we have spent so much time. Like it would have been so satisfying if she. And it still would have had all the ageist stuff going on. Right. But it would have like. It doesn't even make sense as a movie for Flynn to be the one to initiate the ending. But I think that he's like the movie's protagonist. Honestly.

We see more change in him than we see change in Rapunzel. He's the first fucking face you see on the screen. He's narrating the movie for some reason. I don't even think she's the protagonist of her own movie, which is why that's like, it bothers me. I would maybe argue that she, that is like a dual protagonist situation,

but why? It should just be Rapunzel. He doesn't have a song, I guess, except for the song where they're like, kiss the girling. I mean, it's,

it's her desire and goal that drives the narrative. That's true. So I would argue dual protagonist, but also even so it's like, well, it's a princess movie. Why are we, I think that that like,

that's something that bothers me is like, they're like, the way that we're going to subvert the princess movie is by making a man a dual protagonist. Like, that just does not work for me. Not that it's like you can't have a buddy movie with characters of more than one gender. That's totally fine. But it's like, just because of the way this movie was specifically marketed as like this is a new kind of princess movie where a lot of the princess movies suck ass and are like reinforcing every trope in the book and every stereotype in the book

but at least they are clearly the protagonist i agree with what you're saying like flynn isn't the um sole protagonist but it doesn't make any fucking sense that he gets the final blow in that storyline especially because the movie up until that point seems to have a very vested interest in making rapunzel way more active especially versus how she is in the like Brothers Grimm fairy tale version of the story that's why I feel like pretty convinced that there had to be a different draft of because this movie was in in development for 9,000 years and its first draft was and they said this themselves not in this delightful way but um shrekian yes where they literally like we're gonna do rapunzel shrek but then you know later on in production they're like

well we want to like give this a more wholesome core a more disney core so you have those shrekian elements and then you have those disney elements and i think that that is the place where it's like chafing the hardest because if you're trying to have flynn rider be shrek first of all it's not going to happen honey there's only one only one trend there's only one truck and i wouldn't have it any other way but it really bugged me okay so actually let's well because it keeps coming up the production of this movie it was in development forever it was originally uh announced as rapunzel unbraided in october 2003 which the director himself described as a shrek-like version of the film he didn't think to,

because the word Shrekian wasn't around back then. This was Glenn Keane, who started developing the story in 1996. He eventually left the project. Yeah. But yeah. Because it wasn't Shrekian enough. He's like, not Shrekian enough, I'm leaving.

I'm out. Fair enough. But yeah, so it started as a glenn keen shrek ripoff which is wild because shrek was made despite disney right whatever the story's been told a million times but like it was supposed to take place in san francisco and revolve around teenagers named claire and vince question mark it kind of sounds more like enchanted than it sounds like right shrek or tangled um yeah but anyways that is obviously not uh what ended up happening so then eventually glenn keen leaves the project rapunzel unbraided is changed to rapunzel which makes sense most of the princess

movies are named for the protagonist, with, I think, the exception of Beauty and the Beast. But you've got The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Jasmine's not the protagonist of Aladdin, so there you go. Pocahontas, but it is named after her. And so the movie's going to be called Rapunzel. The Princess and the Frog is the one that comes immediately before this. So the story here is that Princess and the Frog comes out the year before Tangled.

And while it was like people enjoyed the movie, you can listen to our episode about it. We simply cannot get into it right now. There's pros and cons. But the movie was considered to have underperformed at the box office. And the reason that they decided that it under would not want to see a movie with the word princess in the title or a movie named after a princess. So they reworked the story to have two protagonists, including an action boy named Flynn Rider, and they changed the movie's title from Rapunzel to Tangled which I think rightfully

caused a lot of controversy and I think annoyance within the company um yeah I want to quote a former Disney Pixar animator named Floyd Norman who said quote the idea of changing the title of a classic like Rapunzel to Tangled is beyond stupid. I'm convinced they'll gain nothing from this except the public seeing Disney as desperately trying to find an audience. We've got another writer named Margot McGowan saying, can you imagine if Disney switched a movie title so it wouldn't risk highlighting a male star? It's awful that this kind of radical gender discrimination exists for our smallest people, which at first I was like, what do you mean by that? She means kids.

