The Ringer-Verse - Ringer-Verse Recommends: August 2026

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Who says the late-summer schedule is slow? First, Ben Lindbergh talks to Ringer contributor Adam Nayman about a trio of recent big-screen releases: 'The End of Oak Street,' 'The Dog Stars,' and 'Coyote vs. Acme.' In addition to those three films, they discuss the summer box office, the year in movies as a whole, and the best live-action and animation hybrid movies. Then, Jomi Adeniran and Daniel Chin join for an animation roundup as they explore some superhero and 'Star Wars' stories that slipped through the cracks in a month headlined by 'Lanterns,' 'X-Men '97,' and 'Star Wars Zero Company.' They look at 'My Adventures With Superman' Season 3, 'Batman: Caped Crusader' Season 2, 'Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall' and 'Star Wars: Visions Presents—The Ninth Jedi.' Ben concludes with a listener recommendation and a bonus nomination.(0:00) Intro(8:48) ‘The End of Oak Street’(26:57) ‘The Dog Stars’(42:03) ‘Coyote vs. Acme’(58:08) ‘My Adventures With Superman’ Season 3(1:10:01) ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’(1:16:50) ‘Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall’(1:29:47) ‘The Ninth Jedi’(1:47:46) OutroHost: Ben LindberghGuests: Adam Nayman, Jomi Adeniran, and Daniel ChinProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna RamgopowellStudio Production: Remy Hernandez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor for the ringer, host of ButtonMash and RingerBers Recommends. And I'm here today in the latter capacity to deliver. Ringerverse recommends our edition for August 2026. This is the show where at the end of every month, we wrap up a bunch of nerd culture adjacent releases that came out in the preceding weeks that we didn't have time to devote a full. episode of the ringerverser House of R2. We've had our hands full. We had House of the Dragon wrapping up this month. We've had lanterns, of course. And so a lot of stuff has slipped through the cracks until now, of course. So we will be starting with the big screen and moving to small.

I will be joined by critic Adam Neiman, who pops up around the ringer. And we will be talking about three movies released in August the end of Oak Street, the dog stars in Coyote v. Acme, We will actually be recommending at least two of the three, but we will be talking about each of them in some depth. Only spoilers about the end of Oak Street, but we will warn you before we get to those. Then I'll be bringing in Jomea Denneron and Daniel Chin, and we'll do a little roundup of animation.

We've got a lot of D.C. to catch up with my adventures with Superman, season three. Batman Cape Crusader, season two, Batman Nightfall, the new TV movie, even a little bit of Star Wars on the, docket today because we have visions presents the ninth Jedi. So we'll get into all of that and maybe a little bit more today. As always, you can submit your own nominations to Ringiverse Recommends at gmail.com. So send your submissions for September. And next month, we'll be back, which with much more.

I'll be back at the end of this episode to pass along this month's listener submission and a bonus recommendation of my own. Talk to you then. But before then, let's roll out Adam. Well, I'm joined by critic, lecturer, author, ringer contributor, both to our website and to the Big Picture podcast, Adam. Adam, hey, how are you doing? I'm very happy to be here. Doing great.

Happy to have you. Are you ready to talk about some movies where dogs are in danger? That's the theme, I think, to all three. That would sort of seem to be the common denominator. Yeah, I'm, I'm here for it. This is definitely a check the dog, does the dog die.com situation. for anyone who is sensitive to pets in jeopardy, which does include me, but I made it through. I do it for content.

So we are going to talk about the dog stars, the end of Oak Street, and Coyote versus Acme, the latter two of which you wrote about for the ringer.com. What a great website. Before we do, just to set the scene, we're having a pretty decent summer box office, huh? We're record or near record box office totals. That's if we pretend that inflation doesn't exist. that there aren't fewer movies and fewer moviegoers paying more per movie. This has been quite a summer slate, including some of the movies, at least, that we're

about to talk about. You know, on the inflation topic, when I do this economics film class at UFT, I always asked them to guess the top 10 movies of all time adjusted for inflation. The one that not even the smartest kids, like they all get gone with the win, you know. No one ever gets Dr. Javago, four hours of Julie Kahn. Christy and beautiful hats, you know, slogging through the snow. Yeah. Pretty, pretty good movie. Yeah. But it really is, I think number, I don't have the list in front of me, but it like, it is number eight or nine. Yeah, it's not just modern blockbusters that

are long enough to need an intermission. It is funny how we, we all just kind of collectively pretend that the dollars are the same across eras because it leads to flashier headlines. Like, this might be the biggest summer blockbuster summer season ever. Aside from maybe 2013, it's going to come down to the wire these next couple weekends. But it does sort of seem like something for everyone, I guess, right? I mean, this season has largely delivered. Well, the Odyssey is even a kind of throwback to that era, too. You know, not a lot of people were invoking Ben Hur or Cleopatra or Spartacus because Christopher Nolan kind of trumps all of that as an artistic personality. And I think there's a lot of things with The Odyssey that are obviously very different. But, you know, those were the great

Hollywood spectaculars of the end of the first half of the 20th century, largely because the Bible or the Old Testament or Greece was a way to get around the censors. Funny that Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is less sleazy than the Ten Commandments was, you know, made 60 odd years ago. But certainly this summer, you know, the rhetoric about, you know, the movies are back, the box office are back. There's something for somebody is interesting. And I think all three of the movies this week have an interesting kind of industrial

angle to them. There's like the sleeper hits. There's the sort of high profile disappointment. And then there's the movie that, you know, Acme didn't want you to see. Yeah. Which depending on what, how you look at it is either a real success or a moral victory or, you know, underperforming. So lots of, lots of stuff to talk about.

Yeah. And amid all the movies are back. Box office is back. Buzz. Of course, the box office for the year is tracking to be the best since pre-pandemic times, which is encouraging. So that's been well covered on the big picture and elsewhere.

But, you know, we're all prisoners of the present and it's hard to know if we are being biased by our lack of perspective. But are you getting the sense that with Dune's Day still to come, this is going to be one of those years that we look back on

and say, that was a great year at the movies. You know, you had the kids blockbusters. You had Toy Story 5. You had a movie like the Invite, which was a great date-night movie for me personally and my way. wife on our anniversary, and we got to observe how much stronger our relationship is, hopefully. But, you know, just the biggest, I mean, Spider-Man, Dune, Avengers, there's just something really

running the gamut, right? So are you feeling good about movies right now? Do you recommend movies? Do I recommend movies? I always recommend movies. I, you know, I'm also wary of that idea. I like that phrase, you know, prisoner of the present. I mean, the years that sort of tend to be very famous in movie history are often made so with at least a little bit of hindsight, you know, 1939 or 1999. I think 2007, the internet was not what it was, but even that fall and, you know, whatever the digital version of Twitter existed or social media is like, oh, there will be blood, you know, country for old men, Michael Clayton, something's kind of going on. I mean, I think that this year has been, you know, a pretty good year commercially. I cannot say it's been a year for like deeply

innovative or amazing or aesthetically exciting movies any more than usual. Probably not less than usual. A couple of last last couple of years has been pretty grueling getting to the, getting to the fall. I mean, I don't know how much time of year has to do with it, but, you know, there's that self-fulfilling prophecy thing of the summer, which is like if you release a certain kind of movie in the summer, people bring certain expectations to it. It's the same with dump you area or the prestige movie season. I mean, the fall is the real false advertising where it's like if this is from a modest, you know, indie or indie quasi-distributor and it comes out in October must be a great movie. It's not.

You know, this is positioning. This is recency bias. This is trying to get movies on year-end 10 best lists. You know, we all know how that works. But I do think that this late summer, at least for someone who's writing about the movies and thinking about them, whether they're great or not, there's stuff to chew on, you know? And I'd include even a movie that I didn't love, like, the invite in that, where I agree there's kind of something to talk about. The movies are very talk-aboutable.

Or, to your point of prisoner of the present, we may just be in a discourse cycle where we need every movie to be chewy. Yes. Because we have so much demand to chew over, to chew over these things. But I think there's stuff in each of the movies we're going to talk about today that is worth it. I wouldn't throw any of them away. it that way. Well, we'll see how the critical reappraisal goes, but I look forward to the ringers 2036 10-year retrospective about the great year in Hollywood of 2026. And let's tackle our dog danger trilogy here. And we can just go in release order, start with a movie that premiered in

mid-August, the end of Oak Street, which was written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. I think the pitch is Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor versus Dinosaurs. And if you've seen, seen the trailers, you kind of have a sense of what the movie is, right? It becomes sort of a summer action flick sci-fi survival film, though there's a bit more going on there, perhaps, as you wrote in your piece for The Ringer. So how would you pitch this or recommend this to people? Well, I would say this is a movie that I feel, to a very small degree, I kind of failed it because there's an ending that I didn't give much credence to when I watched it, and even going back, in my review. I mean, we all do this sometimes

with a review or a podcast or, you know, pivotal moments in our personal lives where you go back and you cringe, you know, and you sort of go, I really could have gotten that more right. To me, End of Oak Street was a film that's very suggestively conflating like the Reagan 80s with the end of the world.

Not just because 40 years is the blink of an eye in terms of time, but that is kind of like, that's kind of where everything is peaking or depending on how you look at it kind of ending. And, you know, American culture, pop culture. I always love when there's these apocalyptic movies that take place in the past, you know, Ben Wheatley's high rise is another one where it's kind of like, it's the end of the world, but it's also

1975. So how do you square that with, you know, history? But I kind of got the idea that this movie was playing with that. And I thought those images of the humans and the dinosaurs running from the hills on fire was very resonant in light of the Los Angeles wildfires and climate change. And then I kind of said at the end of my review, ah, but the movie kind of stop short of being very thorny and has a cop-out ending. And I don't think that that's right. I think that that last shot, I don't know how spoiler deep we go, we're going to go. Yeah. But it's a tricky final image because it sort of suggests there really is a kind of loss and sacrifice. And it's not that the movie doesn't care about it. It's treating it offhand kind of as a trick,

you know? I think we can get into spoiler territory briefly at the end of our discussion of this movie. I will say that it's not a movie that you can spoil much of in terms of the setup. You know, a lot of things that we talk about here at the Ring ofverse, we're going into the lore and how do they justify this and what's the science or pseudoscience of it. Really, it's just suburban Michigan, part of a town gets plopped into the prehistoric age. And that's about all you know. You know, there's some wormholes involved, but we're not really interrogating deeply how this happens or why this happens. It happens. And then you have to roll with the punches

and the chomps. Another thing is that it is a period piece. It's set in 1982. So it's part of that whole sort of, you know, I guess freaks and geeks maybe started it, you know, prematurely. But the 80s nostalgia that we've all seen so much of the stranger thingsification of everything. And J.J. Abrams is a producer of this film, as he is of Batman Cape Crusader, which we we'll be talking about later on this episode. And so you might think this is going to be very much a sort of super eight homage to that era. It's not really, though, right? I mean, it has some of those touchstones and hallmarks and the fashion and all the rest of it. But in your reviews, you sort of suggested that it's mainly a contrivance or a convenience so that no one has cell phones,

right, which, you know, makes it harder to communicate and coordinate and figure out what's going on, where are we or when are we? But there's not too much emphasis really on, you know, this is an era that we are fully exploring or, or nostalgicizing. No, I didn't feel a lot of nostalgia at all. To me, the longing of the characters moved in the other direction. It's this longing for a future that they're worried is not going to happen. You know, when she goes into the garage and listens to Valerie by Steve Winwood. It's not a golden oldie. It's, you know, the driver's license that she's never going to get to have. You know, the kid looking in the picture book of the dinosaurs

is just sort of contemplating what it means to be extinct when he's 10. You know, there's no comfort in that period. And I do think that the lack of cell phones is refreshing. It's not like a major artistic statement or anything, but it's kind of nice that people can't just Google what's going on. To your point about the lack of exposition, it's nice to watch a movie where you're really not ahead of the characters. Yes.

