The Dogg Zzone by 1900HOTDOG - Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 85, Traxx Part 1 with Jason Pargin

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Brockway asks Seanbaby and special guest, author Jason Pargin, to come along with him on a fantastical journey through the movie Traxx! A 1988 action parody that is at once both and neither of those things, and also starring a DJ! What fun. What pure and lighthearted fun with no catches.

One nine hundred hot dog. One nine hundred hot dog. Our podcast slams with maximum hype. Say hot dog podcast work. Yeah. When you taste that nitrate power, you're in the dog zone for an hour. Come on.

You know the number. One nine hundred. One nine hundred hot dog. One nine zero zero. One nine hundred hot dog. One nine hundred. One nine hundred hot dog. One nine zero zero zero.

Yeah. Nine thousand. Welcome to the Dog Zone Nine Thousand, the official podcast of one nine hundred hot dog America's last comedy website. I'm a fart trapped in cookie batter, Robert Brockway, and skateboarding through a pet shop's window.

It's my partner, Sean Baby. Hi. I'm a cough syrup and laxative cookie. Yes, you are. Joining us today is the man who exclusively bangs mayors, Jason Parger. That's a really nice title.

We've no time to screw around. We've got so much ground to cover very, very quickly. I'm here selling the novel that I wrote called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. The title has already become nonsense to me because I've already promoted it too many times and it doesn't come out for another three months and then I have to keep promoting it

for months after that. So that's the name of it. It's the one that's in the series of novels that gave us John Dies at the end and the movie that's now on Amazon Prime and lots of other places. Please go by it. That's the only thing I have to say,

but we need to quickly get into talking about tracks and I need to say right off the bat. We're going to say the word tracks a lot. It's important you understand. We are not saying tracks like train tracks, T-R-A-C-K-S. We're saying the word T-R-A-X-X. It's a fake word.

Well, it's a name of a fake job, a town tamer named tracks. And we're talking about the 1988 action comedy movie. It's definitely probably a movie. Maybe a parody. Maybe a parody. It was a vehicle. Someone said Shadow Stevens,

we're going to make you your own Rambo movie, but Rambo in a city. It's going to be a little silly, but very serious. And also you talk like Mr. Rogers the whole time. Right. For no reason. Can you do likable but menacing? Absolutely not.

Perfect. Also, there's a thing we need to tell the listeners right away because sometimes when I am watching, say, Red Letter Media and they are doing a spotlight on some very obscure movie. And I, when it's over say, or probably through the episode say, Hey, I would like to go watch that.

And then they will say in the episode, now Jay, where did you find this? And then he will say, Oh, I bought a copy of the VHS at a garage sale. Right. It's not in print or on streaming anywhere. I believe tracks. I believe Sean baby bought a copy of the garage sale

and it is not on streaming anywhere. It is true. If you go to one of the aggregator sites where they now have where they'll tell you which platform has a movie very, very helpful and you type in tracks, it's one of the only ones I've ever typed in where it just pops up and says,

not available in any format. Tracks 1980, whatever. Shadow Stevens, not available. Period. Like it's not. Nobody wants this. Nobody wants anything to do with it. People.

Taking off of YouTube. Like you used to be able to just find the full movie on YouTube. Like you can't have a lot of old movies, but it got taken off very recently. Yeah. That's, that's been the refuge for a lot of movies. Like hamburger, the motion picture, which I wrote about for the site and probably did a podcast

episode about that was the same situation. But in that case, somebody uploaded it to YouTube and the theory is well, there's nobody patrolling for the copyright because why would they? Like it's not for sale anywhere. Who cares? So you would think and multiple times people have tried to upload tracks again,

to YouTube and then someone pulls it down. So in other words, I'm bringing this up for a reason. There's someone out there policing the copyright for tracks. Purely to prevent. Fingers crossed. To prevent anyone from seeing it. Getting a new one.

Getting franchise. When Brockway's body fell apart on him, the discord got together to make a little cameo featuring Shadow Stevens. And in the cameo, we always like Robert and I hope you're feeling better or whatever. You're feeling better now, right? Is your body like in one piece?

I'm feeling a little bit better. I've got a lot of issues that I'm going to struggle with for the rest of my life, largely because of tracks. Of course. But the reason I brought that up, I'm glad you're feeling a little better, but he kept quoting the movie as if like everyone knows these

classic lines from tracks. And I thought that was really good. He heard you were a tracks fan, but he's like, I thought you were such a big tracks fan. You would remember just some random lines from the middle of the movie, which as I've probably seen it 15 times, didn't quite remember.

But he did. But he did the spin off the top of the dome. I didn't think it made the kind of impression on his life that he had a job as a radio personality for many, many, many years. And this seems like, oh, I tried that. It didn't work out. He's kind of got a fond memory now and then, but he just off the dome spit out like 80 lines in a minute.

And it was incredible. Okay. And again, I feel like I know this is my bit. I feel like we have to slam it in reverse for a moment because I think a lot of our listeners, like I had to be reminded who Shadow Stevens was. My only memory of that. And again,

Shadow much like the word tracks is misspelled. It's S-H-A-D-O-E, correct? Yes. Perhaps short for some ethnic name that I apologize for. I think his real name is Terry. Sure. I'm not kidding. I think that's deeply offensive.

But Shadow Stevens, I only knew him growing up in as an 80s kid as like a guest on, I think, Hollywood Squares. He ran that was one of those. And me, Center Square. Yeah. Where I was at an age where all of the celebrities on Hollywood Squares. And again,

I know some of our younger younger listeners don't know what freakin Hollywood Squares is. I realize I'm giving you a frame of reference for another thing you don't have a frame of reference for. But the point is when I grew up, I only knew him as like a D list celebrity because Hollywood Squares was where you went when your show got canceled or wasn't doing well. Like that was that paycheck. It was like the equivalent of like the British panel shows where it's like,

you know, they just pick up whoever's around on the con, you know, the comedy circuits. And the people who were on Hollywood Squares every day were the saddest of the sad. If you don't know what Hollywood Squares is, it's like tic-tac-toe, but with has been celebrities. And Shadow Stevens was the Center Square for many years. Yeah.