Children. Little kids who come into this world with huge imaginations and aspirations, big dreams that get squashed by a bunch of billionaire guys who run massive entertainment franchises. People had fun with, you know, being like, what are we going to call a little mermaid beached or whatever? Like, it is kind of an obvious thing. And then, um, famous sexual harasser,

John Lasseter finally spoke out on the issue. Um, four years after the movie is released in March, 2014, um, saying that this was in fact why it had been done in order to, and this is like very businessy in the, in the weeds terminology that I didn't even know existed, improve the film's appeal to the four quadrants.

Yeah. Father, son, Holy Spirit, and women. But Lasseter says, quote, there was an audience perception that these movies were just for little girls. But when boys, men, whatever, actually see these movies, they like them. So on Rapunzel, we changed the name and we called it Tangled. We did marketing that made the people who would not normally show up say, hey, this looks pretty good, unquote. And the movie did do very well at the box office or at least outperformed what the princess and the frog had taken in. And so I think that this ethos was considered like, all right, cool. More male

protagonist. I went back and watched two of the official trailers for this movie. Oh, interesting. And both of them make it seem like Flynn Rider is the sole protagonist of the movie and that Rapunzel is barely a character based on just like the screen time and the activity that both characters are allotted in the trailers really emphasize Finn's, Flynn, what is it? Flynn's, Flynn's swashbuckling. Yes. And like all of his like. His like, he's riding horses. He's fighting. He's doing all this stuff.

That is featured far more prominently than anything related to Rapunzel's story. And her like, I have this journey I want to go on. That is left out of the the marketing exhausting the movie i remember a similar thing happening to moana where i was watching moana trailers and now he was framed as the protagonist so which at least they were able to name the movie moana like it does seem like and maybe it was like frozen that was able to turn this car around and like having dual female protagonists being wildly successful they're like maybe we don't need to go down this road of giving the love interest this outsized presence in the movie i that's my guess

off the top of my head of why you were allowed to name movies after female protagonists again it's all money it has nothing to do with you know giving a shit about equity or anything like that but um you know i'm sure that frozen being a billion dollar franchise contributed to that but this is such a bizarre moment for like it it sucks because Rapunzel is a very cool character. And I don't, I don't even mind that Flynn has, I think it is actually like a positive adjustment for the princess world that, I mean, such a popular criticism of Disney princesses is that they, Disney princes is that they have no personality and they're boring and you have no idea why she would be interested in him right this movie feels like a major overcorrection of that

issue I think that Flynn having a personality is great I like that now and in Frozen, which is not a movie that I have any love for really like Frozen too much better. But, you know, the love interests have or like Anna's husband guy has a personality. Like you at least have some understanding of why or they're at least attempting to let you know why they're interested in each other. I think that that's important and good. There are still two white hetero couples giving a man more of a personality. It feels like a real half step in sideways, but, but it's whatever the point being like, great.

Let's have Flynn have a personality, but that doesn't mean that giving him a personality means the movie should then be about him 50% plus. Especially when that personality is he's kind of a dick for a large swath of the movie. Right. Right. And it feels like he's like, well, it's okay that I'm a dick because I'm an orphan. I'll get better.

And you're like, well, but I do feel like they try, which is also a very Disney choice. And I know that that's a lot of like, do feel like they try which is also a very Disney choice and I know that that's a lot of like I feel like with Rapunzel she is a very abused person and she's still extremely kind and extremely empathetic and wants to see the best in people so it doesn't really play for me that it's like well Flynn grew up in an orphanage which obviously is an extremely difficult thing but they've both had difficult childhoods it doesn't make it okay that he treats her like garbage like yeah so which does that transition us to the mother-daughter relationship discussion let's talk about every movie's about fathers and

sons not this time baby it's about it's about mothers and daughters and flynn rider for some reason i have a spiel about this go here we go go off thank you so disney fairy tales disney fairy tales as we've discussed yes as we've discussed endlessly on the podcast they have a sordid history with mother-daughter relationships because usually the mother is dead and or there's an evil stepmother situation they don't kill the mother in this one they just almost kill her they just don't let her talk they don't let her speak and he almost dies but then they're like but then we saved her we saved her and she's good now and she's good and and so in this movie there is an evil foster mother slash kidnapper slash captor but because Rapunzel thinks

