The Josh Innes Show - Rest In Power, Dawson

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

I was legit sad to learn that James Van Der Beek died today. It must have been tough to get typecast in that late 90's/early 2000's era. That said, he seemed to handle it well. The late 90's Teen wave was something. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, everybody, all up in us. Hello, how are you? Shitty Day today because James Vanderbeek died. That blows. Like, that one legitimately made me sad. I think I'm not someone that really gets sad over celebrity stuff because it's just not really not my thing. And, you know, we don't know these people and they don't know us.

And big picture, like, they don't give a shit about you and they don't give a shit about me. So, like, I find myself in that kind of debate with myself pretty frequently. Right? Like I'm kind of like, why do I care what happens to a celebrity when we all know a celebrity doesn't give two shits what happens to any of us? But that said, there are some people who I think are just extremely likable and they're not these kind of people that beat you over the head with their beliefs and they're not these kind of people who, like, basically let you know they think you're a piece of shit or that they like you or they don't tell you about who they're voting for. they don't tell you what they think about the fucking cops. They just seem like cool people who just want to live their lives and be cool people. And that's kind of why I think I like James Vanderby. Let me play a couple commercials and we'll continue.

Again, I have no idea what James Vanderbeak thinks of anything. And my opinion of celebrities or anybody isn't determined by, you know, who they vote for, what their politics are. Like, that's not really my thing. If you've listened to me for any period of time, you know that that's not really my thing. So that's not what that's about. But my point is that when you start, like, like you kind of base what you feel about certain celebrities

on whether or not you think they're just cool people, right? Like if you think they're decent people and if you think they're people who would tolerate you, right? Like that's why I think I like Sammy Hagar so much. Like Sammy Hagar just seems like he'd be a dude that would tolerate people if that makes sense. Like I don't know if that makes any sense at all. But Sammy Hagar seems like a dude who wouldn't,

judge you or disown you if you disagreed with him politically. Now we have no idea what Sammy Hagar believes politically or anything. The guy's in his late 70s. He seems to be a free spirit type of guy. I have no idea what Sammy Hagar believes about anything. But I feel like if you hung out with Sammy Hagar, Sammy Hagar probably wouldn't hate you. Does that make sense? Like I feel like he'd be willing to listen to what anybody I say. I mean, look at some of the people he's buddies with, right? Like you see some of the friendships he has. Like he seems like he'd be a guy that'd be pretty cool and wouldn't hate you for whatever reason.

We'd just dig you for you. And the conversations would never come down to controversial shit. You'd just be buds. You just hang out, drink tequila, have a good time, and he'd be a good hang. And that's kind of the vibe I got from James Vanderby. Right? Like he always just seemed like an affable guy,

like a likable guy. And I think part of that is because, like once you got past varsity blues and got past Dawson's Creek, the guy never really had like a megastar career. So he was never one of those guys that you'd think would be some sort of elitist asshole or some sort of snobby asshole

or some kind of guy that would... Like, he was always a guy that seemed like he was still trying to make it and was, you know, taking jobs that he needed to take to do it. He was in a funny thing. He was in a show called What Would Diplo do? And it was a whole TV show based on, I believe it was based on the tweets of Diplo. I think that's what the whole basis of this thing was.

Like they based a whole show on the various tweets of the DJ, the house music dude Diplo. And it was a funny fucking show. And he played Diplo on the show. And it was fucking hysterical. Like James Vanderbeek is a funny dude. Like James Vanderbik is a talented dude. What happened to this guy,

and this is not just me saying this because the guy died and whatever. Like I understand that sometimes people die and our first thought and our first instinct is to, you know, stroke this person and elevate this person to something higher than this person actually is. And that's not what I'm attempting to do here. But I think what really hurt him, and I don't think this, this is pretty much a fact. What ends up hurting this gentleman is that he's associated with this cultural phenomenon of the late 90s called Dawson's Creek. And it's, you know, a teeny bopper show. It's a teeny bopper drama. It's, it's the WB. It's a time and place. It's something that's easy for people to make fun of. It can be a punchline. And when you're

that associated with a show like that, it is hard to break away from that. It's hard to break away from anything when you're a part of such a cultural thing when you're a teenager, you're in your youth, whatever. That's tough. I mean, look at people. Now, they're child stars. A child stars have a balls difficult time trying to break out of this shit. He wasn't necessarily a quote unquote child star, right? Like James Vanderbeek, not a child star. James Vanderbeak was, you know, teen star, teen heartthrob, tiger beat dude. You know what I'm saying? Like that's what James Vanderbeek was is whatever. But there, you know, you hear the stories about the people that can never get out of being a child star and can't escape that life and end up dead, you know, from not from cancer,

you know, drugs, alcohol, whatever. But it's hard to break that, what's the word I'm looking for, stigma. It's hard to break that stereotype. I mean, just look at the people that were on Dawson's Creek. Michelle Williams broke out of it because Michelle Williams just said, fuck it, I'm going to avoid doing any sort of teeny bopper shit. And she got into deep acting and she was with Heath Ledger. And, you know, she's in shit like broke back mountain.