Even sitting here right now, I don't know what he was famous for because it wasn't tracks. Like track. Yeah. I know him as the guy from tracks. That's what I know. I think he was like a Casey Kasem for a few years. Like he did an LA radio show that got transmitted nationally of just top 40

type shit. So. Okay. And then somebody said he could be the perfect guy for our brutal vigilante parody. That's an amazing decision. An amazing decision from the start. Imagine just casting Casey Kasem, not as the voice in a cartoon himself, just

like prowling around the city, Charles Bronson style, murdering everybody. I'm listening. I'm listening. So he's such a poor fit. And this is why, again, it's like, well, what are they doing? They're talking about another bad movie. Tracks is a fascinating bad movie. And I saw it.

Like there are certain movies you need to see in a certain format, you know, like Interstellar needed to be seen in IMAX and certain films. It's like you need to see this in the theater. I saw Tracks in the best possible format for it, which is on like a 300 pixel wide video file that Sean must have gotten off of Lime Wire in 1998 or something. Extremely poor quality audio like out of sync. It looked like it was recorded with a Nintendo DS. No, it's exactly the format that that film deserves.

But it's a movie where every shot has a weird, incompetent choice in it, including Shadow Stevens performance. And that's why we're going in all this background because it's clear he has no background in acting or action or charisma or or anything or like life. We're just talking to people. We wear those clothes. Weird situations that humans get into and how they respond to them. His hair.

So he moves real stiffly. Like I think he made this like just after he started getting into bodybuilding. So I think he has like 40 extra pounds of muscle that he's not used to moving around in. So he looks real clumsy and speaks real gently, but not in a menacing way. Are you are you saying he trained for Tracks? I don't know if he trained for Tracks, but I know he was really in the bodybuilding because I have a bodybuilding video that he hosts and he's like, this is the guy who

made me into what I am. And he looks exactly like he looks in Tracks, which is kind of big, but not not steroid big. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't seem like it's this main hobby. There was never a topless track scene. Yeah. No, he's not. He wasn't ready for that yet.

It does. So when I mean clumsy, like it starts off with him drawing his gun against people and they clearly fire on him before he even gets his gun out. And like you see a lot of actors like Leo de Caprio, when he was in his cowboy movies, he would pull out a gun pretty fast. Like, okay, he did the work. He fucking hung out at home drawing that gun over and over and over. And here's Tracks just like clumsily pulling it out for the second time that day.

Like, okay, I got him. And it like the bullets are flying at him. And so the movie very carefully shows this, that he can't be killed. Like people are shooting him point blank range while he says he's never been shot. He doesn't know what it is. And I'd like to tell you about my Chronomaster Jones theory, which is his sidekick Dieter is actually a time traveler dimension traveler who's here trying to steer this unkillable tracks demon in a way that like does not destroy the universe.

And so I think that was him. Okay, he does have an amulet. He does have a magical amulet that has never addressed. Yes. And it's very suspicious how like shadow Stevens makes the decision to clean up this town. To just kill the bad guys in the town. And at that moment, he's like, help me, help me, there are bad guys chasing me. I'm just a regular guy with a medallion.

Pay no attention to the medallion. Let's not address the medallion. So it's just a theory. If you watch the movie again with that theory in mind, you'll start to see like, yes, that's that's why he makes so many strange choices. That's why he says so many strange things. He's trying to say the exact right thing to like butterfly effect this universe into non oblivion. I just valid a theory as any.

I also have a theory about tracks. I think everybody making the movie thought they were making a different thing and they never had a single meeting to talk about it. I think almost certainly true. I think shadow Stevens thought he was making a straight up action movie. I think he played it like I'm going to do a menacing thing with my quiet voice and like incompetently for sure didn't pull it off. I don't think she knew it was a comedy at all.

I think the writer knew it was a comedy because he tried to make jokes. They didn't work, but he tried to make jokes. And I think the director didn't realize it was a movie. Yeah, he thought this was like a birthday card for shadow Stevens's best friend or something. Yeah, it was like maybe it was like maybe a commercial for insurance that just went really off the rails and he was trying to get it back. Like that Rob Zombie Munster's trailer that came out and it looks like it's like an ad. It's like a Super Bowl ad for some for Doritos or something like.

No, this is a feature length film that all looks like this. On purpose. I did this on purpose everybody. Yeah, it costs 40 million dollars. I don't I think I was the one that introduced that to you. I don't know that's true because that was like prior to the trailer coming out. The early talk was that he was going to get 30 or 40 million dollars. But even if he got like two million dollars, there's some embezzling happening in that.

Yeah, that looks like you know, there's the Comic Con videos where someone will like make their own Superman video. It looks much, much worse than that. It does look like a cameo. It looks like someone gave Rob Zombie like 50 bucks and said, hey, my wife really loves the Munsters. I made this joke on Twitter that that's what happened because that's it looks like exactly that. Like the sets are garbage. The costumes look like cosplay. There's no good gags.

I feel like maybe they're recreating Munster's gags. I don't know. He was on TV fucking 150 years ago. I've never seen it. But like, of course, know what it is. I've seen, you know, pictures of it. Are they recreating like actual scenes or credit sequences or something? Because there's no real jokes.

It's like, here's a thing happening. It feels like it must be a reference to something. I don't know. Yeah, they're like references, but without any awareness behind them to like make that, you know, a relevant thing to do. It's just reference, reference, reference. Guys, we're getting off track. I was hoping somebody would say it. So let's let's do the plot.