this is her real mother for most of the movie let's just call it a mother-daughter relationship even though it's for sure i mean she was raised as gothel's daughter exactly yes so we've got so let's examine gothel for a moment she is emotionally abusive she's manipulative she gaslights rapunzel constantly she's obviously using rapunzel for her powers. So Gothel is dependent on Rapunzel and then has created a situation where Rapunzel has no choice but to be dependent on Gothel. And part of this is Gothel completely isolating Rapunzel and being very controlling of Rapunzel's life and what she does and does not have access to. Gothel also makes insulting remarks to Rapunzel that she insists are jokes and then says things

like, stop taking everything so seriously. Gothel blames her own abusive behavior on Rapunzel and then says things like, you're making me the bad guy trying to make Rapunzel feel guilty. So even though we do not have a lot of great examples of loving, caring, non-toxic mother-daughter relationships in movies, because most movies aren't about mother-daughter relationships. The relationship we see in this movie is very similar to plenty of real life mother daughter relationships. And I know that there are people who feel very seen by this particular relationship dynamic, which is important. People like regardless of their circumstances want to feel represented and seen and validated and and I think like the focus on a parent-child relationship in a movie of this genre that isn't uncomplicated is cool and I feel like it kind of um I don't know I'm trying to think of other parent like in earlier Disney movies parents are either absent dead or you have like a well-meaning but ultimately harmful father whose behavior is never

really called out thinking about king triton and bell's goofy dad who both um you know like i don't know maybe there is like some introspection on king triton because he faces a consequence which is his daughter uh bails him. But all that to say, like you don't get a focus like this with mothers specifically very often. Sure. And it's like, I don't know. Like I'd be interested to read how people feel about it

because it is like, I don't know, having a deeply narcissistic person in your life from a very young age is really traumatic and like fucks with your perception of the world and i like that going back to seeing rapunzel's like back and forth of like elation and deep guilt like that really follows attracts affects you yeah like i thought that that was really um whatever i mean it's a disney movie it's not subtle um but yeah it's I'm kind of like the Mother Gothel stuff is tricky because I'm of two minds about it where on one end I do think that

representing um or like just having a storyline with a child growing up with a very narcissistic manipulative parent is interesting and i do totally understand why a lot of people felt seen in that and i see a different side of it where it's like is this not just another evil older woman who is being demonized for wanting to be young and it gets tricky because it's like you should be angry at her for the way she is doing it the fact that she in the same way that like you almost think of like the queen and snow white to go way back in disney princess canon where kind of a similar motivation where the queen wants snow white to die because she is younger and more beautiful than her gothel is trapping Rapunzel and you know manipulating her day after day because she

needs her to remain appearing younger and quote-unquote more beautiful right prevent her from aging yeah she's like Rapunzel is like the tuck everlasting tree of the movie so I feel like the little wrench in this is that she needs to manipulate another woman in order to remain young. It becomes a rivalry between these two women. Right. But I also feel like having an older woman, like making it seem, it's almost like patriarchy the guy kind of thing. Where it's like, oh, well, her fixation on appearing young that's an evil quality and like there's no introspection to like well what about the world has made her feel

that way because that's a very legitimate certainly in 2010 and also now and probably for a long time women are going to be made to feel bad about aging and they will be viewed as less valuable by society for visibly aging. Right. Like that's just the factiest fact there is, unfortunately. Right. I feel similarly conflicted because again, like I think on the podcast, at least I've been guilty of seeing a toxic mother-daughter relationship and just kind of writing it off as like, oh, well, this is two women being pinned against each other. And I don't like it. But and there's a lot more nuance to that. Because there are a lot of toxic relationship dynamics in real life that absolutely many if not most people have experienced

they deserve to be explored as much as positive relationships do on screen but i just think it's very pointed that this is the first one you're seeing and the reason that it's toxic i think like yeah that's where it gets a little muddled. It feels like this, like, again, it's like a lot of this movie where like some of it is exploring new territory and like pushing forward in an interesting way. But even like the attempt to do that in this movie is still like hampered with these older tropes that I feel like gives what should be something that is.