You know, their speculations are kind of just about as good as ours. And they're both kind of like, they're not quite up to what's going on, but they're kind of reasonable. I guess we went back in time. Maybe if we went back, we can go forwards. We should probably look for some more of those flashing lights. I mean, I think that there's two ways to make a movie like this. There's where that spontaneity and offhandedness is because you really haven't thought things through. And then there's make this movie with a kind of a design.

I think David Robert Mitchell, I mean, I don't know, if you've talked with us on the show already or if it's worth talking about. I mean, as a get out of Jay, director, Jail Cart, this movie is so unusual. Because you wouldn't think the comeuppance for Under the Silver Lake, a movie I like, by the way. You wouldn't think that it's like after eight or nine years, it's like, here's a $90 million dinosaur movie. That's your reward for the Andrew Garfield Neo-Noir that no one saw. So it's strange. And yet, I would also say if you've seen it follows or under Silver Lake or Myth of American Sleepover, which I really like, his first movie. It's totally of a piece with these films. Despite the scale and the budget

and the dinosaurs, it's very similar to those three movies, I think. It follows with T-Rex instead of ghosts. Yeah. Yeah. It follows with T-Rex and it goes or just like suburbia as something that's kind of pressurized and anxious and a time of life that feels like it could go either way or that it's going to end. To me, that's what Myth of American Sleepover and it follows or getting at. And then under the Silver Lake, the Andrew Garfield character is 35 and feels old. Like, it's 2000 and whatever, and he's still listening to Monster by R.E.M. and

dreaming about Kurt Cobain. I think he's very good with the way people measure themselves against pop culture, which is one thing that's kind of going on in this movie. I also think it's probably a good sign that half the people I've talked to about this movie think

it's really mean-spirited and half of them think it's really sentimental. Because I think he kind of picks and chooses what parts of his arsenal he's using. I mean, the great moment in the movie where insert name here gets chomped. Yes. The audience I saw it with went nuts. And I think about half of them were laughing at it.

And I think about half of them were horrified and feeling terrible. I mean, that's the mark of a filmmaker who's got you engaged. Yeah. Yeah. And the effects are all strong and convincing, I think. and I enjoyed our current understanding of what dinosaurs actually looked like, very feathery, right? There's the scene where one of the kids, you know, there's kind of like this Jurassic Park style. I mean, they look up a dinosaur reference book that was from the 80s, right?

And they're sort of the old school lizard-like dinosaurs, a little bit different from the reality that they confront as we understand dinosaurs to have been. And the movie's not extremely long. It's an hour 40, including credits. you know, even so there is some repetition of why, we have to venture out of the house for some contrived reason, right? Sometimes to save the dog. The dog is actually quite capable on his own, but nonetheless, we have to get these folks out of their house so that they can be in jeopardy and they can be attacked by flying dinosaurs and slithering prehistoric creatures and the dinosaurs we know and love, right? just, you know, all the usual suspects and characters are here from the prehistoric kingdom. So there is a little bit of rinse and repeat and run and survive in many cases,

not in all cases, until the ultimate escape. But it didn't overstay. It's welcome too much for me. Well, the thing about the first Spielberg Jurassic Park especially, which we're not going to criticize, but just as an observation, it's kind of caught between like these things are abused. beautiful and these things are scary. You know, that's always the Spielbergian thing, you know, slack jawed awe, but also like run, you know, and I think one of the reasons I like War of

the World so much is that wonder is very short-lived and then it's just two hours of run, you know, this movie is not interested in the dinosaurs being beautiful. It's not interesting that they're moving in herds or, you know, because it's not about science. It's a supernatural or quasi-scientific phenomenon. on and it treats them even more like the Jurassic Park movies did just as like animals. You know, they're like rooting around in garbage cans and jumping over fences and hunting the neighborhood cats.

And they're kind of like raccoons. And I thought that that was funny until, as you say, it gets a little bit repetitive. You don't want to criticize a filmmaker when he's cooking because the set pieces in this are extremely well staged and designed. I mean, as choreography and things that are lost from so many green screen movies, you know, like actual camera blocking and stuff, you know, and movement in space is very good. But I got a little tired of it. And then I was glad it didn't wear it.

It's welcome. And then again, in my capacity as a, you know, film critic, I kind of failed the ending, which I don't think is a huge miss, but I would have to have it back. Well, let's talk about that. So we'll enter some spoiler territory here and we'll put a timestamp in the show notes if you want to skip ahead to our next movie and not hear anything about the end of the end of Oak Street. But tell me what you mean about the last shot and what you're ruing and what you may have missed. Well, I didn't think through, I mean, to me, you have this

closing news montage, which is, you know, two years later. And it's like, remember when this crazy thing happened? We haven't figured it out yet. And I don't mind that that's tossed off. I mean, I think it's kind of funny. And you have the family is now intact because of this substitution that's been made in time. Basically, they find a way to one family. And, you have, member who's dead is replaced by an alternate timeline version of said family member, but also another character in the film who managed to make it out of the alternate timeline is now greeting a second version of themselves. Yes.

They went back and saved that person too. And so there's this little subtext of self-interest, which is that the only people who they seem to, the survivors seem to pluck out of the doom timeline where, you know, their close friends, the only people they could reach in time. Yeah. But also this idea that, like, there are alternate versions of some other characters in this movie who we know and like and who didn't make it. Yes. died horribly.

And the family has had to be rebuilt kind of out of the corpses and the dissolution of the earlier iteration. And it's also such a cheat to solving the domestic problems. Yes. And I'll just say that, you know, because we actually try and read films as, you know, images and ideas, not just plot. the way it puts this across with a particular framed photo in the foreground of one of the characters and some dinosaurs in the background doing something very funny, it's it's quite snarky, you know, or it has a bit of a nasty grin on it. And I think all I mean by getting it wrong is I think I said in my review that this movie comes right up to the edge of being as kind of dark or as, you know, ambivalent as you expect from the guy who made It Follows, which has such an open ending. Even under the Silver Lake has an interestingly open ending. I found this ending kind of closed and crowd pleasing and I don't think I was right.

I think it's tricky. Yeah. I read it that way initially to some degree too where it seems to have tied everything up neatly and very powerful. and almost sort of a package to spawn a franchise if it's successful and maybe doesn't really wrestle with all the implications there. But maybe there's just enough of a subtext there that it doesn't spell it out, right? Because so there's this relationship. George is played by Ewan McGregor. Denise is Anne Hathaway. She is chafing against the bounds of this relationship. She is squirled away in the basement writing about a character who is longing to escape and might

actually do it. And maybe she will too. And, you know, we learned that Greg has left, he's lost his job, right? He's hiding things from her. He's taking little nips from a flask in the garage, right? And so they're each hiding things. And then they get through this experience, or at least one of them does, they get back on the other side of it. And it seems as if all is now well, right, that the minor relationship issues, it's

almost as if Denise has kind of, you know, she's gotten to exercise her authorial inclinations. She's written a memoir or a book about this experience, but also she seems to have realized that, well, everything that was bothering me before about this marriage kind of pales in comparison to running from your life from dinosaurs. So really, maybe in the end, it's all okay, and we can just sort of sweep that stuff under the rug. And so, you know, maybe the idea is, well, that really does put things in perspective. And we don't realize how good we have it, right? Or maybe it's, you know, this is not what we encounter in real life, typically wormholes and transportation to prehistoric times. And maybe we all lull ourselves into thinking things are fine. And I can put up with this or that because of this other thing.

So is your inference, then your read of this at the end that all is not necessarily well and peaceful and wholesome in this relationship? Well, a movie I thought of while watching this, and this is a high compliment for me, is signs. by Amnite Chamelan, who's my favorite crazy-pants director, because he's a brilliant technician, and he's kind of a lunatic, and his movies are wonderful. Signs is a movie that seems to suggest, I think there's a statute of limitations after 23 years of spoilers on signs. Sines is a movie where it's kind of like,

aliens will come so that you can get your faith back, and it is a one-to-one cause-and-effect ratio of just, you know, this, you know, Mel Gibson, Mel Gibson finds God again, And this was kind of the design all along. And we don't really think in signs about anything but the farmhouse because Champlain shrinks the whole world in the invasion to the scope of the farmhouse, which is very effective. It's like Night of the Living Dead with aliens. Here, I think, the movie is pretending to do that where it's saying, well, this giant cosmic conflagration has sort of gotten this family back together again.

And they've rediscovered their faith in the family unit, except the dad is not really the dad. Yeah. You know, where he's the dad minus all the experiences that, you know, the rest of his family have had in trauma. And their best friend is now basically a doppelganger of herself. There are two of her. Yes. And she has basically doubled and multiplied in lieu of her family who she could not save. So the unit has been reassembled, but it has been reassembled in this kind of mutant version with no sense of a real return to order.

And it's not the family's destiny that the unit has been. cares about. They're just kind of random collateral damage, you know, they're just one story out of out of a hundred that this movie could have looked at. I don't, I don't think the movie is built in a way that obliges you to see it too deeply. For instance, for interest, for example, there are no conversations on the couch like in signs about whether God is real or not, you know, signs is trying to be metaphysical. I think End of Oak Street is trying to be like a Joe Dante entertainment. But David Robert Mitchell is very interested in ambiguity and disappointment and anti-climax, I would say. Like under the Silver Lake is a great example of anti-climax where he finally unravels the conspiracy and it's just like not impressive.

And he is still left with himself and his problems. So I guess, you know, the oturist in me is thinking whether this is a great movie or not or whether he's a great filmmaker or not. I don't think I'd go that far. He's consistent in whatever genre he's working. in or whatever budget level he's working in, he's interested in leaving things slightly ajar. And I admire that in a $90 million, $95 million movie because not all filmmakers who have that opportunity do that. So I just want to give credit where it's due. There is a dark matter aspect, a show that we'll talk about on this program next month of what does it mean to have

a particular family unit when there's an infinite number of said family units and they're all identical up to a certain point, and then they branch out because we are in spoiler territory. So it is Greg who meets his demise in the past Ewan, who's this kind of wholesome, sort of hapless character. You know, he's very much, let's look on the bright side and things will work out whether or not he believes that. But in the end, does prove his medal and saves his family and saves Denise to his detriment. And then when she and the kids get back to the present, they save the alternate timeline, Greg. but not the alternate timeline kids, right? She just keeps, so she essentially dooms the alternate timeline versions of her kids to death

or at least to fighting dinosaurs while saving the ones that she saved and then bringing back the other father. Is he bothered by the fact that his kids in his timeline are still in prehistory and possibly dead? Is she bothered by the fact that this is actually a different Greg when you get right down to it? We don't really know. We don't get much sense of that in the movie, which just sort of ends at that point.

But it left us asking those questions. And that's probably by design, even if it doesn't answer them for us. So I did appreciate the ambiguity of that ending. All right. Let's transition to the dog stars, which we will probably spend a little less time on. But we're sticking with live action here. A lot of name brand creatives associated with this film. This is directed by Ridley Scott, his first since Gladiator 2.

written by Mark L. Smith, known for The Revenant and Twisters, among other movies. It's based on the 2012 book of the same name by Peter Heller. Big name cast, Jacob Allerty, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce. Definitely less than the sum of those parts, it seems safe to say, because that has all the makings of some sort of prestige hit. This movie bombed at the box office this past weekend after largely being critically panned. I think it has some redeeming aspects, but what was your overall view? I mean, I think Ridley Scott has become an extremely interesting piece of contested territory for tourists, you know, because for a long time, he's seen as kind of, you know, a visionary and then kind of a soulless, you know, by the assignment hack.