Let's do the plot of tracks for anybody who hasn't seen it because you will not be able to see it. You will never, you will never know about this. You basically just have to trust us on this one. And you won't. Once we tell you what it's about, it's about. Fuck. This is I just that was such a hard thing to jump into. I really thought I'd have that.

Okay. Yeah, he's a mercenary. Go ahead. And he is working his way through the Middle East. I think they say just murdering everybody and having a great time when he suddenly decides to retire to a life of baking cookies. Only here's the problem. And this, this is not a throwaway gag. You're going to think it is when I say he's really bad at making cookies.

This is the central plot of the movie is that he's really bad at making cookies. They bring it up over and over again. So in every way, like he can't, he can't get flour into a fucking bowl. He can't. He doesn't know what temperature to put the oven. His ideas for cookies are that I said cough syrup and laxative cookie earlier. That's one of the cookies from this movie. He just.

Yeah, what is the joke? What is what is it a joke? What is the approach do you think with that is a joke that the screenwriter thought was extremely funny? Yeah. Because it is the joke that the entire comedy for this action comedy vehicle hangs on. But the cover for the movie is actually him cookies cookie mix. I don't get that joke. Like I, again, I would go, uh-huh.

And where are we going to take me somewhere? It feels like, uh, like someone who kind of has maybe they've seen a few 80s movies. They think they get the format. They think they understand what it takes to make it work. Like, okay, we need something zany here. Like the, um, like in a police academy movie, all the guys have just a thing that's weird about them. Like this guy loves guns or this guy never talks. This guy makes funny sound effects.

And so they're like, he has to have something. How about, I don't know, he's bad at making cookies and like that's enough. And then they just hit that too many times and went too far past reality. Because you just, you don't make that. That's what it is. Somebody, somebody dropped a copy of summer school on like Sentinel Island. Yeah. And they just, they had no context of the outside world beyond this.

And this is what they made. This is what they sent back thinking they were contacting alien life. Yes. Summer school is a great example of a movie that did all that right. Like all the characters have a wacky thing about them, but it's anchored in reality. They're extreme versions of a thing you can relate to. Right. But if you remove reality from that completely, you would make tracks.

Yes. Okay. So he, he needs money to start this cookie making business that is terrible and every, nobody encourages him on it. So he has no reason to believe he's good at this whatsoever. And he decides that the way to do that is to become what he calls a town tamer. And that is a man that goes in and just murders everybody he sees. Right.

I think the plot was supposed to be, he's going to murder like the bad element. But we go through like a montage early on of him, like murdering the bad element. And it's, it's a brothel. There's not a lot of due process. Yeah. It's a brothel. Sure. Then he murders like a strip club.

Yeah. Which is a legal business. Then he murders a tattoo parlor. Okay. What, what did the tattoo parlor do? That's the bad element. So he's just going through killing everybody in town and telling them like. The strip bar scene was especially rough because he goes in and it's just a normal bar.

There is a waitress. She gets her butt grabbed, but she tells the guy, no, don't grab my buddy. He's like, oh, okay, sorry. But like that feels like, yeah, they're people, they're sex workers. And they're like, here are the rules. He's like, cool, I'll follow the rules. My bad. And for him to come in here and then threaten to kill every single one of them is one thing.

But he's also like, at gunpoint says all the trash get on one's, all the scum get on one side and all the decent people on the other. And then like, oh, you guys are all scum and they all get on the other side of the room. So he's like toying with these people. But it shows like how childlike his idea of right and wrong is that just like all of the good people here and all the bad people there and then I'll kill the bad ones. Yeah, he thought that to be clear. It wasn't a bit. He thought that was going to work and he got frustrated when they all went to the other side and he went, oh, okay, this isn't working. And he told several waitresses that he was going to kill them.

He told them personally, like at the end of that scene. And it's one of the few bits I laughed at is that he has everybody file by and he shakes their hands and looks them in the eye and says, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. And it's just like a waitress stockbroker used car salesman and they're like, uh-huh. Stopped in for some titties and beer. At one point he throws a grenade into a porno shop and explodes it does that to as part of the montage of him cleaning up the town as he uses grenades to blow up several businesses. Nobody comes in my town.

Well, it's a no ejaculation zone. And then he at one point he is just riding through town in a car with a belt fed M 60 machine guns. The gun Rambo uses and just shooting. Just shooting. Just shooting. That scene they show to be specific. They show people are just like wandering around the street. It's not like a gang fight.

It's not whatever. There's just like people going from their apartment to a business. And then he comes around the corner with his belt fed M 60 and just mows all of them down. They specifically show just like women running from him and just getting cut in half. And it's all done to like a wacky scenario. It's a maniac. It's a maniac movie for maniacs. That's all it could be.

Well, again, I fear some listeners are saying, oh, so this is a parody. This is like the naked gun movies. There were again, there were people on set who probably thought that's the movie they were making. Yeah. Shadows was not one of them. And at no point does the movie like portray this as being wrong or misguided. It keeps working right up to the end when they successfully kill all the bad guys. And then they have peace for a thousand years and everything is fine again.

It's just it's it's such a puzzle. It's more of a puzzle than any other movie. Like I've seen an incompetent parody. You feel this is an incompetent parody, but not quite. It's also an incompetent action movie. And it's also doing something else. It's every level of it is at war with itself in just an utterly fascinating way. And where were we?

So he goes in where people are going to think this is racist. Like he's he's singling out people based on race. And I the movie makes it very clear. Tracks is not racist because Priscilla Barnes is giving a press conference and she says tracks killed one of every race. And she says and I quote, no one race can bitch about discrimination. So it is canon. Cutting that off right here. I know you were gonna always complaining.

Oh, you're killing us because we're a certain color. Shut the fuck up about all that whiny babies. To be fair, there was a reason to think that because it was a predominantly black part of town. It was like 90% black people. And then he did very carefully kill some white people there. So so maybe yeah, maybe maybe he's a bastion of progressive thinking. So he's murdering the whole town. The big mafia boss doesn't want to stop doing crime.