And she's in like deeper shit. She never like stuck with the stereotype. stereotype, right? Michelle Williams just did deeper shit. Katie Holmes never broke out of it. You know, Katie Holmes did stuff and Katie Holmes has had a decent little career, but Katie Holmes never full on broke out of being little Joey Potter on Dawson's Creek and she was adorable on Dawson's Creek, but she never broke out of it. She couldn't. She couldn't get out of being little Joey Potter. I think Joshua Jackson's done a solid job. He's had a solid career. He's done some cool shit. But it's not like Joshua Jackson.

Like, it's not like you look at Joshua Jackson and say this guy's had rock star career, but I think he's done a good job of kind of breaking free of the mold of all that shit. And he's kind of escaped being pigeonholed into that. But it was tough. Like, it's tough when you're doing that. I mean, Sarah Michelle Geller. Sarah Michelle Geller was Buffy. Did Sarah Michelle Geller ever really do anything outside of Buffy that you'd circle and go,

wow, that was game changing? No, she had a nice little career and whatever. Freddie Pringe Jr. Never able to get out of being teen heartthrob of the 90s. I would argue that outside of like the child stars of the 70s and 80s that like really got fucking nuts and we're doing drugs and everything, the teen stars. And I guess you could also look at some of these stories.

We're hearing about kids of the 2000s like child stars that I don't really know anything about. Like child stars of like Nickelodeon of the early 2000s. Or like an Amanda Binds who just seems to be bad shit crazy in her life went off the rails. But if you start thinking about like the ones who've had it difficult and not necessarily from the standpoint of drugs, alcohol may die type shit, but like had a hard time escaping teen stardom that the that kind of generation, like if you look at the generations of people that are teen icons, 99% of them can't break free of it, right? Like go to the 80s. Who were the biggest icons, the teen icons, the John Hughes icons of the 1980s, right? the rat pack people. And Emilio had a nice career, but like Emilio wasn't a gigantic star. I mean, Ali Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy.

Like the only one that really cut through and had like a really lengthy type of career, you could argue, out of all those guys in like the breakfast club, 16 candles, San Amos Fire was Rob Lowe. They all had nice little runs and did things. but none of them were as big of a star as they were when they were teens in those John Hughes movies. And the same thing happened to a lot of these people who were in teen shows. Because like really you had a couple of huge teen icon runs, right? You had mid-70s, early 80s.

Actually, not even really mid-70s. You had mid-80s. Like the early to mid-80s was a gigantic boom for teen icons. As I noted, that was the breakfast club. That was 16 candles. That was pretty in peasant. pink. Like, that was that era. And teen heartthrobs and teen stars were a very big deal in that era. And then you had that new wave hit, that kind of mid to late 90s wave where it was big again.

Teen icons, teen heartthrobs were big again. So what you ended up with is the Freddie Prynge juniors and the Dawson's Creek cast. And you ended up with Buffy because I mean the WB was such a huge thing. The WB, which eventually became the CW, like it was such a huge deal. And it created all these teen icons and these teen heart throbs. But none of them really emerged to have gigantic game-changing life-altering careers. They had nice careers. But none of them, and they found work and they worked steadily and all that, but they could not escape that. And there were a lot of people like that. Very few did. Very few people were able to come out of that. and become iconic, like, next-level legendary actors.

It's a tough thing to do. Like, Michelle Williams became a credible actress, right? Like, she became Oscar-level, credible actress. Outside of that, you're hard-pressed to find a lot of people that were able to do that. So when you look at, like, a James Vanderbeek, like, dude had a nice run. He played two iconic characters.

Like, you think about that. A dude that played two iconic characters. characters. Dawson and he played John Moxon. He played John Moxon and Varsity Blues and he played Dawson. Those are two late 90s iconic legendary characters. I do not want your life. Tell me who wins. Twitter drank beer because well Twitter drinks beer. Like it was varsity blues might be on my Mount Rushmore favorite movies. And again

that seems like recency bias. because James Vanderbeek just died. But when I tell you that Varsity Blues is among the movies that I watched probably more than any movie in my life, that would not be a lie. I think I've told you guys this before. I used to have a blank VHS tape. When I used to visit my grandpa, he was kind of a, you know, like a bootlegger. I don't know if you call him a bootlegger or a pirate. A bootlegger is someone, you know, that's, you know, fucking with alcohol and shit.