And I'm glad that it has really worked and made a lot of people's family dynamics feel validated and seen in a huge movie but it's just like I feel like it takes away from it a little bit by having it hampered by those old tropes yeah the main issue for me with this particular aspect of the story is that we end up with a pretty one-dimensional female villain yeah i love a female villain especially if oh yeah their villainy is contextualized and not that you necessarily need context for every single movie villain but because this one it does seem to be playing into tropes it would be nice to have a better understanding of why gothel is the way she is where she's coming from all this stuff well

especially because like this movie has i think it just like depends on the kind of movie you're watching where sometimes it's like we're not getting context for any of these characters it's an action movie we're giving the protagonist context and that's it and that at least that's like equal but in this this movie goes way out of its way to give you context for Flynn which is a subversion of this kind of movie but I think that the fact that they don't and I love villainy evil villains I love that she gets stabbed like great totally fine by me I like you know I love a villainy villain Jigsaw is my husband game Game over. Game over, slam. R.I.P.

But I mean, and talk about a contextualized villain. Jigsaw, they got whole movies about it. But I just think that if this movie is trying to change some of the standard mechanics of a movie like this by giving the love interest context not extending that to the villain feels pointed especially when there's so much baggage around that type of character that like old crone archetype totally it would it would have been nice to get some some context because otherwise yeah it just feels like a harmful trope that we've seen again and again but in keeping with the disney tradition i did really like her song oh it's a good one i like the visuals too as it's oh it's a banger yeah it's good it's kind of tied with i also really like

rapunzel's opening song i did like that fly Flynn Rider did not get a song because I didn't need it. I also, oh, first of all, Brad Garrett and Ron Perlman. Wow. I mean. Can I just say wow. Also, this movie is so aggressively white. It is scary. That was another thing I was going to say about one of the things that this movie does not subvert as far as like Disney princess fairy tale tropes.

At all. The character design for Rapunzel, very much she is adhering to classic Western beauty standards. She's thin, she's white, she's blonde. The male characters are young, 18 years old. Why are there so many movies about 18-year-olds? What about the movies about people double that age? 36, my age. The Caitlin Durante story.

The Caitlin Durante story. There's plenty of those, too. Anyway, my point is that all the female characters are very classically beautiful. Men get to be different shapes. Different shapes shapes different sizes etc not different colors everyone is white which is like i mean such an animation trope that we've discussed a million times at this point where there's no reason that there couldn't be diversity in this movie for and i it always really like it always bugs me when the excuse for that is like well this

movie takes place in european countries so in the area it was supposed to take place in there would not have been anyone who wasn't white and it's like um he fights a horse with a sword like with a pan like we can suspend our disbelief clearly we are like open to not adhering to the rules of reality like yeah haven't you ever seen brandy cinderella 1997 the best fantasy adaptation of all time yeah wow that real that movie really does i'm i'm due for a rewatch i really love that movie so much but then i'm just like can i cry all night again oh oh my gosh i just got like a really nice feeling thinking about brandy cinderella tangled yeah it is not diverse in any way the most radical statement it makes on anything is that it's okay to have brown hair

which is so weird um like kind of a shockingly like nothing message like you can have a shitty haircut sorry but i don't like rapunzel's haircut you can have a shitty haircut and brown hair and you're like well i've been doing that for you know decades at this point so let's let's keep it let's keep it pushing all right there i don't know yeah there there's no body diversity there's no diversity period and then also like I think it's very I read some criticism around how mother Gothel is you know like she's taller she's got dark hair she has darker features than Rapunzel and it just sort of seems like, oh, the palest, blondest, bluest eyed woman is going to be the best. So, okay, we wanted to add an insert here

to address something that we didn't address in the original episode. A lot of listeners pointed this out. Honestly, I didn't pick up up on it so thank you to our wonderful listeners for informing us and just helping us be as intersectional in our analysis as possible and honestly i mean this is a trope that we have discussed before i just we just did not pick up on it in this particular movie so we want to make sure that we were acknowledging that once our listeners pointed it out, we're like, oh yeah, I mean, we want to sort of dig into this trope a little more because it is rife throughout animation, which is how it's come up on this show before. And that is the trend in not just Disney media, but children's media in general and media on the whole of using