So he he calls for three assassins from Mexico who begin the film Mexican turn into Texans and then maybe Italian towards the end. No one race bitch about discrimination. It's built into the characters. It's just it's another like weird bit that you wonder if they wrote three different movies or just didn't edit the script or if that was supposed to be a joke that they never paid off. But it happened. It might be a joke about how like Hollywood actors of color like often play races that they aren't. It could be a male reactor. He'll be an arrow or whatever.

Like that's it. There's a comment to be made there. I don't know if there's a lot of comedy to be had there, but maybe that's what they're saying. If you were to do that joke as a comedian, you would have three like in placeably ethnic actors and then you would say they're all brothers and cast them as like an Italian, a Mexican and a Spaniard or whatever. So they're all like playing a different character. But that's probably how you would start to approach that joke. That's how you would do the setup and then you would have to make jokes using that. You wouldn't even get to the setup stage with that.

Sure. That's what they're doing. So they're slowly on their way. And this is the A and B plot is these assassins getting into wacky antics also just murdering everybody they see in hilarious fashion. Only they forget to like play it up as hilarity. So they do like wacky setups and then somebody just gets shot in the face and dies not to like sound effects. It's a it's wildly uncomfortable all the way. There's a scene where there's just a bunch of dead bodies hanging from the light poles.

That's my favorite tracks gag. Yeah, there's notes on them like, hey, I died because I went to the strip bar or whatever. And it just looks like a zombie movie. It looks like a post-apocalyptic zombie movie where this is the base of the worst bad guy in the zombie apocalypse. And two guys drive by or drive through it in a truck and just hysterically laugh like it makes them happy. Not like I just watched this. They're garbage men and they begin the scene. One of them goes, I got your garbage.

Let go and then jumps in the truck and you're not sure why that happened. And then they drive into the main thoroughfare and there are 50 crucified upside down crucified bodies there. And they're like horrified at first and then they start laughing and then the movie pitches them deeper. So they're going, oh, yes. It's like shot and scored like a horror movie. So somebody making this was like, oh, this is obvious little horror scene. The editor at that point in the movie was like, I know what they're trying to do. This is a horrible thing.

And then it cuts from that to the maniacs coming up from Mexico just murdering a bunch of bikers just like 12 bikers biking along the highway. They kill them with baseball bats one by one. The final one escapes. And so they stop the car and just shoot him with a machine gun. And then it cuts away. There's no joke. There's no dialogue. Because it doesn't need any itself.

Explain it to me. It is pretty hilarious. You mentioned the editor. I looked up, I stopped this movie halfway through and went to IMDB to look up who edited the film. And it is a person with no other movie credits or TV credits or any other kind of. Not just no other editing credits. There's no evidence they ever worked on a set of another movie anywhere. Would you say this ties into my Chronomaster Jones theory?

That some man should have popped. Sean, I'm going to be frank. I don't fully understand the Chronomaster Jones theory, but I didn't want to say anything at the time. Let's explain it again. From the top. I feel like someone could have popped in from another universe and done exactly the right thing to make sure our universe did not die. I'm just saying it supports my theory. And it explains his inexplicable, never commented on clearly magical amulet.

Then you would have to see it, which you can't, but it's a magical amulet that this black man is wearing for no reason and never, never addressed. Okay, the editor, getting off tracks here. The editor, if you watch this movie and you don't feel like you're somebody who notices editing in movies, and I don't really. I get something where if I watch a cool YouTube breakdown of how great it seemed was edited. I'm noticing all that stuff for the first time. I can't remember ever watching movie and saying who edited this thing. Tracks was the first. Because you don't realize the invisible work that editing does until you see a movie where every shot is just off by a few seconds.

Like it hangs on a face for a little too long after a punchline. It hangs on tracks' reaction to a scene for way too long. Like something weird will happen and it will cut back to Shadow Stevens and he's like laughing and shaking his head. To himself, to nobody. To himself for to no effect. Like it's why am I looking at this? And it is so uncomfortable that it's almost like, I guess the closest thing I compared was like the Tim and Eric style of comedy. Where they kind of showed you how weird choices and just costume lighting, song soundtrack and editing can just add this weird otherworldly element.

It becomes funny because it's like you're not used to seeing stuff put together wrong. And here every scene has got something weird about it. The soundtrack choices weird. There's a cut of this movie. The only like the best quality version you can see is on Vimeo. Shadow Stevens made a Shadow Stevens cut of this movie in 2014. That's only like 56 minutes long. Because he took out all the parts where he felt like they had betrayed his vision.

Like he thought like when we made it, it was great when I saw the finished cut. I was like so embarrassed I walked out of the screening. So he has gone through and tried to fix it. And even there you can see where he's like tried to cut out the most awkward parts. It's like he recognized the same thing. But to somebody who really knows what they're talking about, like I bet if they watched this, they would find it fascinating. The choices that were made. There's a lot of times like you could have gotten away with not fully understanding the joke you were making

or not having a punchline to a setup, but then they'll just stay like they'll just like stay in the car as both characters look out the window and just kind of wait it out. And it's like it's almost art because I don't understand it. Agreed. Like if there's a competent filmmaker, you'd be trying to understand what they're communicating there. You're like, what does that say? What did that edit? If this was Cohen Brothers, I would write an essay about it. Right. But it's not. But it's definitely not.

It's a series of tumbling mistakes. Okay, so he is in this town. He's squaring off of the criminal element. The town is tacitly, the sheriff is tacitly endorsing him. The mayor comes to confront him and sees him and instantly not only falls in love, but just soaks her panties. They fall straight off, literally jumps on him. I'm not exaggerating. She just sees him and like is the horniest any woman has ever been and leaps over the desk to have sex with him because that's the site, the site of tracks, which again could be a competent gag except we don't cut away.

