Triforce! - Triforce! #300: The Small Three Zero Zero
Episode Date: October 23, 2024Triforce! Episode 300! The gang went to Thorpe Park and rode some terrifying rides, we discover Saw and Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a million movies, wonder when a "Sequel" becomes a "Franchise" and w...e mash up our favourite 80s movies to create some real abominations! Go to http://expressvpn.com/triforce today and get an extra 3 months free on a 1-year package! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon:Â https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Pickaxe.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Triforce podcast.
We were so close.
Oh, my God, we're back.
We were so close to doing like a special. Yeah, we almost did a special, but Lewis never turned up.
So we were so close.
We were going to do a special episode, 300 special on the boat
or in a theme park or something.
Oh, is this 300? Well, it's yes.
Yeah. Well, it's not really, though, is it?
This is not 300. We blazed past 300 episodes. Yeah. We had Well, it's not really though, is it? This is not 300, is it? We've blazed past 300 episodes.
Yeah.
We had all the 99.1s and 99.2s.
We had the 0.1s and 0.2s, yeah, we're way past 300 now.
It's yesterday's news.
Yeah.
I didn't prepare anything special for it either, in the true Triforce fashion.
It's not like I've...
I haven't got like a clip reel, do you know what I mean?
Or like a funniest conversations, or like, you know, best bits, you know, or reminisce
like seven years retrospective or whatever of doing the podcast.
I'm not a none of that.
I just turned up, uh, seven minutes late, uh, with a cup of tea.
What more do you expect from years of doing this?
Not much, honestly.
Um, I think you are a confirmed silly Billy and that's that.
We know this of you.
It is normal.
Yeah.
I got shit else to do, you know?
Yeah.
Actually, I have got shit else to do.
No, I've got other things to do.
You know, being ill, for a start, but also working on Jingle Jam and keeping the torch alight for
YouTubers everywhere.
All over the globe.
For 41 year old YouTubers.
You know, they appreciate it as well.
There's a lot of them just sitting there doing a knowing nod to you right now.
Keep up the good work, bucko.
So we were supposed to be meeting up this week.
We can talk about this now because it's not going to go out for a couple of weeks.
Well, just don't say what we were meeting up for and then you're fine.
We went to an event that we're on, we had to sign an NDA.
So we can't talk about it until more events, more events transpire, but we, we were
all invited to an event and we were all supposed to meet in London and two of us
turned up and then Sarah turned up as well and it was really fun.
Holy crap.
We had so much fun and, uh, we texted Lewis and said, holy crap, we're having
so much fun when are you going to be here?
And Lewis was like, Ella Mayo, I'm not on the train. So that was,
Well, I had to do a brand deal that evening. I had a terrible fucking sudden like migraine
like halfway through it. And I just like pushed through and then they were like, get a two
hour train to Staines. They'll get you in at midnight and stay in a travel inn. And
I was like, you know what? I'm not doing that. I
was like, no, I'm not doing that.
Life happens.
You went to Thorpe park.
You can't say that. Oh yeah. You can actually say that.
It did go to Thorpe park.
Would you know what, Sips?
It was raining all day at Thorpe park.
This is the first time Sarah has ever met you.
Because you don't make it down for jingle jam because you've got the three kids, you've
got other obligations, your house is falling down, various issues, right?
Yes.
There's the boilers on fire, the sewage pipes back up, back to-
The bath plug, everything.
There's so many issues.
A lot of issues.
But you did come, you did, like, as soon as someone said, do you want to go to a theme
park for an afternoon, you were like, yes!
I was honestly astonished.
It was okay, I mean, it was a cheeky little trip, honestly.
It was just one night, it was only an hour flight there and back, you know, it was very
doable.
Very doable.
Nearer than where we get to come from, by the sounds of it.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, period in rush hour we get to come from, by the sounds of it. Yeah.
I mean, period in rush hour traffic from London.
No.
From Twickers.
It was not rush hour.
It was not at all.
I went down, we went out for a meal on the first night, and I got an Uber down there,
it took 20 minutes, so that I could have a few drinkies with the chums.
And then I drove down to Thorpe Park the next morning, post-rush hour, I
said to Sarah, because with all of these things, like, I'm not being funny. People plan these
things with the best intentions. This is not on Sarah. This is on the event. They always
say we want you there at eight, whatever, with a view to starting it, whatever time.