And now the pendulum has kind of swung back around for the simple fact that he gives great interviews. about being ahead of the curve. He's now referring to himself not so much as a filmmaker as an influencer. He has this great way of meeting critics head on and saying, you know, fuck you. My movie's historically inaccurate or if you don't like it, you know, I know better. He gives great copy. And he's also incredibly prolific and he has phenomenal stamina. I mean, we should say that as the director of the dog starts, he's 88 years old.

Yeah. So he is a living link to different eras of film history. I mean, he doesn't just work in intellectual property. He built some of the really sturdy ones, you know, the alien franchise and and Blade Runner. And I think as of some as a Ridley agnostic or skeptic, I would concede he has a great eye. I mean, compositionally, he's a major filmmaker. And he does landscapes and scale and scope really well. And I thought the first five minutes of this movie, which were Jacob Allorty piloting his Cessna over what's left of Denver, I don't think it's, the basketball.

Arena isn't actually NBA branded, but I was like, did Nicola Yokic die? Did he make it? Yeah. Did he make it out? I hope so. But, you know, he's great at, and I hate this word, because it's not a word for critics, but I mean, he's great at world building. The problem is that inside that world as much, and I know some people, some friends of might really like this movie, they're like, well, it just kind of wanders around the world and people talk about their feelings, and it's kind of a throwback, and it's spacious. I just found it as a, as a riff on the Western, it's so boring and on the beat and predictable. And I found most of the characters in their exchange is kind of laughable.

And I found that it was oddly reactionary, or not even oddly reactionary, kind of unapologetically reactionary. Like, if your cozy fantasy is that you are with Josh Brolin playing poker with meaningless stacks of money and then every so often you get to murder people who cross your boundary line with the millions of guns you have stored in your armory and night vision goggles. And hey, who am I to say that that's not fun? This is a great fantasy. This is a homesteader, trad fantasy where Margaret Qualley is waiting for you in a baseball cap and jeans to listen to stomp, clap, hey music on headphones like she's in Garden State, you know.

Who am I to argue with this, except I just didn't have a very good time? I do like how insane the film goes in the home stretch. This sort of like strange quasi-cubric spasm where they end up in this airport presided over by Margaret Pauly, who I guess represents what the false. And Jenny, sorry to say Alison Jenny. The false promises of airlines, of madmen, of the 60s, of civilization. Yeah. And of course, you know, the best thing to do at that. point is get back to the Mennonite community.

And, you know, have barn dances, which is sort of the vision that this movie is putting across. I guess I don't think Ridley Scott cares at all about any of these things. And maybe he doesn't have to. But his detachment into just pure, get the shot and move on, it does not do much for me. And if it does much, if it does something for other people and they see this as classicism or, you know, this is his version of Shane or something, I mean, go for it. with God. I just thought it was really lousy. Of course, there is always that tension in post-apocalyptic

stories of, you know, do you want to sort of, I mean, it could be some kind of immigration allegory, but but do you want to close ranks and distrust everyone? Or do you have to open your heart at some point? Because what are we, you know, if we're treating everyone as cockroaches, right? Which is how Josh Brolin refers to any outsider. Well, we've lost our humanity in the process, right. And so Higg is of course greatly dissatisfied. You know, he likes being alive. Well, usually, not always. He's not so sure on that point, actually. But he is bonded with with, with, with Bengley, this, this hardliner, this ex-military guy. And they do have very different world views. And Higg is much more sensitive and he misses his wife and he wants to connect. And so he wants

to go to Grand Junction where he has heard a radio signal and it's, It's possibly illusory, but he wants to find out. And, you know, ultimately, I think the movie suggests that there is some merit to his approach, even if his hopes are dashed because he gets to Grand Junction and finds that it is this incredible, yes, Kubrickian, lynchian sort of nightmare world. But also, he just happens to stumble across Margaret Quali and find a new life partner. So that works out nicely for him. But, you know, it's very conventional. I mean, it feels like the book is from 2012.

It feels like it is of 2012, right? Where we were inundated with the Walking Dead and just so many post-ocococlactic stories. And this just hits all the beats, right? It's just the abandoned cityscape after the virus and, you know, the roving bands of marauders, right? Which is one of my peeves from post-apocalyptic fiction is that even if everyone's dead, suddenly, you know, no matter where you live, even if you're out, in the wilderness, right, which they are, you can't walk five feet without stumbling across some kind of cult or tyrant or people, you know, roving band of murderers, right? And we get multiple roving bands of murderers in this movie, even though they're largely trying to just

keep to themselves. So that bugs me a bit. Well, he manages, he does the thing where he just restages Black Hawk down. Yes. Except now they're white. And so I guess, I guess the scales are balance. Black Hawk down is one of the more spectacularly racist or at least, you know, problematic action movie. You know, action movies are around the beginning of the 21st century. People said so then, you know, it's no less true now. But that idea that human life is precious, I wouldn't say it's contradicted interestingly by the movie, but it's certainly contradicted by the movie because, you know, Josh Brolin goes into night vision sicko mode. And, you know, Scott is interested in how cool arterial spray looks like.

under black light, and it does look cool. But I compare the way this movie handles that to something like 28 years later. The Bowden Temple, I was thinking the same thing. Both of them. A guy in Alex Garland, who I think is often susceptible to fetishizing the apocalypse, whether it's happened or happening, those movies are so actually about these things. They're about family and community and sacrifice. Both 28 years later's movies are about this incredible memorialization.

of the dead through those osuaries, you know, through those bone temples. And they also have like spines being ripped out and shit. Like they're super cool, gory action horror movies, but they're, I think, actually humane and contemplative and funny and have showmanship in them. I found that Ridley's version of this, even the helicopter propeller blade decapitation or the airport lounge stuff, which again, I appreciate how weird it is. Yeah. It's kind of, it kind of sags for me. It's sort of enervated. And I don't want to say the problem is the actors or an actor in particular because, you know, I too stand in awe of how long and Lakey Jacob Allorty is and seems like a super nice guy. But Higg as a character, his optimism, his dreaminess, his melancholy is just so wrote.

And the great missed opportunity to the movie I thought is you have Josh Brolin playing a kind of like live by his wits koot. and you have Guy Pearce doing the same thing. Guy Pearce is Margaret Qualley's father, whose name is actually pops. And I'm like, how is there no Josh Brolin Guy Pearce Summit? Right. In this movie,

it does take a while for their arcs to come together, but I'm like, this is the missed opportunity. If you can give me Brolin and Guy Pearce just talking about like how to best cut down trees and, you know, short shuck a shotgun,

I would love it. They had similar grouping habits and hygiene and hairstiles, very her suit, but we did not get much direct interaction between them. Unfortunately, that was a lost opportunity. Yeah, it does feel, again, like it just hits all the usual post-apocalyptic beats. You know, I think we're overdue for planes in post-apocalyptic movies. It's always seemed to me like that was a great idea waiting to be done as it was done by the book, where this is a way to get around a little bit, you know.

Surely some pilots will have survived and could just hop in a Cessna be a bit more mobile. That plus the dog, which of course gives you the instant investment and the emotional connection, at least in theory. It's much more violence than the book. I think a lot of the violence in the movie is added. It's given the Hollywood treatment. You know, there are some roving bands of violent marauders, but not so much the heavily tattooed out of their minds cult aspect. When he comes across Seema, the Margaret Quali character, again, they're driven away from their home by another. just band of cavalry essentially. In the book, it's just a drought and they have to move to find water, right? Jasper has a different fate in the book.

The Erie Airport or the Grand Junction Airport scene, which we've been talking about, which is so out of step with the rest of the movie, that's not really in the book. That's a creation of this movie, too. So there's a little bit of, you know, it has that contemplative, moody aspect. And I almost wish it had gone further in that direction, maybe, instead of sort of splicing together that DNA from the book with the all-out action fest that they incorporated? This screenwriter is responsible for a movie that I really dislike, which is The Revenant. And one thing I dislike about it beside the fact of who made it and how he makes movies,

I'm not an eniori 2 guy. Is it took this really lean, kind of mean-spirited story of revenge. And I don't know how much if it's the writer or the director, but like the Revenant is very sentimental and politically correct for a movie set and about what it is. is where it's like, well, he's a good reason to kill this guy. I mean, the reason that DiCaprio character has to go after Tom Hardy in the movie is very different than in the original story. And we constantly see these scenes that show what a good guy he is along the way. I feel like that violence and that depravity sit very much at odds with how sentimental this guy's

writing is, not the novel, the screen, the screenplay, you know? And then you've got Ridley, who is sort of underrated as an all-time kind of gore guy. He's an insane gore filmmaker. Prometheus and the counselor and Alien Covenant. So, you know, Gladiator 2, he loves him at decapitation. So I guess these elements, I wish there was more interesting tension between them. But it is a movie where you kind of have like tender making out under the stars and then also like 85 guys getting shot in the head at the same time. Yes.

So I guess there is some, I will say he still has some range. And I should also say that we're talking about candidates for re-canonization, it will not be me reevaluating the dog stars because I have a lot of other movies that I would rather watch or re-watch. Do not be surprised if a bit like the counselor, though not as enjoyable to me as the counselor, I think this movie will be in for some kind of critics missed the boat because the reviews are so bad and the box office is so bad. There's a real critical instinct to seize on that and praise it. So it will happen. Yeah, I'll stop short of praising it, but I won't condemn it either. I won't pile on. I enjoyed some aspects of this movie. I was not bored in the theater necessarily. I just felt as if I had seen all of this to some degree before. But it's, you know, a kind of competent version of some of those things. I enjoyed some of the scenery and some of the wilderness and some of the music, etc. So there are some reasons to see this, but don't all run out to see it in theaters, which. people already have refrained from doing. But I tend to think, you know, if almost everyone's dead,

then there will be enough resources to go around. And we won't need to form bands of tattooed cults roving around the landscape because we'll all have plenty. There won't be as much pressure to squabble over the remaining resources. But maybe that's just me being a Hig, being over-optimistic and looking at the bright side. I will say that I do think the movie is quite reactionary and backwards-looking. but it does make sure to throw up, throw in towards the end a scene where the dialogue is basically like, what can we do to help these sick people?

Yeah. Here's some vaccines. It's true. Yes. Measles is an issue for the met and makes. Please take these vaccines and most of your small problems will go away. Yes. So I think that when the novel, I mean, not to talk too much longer about dog stars, but it is interesting that the novel in 2012, there's nothing new about, you know,

influence a pandemic end of the world stuff. There's so many sci-fi narratives about that. The movie does become interestingly pressurized post-COVID in a way, right? And that's where I think Scott has always had some instinct for what the mainstream is interested in and for kind of feeding off of it. So it's not so much credit where it's due as just that is part of the text now that plays a little differently than if this movie had come out in 2015, where the idea of that loneliness is like more hypothetical than experience. That's all. Well, finally, let's talk about a movie that has not been in the can since 2015,

but almost Coyote versus Acme, directed by Dave Green, written by Sammy Birch with story input from James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, of course, adapted from Ian Fraser's 1990 New Yorker humor piece, starring Will Forte primarily, along with many other recognizable voices and faces. including John Sina, who commits to the bit, as always. And this is, of course, the movie that has been waiting to be seen by the world for a few years now after it was shelved by David Zaslov and was ticketed for a tax reimbursement until it was finally bought and distributed.