And then we just stay on her being incredibly horny for him and like writhing all over him for like five minutes. It's so uncomfortable because they just, you can see this actress trying to play off this bit. It's Priscilla Barnes. She's a pretty good actress. And it's so like weird and awkward and she knows it doesn't work. And like Shadow Stevens doesn't know as an actor like how to react to it. It's so weird and upsetting. They don't give him any like the director told him, all right, for this scene, this is going to happen to you. And that's the direction he got because that's what he did.

It was just a thing that was happening to him and he wasn't sure how to understand. I understand. We will be earth fucking ready. And then that scene ends with all of the card catalogs in the library opening and spewing out their cards as though that's shorthand for ejaculation. They made the Dewey Decimal System come. Don't you get it? That's how hard I really don't. Again, that's that we're describing it like a naked gun bit. And I can't emphasize enough the point that the rest of the movie is not a Zucker Brothers. Yeah, I was going to say that's like the one most cartoonish thing in there.

And they put it in that scene and then kind of never hit that tone again. Like that's Looney Tunes. That cartoon, yeah, which was what the Zucker Brothers like it's cartoon logic, right? Like the slapstick is all it's like the the physics are different and it's established very early. This movie is not doing that. If it did that all the way through, it would probably be remembered as just another wacky 80s comedy would probably still be in print somewhere like porkeys. But no, that's that's what's so weird about it because like at the beginning when they show him still in whatever Vietnam or whatever he's supposed to be, I think it just come out the bottom screen says Middle East.

It doesn't even specify country. And like he and his friend are like having a casual conversation while explosions are happening just feet away from them. And that's that's kind of a funny bit. It's like yeah, it almost works. But it's like then there's long stretches of the movie that don't do that, including the fate of the main villain, the mob boss, which I know we haven't gotten that yet. I mean, it might as well get to now because it's like a two thirds through the movie. The mob boss rolls up on Traxxas camp and they're making his terrible cookies and he's like a nose. He's beaten and he wants to make a truce and he eats one of Traxxas cookies and he says, what is this?

It's a chili cookie. It's a chili con carne cookie and he pretends to like it and then it becomes clear they can't make a deal. So he spits the cookie out says this is crap and then he gets in his car. And I think everybody else has a different opinion of this. So somebody else tell me what happens next. I think it's a fart joke. I think he drives away and the chili cookie made him fart so hard that he explodes. No, that is what that is what it is.

I only know that because I googled it. Okay. Yes, it's done. It's done very strangely and very it's very difficult to get. But he does get in his car and say, I this is what I think of your cookie and then he farts. And then before there's I want to be honest. I I didn't get that until the third time I saw the movie. I just want to be clear like this is not like, oh, of course, that's a fart joke.

Like it's strange because there's zero pause. He farts and then before the farts even over, he goes to light a cigar and the the motion of going to light a cigar. It takes like half a second. It's just blinking. You will miss that there is even a cigar there and then it cuts to a very long shot of a real explosion. And then he is never seen again. And that's how the villain of the movie dies two thirds of the way through the movie. Yeah.

And it's then nobody even comments on it. It's just he's just gone. That was that was it. That was the main bad guy gone. So there has to be a reason for that, right? Like the the short little edit must have been completely unrelated. Like someone later said, oh, Robert Dahl is that his name? Sounds right.

His name. He's like a right wing lunatic now. But anyway, he Robert Davi, that's his name. Um, he had to have like left the set or left the project and they're like, shit, we got to kill this guy somehow. Like it feels like that. It feels like a whole movie of that. It feels like a whole movie of minor emergencies and responses to them. Yeah, that's possible.

The movie had a budget to make it clear. This is not something that people threw together in, you know, in their apartment. This has explosion stunts, car chases, car crashes, cars crashing into buildings. It's got the whole it had real money. It was a real movie. It was a real effort to launch Shadow Stevens as an action star. That's why so much of this is is baffling because, you know, typically there's there's some terrible 80s movies at that budget level of the era, but there's a certain level of a baseline of competence. You still expect you expect the soundtrack to make sense.

You expect the editing to be like you expect to not notice the editing. That's what makes tracks so. Yeah, you don't have to hire a ghost. You can hire a real person to do it. Tone wise, you shouldn't go from lethal weapon to airplane. 20 different times without ever, without ever telegraphing, which it's incredible. So the main bad guy is dead and you're left wondering what's the point here. Oh, right.

Those other guys are coming in and they show up and they're now the main bad guys, despite having no real relation to tracks or the story at all. They've just arrived in town and they kidnap a little league team and tie them to their limo as like armor. And again, it's like it could be funny, but something about the way it's executed makes you think of like a serial killer movie in the 80s where it's it's goofy, but they think this is terrible. And it's just it's a tragedy. You're not sure if you should laugh at as it cuts across. Like, I think it's because they show all of the kids faces looking just terrified and sad and beaten up earlier in the movie. There was a daycare center at a whorehouse and one of the Johns runs in there and grabs a kid. He's like, I'm going to kill this kid.

And so tracks comes in, shoots the gun out of his hand and then shoots him in the belt buckle until he falls out of window. So he is not against like throwing bullets around in a closed space, ricocheting them off metal with children around. So this was when I saw this, I'm like, oh, tracks just shoot the bad guys. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. He comes out. He sees a bunch of children there and it never factors into this action scene whatsoever. He just starts shooting at them. They start shooting at him.

It's why did we do? Why did we do any of it? It's never those kids were actors. It just kids were a real league team. And those were real bullets. So they have like a car jousting scene at the end where they they just charge at each other shooting over and over again until tracks wins and he kills them. And that's that's the end. It's this car joust which seems anti climactic for whatever this movie.