anti-semitic tropes in the villain of the story which is present in the character of mother gothel in tangled and a listener sent us a wonderful piece written by tatum shut from hey alma.com entitled why do so many disney villains look like me tatum points out that disney has a long history of jewish coding their villains and it is very clear entangled i'll pull a quote from this piece quote mother gossel is the cinematic foil for the predictably wide-eyed button-nosed rapunzel gossel that magnificent mercurial whoops didn't do that word right manipulator so miserly with her food and money so separate from the other golden-haired kingdom so distinctly othered she so happens to be animated with the curly black

hair and hook nosed stereotypical to jews but beyond gothel's suspicious phenotype tangled follows an eerily familiar story blood libel an anti-semitic canard that reverberates throughout history accuses jews of stealing christian children to bake their blood into matzah. I didn't even know that that like that this is like a spot in history and tropes that I was not aware how deep this anti-Semitic trope went. Same, same. Yeah. Tatum goes on to say it was particularly prevalent in the Middle Ages when it was not uncommon for European Jews to be hunted down and murdered whenever a child went missing.

Jews stealing pretty Aryan children to sustain their dark magic, unquote, as the, you know, perception went. And then another thing I just didn't know was Tatum Shutt goes on to describe and kind of explicitly connect the fact that, you know, Disney is a horrible company that is not employing this trope out of nowhere it is cooked into the text of grim's fairy tales which are also wildly anti-semitic um going so far as uh they cite a lesser known thank god uh story from Grimm's fairy tales called the Jew in the Brambles. So the brothers Grimm were also horrifically anti-Semitic themselves. And Disney, instead of subverting all of the things that they do in this movie,

which is how this movie was marketed instead re-employs this, like you cannot overstate the harm of using a trope like this and we see it in media still and so yeah we really wanted to thank our listeners that sent this our way we did not pick up on it on first viewing and it is still an issue

in animation I mean we've talked quite a bit about how Disney habitually queer codes their villains but this is also an extremely worthy discussion. And we're sorry we missed it on the first time. Thank you to everyone who sent it. Indeed, especially again, because, you know, coding villains in a certain way, queer coding them, coding them as people of color, as Disney has done in the past, coding them as Jewish. This consciously or subconsciously

influences people's perceptions of already marginalized groups. It reinforces harmful stereotypes, all kinds of very nasty things. Yeah, to the point where like we adult media critics did not pick up on it. Right.

So, and my guess would be like, why is this happening in a movie from 2010? As Tatum Shut points out, like out like yes it is baked into the excellent fucking source material but why is this but like fling rider is not you know it there's there's no excuse for it right it's absurd honestly my guess would be i mean walt disney was notoriously anti-semitic and he probably had a hand in coding early disney villains as jewish and since most animated disney films follow the same formula they have a very distinct visual style all the you know princesses are kind of molded after a very specific you know western beauty standard phenotype all of the villains are modeled after like another very specific design.

Like earlier Disney movies just reused animation from previous movies. It's just like the same movie basically over and over. Recycle over and over and over. And yeah, it's like by the time Tangled came out, when is the last time this company sat down and said, well, what have we harmed that we need to scale back right so so thank you again and um yeah we wanted to include that um in this insert so thanks again everyone and uh back to the episode she's got dark hair

she has darker features than rapunzel and it just sort of seems like oh the the palest blondest bluest eyed woman is going to be the best she can get a shitty haircut later but she you know but she's got to have blonde hair for most of the movie and then flynn rider bravely likes women with brown hair fine like oh wow what an ally what a king just like so bring in jigsaw i'm ready to die that do do do also i don't think the saw episode has come out yet on the matrion but oh matrons give it like four days and then i think think we really like. Not to freak anyone out. But I think that we had a really special month over in the Matreon. Our most chaotic episode to date.

And then Saw. And then Saw. Ugh. We're. Caitlin, we need to plan this offline. But that screening of Saw is coming up. And there's still time for us to get Jigsaw cosplay. All right. Okay. Yes. Do, do, do. Do, do, do. is coming up and there's still time for us to get jigsaw cosplay all right okay yes

i think that because it is a 4 30 screening that there will be no one cosplaying except for us and it'll be like that amazing tweet about the babadook where everyone else is just enjoying themselves and then we're dressed as two jigsaws perfect i wouldn't have it any other way oh baby anyway do you have anything else you want to talk about i wanted to share one more quote about specifically this movie's preoccupation with blonde hair the link to this original story is unfortunately no longer working but it was quoted in a ms magazine piece from the time the writer being quoted is only credited as renee um but renee of womanist musings and uh she's talking about the, you know, I mean, and this is technically Rapunzel canon, I guess, like,