And here it is, and we are finally able to see it. So was it worth the wait? Are you happy that Coyote v. Acme has been freed from the vaults? Yeah, I had a very good time at this movie. I wanted to have a good time. I'm a Wiley Coyote truther. I believe he is as good a candidate for, you know, the great fictional American hero as any. You know, he's an amazing character.

And the movie, I think, understands that. I took my daughter to see it at an early morning press screening. So part of the fun was having her sit in a room with a bunch of other people in Toronto. And I'm like, see, I'm pretty well with. Justin, look around, listen. Now, this is your younger daughter? My older, my older daughter is 10. Okay, because I was debating.

I went alone to the press screening. I have an almost five-year-old daughter. And look, it's cartoon violence, but it is very, very violent from a cartoon perspective. So I think I will wait a little longer. If you're wondering about the kid friendliness here, yeah. Well, you know, violence where, you know, no one gets hurt. No one dies. Yeah.

But she loves Wiley Coyote. And, you know, at the other end of the generational spectrum, you know, my mom is the reason I love White Lake Coyote. We used to talk about them all the time when I was a kid because we just talked about how, you know, failure is noble and to fail is human. And, you know, I'll spare you the deep. I put it in the ringer piece. I'll spare you the deeper exegesis on this. But, like, if you like the roadrunner, you're a sociopath. Like, that's the, that's the test for sociopathies, do you like the roadrunner?

So the great compliment I can give to this movie is it actually redeems the Roadrunner just slightly in a way that breaks those Looney Tunes rules. You know, there's a lot of debate over whether the creators of the Roadrunner and Coyote actually wrote rules about the cartoons. The writer Michael Maltese said that never happened. Chuck Jones said it did. But one of the cardinal rules is that like the Roadrunner cannot be aware of the coyote's presence and can do nothing to harm him except by beeping. That's just the indignity of it is that the. the roadrunner doesn't care. Yes.

And I thought that in this movie, they broke that rule by giving the roadrunner a moment of recognizance and caring. And yet, it was still so on point and in tone that I didn't just forgive it. I was moved by it, which might make me a bit of a sucker. But I thought it was genuinely sweet. I thought so too. Yeah, it's meditation on male friendship and isolation and loneliness. And in the end, they need each other really, you know.

Everyone needs a nemesis. Absolutely. It reminded me of the end of the Alan Moore killing joke. You know, like these, did this. And yet, you know, also played very lightly. And I thought that one of the things about this movie, and this is where it's not just the characters and the Looney Tunes, but the people who actually made it, you know,

Sammy Birch, the screenwriter and Dave Green, the director, they don't just understand the material. Like, they have a really good sense of not too much. There's a lot of things in this movie where there's, there's less than you would have thought. They hold back a little bit. There's a lightness. I don't want to call it subtlety,

but a fair amount of restraint, you know, from the running time on down. It's the first Warner's live action movie that also doesn't feel purely mercenary, right? Like, whatever you say about Space Jam, that movie is just basically telling you at all times. It's like, this is selling you something,

selling you Michael Jordan, selling you the NBA, selling you the Looney Tunes. This one inverts that equation. It becomes about corporate exploitation of resources and talent. And it does it with a light touch, but it's a real subject. You know, it's about something. Yeah.

Yeah, you're wondering how much mileage can you get out of this gimmick of we're suing Acme Corp for exploiting cartoon characters and delivering shoddy products. And it turns out more than enough mileage for this movie, I think. And it does continue to reveal added layers of, ah, yes, we can mine more humor for. from this and also maybe some significance. I like the central performance. I almost always enjoy Will Forte, but there's that notion that if you act with Muppets, you either have to play it straight like Michael Cain in a Muppet Christmas Carol

or just become a Muppet yourself, more or less, like the late Tim Curry in Muppet Treasure Island. And Forte, I mean, he's an animated character, even in live action often, but also is able to play that pathos and that sort of insecurity. You know, he's going up against the John Sina high-powered corporate lawyer. He is out of his depth.

He doesn't even mean to be the one who's launching this lawsuit. He's been snookered into it by Wiley Coyote. And, you know, it's some of the best Albuquerque content not made by Vince Gilligan, right? There's a real sense of place to the desert and the town and just a lot of great gags. But then there's also, of course, the medicarets. narrative, right? Which the movie nods at and winks at, obviously it was made prior to the whole saga of it being shelved for years and no one knowing whether it would see the light of day.

But there's enough in there, the whole, you know, warners as Acme kind of analog, right? Where coming to this as an audience that is aware of the backstory, and I would recommend while we're recommending things, my colleague Alan Siegel's oral history of the film published at the riner.com last week. there's all that baggage, right? Which the movie, I think, to its credit, and, and, you know, it doesn't heavy-handedly nod at that and sort of, you know, it's positioned as the underdog and the fan favorite. And here we are. We finally got a premiere after all. And so you can't help but root for it. But it's not kind of pandering to that, you know? It's almost like, it's like when Conan had the whole,

you know, late night saga, right? Or, I don't know. It's like sometimes you're really rooting for someone, but then they lean into that bit and it's nonstop that. Like Colbert's farewell shows, right? All right. We're all rooting for Colbert, but then we're really hammering this hard, you know, where he's speaking truth to power and he's being silenced and all this. And maybe we're going to that well one too many times. There's nothing really along those lines in Coyote versus Acme except what we bring to it, right? And the interpretation. So I enjoyed that it works on that level, without really signaling that, I suppose, really explicitly. Well, no, the history of the Looney Tunes is of breaking the fourth wall, right? They demolish that thing. And it's not that Disney never did or that the Looney Tunes only did, but that's how I was think of them historically is, you know,

Disney is the studio that builds fairy tales and maybe personalizes them a little bit, but for the most part, it's the official story. And then Looney Tunes is, you know, the animator is trying to kill us. or Peter Lorry, you know, works at the same studio we do. So that's a historical truth of those cartoons that they break the fourth wall, they bite the hand that feeds, they expose their own mechanisms. And again, also the great Lutututons are always about failure. So I feel like even if this hadn't happened with Zazlov and the movie,

the filmmakers understand this in a way that's resonant. But as you say, it's all recontextualized in a way that I think artistically is to the movies benefit and makes Wiley Coyote sort of the face of the underdog in a larger way. And I try not to buy into that stuff too much. You know, I don't think there's any such thing as like the duty to see a movie. I didn't like how this got framed on social media where it's like, you know, you owe it to the world to go see this movie. It's like, no, I hope you go see it.

And I'm looking forward to it. But you know, like you don't win or lose by doing that. I think that Warner Brothers or Warner Discovery or whatever. we want to call it. There's been a lot at stake with it this year. And it is kind of the plaintiff or the defendant, depending on how you look at it, because it's currently hanging in the balance between like a rock and a harder place. You know, evil and more evil, depending on what you want to say about the companies that may be lobbying to buy it.

There's something at stake with that catalog and what it means. If I'm someone who happens to think the Looney Tunes are the most valuable part of that, there's going to be someone else for whom that's Batman or someone else for whom that's, you know, whatever else. So those courtroom scenes at the end, it's not what they're about. The movie isn't allegorizing the possible sale of Warner Brothers. I mean, it can't because it was made in 2003. But that stuff plays too, not just as why like Coyote going to capture the roadrunner, but it's just like, who do these things belong to? Intending that this isn't all a business is naive and facile. And I think with the internet, we're all kind of past that, but still kind of

caring about it as a business and thinking about the fact that some actors or some entities are better than others, or maybe just that some entities are more malevolent than others. It's a good thing to be, it's a good thing to be reminded of. So I like the film and think it's good. I'm glad that it exists. I'm glad that it was released. All hail, catch up entertainment, whoever they are. I don't know if they're good people or not, but good for them for buying this particular, you know, for buying this particular movie. But I don't know how you felt about this.

I will say, inserting the old Chuck Jones cartoons into this, that is some risky business. Because in 15 seconds of those, you're like, that's genius. Yeah. So you are setting a very high bar by putting those things in your movie. I think it was a good idea because I think this movie is enough in the spirit of them that it doesn't embarrass itself. But that's risky to do that. And, you know, good, good for them. I thought that worked well too.

And I thought the movie works because it's not kind of a naked bid to rehabilitate this IP and get people into the Looney Tunes again, right? And spawn sequels. And yet because it doesn't try to do that, it had that effect where, as I was watching, I was really reminded of how central Looney Tunes was to my childhood media consumption and has really been absent, at least in my media diet of late. And yet every reference was landing for me. And I wouldn't have even thought that I knew as much about this universe as I did.

But every little inside Joker callback, you know, it wasn't too Easter egg heavy. But when it was, I got what it was going for. And I remembered just the many happy hours that I had spent watching these characters in cartoons. And it brought it all back to me. And showing that old footage was one last link to that as well. The circle back at the beginning about how we talked about, showing in the movie or not showing the movie to our kids. I was very happy a couple days after the movie.

You know, my older daughter likes to write notes sometimes, you know, like kids do. She handed me one that said, I have a limited number of signs, which was the hardest I laughed in the movie. You know, they find a way to have the coyote communicate without breaking the edict of his. It's a good guy. I mean, it's such a torture in the original cartoon that the coyote has a snout and cannot scream, You know, and the roadrunner who can talk just says the same fucking thing over and over again. You know, the beep, beep, beep, beep.

Not beep, meep, canonically, beep, beep, evidently. Everyone says beep, beep, yeah. We all have those people in our lives who are like that. You know, they just say beep beep over and over again. Yeah. But I thought that the limited number of signs was extremely funny. The first 20 minutes, I don't know if you agree, they're great. And then after that, it's good.

But those, that, that opening passage that's very coyote heavy, I thought was, was wonderful. Lastly, I didn't prep you for this. But if we were doing a big pick style top five animation, live action crossovers, I mean, this would make mine probably. But what else would be, you know, you mentioned Space Jam. I know you're a fan of Looney Tunes back in action, right? There's, of course, who framed Roger Rabbit, you know, what else would you want to name check there on that pantheon? I think the nine or ten-year-old version of me that looked at box art would pick Cool World. Uh-huh.

Had the sexy Kimbasinger cartoon, which I think was very post-Gessica Rabbit, you know. You know, so Cool World, Who Frame Roger Rabbit. I think the Louvre scene and Loosene Tunes back in action is the best where they're jumping into the Dolly paintings. Right. It's, you know, what qualifies how much animation do you have to have, I mean, Mary Poppins or Elf, you know, are. Paula Abdul and MC Scat-Cat-Cat in music video form. A good one is, speaking of Joe Dante,

also the third segment of the Twilight Zone movie where the psychic kid project people into like an evil version of a Looney Tunes. There's some live action animation combination. There's a really good animated bit in Annie Hall when Alvi says that he always had a crush on the evil queen and Snow White. But, I mean, these are all like sometimes passages in larger movies. In terms of live action animation crossover for an entire feature,

there's Who Frame Roger Rabbit and there's The Field, right? I mean, that movie is so brilliantly designed and integrated and funny. This movie's chasing it too. And with respect, it's not as good as Who Frame Roger Rabbit, but that's a high bar. Yes. Well, you always set a high bar in your work as well. You mentioned Batman and WB. We have much more Batman to discuss on the second part of this episode. But always recommend Adam Naiman in written form, in audio form. Read them on the ringer.com. Check him out on the big picture from time to time. Adam. So happy to have you make your Ringerverse debut. This was great. I had a pleasure. Thanks so much. All right. Well, let's segue from the live action animation crossover of Coyote v. Acme into fully animated territory.