So my grandpa was a pirate Like he would pirate videos He would pirate cassettes Like that's what my grandpa did That was his M-O right Grandpa Greg Hayes So like he'd go to the video store New movie comes out hey Titanic's out

He'd go rent Titanic He'd put the rented VHS in one VHS player He would put the blank eight hour tape And the other He would hit play and record And we're off Like that's what we do

He would record the videos and that's how I would get videos. I had so many VHS tapes and movies that were just pirated, right? Like I started doing that. Like I would start watching movies on TV, hit play and record. I had like the 19-inch TV VCR combo. And I would just, if a movie I was wanting to watch was coming on HBO, whatever, bang, you put the VHS in, play and record, play and record, boom. And that's how I would get a lot of my movies.

That's how I'd get a lot of my skinna max. That's how I would get hot spring. Hotel. That's how I'd get my jerk off material. Hot Springs Hotel, Red Shoe Diaries, Playmate of the Apes, which was a wild one where there were big-titted women that had monkey heads. Emmanuel. Emmanuel in space. But that's what I did. I came from a long line of pirates and dumpster divers. Like, that was my life growing up as a kid. So my grandpa made me a VHS with two movies that I absolutely adore and to this day still adore. They are like Mount Rushmore epic movies for me. All right. One of those is varsity blues, which epic movie, one of my

favorites. That's number one. Number two was cruel intentions. And I had both of those on VHS. And I adored these movies. So what I would do is I would put these in the in the cassette player. I say cassette player. That's my like music. But I would put this VHS tape in the, you know, the 18 inch TV VCR combo, right?

I would put that tape in at night and I would go to sleep watching. I think varsity blues was first and cruel intentions was second. So I would fall asleep with that on almost every night when I'm, you know, 13, 14 years old. and over the course of the night, like in the middle of the night,

this shit would just start playing again and again and again. It would repeat. So I'd like stop, start again. Stop, start again. It would repeat over and over and over again. So like I'd wake up in the middle of the night and it'd just be on random parts of varsity blues. It'd be on random parts of cruel intentions.

So like, hey, you can put it anywhere or, oh, the whip crane, bikini and all that shit. It would just randomly be on these parts. And like that's why I think those two movies might be more. more burned in my brain than any two movies that I've ever watched in my life. Varsity Blues, Cruel Intentions. Those lived in my brain, those two movies. And they just never stopped. Like it just looped over and over and over and over nonstop.

And I love those two movies. So I love James Vanderby. Of course I love James Vanderby. Who didn't love James Vanderby? Who didn't love John Moxon? The Mox, the star quarterback of the coyotes, is at my window. Love that movie. Love Bud Kilmer.

Love tweeter. Love Billy Bob. Love Lance Harbor. I used to watch the dudes who were the announcers in the movie, you know, the, the, the, folksy play-by-play announcer guys, and I would watch them, and be like, shit, that's what I want to do with my life. I want to go be folksy, play-by-play announcer guy for the local high school football. Hot damn.

That's what Josh Innes wants to do with his life. Josh Ennis has dreams, and those dreams are being folksy, play-by-play guy, small radio station in Texas. God, I used to love that shit. Like they had the little, and I had the same headset as one of those guys, one of the play-by-play guys that were calling the West Canaan Coyotes games. Shit, dude. Like, I had, that was my aspiration.

Like, I would watch that. And instead of being, like, all into the football highlands. lights, although that's where I learned about, you know, there goes my hero, and that's where I learned about thunderstruck, and every little thing counts. Like the music in that movie was so fucking good. Varsity Blues was elite level entertainment for me, but more so than anything. More than the whipped cream bikini, more than the titties, I loved the old folksy play-by-play guys calling the game because I'm like, God damn it, that's what I want to do with my life. I mean, mocks. show them what you made of

knock off this here can show them what you made of come on Lance you can do it come on Johnny you can do it he's chicken damn right he's chicken God it's such a good fucking movie

again not recency bias because of James Vanderbeek dying I feel like I can make a legitimate strong case that varsity blues is the best football movie ever. That is 100% not recency bias.

I feel like Arsity Blues is the greatest football movie that has ever been made. At least I can make a case for it. There are other good ones. We know there are other good ones. You know? I mean, I don't,

the Mount Rushmore, you could talk about movies like any given Sunday. You could do um, um, um, little giants. You could do, uh,

the Friday night lights. You could do the program. There are a lot of great football movies. You got different categories or different levels of them because you can also have like, hey, there's the kid ones. There's the more adult ones, whatever. Varsity Blues.

I remember going to see that with my dad and my stepmom and we're, we did go see that. Titties. We had titties. We had football. We had a fucking kick-ass soundtrack. We had Dawson. We had Ali Larder.

We had whipped cream bikinis. We had puke and rallies. We had the fucking oop-de-oop. We had all that shit, hook and ladders. We had everything you could possibly want. It was a damn near perfect fucking movie. We had Bud Kilmer. I swear to God, if that needle goes anywhere near Wendell's leg,

I swear to God, I'll rip your arms. I'll beat you to death with him. God damn, that was such a good movie.