Yeah.
And I'm like, I'm not going to be there at that time.
And Sarah was like, oh, you are going to be there, aren't you?
I was like, I will be there, but I am not in a rush to get there because I guarantee
you that they will be running late.
Like there's no doubt in my mind that this will not start on time because you're dealing
with, there were like 20 people or something and you've got to arrange them and this will
go wrong and you're waiting on that.
I'm not going to rush there.
So I drove down there about 20 to 10 quarter 10, like an hour later than they'd wanted. And guess what?
Nothing had started yet.
So then they had this briefing thing and then we rode a roller coaster and I
rode Hyperia and Hyperia was also not ready to the where, and Cips and Sarah will attest to this, we went out there and waited
for an hour in the rain in the queue.
And they stopped everyone else going in.
It was just me and the other people there and some of the staff and everything.
Waiting in the queue, it was an hour.
It was an hour.
And then we rode Hyperia twice.
I got a blinding headache because it
was very violent and I'm much too old.
The tallest and fastest roller coaster in the UK.
I was not ready for it. Like, I've ridden roller coasters. The picture that it... I
got a photo, you know the photo that takes a picture of you on the way around the roller
coaster. As we're coming out, one of the guys says to me, oh we'll cover that, we'll get
you the picture. And I was like, cool, maybe we'll use it for a thumbnail.
I showed this to my kids.
My kids thought this was the funniest thing ever.
It's me looking.
Oh my God, man.
He looks like he is doing the most powerful come in the entire universe.
Like, he's braced.
Like, it's insane.
To me, it looked like the hardest sneeze ever.
Like on the real chew part of the, ah, chew!
It's like right on the tail end of the, chew!
That was my face.
It was like, eeeh!
Just clenched up, horrified.
Or someone with an explosion going off behind them, that's also what it looked like.
It was the kind of climax where your genitals explode like the Death Star.
Oh, 100%.
Right, that's your one time.
It's like if we were some sort of like spider that only came once or whatever and it died
doing so.
Yeah, that would be it.
That's the, the moments before death picture.
Yeah.
Fuck me.
Did you, was that, what was your thought going on it for the second time after you got off
the first time and then we were like, then you got off to get on it again?
Didn't get off.
You didn't get off?
No, they said, if you want to ride it a second time, just stay seated.
I didn't want to, but they said, who wants to go again?
And everyone ahead of me, all much younger, went, yay!
And I went, yay!
I'm not going to be the one guy getting off.
So I rode it again.
I love it. Our dad the one guy getting off. So I wrote it again. I love it.
Our dad's getting off guys.
So, so how, the other 20 people, were they like YouTubers or roller coaster enthusiasts
or what were they?
A combination of the two.
Right.
And I would say mainly content creators, but there were a couple of expert roller coasters
in there and they knew their shit.
But it was like it's a very scary ride.
Like, it's not that long.
But I can just remember the G-Force was intense.
Coming around, you go up, it's the highest roller coaster in the world or in Europe. Sorry, you go up very high and then it drops you into this plunge with a slight twist
into loop the loops.
And you just when you're hammering down the loop to loop at speed in slightly increasing
or decreasing spirals, the G force is like really messing with your head.
And I could just feel my head aching instantly.
As soon as we hit the first corner, I was like, oh, this is a mistake.
It was bad.
I had a headache for the rest of the day.
Oh, no.
I mean, I've been on roller coasters before, but I'm just at that age
where it's just a bit much.
It's just a bit much.
But Sarah and Sips to their credit also rode a roller coaster.
They didn't ride Hyperion.
Neither of them were up for it.
No, that they went on the we went on a pitch.
Yeah, we went on a kids ride.
The flying fish is a pretty slow day at Thorpe Park.
So the guys thought it would be funny to send us around on this thing. Six times.
Yeah, they just kept going around. I was like, you know what, that's fine for me. But after six times,
I was pretty close to puking. I didn't, you know, it's just too much. Like I'm not a roller coaster
guy. I'm more of like a dark ride at a Disney guy. You know, I like the slow scenic, I like the story unfolding, you know,
maybe a drop or two, but, you know, I don't like being, I don't like being sped up and
like jerked around and stuff, you know? It's too much, I feel sick.