not that Rapunzel has to be canonically blonde or white or anything like, so she writes, quote, as a black woman, I know all too well how complicated the issue of hair can be. Looking at the image of tangled Rapunzel, I found that I could not see beyond her long blonde hair and blue eyes. I believe that this will also become beyond her long blonde hair and blue eyes. I believe that this will also become the focal point of many girls of color. The standard of long flowing blonde hair as the epitome of femininity necessarily excludes and challenges the idea that women of color are feminine and desired. And therefore, while Disney is creating an image of Rapunzel that we are accustomed to, her rebirth in a modern day context is problematic because her body represents the celebration of white femininity the fact that Tangled is coming on the heels of the first African-American Disney princess is indeed

problematic it makes Princess Tiana seem like an impotent token with Rapunzel appearing to reset the standard of what princess means and even more precisely what womanhood means unquote um again i mean we do have a whole episode on the princess and the frog that you can go back to but a big issue that a lot of people had with that movie and that we did as well is that disney's first black princess spends most of the movie as a frog and so you while tiana is their first black Disney princess, she is also not celebrated to the extent that any other Disney princess is. So I just wanted to share that as well. Because again, this is a Disney fantasy movie.

Rapunzel didn't need to be white and blonde and skinny. It just didn't need to be that way. I mean, so most people have hair. Wow, that could become long. That is so brave of you to say not everyone I don't want to be making sweeping generalizations. No, but I mean, I get I think that truly the only absolute must with rapunzel's character is she's got to have long hair end of list like kind of end of qualifications everything else about her is malleable the only thing that is absolutely important to the character is that she has long hair and she's going to be trapped in a tower yeah so there you go she could also be wearing a wig or extensions we don't know true

we don't know can you imagine the cut if nicole kidman played rapunzel what kind of wig she would be bringing to set oh my word oh my word okay well anyways um that's all i have i wanted to share that quote and that i think that that's all i've got so shall we get to the matter at hand the movie passed the bechdel test yes it does but i think only between rapunzel and gothel yes because this movie i think again in this overcorrection like the boys won't see a princess movie like panic. This movie is front loaded with a million extra male characters. Some of them, I like some of them.

They don't, we got too much Flynn. Flynn's animal has a huge arc tournament to glue. Don't care. We have the gallery of rogues that all want to be musicians in my, and I kind of like them, but they are all men and they didn't have to all be men. Nope.

Why can't we have some some women rogues that are yeah give Rapunzel a female friend let's get some enby rogues in the mix all these the only qualification for a rogue they're gonna be roguish end of list

yeah so you really only do get two women I think talking in the whole movie because rapunzel's mom parents are not talking i think that her dad at one point goes yeah but the queen says nothing zippo damn as far as our nipple scale which is the golden standard speaking of golden hair i see you're not going to have a reaction to that okay sorry i was looking at a picture of zachary levi is that embarrassing wow okay sorry i did zone out for a second because I was looking at Zachary Levi's Wikipedia page.

Okay. Kill me. So no, I was just. Can we do it again? Wait, what did you, can you do it again? It's not worth repeating because it's not even a good joke. I just said, I said, it was like, and I also phrased it wrong. I should have said like, speaking of golden hair, the golden standard of movie analysis

scales. The nipple scale. Meanwhile, I i'm being you're looking at pictures of men horny and on wikipedia wow lord i know betrayal much setting the clock back yet again um okay yes i do agree this is the golden standard yes thank you so much this is the golden ratio wow what is that the golden ratio is a specific number. I forget what it is, but it shows up a lot in nature. Like a snail's shell has the golden ratio. Oh, yes.