I don't know what I expected of this movie, but it was better than that. And the villain is dead. These guys are just meeting tracks for the first time in that scene. Like the guy he was actually opposing to clean up the town is gone. These guys just showed up for that for the ending. They just had a long time ago for this job. They're like, well, we're still going to go kill the guy, even though the guy who our boss is dead. There are no stakes.

Everybody could just literally walk away from this and it would be fine. You don't. Because what do they care if they're still crime in the town? What does it make to them? They don't live there. Like, no, we must preserve the crime in this town. We must preserve the strip clubs. What do they care now?

Not the guy who hired him is dead. Like, hopefully they already have his money. If not, they're not getting paid. He's not Bob Boss is here to like replace him. He's one. No. Oh, no. And the town.

Okay. The town loves him now, even though everybody kind of hated him up until this point. Well, now they had that a running gag of tracks t-shirt. So I guess he's been slowly winning them over and they have an 80s dance montage where they showed the town going to tracks aside and loving tracks. Again, it was edited so incoherently that the only reason I know that that's what was happening is because I know what they were trying to do from other 80s movies. Like, it's a, you know, it's a weird science or a venture the nerds summer school style. Right. The dance montage didn't connect to anything.

It was tracks indeed are dancing on a beach unrelated to anything else. Like they thought if somebody's dancing, this is a dance montage. And then there was a bunch of things that weren't. During the montage, they showed like an old couple, like taking the for sale sign off their home and throwing it down and then watering their lawn. Like it was showing the transition of like Maniac sex club town to nice old town. I did not get that. Well, again, there's no way you would unless you're thinking that's what they're trying to do. I've seen this in other movies and the space monsters who made this movie are trying to recreate that and failing.

Yes. The Sentinelese, of course. How many times have you seen this film, Sean? Probably 12, 13. So I once went, I was working on this show in the early 2000s where like the main characters would sort of talk shit about stuff. Beavis and Butthead style. And so when I got hired for it, I brought down like a suitcase full of stuff and I just like all of my weirdest VHS is. And I remember we pulled them all out and put them in the tape and everyone was fascinated with tracks.

They pulled out tracks like what the fuck is this? We put it in and they were howling like no one had ever seen anything like it. It is the weirdest thing that I've owned in my entire life. No joke. You might be the world's foremost tracks expert. Like of the of the eight billion people on this planet, there literally might not be a second person who's has seen tracks as many times and knows this much, this much about it. I think Shadow Stevens might have after that cameo. I know the art of it.

I have never looked into everyone. I did meet Priscilla Barnes once. I think I said this in other podcasts. We talked about tracks where I was like, I love tracks because she's in tracks. She was like Comic Con or whatever. And she pretended to have no fucking idea what that was. And I thought that was really funny. I mean, can you blame her?

Her part in this is just to be literally like she's supposed to be a parody of action women except for they didn't know what to parody. So they just had her be horny as shit. And that's like her one character trait. Why would you race up to that? Why would you want to talk to somebody who's like, I loved you when you were just a horny idiot in that movie? You know what that person was. Shit, I just realized Priscilla Barnes hates me. Yes, she does.

You're the biggest creep she's ever met. Okay, so it's the end and they're having a tracks party. The whole town is having a carnival. He is open to his bake shop called snacks by tracks where he makes terrible cookies still. That's the end of that bit is that he never did anything else is that he's just making terrible cookies. Only now he gets to sell them and nobody likes them. We call that a character arc where a character isn't good at something and then isn't good at it. If it's a joke, what is where is the change because it was just he's bad at making cookies.

That was my joke that there wasn't. It's so confusing. They fucked it up. Every aspect of storytelling up from the character to the tone. The existence of the tracks theme song. Are we leaving that for a pleasant surprise for the people that do seek out a copy of tracks? That was at the very start. At the end, they don't play the tracks theme song, which is amazing.

They play a just unrelated slapper of a jazz band, something, which is an amazing decision to not play the track theme song at the most tracks moment. Do we have a copy of the tracks theme song, Sean, on your sound board that we can play? I didn't put on the sound board, no. Do we have a copy you can freestyle for us right now off the top? Because surely you'll remember it. Dealing with maniacs. You better call tracks. That's exactly some other stuff that Rongel tracks.

And then I say tracks. Then imagine that. Those are the facts. Imagine that with saxophone and nothing else. And it could just keep going. Now, Jason, did you get the cameo at the end of this movie that was, I guess, supposed to pay off. A running gag. Did you get the big cameo in the cookie shop?

I did because I'm a child of the 80s, so I recognize Famous Amos. I did not. It was the equivalent of like a George Foreman grill type thing. If you were inventing a little grill, and then George Foreman came on and said, well, that's a nice looking device. And people would get like, oh, haha, that's George Foreman of George Foreman Grill fame. It was also famous as a boxer before that. Famous Amos was a comedian. I don't know.

I have no idea. And then had a, and I think made his real money with a cookie brand. I'm sorry. I apologize. I've tried to Google tracks theme song lyrics so we could actually list them. There's no way you're gonna find anything. Google does not have that on any of the. Did you mean to type anything else?

What is this combination of words? I didn't get the big cameo in your area. And I also, I also didn't get the joke because the joke is that he tries like the cookies and knowing that his famous Amos, which I did not. I would expect him to go like, oh, shit, these are really good or something, right? Like the one guy. No, he says these are terrible cookies. And then he throws up outside. Yep.

I mean, it's just, I can't even explain to you what a joke is if you're starting from, from that point. It's amazing. Yeah, there's no punching that joke up. Yeah, not to derail us. But if you, Sean, when you do try to Google tracks theme song lyrics at the top of this, do you mean taxi theme song lyrics? Which tracks is misspelling taxi a lot. Yeah. Like there's literally only one letter in the right spot.