It's part of the animation domination segment of Ringerverse recommends. I've got company. I am no longer alone in the studio. Welcome, Daniel Chin. Thank you, Ben. And joining us remotely and always animated character in L.A. It's Jomi Adoneron. Hi, Jomey. What's going on? It's crazy. I feel like I just saw you, Ben. I feel like we, we We were just talking the other day. Also, now you're in the studio and I'm into Zoom room. What's going on?

We swap places. This is a total role reversal. How rare for me to be here. Anyway, always good to see you and talk to you wherever we are. And we have a lot of ground to cover. So there's been a lot of superhero stuff that has been covered on the Ring iverse this month. Obviously, we're all watching lanterns in the DC arena.

Midnight Boys covered X-Men 97. but we don't want to let some of the other animated superhero stuff slip through the cracks. There's been a lot of it. Superman, double dose of Batman, also some Star Wars, Ninth Jedi while we're at it. So maybe we can start with My Adventures with Superman, which was covered a little bit on the feed. Steve talked to some of the cast creators of this show, but now season three has wrapped up so we can talk about it in full. You've written about it. You've talked about it before.

You're a big fan of this show. So how did you feel, Daniel, about season three? I still love the show. I'm so happy that it's going strong. Like, it was always a refreshing thing to just have a new take on Superman, whether it's just the animation style, but beyond that, just all the technology that comes into the show, it just feels like a very fresh take on a character

that we've seen so many different times before. And just to see it keep on getting better and just evolving in its own ways has been really fun to watch. Yeah. Jomey, what did you make of this season? I had a lot of fun with the season. I think the main thing that keeps me coming back is not only Superman and Lana's relationship, but Jack Quaid, man, he's the man.

Like, you know, I mean, we can talk about the boys and shout out to all my Star Trek, lower decks heads, but the work he's doing in this show is incredible. There are some line reads that are not only like hilarious, and then there are some that are like really deep and meaningful. He's like really going for it in the show. And it just like keeps the momentum going, keeps the energy up. And I'm just having a ton of fun. I can't want to see what they do next season with it because it's a blast. There's a lot going on in this season of this show.

I mean, we've got cloning, time travel from multiple timelines, lost powers, AI brainiac is back. In addition to all the romance stuff and the will they or won't they with Jimmy and Kara and then the Superman romance too, did it feel at all overstuffed to you at times? Was there too much going on? Maybe at times they do, I mean, like you said, there is a lot that happens. I mean, they have that one episode where they're all off doing the games, like that one. You know, but I like the fact that they still have enough time to really focus on the characters. And like the character relationships and the things that they're all struggling to go through, I think they never lose sight of. And I think that's what's the most important to me.

And I think that especially with the relationship, like they really focus on the, you know, Whether it's Lewis is struggling to embrace, like, the future that she's taking on and, like, overcoming her fears, or it's, like, Jimmy actually, like, sabotaging himself before the relationship even starts with Kara. It's, I think they carve out enough space for the people that are just not Superman, too, and the way that they grow over the show, over the season and over the three seasons, I think, has been really nice to watch. Yeah, we got a lot of Kryptonians going on here, not just Supergirls. Superman, Superboy. Yeah. We got like Superman clone. We've got like hybrids,

Krypton like splicing going on here. There's a lot of storylines. Jomi, what was the highlight for you? Was there anything that didn't work so well? The highlight for me would have to be John coming back both times, right? Because the first time it's like, you know, John, he's light, he's having fun. Look at me.

I'm out there with my aunt and my dad. It's a great time. And then coming back to the second time and he's like, that's not me. That was your different son. Look at me. I'm dark. I have a scar and a sword.

I'm so tough. And like you can like, we, we talk about the motorverse to death since like 2020. It's like really like exploded in media. But I feel like this show did a really good job of, you know, keeping things fresh with this kind of stuff, you know. I have one son. I have a, now it's a different son and a daughter. What?

That's crazy. Also, I want to say, I called Lois Lana earlier. My fault. I am a day one small field watcher. Y'all know what's not I'm saying. But no, like that, like, and obviously, and I talk to the creators about this, that Jimmy and Kara love, like, you know, the push and pull that they had this season was great, even all the way to the end when Jimmy's like, I'm in.

And Cara was like, hold on, I'm in a player. going on. You was giving me signals sounding going, drag it out for another season. But, you know, that's their priority. But no,

the relationships between the characters and, like, seeing all these, like, seeing Superboy and, like,

the new Superman on screen together. Like, that's, that's a ton of fun. In terms of things that didn't work well, I don't know,

man. I think, DC, you mentioned it. They did have that episode with the, Mr. Misalplic, and they go back

and, like, you know, they're playing the games. But even then, though, like we're still learning a lot about these characters. Jimmy is like, yo, man, actually, maybe I do want to be with Cara. And Lois is like, hey, man, like, maybe I do want a family. Maybe I do want to, like, push things forward with Clark.

And we get to the end of the season and she's down on one knee. By the way, that is something Lois would do. But have some pride. Lois, come on, man. You know what I'm saying? I'll be like, hey, yo, you know, small of it. Lock me in. You know?

And Superman, easy. You just got to do Superman a couple lobs. Now he might be a little dance. But he'll get it eventually and then he'll get done one knee and you don't got to worry about it. But not.

I think like getting to that ending, like they really put a lot of effort in getting from where Lois is the beginning season where he even like mentions his family and she's like scaring away to the point where she gets down on one knee for him. That was I thought really,

really storytelling done really well. Yeah. I like these depictions of super powered with non-superpowered couples, right? Because it gets complicated with kryptonians for various reasons, right? So you have the non-superpowered part of the couple is getting cold feet, kind of for different reasons. Like with Jimmy, it's more about, I don't know if I'm worthy. She'll just find someone better than me when she does more dating. And then Lois, you know, it's not that she has reservations about Clark so much is just, it's a lot of commitment to take on with someone who

goes through what Clark does, right? So, but ultimately lands in a good place. But it makes sense that those would be complicated relationship. I mean, it takes you back to the boys, right? And Jack Quaid there and Annie and all the just like the power dynamics are weird here. And someone is always in jeopardy. And so how do we carve out time for our love life and just going on regular dates when we have our like son from multiple futures who's just transporting back all of a sudden to like, I don't know if I want to. get married and have a family. Oh, wait, our family just showed up from this dystopian future.

So I guess it's going to happen. Yeah, like that's what I think is so fun about the choice of just having this, this future version of their son come in and out of the story too because you get that instant gratification of just seeing like what they did as parents. And like they haven't done that yet, but like this is what it could be. And it just fits so well into Lois's fears and that she's trying to work through too. Yeah. Now compared to nightfall, which we're about to talk about, the violence is is pretty tame, I guess. But. It does get, I mean, at the end, there with the finale, it's, it's pretty invincible-esque, right? I mean, it's, Clark kind of looks like Mark a little bit, you know, just like the animation styles where it's not anime, but it's anime inspired. Yeah. But the whole just like, you know, flying, pounding people into the ground, punching holes through people.

Like, it does get kind of invincible-ish there at the end of the season. I don't know if I'll say that, but to your point, though, I will, if I did. did have a note, it would be like, every time there's this fight with the Superman or the multiple superpowered people, there is a bit where one of them is finally about to go down, right? Like, you know, somebody's punching car really bad. Yeah. And then Clark will fly in.

Boom. And Saver. And then Clark's getting his face punched in. And then Supergirl will fly in and come. And they just did that every, they just switched on and off every, every super super fight. Yeah. It's like a tag team fighter or something. Or like...

Basically, yeah. Superman's down, but then someone delivers an inspirational speech or something. Or he just like reflects on stuff and suddenly he's back up and he's stronger than... Very anime-like. Yeah. We talked about this. Last time we talked about the show, the show, we can see the influences everywhere. You know, and to even the Invisible thing, I mean, you got...

We talked about this. Invisible is just Dragon Balls Z for white people, right? And so ultimately, you can kind of see where, I mean, This is why Charles is the man. He sees anime everywhere. You know, this is what it's all about. Nice. He's not, but he's not wrong.

All of this stuff comes from Dragon Ball Z and bleach and all, like, all this stuff that we've been watching for a long, long time. And so you can see the influences right down to how the ending fight scenes are. I mean, because the eradicators, frankly, it's terrifying, scary because how do you, how do you, how do you beat a Superman now, you know, in the real world, they would have like just got it packed up. Because if you could multiply all that time, like how many can you stop at eight? Yeah. You got to feel you could probably go to 16, maybe even 24.

Kind of feels like you're just no upper limit to the bounds. But now, I think, yeah, it was a lot of the same fight scenes, but I didn't mind it too much. I feel like to your point, too, in terms of the violence, like they do kind of the classic like American animation thing of just getting away with going a little bit over the top, because they're like robots. It's like a classic like samurai jack kind of thing too.

Like you can get pretty gruesome with it, but because of like they're either robots or like clones and the other side of it, they can get away with a little bit more. Yeah. So I guess, you know, in the kind of meta narrative of DC, obviously the next Superman movie just wrapped filming, but that's still a ways away.

But if Supergirl left kind of a sour taste in your mouth, then it's nice to switch to a different depiction of Supergirl or, you know, reading this month about how the Waller series is no longer in active development. You get a little Amanda Waller here in My Adventures of Superman. So it's kind of like, you know, when things aren't going great in live action,

then you just dip into DC animation where things are pretty solid and dependable typically. So you can always count on the animated universe to deliver. Definitely, definitely. And they always have just have a wide variety of options as we're going to keep talking about here today too.

Yeah. Any thoughts, hopes, expectations for season four and beyond with this show? Anything you'd like to see it explore that it hasn't yet? Put Jimmy and Carr together. Let them be happy. Yeah. I can't watch it.

I don't have enough in my heart. It's tough. I know you're listening. Okay. The creators, you know, hey, you know, we follow each on Instagram. You know, those are my boys now, you know. But no, but seriously, though,

like, let's lock this in, okay? I can't do another season of this pain. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. love. It's tough for you to watch that mirrored on the screen. Guys, I need a girlfriend, man. I can't keep doing this. This is brutal, man. Like, I got to get outside, man. Like, it's August. It's almost, it's almost September, fellas. It's bad.

You know, y'all got to help me out. Jumby's a great guy. I mean, we vouch for him. I don't know. I don't know what people are sleeping on, but shoot your shot. He's available. He's, I mean, extremely available, possibly down bad. So, you know. But you got until November because once the TTA come out, it's over. I don't know. You know, you know, when Zeta come out. You and Lucia. Yeah, hopefully Lucia will love you.

We'll see. All right. Let's transition to bats. Then we've got a double dose of Batman. Cape Crusader, season two, technically came out July 31st, but binge drop. So we'll count it as August. And then we will also talk about Nightfall, the new TV movie that just came out last week, part one, of course, of it's going to be a three-part movie.

So Cape Crusader, season two, this is, you know, harkening back to the animated series, that kind of animation style and legacy and adult themes and all the rest of it. Season two, what's your take from what you've seen? I still like the show a lot. I think I'm not as high as I was on it as I was in season one. I feel like it's more hit or miss for me in this season. I've also only seen like the first like six episodes. And I think the fifth and six are probably my favorite so far.