I feel like when you're designing a roller coaster and a length of it and the whole experience,
it's a little bit like you're trying to put
through as many people as possible, but also you want to make it long enough that they're
not like disappointed, right?
So six times is quite a lot to go consecutively, I think.
On a ride.
Even a kids ride.
Yeah, the guy seemed like quite, he seemed to be having fun, you know?
He's in the little booth and we would go around and I would be waving my arms like, come on, not another one.
And he was like, he would like look down and kind of slur.
You're like, you're like waving no, he's like, he must be, he must be loving this.
Let's go around again.
It was a very tame roller coaster, in all honesty.
Like it wasn't, it wasn't crazy, but it was just, once you've done it a couple of times,
it would just be boring.
And there'll be a corner or something where you just get banged around a bit and you think,
geez, I don't want to do that again. You have to do it six times.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Yeah. You'd be like, this is enough.
Fucking hell.
But there was no queue. It was a Tuesday.
Yeah, it was Tuesday in the middle of, at the start of October.
There's no half term.
There's no, nobody's taking any vacation or whatever, it was pretty dead.
And yet, there were definitely school-aged children there just skipping school.
There did seem to be quite a few kids there, yeah, somehow. Maybe they were on school excursions,
who knows? There was a school excursion for a school, that were there, but I don't think
the rest of them were just people skipping school, the miserable buggers.
Wow.
So, so, so space...
So the one you rode, the Flying Fish, it used to be called Space Station Zero, it was the
first rollercoaster in Thorpe Park.
Right.
And it was seen as a flight through space.
Right.
However, it was removed. ALICE It's more of a flight through unkempt areas of grass.
In Thorpe Park.
There's just lots of long grass that's never been mowed.
ALICE Well, what happened was, it was removed to
make room for the stealth roller coaster, which is one of the more famous ones.
But then it sat in a shed for two years, before they reinstalled it in 2007.
So I guess they just gave it, they were like, oh, you know, this one's...
We could just put this one back!
Pfft.
You know, it wasn't even that bad.
Thorpe Park is quite...
It's very British, you know?
It's a bit shitty.
It's a bit shitty.
Yeah.
It's a bit run down.
It's a little, you know, it's rough and ready.
I'm, you know, if you love thrill rides, I'm sure it's great.
Not a huge fan of thrill rides.
Been to Disney a lot.
I think, I feel like Disney's just kind of ruined theme parks for me because it's
everything's very sort of clean and detailed and precise and stuff. And you build a bit of a
standard around it, you know, everything else you go to, you think like, oh, this is not Disney.
Yeah. You know, like when there was a bit that we went to, um, quite a few of the rides were
closed because of the weather, I think. Um, weather didn't help. Let me play some context on everything I just said.
Well, I mean, I think that you've got to understand that everything in the UK is out in that weather,
nine months of the year, right? And so, whereas in Florida, it's kind of warm-ish throughout the year.
And that kind of, like, I don't know, it's like LA, you know,
where you have all these sets. They have like the Hollywood back lot where they've got all these
fake buildings. They've been there for 30 or 40 years. They're just made of fucking plywood
and polystyrene. But if they were in the UK, they would be all moldy like fucking instantly.
Do you know what I mean? But because it's LA, it's always like...
Bringing that back to what I was just saying, I mean, I've been to Disneyland in Paris a
few times and I think one time I went during the summer, the weather was glorious. Every
other time I've been, it's rained like the whole time. So it's, you know, as good as
Disney is, the one in Paris...
The Paris climate is not that much different to the UK. I've been, it's rained like the whole time. So it's, you know, as good as Disney is the
Paris is not that much different. The weather is pretty inclement at the best of times sort
of thing. So it's like, yeah, you do get the, uh, the shitty weather experience there too.
Well, I mean, that's, that's, that's to be expected. I mean, the first Disney,
what was the first Disney you went to? Sibs remember?
Uh, the one in Orlando, I went as a kid.
We went on a family vacation one year and uh,
Was it a truck? Was it a road trip?
It was, it very much was a lot like the Griswold family.
You drove down the whole East Coast.
Not that I'm aware of on the way.
We didn't visit any family or anything on the way. We didn't, we didn't visit any family or anything on the way there.
We didn't, we don't have any family in America, but we did do a full two day drive from Ottawa
to Orlando.
And it was pretty, it was pretty rough.
Did you, what was the killer dog thing?