And it's like and like conscious and shit. That's fun. Leaves, etc. Leaves. Shout out nature, you know. Anyway. you said it so uh the nipple scale zero to five nipples based on looking at the movie through an intersectional feminist lens i'm tempted to just sort of and i know this feels like cheating but I kind of want to give it like a split down the middle. 2.5, I do think it is pushing the needle forward by a little bit as far as Disney princess fairy tale movies go, because it is subverting some of the harmful tropes we've seen

of the past. Especially because when I think of damsel in distress my go-to person that i think of is rapunzel it's like sleeping beauty and rapunzel yeah yeah and i didn't even the only thing i knew about like the rapunzel story because i've never read the grimm's brothers fairy tale fuck them uh had to like look on wikipedia to see what the actual story was because the only thing i knew was that there's a lady with long hair in a tower and a prince climbs her hair to save her like very very classic damsel in distress narrative so because this movie you know takes that premise but then gives her a lot more agency lets her save herself lets her save flynn i keep saying fit whatever

his name is flynn probably except it's eugene i forgot to mention that in the recap but his real name is eugene who cares flynn uh she saves him she saves herself she has far more agency than your classic damsel in distress character but there's all these other things as we've discussed that you know don't push the needle as far ahead as we would have liked but it is kind of like a stepping stone movie i feel yes paves the way for moana for example sure so with that in mind i'll give it two and a half nipples and i'll give one to rapunzel i love rapunzel i think a lot of rapunzel i mean this i love her character but a lot of it is just like wow mandy moore she's special i feel like she's even though she just was on the most famous tv show for like 10 years and i never watched it

i feel like she's still underrated i love mandy moore yeah i agree anyways um i'll give one nipple two to gothel because i feel like she is potentially misunderstood slash i love a female villain slash i wish she had been more contextualized slash there was just like things about her character that i they didn't even need to contextualize her in a way that made her seem nicer you just had to give us something right although maybe people will be like you don't it's a fairy tale villains are just evil for the sake of being evil i don't know i still it's just i feel complicated and i feel like i'll still be my feelings about this will like continue evolving as we examine similar relationship dynamics yes Yes. Point is, I would have liked more for her character. Yes.

My half nipple, I will give to the Paul F. Tompkins little old guy who wears a diaper and looks like a little Cupid with a bow and arrow at the end of the movie.

Shout out as always to Mr. Paul. He's the best, best rogue in the gallery as far as i'm concerned and we had brad garrett in there okay true there uh caitlin i before i give you my rating i did just want to say i just sent you the first look at one of the two dueling pinocchio movies and it looks so bad it looks so ugly scary they've they made him look way too much like the disney animated pinocchio it looks like a robot chicken sketch it literally looks like robot chicken and i mean and as a former employee i love robot chicken but that's like this this has like a billion dollar

budget why does it look like that scary why does it look like that horrid and for more on that you can go to the matreon in november for our month that we've already roped off to be the dueling pinocchio's month del toro versus zemeckis do we already know who's going to win obviously robert zemeckis i don't know something happened something happened there that happened and he's something a witch put a curse on him and now he's really bad at his job but um anyways that didn't happen to del toro no all right i'm gonna give it two and a half nipples as well uh i think that this movie uh pushes some boundaries in interesting ways i think that it like actually kind of regresses the princess genre in certain ways by giving flynn so much agency i think that you could accomplish the

same thing by having rapunzel she should cut off made rapunzel an action hero she should cut off her own hair but also it's like did princess fiona not learn like karate while trapped in the tower yes like i think that there were ways to even if you're gonna have flynn be a bigger character okay but like you know there are ways to make rapunzel more of an action character if you worry that there are demographics that aren't going to be interested in a princess movie where the princess is not actiony, make the princess even more actiony. I think that they went partially that way with Rapunzel, but they would always fall back on like Flynn had to be validating that she was good at combat.

He had to validate that a pan was a decent weapon. And he's the swashbuckler. Why couldn't have she been, she, yeah, she had all the time in the world to learn swashbuckling i mean it's like and we can go back and forth on that because i was like yeah couldn't have technically but like whatever princess fiona did it okay not to pin two women's again against each other again

two women okay this has to be over okay but i i did like the movie i think it's really sweet i would kill off the horse so horse isn't getting any nipples from me. That's for damn sure. I like how your solution is kill the horse, not just like write him out of the story. No, I think he should fall off a cliff in the first two minutes. He does fall out of a very high up tree,

but somehow survives. But he's fine. I was watching some horses yesterday. Don't ask. I was just sort of spying on a little ranch. And I was watching some horses yesterday don't ask as well i was just sort of spying on a little ranch and i was watching some horses roughhousing and it was honestly very scary i'm becoming a horse girl i'm thinking about taking horse lessons so of course i'm going to be observing horses wow i did see the movie nope recently so that it's a big year

for horses i can't explain why but something is going on horses are back in a big year for horses. I can't explain why. But something is going on. Horses are back in a big way. I saw Nope for the second time yesterday and I was like, exactly. Exactly. Horses. They're back. They're back. But not this one.