But I don't know, there's a lot of, like, I really liked in the first season that they did flip a lot of, like, what we thought of a lot of the villains, especially, and a lot of the characters. Like, they do have a lot of fun of just really, really adding a fresh perspective on some of these characters and just switching, remixing them, really. But for characters, like, the riddler in this season, like, it's just, I guess the idea is that he's riddling people with holes instead of actually doing riddles. And it's just like, I'm like, I don't know what's going on here, you know? With things like that, though, it's just like you're kind of taking the interesting point of the riddler, and now he's just a classic, like, old school mobster. And for me, like, some of that is where the show has, like, lost me a little bit

and where it's been a little bit more misses for me at times. Man, Batman, how many bullets do I have of this gun? That's funny. I could see that. I think the strength of this show, comes from like the voice acting. And I think Hamish Slink later, like Kevin Conroy's the goat,

you know, rest in peace to the legend. But Hamish Slinklater does an incredible job as the voice of Batman to where like you can feel like, yeah, this feels like Batman. The same way like I'll never not, like when I'm reading Batman, I'll never not hear Kevin Conroy's voice like forever. However, Hamish Slinkduty does an amazing job.

And part of that is they also, like, they have the Joker in the season, right? And at first, you know, really busy August, you know, I'll tap it at a Capucho Shrader when I see it. I saw on Twitter that the Joker was German and I was like, let me lock in. And it takes a while to get to him, right? D.C., you haven't seen him yet.

You don't even know what I'm talking about. Like, the first, like, four episodes all end with the same tease of Joker on ones. Is he actually going to show up? You, yeah, please. Please tell me more. Sounds by a German Joker. And he's, he's German.

And I'm like, yo, this is inspired, right? And we'll talk about some, like, voice acting stuff later when it comes to nightfall. But I just thought that that was such an interesting choice

in a show where, yeah, they like to play on stuff. And, like, they like to, like mix and match some stuff from early comics to, like,

things of the time period or whatnot. And so to, like, you know, not really manifest, but like reconfigure Joker into this like, like I just thought it was inspired and really fun and just like kind of ridiculous, but all in the best type of ways. Yeah, there's a lot going on here too. It's like, you know, the whole Rogues Gallery shows up in these shows and these seasons.

We have this, you know, injection. We have gas. We have resurrection. We've got zombies. We've got this kind of, you know, grinning, mutating virus poison going on here, right? Watching this and nightfall back to back, it's just, it's not a new thought, but man, like, Gotham, like, why does anyone live there? It's just, it's just a hellscape. It's just nonstop.

Just something awful is happening in this city, despite Batman's best efforts. So, you know, it's like a little dark. It's got the noirish aspects that it's trading on. the animated series and everything. It's bringing that back. You know, like, I like that it's TV 14, right, compared to Nightfall, which is R-rated and is, like, shouldn't say Hard R.

That's something else probably. But, like, it is kind of- Hard R? Are we talking about Hard R? What's going on? What's going on? It is. From a parental rating perspective, it is.

So, you know, like, watching, I watch Cape Crusader and then I watch Nightfall, and now suddenly I'm like, oh, my four-year-old could watch Cape Crusader. this is nothing. It's like, you know, compared to like mortal combat style fatalities and stuff and gore and gruesomeness. But it's got for a cartoon for, you know, Saturday morning style, it's definitely heavy from from that sort of perspective. So I like that there's a bit more of an adult aspect to it, right? And a darkness. You know, we all like a dark Batman. And so there's a lot to like here. I see what you mean. But I think by the end of the

the season kind of it comes around right yeah yeah i mean i'll definitely still keep keep watching it like i think it's a very different kind of show than my adventures of superman where it is like very episodic and like i do kind of kind of like that and it really recaptures a lot of the spirit of bruce tim's old uh batman series and like i feel like there's still a lot of that in it that i that i do appreciate but i think it's also more subject to have a few misses along the way because of that that kind of format. And I feel like, thematically,

it may lose some of that focus sometimes, but what the episodes, when they do it right, and like I really did like the, scarecrow episode, for example. Like, I think it's,

you know, I'm definitely still, still lipping with it. Yeah. Jomi, any thoughts, hopes, dreams for season three and beyond? Man,

you know, if they're doing season three, let's, um, let's get some robins in here, man. Mm, Let's just do it, man.

Let's get the robins in here. Yeah, you know. Like, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, from a, from a trapeze? You know, I would like, let's, let's see, let's see what it looks like. It's all I'm saying. Sure. It's fun to see Batman out there doing this thing, you know, but when is Jason Todd going start jacking, uh, you know, the rims of the Batmobile, you know?

Like, let's get some, let's get some robin action in here. I like to see it. Well, still awaiting a green light for a renew open. Maybe the ringerverse recommends bump. We'll get it over the hump. And if you want Robin, may I recommend to you, Batman Nightfall, Part 1, Nightfall. We've got some dashes, M-Dashes, colones, multiple colones in this title. I'm confused.

Why would you call it Batman Nightfall Part 1 Nightfall? You could just call it Batman Nightfall Part 1. You know what I mean? You didn't have to. Because I'm watching it. on the thing and I'm like, okay, Batman, Nightfall, Part 1,

Nightfall. That doesn't sound right. Copy editing notes. Yeah, but beyond that, so we've got handsome, handsome Mount is voicing a very gruff Batman here. He'll come up on next month's RBR when we talk

about Strange New Worlds season four. Always happy to see or hear, Anson. But this is an adaptation of the seminal nightfall arc from 93-94. This is part one of three. So this is part of the DC Universe animated original movies series. It's hard to keep all this stuff straight. We've got like multiple live action Batman. We've got animated cartoon TV Batman. We've got TV movie animated Batman. We've got so many Batman, so many Robbins. But this one is, you know, part one of this

three-part TV movie. It's not streaming anywhere as of yet, so it is video on demand, a little higher barrier to entry, but worth it, I think. I really enjoyed this first part. The second part will be out later this year, part three sometime in 2027 seemingly, but this is like crank up all the dark aspects of Cape Crusader 211, and this is nightmare fuel. Yeah, no, I had a lot of fun with this one. It had been a long time since I'd read Nightfall, And it was fun just like revisiting this story because like I've seen Dark Night Rises like a bunch of times and you can just see all the things that they pull from Nightfall but when you actually go closer to the source material too

It's it's very fun with just all the villains that they're pulling in just like seeing Bain trying to wear him down and then just the voice acting is awesome I really liked Michael Mando as as Bain in particular I didn't realize who it was at first and then seeing in the credits I was like ah yeah yeah scorpion in here too so here's the thing DC you're absolutely correct Michael Mando as Bain is incredible unrecognizable legitimately amazing

I love what they do with this backstory like Santa Presca you know like going all the way like to the beginning with Bain I love it

here's the problem Tom Hardy and Hardy Quinn ruined Bain for me forever like I'm sorry because like I get it and it's amazing you're sitting there

but then I'm thinking about it right down I'm like, um, Bat, Batman. Oh, yes.

You think the darkness is your ally. And I'm like, wow, that's why he should always sound like. I'm sorry. That's pretty good,

that's what pain. That's what pain sounds like in my head, you know, unfortunately forever, because Tom Hardy and then Harley Quinn and,

uh, kite, and hell yeah, that's just like reinforced in my, in my, brain. Like, I'm sorry. You merely adopted the dog.

Like, that's what, you know, that's what he should sound like in my head the whole time. I'm sorry. But no, like going on the DC animated, like, movies specifically, they do this thing where either they are super faithful to the comic, almost to a detriment. And sometimes they just be freestined on that thing. They just be going crazy. And this one goes more into the faithful aspect. I think it's for the good because the story of Nightfall is obviously like super iconic, super memorable. And they really do nail it.

You know, when you get to the part where Bain is cracking Batman's back, if you really like, yo, this is, this is like for real. Like Batman can't go one-on-one with this dude, man. Like, he does not have it. And so, Anson Mount was cooking. Obviously, yeah, Michael Mando, I think is the MVP, like, just completely. Pablo Shriver, too. Pablo, it kind of kind of.

budget? What? This is crazy. I say that. Rosario Dawson was Wonder Woman in the last, the last joints. I don't know what I'm talking about. But now I think this like did a really, especially it's like a part one. Oh yeah, give me part two, give me part three. I'm locked in. What did you think of this as a nightfall adaptation?

I mean, it pretty, pretty faithful hit the main beats. I thought it was really and it's just like it is such a good story and like it's such a good like ending to the first part too. And like I remember that just like that's such an icon. moment in the comics and like you know they captured it in Christopher Nolan movie too but like there's something different in like

a comic book or animated form too where you just you just get the full I mean he throws Batman off of a building like he's not surviving this but like yeah because it's animated he can get away with some of these things. He was throwing him into the walls man like you got he's doing a lot even before that

wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait DC hold on a second he had like a 248 pack I was going to say This is the most jacked Bain you've ever seen Yeah

He's not He's not Six-pack This is 12, 18-pack This is The only bane that's scarier Is Bade from the absolute Batman

Joint And then it's this bane Because not only was he like Nine feet tall His muscles Have muscles Have muscles This is making

Midnight Boys' guests Rob Liefel characters looking slim compared to it. Like it's ridiculous how Buffy was. One touch from that thing. And he does that all on this this anabolic rat diet, evidently. This is, I mean,

until he gets injected with the serum, he's like, he's getting super jacked just like in a well in a hole. Just grabbing rats, that's evidently. Man, you got to remember everything has protein now. It's good protein. I was at the Walmart. They had protein pot-tarts. Rat protein.

Okay. And those rats, specifically, have as much muscle mass as berry bonds when he was juicing. So basically, he was eating three berry bonds a day, essentially. So, you know, that's how you get, that's got to be how you get swall like that. Because, yeah, he was not getting swallowed off bread and water. He was not. It was not. Yeah.

I like this burned out Batman. He was like looking like me as I was binging everything that I was watching for this episode of Ring and Verse Recommend's over the best week or so. Like, oh, got to tap in one more series to get through. You got to do it for the tremendous content. But yeah, I like the Batman. You know, he's on the edge. He's cracking.

He's maybe being a little, little too violent at times. He's losing it. Everyone's having their doubts. Is he a hero? Is he an anti-hero? Has he gone too far? Do we need to bring him to justice? So, I mean, that's the whole nightfall hook, right?

So that's reproduced really accurately here. They do not pull any punches, literally, or figuratively when it comes to the violence and the gore. So, you know, this has given you the fully adult DC experience. Yeah, yeah. And just like we're talking about, too, I mean, it's just, I think this is the advantage of having the animated medium sometimes, too, where you can have these, like, Bain can have 300 ads, you know, all these things.

Like, these things can work in the animated medium. And, like, it's just, it's fun to see them go all out. Yeah. So we've talked about this with, like, Spider-Man, right? where you have multiple Spider-Man, you have movie Spider-Man, you have animated Spider-Man in a few different shows. You have video game Spider-Man,

all different continuities. You have animated Spider-Verse Spider-Man. And Spider-Man's kind of just clicking, just firing on all cylinders in all forms. And here with DC, also, there's just a lot to juggle and a lot to keep track all these different, you know, watching Cape Crusader and then Nightfall back-to-back.