Yeah, I don't know that reference.
Is that a big part of your road trip across Canada?
No, it was in national ampoules. Oh, vacation, the first one where they go to Wally world.
Remember they start, come on Lewis. Remember he ties the dog up to the back of the car
and doesn't realize it. And then they, they stopped somewhere for a rest and they find
the, the, the leash and the collar, uh, on the back of the car and they get pulled over
and the cop pulls them over
and says you are a fucking monster. What are you? Because they because they accidentally killed the
old lady's dog. Oh shit. That's how you know that they're a bad guy.
All right. That's right. Yeah. So the branding at Thorpe Park is is kind of shit because we were talking about this on the day Disney
obviously has all of these big names and IP to call on and all that shit yeah thought
park does not know so a lot of the references they've gone for are either vague and dull
or just seemingly the first thing they thought of yeah so one of the biggest areas in the
middle of the park you spend a lot of your time
walking around it is called Amity, which is the name of the township in Jaws.
And there's like a pool area, I guess, splash thing, I don't know, right in the middle.
That always seems to be empty and dried up and looks like shit.
That's themed around the town from Jaws.
There's no mention of Jaws.
It's just called Amity.
And it's like kind of rickety.
They've got these buildings and they've got these fake fronts
that make them look like rickety old wooden vaguely
New England buildings, I guess.
Yeah, but they just fit in perfectly with all the other rickety old crappy buildings.
It's so weird.
And the layout is like you can tell that they've got relatively limited space
and they're like, where are we going to put so and so rides like shit?
I don't know, just jam it in there.
They plonked stuff everywhere.
So you kind of there's no flow.
And quite often there are dead ends where you're like, shit,
we've got to go all the way back and around to go around this ride.
There's no way way through.
So it's very badly laid out, in all honesty.
And there was this one bit we're standing there after getting off the extremely
high energy flying fish ride where we're like getting ourselves together and
serious to check in the camera and stuff.
And there's a speaker attached to a tree and he's playing fake commercials.
It's so loud.
It was louder than anything else.
And it was an advert about diarrhea.
And it was like really, really loud, obnoxious, faux American ad about diarrhea.
And it had like diarrhea sound effects.
And I was like, what is happening?
Like, what does that have to do with any kind of theming or thought?
It's not funny. And it's just boring and shit.
Literally, it was just so bad.
It had some effects. So confused.
You know, when you pour chunky soup into a bowl, it was like
it was like that sound, but very loud, you know.
What are you going for here?
What's the angle?
Like you're hoping we go, haha, diarrhea. That's funny.
Honey, let's get a hot dog.
Because there's like food stores around there.
What are you doing?
Are you saying the food's going to give me the shits and I should be laughing?
I'm like, well, what is happening?
So it was, it's just really bad theming.
But then you go to like the saw ride.
That's well themed.
Like that looks cool.
It's like a room.
Yeah, it's got all the emergency vehicles like all blown up and stuff. No, no, that was swarm. That was swarm. Oh, sorry. That's well themed. Like that looks cool. It's like, oh, yeah, it's got all the emergency vehicles like all blown up.
And that was swarm. That was sorry.
That's the theming swarm was pretty cool.
Yeah, it's like there's been a disaster.
There's some kind of flying alien here.
Look out. The world's falling apart.
So when you're going to it, there's like an ambulance tipped over and there's like a fire engine
crashed through a building and a billboard.
You go right through the billboard on the rollercoaster, like it's
cool.
But the rest of the park feels like they spent no time and effort on it.
That's a really nice way to theme it, because it is fucked, right?
So you just, you know, you let the hooligans into graffiti up a bit.
You just don't tidy up the mess, don't hide the janitor.
Very clever.
But yeah, the rest of it, I don't know what the theme of Thought Park park is or if they've even put much thought into it. Just need no dating. It does. It needs a
little bit of updating, I'd say. Just like a bit of, I mean, it's the season, maybe in the summer,
it's a lot nicer, but like, you know, just some, just some flowers, tidy it up a little bit.
You know, have it, have a think about some, some, some details, you know, like sightlines and stuff like that.
You know, maybe try to plan the layout a little bit better.
So is Saw the ride themed after the movies of Saw movies?
Yeah.
Right.
So there is like movie tie-ins to properties that are not owned by Disney.