They really have to reach. And then down the pages, one of the suggested things is peaky blinders theme song meaning. Like, did you, did you mean peaky blinders peaky blinders and type tracks tracks instead? It's a word that just breaks Google. I don't know what you even, what do you want? What does that mean? This is a repository of all of the universe's knowledge and we have nothing for you. We can't even.

It would not even occurred to me that people haven't seen tracks. This way. Yeah. No one has seen tracks. The most sophisticated machine learning project in the history of possibly all of you may have all living species in the cosmos. We don't know what you mean when you typed in tracks theme song lyrics. We don't even have a really good guess. That's basically all computers have been programmed to do for the last 20 years is guess what you want.

We don't have it. It's not even like giving me the tracks IMDB page. Like, oh, you're looking for stuff about the movie tracks. It's like, we have, what is, what is, what are those letters? What's that combination? It's going. A man with an amulet is going to appear in your room and say, I got your signal. Tracks lyrics.

I'm ready. You gotta come with me. No, no, no. I was really trying to find the lyrics. All right. Well, before we go, here's a, here's a couple of fun tracks facts. It's tagline was garbage you dump trash you kill. Trash you kill.

Which is oddly perfect for this movie. The director, Jerome Gary, he got his start producing hot dog favorite pumping iron. Nice. He went from pumping iron, which was universally regarded as a great documentary about an utter maniac to this, which is a movie made by an utter maniac. He probably didn't meet this guy through his like bodybuilding circles. Yeah. You might have.

Also the screenwriter, Gary DeVore disappeared mysteriously on a lonesome stretch of California highway and was found again a full year later dead and mutilated with some believing he was murdered by the CIA for knowing too much. Welcome to the murder of tracks, a 1900 hot dog night's true crime podcast. One nine hundred. Hot dog. One nine hundred. One nine hundred.

One nine hundred. HOG. DOG. Nights. That nitrate power in the night. It's not the size of the dog, but how hard you can bite it. You will survive or maybe not when you're in the dark zone. You gotta give it everything you have.

One nine hundred. Hot dog. Nights. It's one I am June 27th, 1997. Gary DeVore, the screenwriter of tracks is driving alone through the Mojave Desert. Window down, radio up, almost certainly brainstorming the track sequel. He imagines tracks starting a nationwide chain of bakeries only to have a famous Amos take a heel turn and try to run him out of business.

He chuckles. Amos would do that. It's perfect. He stops at a Denny's. He phones his wife, probably to tell her about the tracks idea. It's the last time he's seen alive. This is real. If you're listening to it, the writer, the writer Gary DeVore, all of this did happen.

Aside from the track stuff that that was completely accurate information. He was driving alone one night, very late at night through the Mojave Desert and he disappeared mysteriously after stopping at Denny's to phone his wife and was never seen alive again. Listeners in true podcast, true crime, podcast fashion. I have no idea about any of this. Brockway only told us when we talk about tracks, I'm going to transition into the fascinating true crime case that I have been researching for months that I will be I will be the audience

surrogate. And I don't know, Sean, do you know a lot of the facts behind the track? I know nothing about this. I mentioned when we were just talking about tracks that I've never really done any research. And in fact, have actively not done any research since Brockway said don't do any research. Yeah, Brockway asked me not to look into it, not even to Google it, which it was not a it was not a danger because if you try Googling anything about tracks, you do not get Yeah, it was it was surprisingly difficult to surface some of this information.

Like there are some mainstream sources, but there's also just nobody gave a shit. Listeners, we will be in many, as is the case with many true crime crime podcast, keeping this light. We are aware that a real person has died. And if you are a friends or family with this guy or his murderer, please, we mean, you know, offense, but please do as much respect for human life as the writer of tracks did. And also please do mentally insert the word facts. Every time we say it, spell it fa xx.

That will really help me. Davor called home often on that trip through the Mojave. It allowed the phone company to track his movements, just like they track your masturbation habits and sell them to Zynga. Davor's cell phone is last registered at being on at one 20 a.m. 15 minutes later, it's gone. Wendy Davor, his widow, offers a $100,000 reward for information. The manhunt by both authorities and amateurs is significant and thorough.

There was even a segment on America's most wanted where John Walsh spoke a lot like this. All of you people out there who immediately said, why did the writer of tracks have $100,000? Maybe it was his wife's money. You don't know. You don't know what it like. Maybe he got paid $2 million to write tracks. You don't know. That's how much it was worth.

Also, when what year was this that he disappeared? I may have missed it. It was 1997, summer of 1997. So this was in the cell phone era, but not very far into it. He did have a cell phone and it was part of the way that they tracked him. It was an entire year, July 1998, before Gary Davor's Ford Explorer was found below 15 feet of murky water in the California aqueduct outside of Palmdale, California. Gary Davor is dead inside.

It would be crazy if he was alive in there. Here is the police explanation. After stopping to rest, he somehow entered a freeway off-ramp instead of an on-ramp. In that stretch of freeway, there's like a middle section that just barely leads to a section that's wide enough for a car to drop through to the aqueduct. But only if you're going the wrong way, only if you're going against traffic, can you split between the two sections of road. And if you thread that needle perfectly, you can get a car through there.

And they say Davor was fatigued driving. And it was evident because he kept mistyling his home phone number on the way back home. And he was, they think he was driving about 70 miles an hour the wrong way when he threaded that needle and his Ford Explorer cleared the embarkment along the aqueduct, smashed into the middle of the channel. He was knocked unconscious and drowned. Shit. That's what the police say happened.

So where's the mystery? Sounds pretty straightforward to me, Robert. That's pretty much time to wrap up the episode, it sounds like. Well, you will be amazed that there is more to this. So it seems like the police had a simple explanation. It was an open and shut case. So why did it take police and search and rescue a year to solve? Aside from the fact that generally speaking, nobody wants to work and everybody is bad at their job. Some things just don't add up.