It's like, all right, different Batman, different Gotham, different Conton. nudie. It's tough to just mentally adjust. We're watching Nightfall Supergirl. You're looking forward to the Batman. It's a lot to keep track. So do you feel like, you know, are we in sort of oversaturation territory or are you just able to separate these things and say like this is traditional DC animation? It's always been there for me. And we can put that on the side and also enjoy James Gunn and whatever he's up to. Yeah, I mean, at least for me, that that is the way I feel because I feel like we have been programmed. We have been conditioned to have so many of these things happening at the same,

especially when it comes to something like Batman. Like he's just always been ubiquitous. But with James Gunn of it all, it is interesting because I feel like that was part of what he was really selling when he took over with him and Peter Saffron with just like how much that, especially on the live action front, the properties have just kind of,

it was like the Wild West. I think he kind of described it, where he was really just trying to gather things back together and make things clear, but also be ambitious and say that everything was going to be connected to with like video games even. And I feel like we haven't really seen at. And this is part of it too where I don't I don't really know that it's become that much more

clear. I feel like it hasn't really changed that much. But we're still kind of just seeing the live action movies and TV shows come together. So yeah. And like lanterns is really good. Lanterns is good. Yeah, it's hard to complain. I mean, you can complain about Supergirl. But, you know, when the stuff is hitting, then I'm okay with more, right? So it's less about fatigue than it is like fatigue with stuff that's not actually good. So we can recommend it as we are with all these things. Is that how you feel, Jomey? You know me, man. I've always been the biggest James Gun defender. I've never said

a mean thing about him ever. So, you know where I'm coming from. But I mean, to your point, though, Ben, Spider-Man get all the love. Bad Man should be getting all the love too. You know, like, the live-action stuff is difficult, you know, because of the Matt Reeves and the DCU, like, push and pull. But in terms of

anime, because he's never showing up on TV. Let's, you know, come on, let's be for real. Like, live action TV, I mean. But Not even in The Penguin or... No. I mean, Spider-Man has the same thing, too. You never seen no live-action, Spider-Man. Yeah.

And that's like, man, there's he in Daredevil. Right. People were like, man, he's going to show up on Daredevil. I was like, guys, guys, they would... No way. No way. There was like a billion other people who that could show up. Spider-Man will never show up on TV.

Like, he'd a one guy that they would never bring to television, live action. And so, yeah, when you have an opportunity to bring that character through film, animated, through TV animation. you do it every time. There's like never not been a Batman show on TV, whether like it's Justice League or the Batman Demandam in the series or Young Justice. They ain't going to have Batman on television in animation form

and in animated movie form because he's the guy. He's always going to be the guy. Spider-Man's the same way. We are always going to see these characters, no matter what. If, you know, Cape Cusader doesn't come back for season three. In two years, we'll have another. Batman show with another Batman doing other Batman stuff because

what are they going to do? Not have a Batman show? What? That's not good for my their wallets. What do you mean? You have one of the most, you have access to one of the most popular characters in the history of fiction and you'd be like, yeah, let's just not put them in anything.

That's not going to happen. So yeah, we're always going to get that. Yeah. Yeah, the pipeline of just comics to animation or to movies too. I mean, the fact that absolute Batman's already coming out with the movie. Like, this comic just came, like, starting, you know? I feel like, in the green scheme of things, you know? Thank you, D.C. We get an absolute Batman animation.

It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be seated for it. Like, yeah. What's the, the Wolverine, you'll be Wolverine to your 90. We're going to get Batman stuff forever. Yep. Not good for WB's bottom line not to keep churning out Batman. So they will mint more Batman and we will lap it up. And speaking of oversaturated franchises that, uh, maybe have pumped the brakes a bit. Let's wrap up with a little Star Wars action. So just when you're thinking there's not much Star Wars to watch these days, I know Nando and Grogu about to be streaming its natural habitat.

But beyond that, there haven't really been any Star Wars shows this year except for Darth Mall Shadowlord. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Another show with hyphen and colon. There was a show. I mean, there was a show. They just put it in theaters. Yes, exactly. It took four episodes.

with what was season four of the Mandalorian instead of, yeah, more or less. But just when you thought we had to wait for Asoka season two or some excellent Star Wars video games, including Zero Company, which we were covered on Button Mesh and the upcoming Galactic Racer. But we do have one more show this year. It's the Ninth Jedi. Star Wars Visions presents the Ninth Jedi. So this show is a spinoff of visions, which we've gotten three seasons or volumes of volume of volume three, came out, last year. And the ninth Jedi is a spinoff basically of two episodes, one from volume one of

visions and one from volume three of visions. And we're continuing it here with its own eight episode series, which like the rest of vision is not canon. It's set in a different continuity. It's set in an alternate timeline in the far future. It's not exactly clear when or where we are exactly. but we're picking up from where we left off, which is basically, well, somewhat familiar set up, actually, which is that, you know, the Jedi order has been disbanded and destroyed somehow, and they're trying to get it back together. These masterless Jedi are trying to come back together. And, of course, there's some darksiders and there's some Sith,

and there's a helmeted, dark costume-clad character who's trying to unite the galaxy. We've seen that script before to some extent. But, you know, I like that Visions is spawning its own spin-offs, and we've seen this with some others, right? With, you know, like the duel got its own novel and comic and then the village Jedi. Like there's, you know, a second, a sequel to that in Volume 3-2. Ninth Jedi was one of the candidates also, I think, to get more, right? So you've seen most of this season, D.C. What do you think of Ninth Jedi?

I was actually very pleasantly surprised. Like I did enjoy visions a lot, and I really liked how you got to see so many different sides of the Star Wars universe and just like have a very creative. They're taking a lot of liberties, like you've said too, but like they still capture a lot of the spirit of it. And I think it's, again, we're talking about another anime-inspired show, and this is like really a full-on anime. Yeah, this is actually anime. Like I remember even like the first, I don't know what you guys did in terms of the audio, but like I thought it. was like a little bit stilted at times with like the dialogue or the writing or something. And then when I saw the credits for the, at least for the first episode, it said the Japanese voice cast first.

And I was like, oh, I should, I should be watching the Japanese probably. And once I started doing that in episode two, I was like, wow, this is like a lot smoother. But I really just liked that from the very first like time you actually see like a lightsaber fight in this. I was like, this is cool. And like this was like really fun to watch. Yeah. It's production IG. They're given this the production IG treatment, which is one of the, this is one of the,

nice things about visions just real life. It's like, you know, Star Wars obviously always has this Eastern influence in samurai and Kurosawa and all the rest, but to actually go all in on anime and give people a turn at this thing. Jomi, you've seen the start of Ninth Jedi. Will you be watching more? D.C., you know the rules, man, sub, not duck. Come on. It's the official position.

It was like the Disney Plus, like you have to scroll all the way to the back for the Japanese. Yeah. They also, they have like the, they have like Simu, they have a stacked like, uh,

English voice cast. Like, I think honestly what it was was like, Masioka should, like no disrespect to him, but he, I heard his voice at the end of it. And I was like,

it took me out for a second because I was, immediately I was thinking of, a blue-eyed samurai. Yeah. Right. And I just felt like it didn't really fit with, with, uh,

I guess his name is like Ethan is the character. Yeah. Um, then again, dubs aren't bad by dubs. No, they're not, especially because like they have, again,

they have a very star-studded cast. And, like, again, that's no disrespect to him. But I feel like I have such associations with a lot of these actors, too, where sometimes it can take you out a little bit. Yeah. But, again, I think just some things get lost in translation sometimes. And clearly, like, this was made by, like, a Japanese, you know, animation studio. Like, it's written by Japanese people.

Like, it's, it just felt more fitting. And it's, the voice actors are really good in Japanese, too. So I was. Yeah, and you get this, this Kylo-Ren-like character who's, uh, Nalaam. who's, you know, finally when the helmet it's removed, it's basically like Sephiroth under there. More than it's just kind of like generic Japanese anime villain, basically, you know, blonde, just like, yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, I've enjoyed visions. I like the visual variety of it, but the one disappointing aspect, even though I like a lot of the individual, the duel, the village bride, all those things, is that they do just keep going back to that Jedi well over and over again, which I get, because it seems like there's not that much oversight

and it's just like, here, here's our playground and our Star Wars sandbox, tell the story you want to tell. And so obviously all these anime studios, they want to tell their own Jedi story, right? But then we end up with like seven or eight different Jedi stories out of the, you know, season. It's like,

I want to see things that are a little bit off the beaten path. And that's where we are with Ninth Jedi, too, where I was reading some reviews and I felt like I was losing my mind because they're talking about like, you know, a bold, fresh start for the franchise and it's like, not really. I mean, visually, yeah, okay.

The visual language is a little bit different. I like the designs of the lightsabers and the, you know, handcrafted Sabersmith aspect to it. Some of that iconography is cool. But the setup for this thing, even if it is in the far future or whatever alternate timeline, it's basically like a sequel trilogy do-over, I guess, which, I mean, a lot of people want that, right? But, you know, it is still sort of your galaxy's spanning light versus dark empire stand-in, first-order stand-in versus rag-tag group of upstart rebels.

Like, you know, the basic framework. And I get it's Star Wars, so you're kind of you're playing the hits and you can maybe your cover version. You start with that premise and that baseline and then you can riff a little and put your own spin on it. but does Hugh pretty close to the setup of every other trilogy, you know? I could not disagree more. Really? Okay. Because that's how you end up with D-Squad. And now we're going to get a D-Squod.

It's true. You know what I'm saying? Like, come on out. There is like a level of, you know, yeah, they can all be Jedi. You know, and I see some Mandalorian love, you know. Like there are other, some Dark Sisters love, you know. There are other things. a galaxy far, far away that we can

blow on to, but fellas, come on, let's not lie to ourselves, we're here for the swordplay and the lightsabers and the force. Come on. That's what it's all about. When you're watching the first season of visions, you talk about the duel, you talk about

the twins, you talk about the Ninth Jedi. Those are the ones that, like, leave you wanting more. Like, specifically the twins and the Ninth Jedi for me. I was. I was like, yo, I want to, where's the new, another episode for this? And so to see it come to fruition, super exciting. Like, can't wait to, like, dive all the way.

And I've only seen the first couple. But I can't wait to dive all the way in because this is what, this is what Star Wars should be in a, like, in a real way in terms of let people tell their stories, man. Let's, like, see what other people have to say about this universe. It's been very, like, you know, one track minded for a long time. You know, first it was George, now it's Follone, and I get that, like, you know,

these, you know, enormous universes need to have a steward, but there are other people with other stories to tell. And I, I frankly think, like, the most, not the most interesting, but the stuff we keep coming back to is the force and light savers and people going,

mm-mm-mm-mm. Like, I'm sorry. Like, let's not, let's not lie, because, see, that's what you say. You say that. Ben, you're like, yeah, man, I get the lightsaber. Give me some. Lock me in on some other stuff. Well, yeah, I mean...

12 episodes, you get... You're in Corrissot. Right we get... But it's not Andor. It's not Andor. Right. It's not Andor because it's not Tony Gilroy. Right.

Sure. He's not putting a deft hand on it. It's going to be... What's her name? Mon Mothma sitting there waiting for a setting hearing. But because... What's his name? The Chancellor don't want to come out on time.