This one should die. I do not share this feeling. But go on. I'm pro horse. I'm anti Maximus having a whole ass arc when rapunzel doesn't even get to kill the villain hello fair um true so okay one nipple to rapunzel i'm also going to give one nipple to gothel because she's a solid villain and i think that there should have been a little more done with her if we're gonna flesh out tropey characters

let's flesh them all out don't go halfway and i'll give my last half nipple to what was the chameleon's name oh pascal i loved pascal um so i'm gonna give it to him and on that oh uh last thing i obviously did this movie not obviously but you could guess that this movie was written and directed by men men men men men men men so many men um however one of the there's two male directors as there usually is on animated movies um but one of them byron howard is an openly gay man um he has uh been out for many years which is pretty huge in the entertainment industry of that time in general and also in animation as well because animation is double prejudiced in a lot of ways i don't know why but i know it's true and he also would go on to direct direct Zootopia and Encanto, which we will be covering on this show rather soon.

So, you know, there's that. Also Dan Fogelman, who wrote the screenplay and I think had a hand in casting Mandy Moore, later created This Is Us, which Mandy Moore is the lead of. So without Tangled, we wouldn't have that really famous show i've never watched wow same makes you think in conclusion this movie is pretty good i think if you're just watching it to watch a movie i really like it like yeah it's a fun romp of a

movie if you're watching it for practical cast purposes it's a real mixed bag but as a movie i think it's really fun and i would probably watch i think i will watch it again same yeah i concur so here we are ruining another movie it's kind of our thing but also if you like it and you just want to watch it for fun that's what we're gonna do in the future. So that's Tangled. We hope that everyone who's been requesting it for over half a decade is happy. Hope you're happy. I've actually kind of probably waited to do it because I feel like we are, we now have better tools.

We are better equipped. Yeah. I could see a 2017 version of this episode that um i would stand by embarrassed about yeah totally uh so as always thank you for listening we really hope you enjoyed this um we've got an exciting let's say rogues gallery of movies and guests coming up in the fall we're sort of laying out our fall schedule and it's exciting you're gonna be smiling laughing crying learning all of loving wow gasp also very soon on the matreon that saw episode that we kept hinting at so damn right scoot on over there to patreon.com slash bechtelcast. I think we are kind of in our golden era of

the Matreon right now. We're really turning out some bangers here and there. Golden hair, golden standard, golden era. Boom. Look forward to the Pinocchio Wars over there and all of your favorite movies and guests over

here on the main feed. Thank you so much for listening. You can catch us on the worldwide web, Instagram and Twitter at Bechtelcast. As Caitlin just said, you can join our Matreon five bucks a month for two bonus episodes and a backlog of over 100 episodes. Hello.

Wow. Impressive much? Now that's what I call content. That's five bucks a month over at patreon.com slash Bechtelcast. And then, of course, you've got our merch at tpublic.com slash The Bechtelcast, where you can get such classics as Wet Scabs or Dry Scabs. Yes. I mean,

team beetle juice. Need we say more? And maybe, and, and we, I, this fall, I am going to be making some new merch designs for the holiday season,

not holiday themed, but for you to purchase for the holiday season. And so, you know, the wheels are turning minion come. That's my idea so far. Think about that. That's as far as I've gotten.

But, you know, Mensa. We'll come up with something. I have a master's degree. We got this. Mensa, master's degree. It's gonna all come together. Okay. All right.

Game over. Game over. Oh, my gosh. Okay. All right. Game over. Game over. Oh my gosh. Okay. Not that Tangled isn't a great movie, but no movie ends better than Saw 1. Game over. Swam!

Bye. Bye-bye. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unnerves the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.

She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free,

subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose. This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, known for his research on brain function, behavior, and neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to adapt and rewire itself. The expectation on us is not perfection, it's being able to toggle between these different states. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. being able to toggle between these different states. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister, or is history repeating itself?

There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.