Now that's bad for the loved ones of Gary Davor, but it's very good for this podcast. If this was a simple car accident and to the only relatively shallow body of water around, why couldn't anybody spot it? Thanks to cell phone records, which were spotting at the time, they could pinpoint the approximate area down to 15 miles. There's also the aqueduct worker who found the hood of Davor's Explorer the day after the crash. But little attention was paid to this discovery. Is it possible that aqueduct worker just had a whole burrito for lunch and was not on his A-game? Or could he have been an evil aqueduct worker?

Oh, what a twist. But he still found the hood. Like you'd be like, okay, this is the hood of a car. Yes, they knew he was missing at that point. And they knew what he was driving and they found the hood of his car the next day and were like, that's unrelated. He was probably hot. He took the hood of his car off, threw it out the window. Well, they said, well, we find plenty of car parts in the aqueduct and that was enough explanation to not look into that more. In fact, Davor's body was only ever found thanks to one suspiciously specific tip.

On July 8th, Douglas Crawford, an amateur private investigator, the most trustworthy kind of private investigator, phoned the police and told them exactly where to search. The area had already been searched by helicopters and people on the ground, but Crawford was right. Davor was there. Davor was there. He says, Crawford says, he was reminded of another woman who vanished and was found in the aqueduct somewhere far away. Now, others say, okay, sarcastically like this, okay. They paint the crash in a very different light, a darker light, a darker night. It was nighttime the night of the crash. I don't know if I mentioned that.

But nighttime is dark. Well, what do you think about that? This is really good writing. I just want to say. It's detective. I'm on the edge of my seat. It is journalism. Now, nighttime is important to this case. To drive backwards, Gary would have needed to ignore do not enter signs and driven two miles the wrong way on the freeway without realizing it.

And despite the crash happening at night and it being a dark freeway, Gary's car's headlights in the aqueduct were found in the off position. Did he drive backwards down the highway for two miles with his lights off? Was he just fucking rad? Was he just fucking rad? Cause of death, Rad. Case closed. Cause of death, excessive rad. Last words, check this shit out. Okay. Now, are you suggesting, Robert, that this was a suicide, that he intentionally turned off his lights and decided he wanted to die in the raddest way possible without leaving a note or telling anyone?

It would have to be super fucking rad. Because again, the space that he had to get through those pieces of road into the aqueduct was like exactly as wide as a car. So he would have had to thread that needle. That's the thing you probably couldn't intentionally do. Like it's kind of thing that only with repeated attempts, could you do that perfectly? That's why I say his last words would have been check this shit out because he would have had to say, I'm going to do this in the dark backwards with my lights off and I'm going to thread that fucking needle. And if that was how he died, that rules. I mean, no regrets.

That probably rules. However, there's a mystery here. Is it possible something bumped the light switch when his car ramped an aqueduct, dropped three stories and plowed into the water at 70 miles an hour? Or is it even more possible that a CIA agent turned off the lights by habit because he just had a giant burrito and he was off his aid game? Didn't think of that. Your burrito theories are fascinating. Yeah, see, I have a theory that everybody really sucks at their jobs and doesn't like to work. And if you have like a big lunch, you're just going to fuck up your job the rest of the day, even if you're like a CIA agent covering up a murder.

Now, there's a few more damning parts of this case of this accident. Friends and family say that Gary worked as a long haul driver. He was a truck driver and they don't think he would have made this mistake. No matter how route, how rad it was, he wouldn't have been that tired from a long drive. He was used to it. Back up. I thought he was a screenwriter. He did other things before being a screenwriter.

Like he wasn't, he probably wasn't born. They're not saying he was currently working as a long haul truck driver. He had previously done that. Because the money he made from tracks should have set him up for life. I mean, it clearly did if his widow could offer a hundred thousand dollar reward for him. Yeah. In 1997 money, that's easily a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. Perhaps most damning, his widow points out that Gary's corpse was found still wearing a seatbelt and with his wallet in his back pocket.

She says he couldn't have died in this car accident because anyone who knew Gary knew he never wore seatbelts. And truck drivers, truck drivers never drive with their wallet in their back pocket. Checkmate, whoever is playing this game against me. And the wallet, you don't put your wallet back there because it screws up your back, right? Right. And only truck drivers know this and they never do it. They never forget. Because it lifts up one butt cheek.

There was actually a Seinfeld episode about this. It actually lifts up your butt cheek by like half an inch. Especially if you've, if like me, you've got a wallet with a lot of, you know, a lot of, a lot of simoleons in there. That's really good. I'm going to call, I'm going to call the widow and tell her about that Seinfeld thing. You're really on this up there. No, if I'm on a long car drive, if I'm on like a several hour road trip, I take my wallet out of my back pocket. That is a completely valid, valid theory.

It is. Otherwise you will get a dent in your butt. And if he's a truck driver and he's doing this, I don't know, eleven hour drive, he would certainly have entertained that. Now, more worrisome, it wasn't what they found at the scene, but what they didn't. Gary's gun and ammunition, which he always kept under the seat, like a normal screen. Obviously. Yes. Well, well, well, not wearing a seat belt ever was missing.

And even most worrisome is Toshiba laptop, which contains something that will change this entire story was gone. Tracks part two. Tracks part two, the notes and screenplay. And this is. That's 1990. Oh, it was a movie script. What Gary DeVore called the hardest hitting movie Hollywood will ever see the sequel to tracks. Loved ones close to Gary say, no, of course not.

But others like me and Sean say, fuck, yeah, it was. Not only that, but we know the title was tracks with three X's. That would have the hardest hitting screenplay Hollywood would have ever seen. Very erotic. Also, both of his hands were severed and missing. That's probably big too. Ladies and gentlemen from gladiator arena here in beautiful Dank Nob Kentucky. Poxco productions presents the supreme gladiators.

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