Because he's too busy doing dark side stuff that you can't see, by the way, because there's no force in this show. We're not putting it in force. I'm not a hardliner. I'm not no force at all. I'm just saying, and look, maybe it's the only way that a series like this gets green lit,

not just a one-off episode, but a whole season of something. You've got to have some epic galactic, you know, fighting over the vision of the galaxy sort of stakes. I get that. But I am very much in that kind of like, yeah, let people tell their own stories. And if their story is just sort of remixes

of the stories that we've seen, seen before. It's like it's a fine line, you know? And I feel like we're already in niche territory here. We're talking about animated anime Star Wars, right? So the ceiling for that is a lot lower than your typical live action Disney Plus streaming series, right? So like this is something that probably the hardcore are going to be checking out, you know, the diehards to begin with. So it's like maybe for that, those consumers, that constituency you could. It's not even that I wouldn't want any Jedi in visions. It's just when you keep giving me Jedi, even if it's different visions of that, so to speak, you know, like, give me some studio Ghibli, give me some, you know, Miyazaki kind of

weirdness. Give me some like off the beaten path out of left field sort of, because it's just like, what is Star Wars? Is it, is it that same framework? Yeah, like ultimately, inherently, it's kind of good versus evil and galactic conflict and all of that. But does, you know, it's pretty close to that territory that we've seen before with some interesting changes, I think, later in the season. Ben liked the Toby joint. He liked the Toby, the Toby visions. I mean, you're not, like, you're not entirely wrong. And I think, like, to use Andor as an example, the thing with, like, Tony Girroy in that project specifically was Tony Giroy did not care about style. Right. We got the lore. Yeah, he was not interested in any of that. Right. And the issue with a lot of

stuff is, like, the lore is really important to a lot of people, you know. George Lucas is famous as saying, like, it's like poetry. You know, they rhyme. Every stanza kind of rhymes to the last one. And I don't want to say, like, that's the problem with Star Wars, but like, it kind of is. We talked about a lot on Midnight Boys where, like,

the reason Star Wars is the way it is now is because back of the day when George was making it, he was thinking about Curisaw movies. You know, he was thinking about stuff that he was scoring up, that he was watching, you know, like old-time westerns, like things like that. now people who are making Star Wars grew up on Star Wars, right? It's like a snake eating at its hotel. It's the reason why people would argue the Simpsons is not the same anymore, right?

Like back in the day, they were getting inspiration for different stuff. Now people making Simpsons are just watching the Simpsons. They're just like remaking the same type of thing, right? So you do need some fresh blood in there. But at the same time, the thing that makes Star Wars special is this wide universe where anything can happen. but the thing that we keep coming back to the things that makes it special. Not only the Skywalker's,

but the lightsaber is the force, but it means to be a Jedi, dark versus light, good versus evil. And so I can understand why people will keep coming back to that well because that's the stuff that inspires us. That's the stuff that makes it special.

Now, you get somebody like Tony Gilroy, and this is why I get, and, like, when people are like, man, I wish we could get more Andor. You're never getting more Andor. No, and or its own thing. I wrote a piece for The Ringer, you know, it's like they can all be Andor. Like, not only can you not compare everything to Andor's standard, but also you do have to like give people red meat sometimes the stuff that makes them fall in love with Star Wars.

That's how you get Andor where you kind of do a different spin on that stuff and say we're actually going to stay away from that. And look, this will be a different vision, so to speak, of Star Wars. But you also have to keep giving people that steady supply of the Star Wars they know and love. Just, you know, we're getting a lot of that to the extent that we're going to be. getting any Star Wars these days, we are getting a lot of Jedi stuff and Shadow Lord and Asoka. And, you know, that's why I'm looking forward to Starfighter. That's one of the reasons that seems to be a bit different, maybe at least a different timeline, you know, set a little after the sequel trilogy. So again, like, I like a lot of it. Ninth Jedi, it's really nicely animated,

great fight choreography. It's a good show. Like, I enjoyed it. It's just, there's a slight disappointment with visions, which just feels to me like it really could be this kind of a boundary-breaking thing. And it is visually, but then in terms of the content and the tone, not always so much. Yeah. I mean, I definitely see that. And I agree with you for some aspects of that. But I think for me, at least, the most, when it comes to this being refreshing, it's just, like, I feel like we've just had so many animated shows that are just, like, in the philoney verse.

And just like, even when it comes to, like, I like Bad Batch, but, like, that's still, like, an extension of Clone Wars. Like, you really feel like you have to watch all of that stuff. And even with rebels, like it's still connected to Clone Wars and like all these things. Yeah, exactly. They're all coming into like the same kind of universe. And like this really feels like it can be like a fresh start. That's totally true. And like you're capturing a lot of spirit of Star Wars, but you also can just like have a bit of a blank slate.

And like I really love the character designs. Like I really appreciate just the different directions that they are taking for some of it. And just like, again, like they are capturing the main spirit. And to Jomi's point, too, like you just need to have. especially when you have like an anime production studio coming in. Like they're not not going to do. Sure. And like the way they use.

You get the studio for, uh, Dutja Kisen or a Demoslayer. And they're like, bet, guess what? We on tattooing 12 episodes. Yeah. That's right. We, this is the coolest weapon they've made, you know? This is our moisture farming show.

Yeah. Yeah. This is what it's all about, you know? Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's the same conversation with, with superhero stuff, Marvel and DC. It's like, people like Spider-Man and Batman and Bad. Batman, you know? So maybe we can dip down the tier list and the hierarchy here and like this is for the true heads. And maybe they appreciate that. But the audience is is not necessarily there for those lower visibility heroes. So one thing I do appreciate about Ninth Jedi is like when they do start getting into the philosophy of the force stuff and the way the sabers work in this show where, you know, it's not how it is in canon where it's like, you know, you have to hunt for the chiber crystals. And then like, you know, to get the red ones, you got to like bleed them.

Right? That whole thing. Here it's very much sort of like it reflects your mood in the moment. And you can see from moment to moment like, oh, I'm getting a little dark side right now. My saber just looking a little red. And then I'm back to blue territory. I kind of like that that it's like a real time reflection. It's like a, you know, this is my mood. I'm I'm dangerously veering toward Sith side now that I like. And a lot of the exploration of like the gray Jedi stuff, you know, silver sabers. Can I just drain my. myself of all emotion and get this silver saber. And we've seen something along those lines with Asoka and kind of the gray Jedi and the like white sabers, gray sabers. It's, you know, along those lines, but I like that kind of can we just drain all passion from this and just do, you know, the unification of the galaxy for high-minded reasons and not bring like anger and vengeance and all that into it. But then the effect of it maybe is ultimately the same and wait, you know, And without giving away too much about the end of the series, like it does kind of circle back around to the comfort zone of Star Wars,

you know, light versus dark and red versus blue or green or whatever. But I like that they at least dabble with that stuff. I'm always into the Grey Jedi stuff. Interesting that Ben said Asoka and then immediately followed up with draining of all passion. Interesting that you say that. I'm just, I'm just noticing. Referring to the performances?

No, I want to say performances, really. I would much more say just that entire universe and that moment in time. Not to, and I, because I know I've been saying you got to do this thing. It's Star Wars. You have to do this. Do not listen to me when a soccer come out in January. Just ignore everything you just heard.

But wait, wait. But guys, and maybe this is just like a healing moment. You know, it's just three of us. What if it's good? What if? Soca season two? Yeah, what if Dave Filoni heard, heard the feedback? back and was like,

you know, three years to work on it? Yeah. We don't cook, you know, hey, let's not make this like a story for children,

you know, let's not make it a story for four-year-olds. Let's like give these characters some depth and, you know, some agency and some change. And like,

let's not make it paint by number of storytelling, right? Let's do the thing that would like surprise the audience or shock the audience

and make them, you know, understand that this is not just, again, a simple story that a three-year-old can understand is something that, you know, that can grow with this audience. It's all I'm asking. That's all I'm asking. But again, who knows, fellas, don't listen to me.

If he just does the same old stuff, don't listen to me. I'm just a crazy old man. I'm holding out some hope for Asoka Season 2, but we will withhold our recommendations until we've seen it. Always love having you guys on here, preserve the spirit of. Mint Edition, RIP on Ringerverse recommends when we do our animation roundups. Jomi, Daniel, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us.

All right. I'm back. Not joined by Grumpkin, the Faithful Doxon today because I'm in the studio, maybe next month, but we covered a lot of ground today. Talked about the end of Oak Street, the dog stars, coyote versus Acme, multiple Batman series, Cape Crusader and Nightfall, my adventures with Superman, the Ninth Jedi, and Moore even talked a little bit about signs while we were at it. We didn't get into the alternate interpretation of signs.

Is it a plot hole that the aliens came to Earth, even though Earth is full of water and they're allergic to it? Are they demons, not aliens, in fact? Maybe we'll talk about that some other time. I have a listener recommendation to relay. This came into Ringiverse Recommends at gmail.com. And it came to us from Anders Drew, who wrote, Is any part of the Librarians franchise going to end up on the big picture or the prestige TV podcast feed, no way.

Should that stop you from enjoying this adventure fantasy series? No way. The Librarians is for those of us who loved the adventure of the week, plus some overarching stories that only Buffy or Stargate could bring in the next chapter, join the next generation of librarians as they work to protect the world from out-of-control magical artifacts alongside a stellar cast of supporting characters and villains. Jeannie who wants to destroy the world, we got it. Anger Giff, who gorges on the feelings of modern teenagers, we got that.

Interesting takes on classic Arthurian myths and characters, it's the backbone. For those of us who enjoy a true week-to-week adventure series about a group of rag tags that find their own family in openly embracing their nerdiness that doesn't take itself too seriously and knows exactly what it is. I have to recommend the librarians the next chapter, which is airing Season 2 on TNT Now. Always remember that all you need is your team and a good book. Well, I subscribe to that, Maxim. I'm a big library user, big librarian fan. I am entirely unfamiliar with the librarians' franchise, I'm sorry to say.

So I will be checking out this recommendation. This is the librarians the next chapter, which is a spinoff of the original Librarians TV series, which was itself a spinoff of the Librarians TV movie series, starring Noah Wiley Wiley, not to be confused with Wiley Coyote. There's a lot of librarians lore here that I have not been privy to. but excellent recommendation. I will also toss in a bonus recommendation for a British show called Small Profits.

This is a BBC series. It's the usual six episodes. This actually came out in February, so I'm cheating a little. It has not been released on our shores, so you will have to find your way to this one way or another. I cannot help you, but it's on BBC 2 and the BBC I player.

It was created, written, directed by Mackenzie Crook, who also appears in this series. Crook played Gareth in the original UK version of the office, which was the inspiration for Dwight in the U.S. version. And McKenzie Crook also made a show called Detectorists, another excellent BBC series, one of my favorite from a few years ago. It's about metal detecting, very pastoral. This one has the nerd culture ringerverse aspect because it's about a man who is dealing with some loss. His girlfriend disappeared years ago. he has not moved on with his life.

So he gets into alchemy and builds himself some homunculi to tell him about where his girlfriend is. And if she's alive, he's got these homunculi in jars in his shed. It's really nice. It's just a little like slice of life with a little aspect of the paranormal and supernatural. Also, if McKenzie Crook wasn't a British enough name for you, it stars Pierce Quigley, who is also in Detectarist. So Crook created it, wrote it, directed it, ax in it as well. It's really nice. It's tender.

There's a little generational friendship going on here. Check out if you can, small profits, if and when it comes to the U.S. or if you can find it some other way. Also, co-stars, Monty Python's Michael Palin, with a nice little guest appearance here as well. All right. Coming up this month, we've got the return of Ringrequest. We have continuing coverage of the lanterns. We have very busy button-mash schedule.

We have Animusha and Orbitals coming up. The Blood of Don Walker, Marvel's Wolverine, we'll be tackling next week as well. The Resident Evil's at Gregor movie, Control Resonant Silent Hill Townfall. We've got our hands full. Next month on Ringiverse recommends, at least tentatively.

We will be talking about Silo Season 3 and Dark Matter Season 2 and maybe doing a ranking of Apple TV sci-fi series, a little tier list. I've seen them all. I'll tell you which ones are they. the actual good ones. Plus, Star Trek, Strange New World,

season 4, 60th anniversary of Star Trek this month. Happy birthday. Maybe not the happiest birthday for this franchise, but we'll do the outlook for the future. You can contact us here again at Ringiverse Recommends at Ringverse Recommends at Gmail.com. Thank you to Devin Ronaldo for producing this podcast. Thanks to our Juno Ramgo-Pal for his senior podcast management.

Thanks to you, as always, for listening. And until next time, we hope that you will recommend the Ringerverse. You know,