Right, right, right. I mean, it's going to be stuff like that. But I mean,
it's apparently a good ride. It's got good actors pretending to be, I guess, people from Saw.
Yeah, I think they do immersive jumpscares and stuff. There's actors that come out of the walls
and stuff. All that kind of shit.
Yeah.
It's got to you got to be a certain age to go there.
So that adds to the sense that this is going to be scary.
Like it's good.
I've seen the actors walking about and it's like, all right, this is this is at least
an effort at theming.
But some of them are just just awful.
And like in the queue for the flying fish when they've got this, again, another faux
American voice over a guy saying, hey, buddy, no smoking in the queue.
OK, so put that out.
Thanks, buddy.
Just playing over and over again.
And there's no one in the queue.
It's like someone's pushed a button to say, please stop smoking.
It just plays.
I'm like, what is that?
That's just annoying. If I'm queuing for a run, I don't want to be badgered by some fake voice,
especially when I'm fucking not doing shit.
Yeah.
It was just like that all, all the time, but it's just really annoying
voiceovers and theming, but Hey, what are you going to do?
So there's this, this, this 11 saw movies.
Good God.
That's a lot of sawing.
Where's the hammering movies.
Cause you can't have sawing without hammering it.
You can't just cut wood.
You got to do something with it.
You could drill into it.
You could. That's why they have the Driller Killer.
Yeah, that's that. That's a thing.
They got the Driller Killer.
Eight, nine to I see eleven.
So which are the there's two future films.
There's also three short films.
It's going to be one of those ones where it's like the first one was really good.
The second one was not so great.
The third, the fourth and the fifth were like straight to VHS.
And then the seventh one was a reboot and it was amazing.
And then the eighth one was like not so bad, but it wasn't as good as the seventh one,
the big reboot.
And then the rest of them are probably not very good.
And it's going to be, it's going to be that sort of scenario, right?
They'll be like one or two gems in there and then the rest of them will just be...
There's a little...
You know there's a website called Rating Graph, which I always use when I...
Because it's really nice to put on, I don't know, The Office or Game of Thrones or look
up one of these things and it rates every IMDB episode of the series.
You could do it with little franchises as well.
And as you can see, there is a definite downward trajectory on the Saw movies, as expected.
But you're right, that's how these things, where they become like a parody of themselves.
They were kind of shit anyway, they were just super gross out stuff.
That was the idea.
It was kind of like very, very overly gruesome, overly violent.
I think the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they did similar things with as well.
I think there's quite a few movies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I think there's only
a couple that people really sort of look back and say, yeah, that was a good one.
But then there are more.
Yeah.
There are nine Texas Shades of Mask coming out.
No way.
Yes.
But it's one of those, like the first one came out and probably became a cult
classic and everybody was like, we need more.
And they're like, okay, great.
Let's do another one.
And then the follow-up was not great.
And then they probably, some company picked up the brand as it was just
dying or it was sold off for nothing sort of thing and tried to revive it and
failed and you know, like, like all these IPs will have a similar sort of stuff.
But even Fallout has a story like that.
Like, and it's a huge game and a huge name now, but it was, it was, it was almost dead, you
know, like before it was picked up by Bethesda and they made a bunch of big games out of
it.
You know what I mean?
It's true.
Yeah.
I think that the rebooting these old IPs can sometimes, I mean, look at what, what, you
know, Disney did with Marvel kind of thing, you know, really sort of took a lot of that
and you know, really ran with it. And I think they were hoping to do the same with Star, really sort of took a lot of that and, you know, really
ran with it.
And I think they were hoping to do the same with Star Wars and they certainly put a lot
of effort into making-
They have, yeah.
I don't know if it's enough.
They just, they pumped out so much Star Wars stuff and I feel like as much as I like Star
Wars or have liked Star Wars, there's a line where it's just too much Star Wars, you know, you can't have
too much of a good thing, you know, like smoke and crack.
When do you think the sequel went from being something that people made fun of and was
generally considered a joke and was inevitably expected to be worse to being something that
people thought, oh, I can't wait for the sequel.
Like more recently than surprisingly, probably more recently because I think
it's recent because like when they made the star Wars movies, that was different,
but Jaws was one of the biggest movies of all time and nobody thought Jaws 2
was going to be good. And they were right.
Yeah. And then you had Jaws, you had Jaws 3.
And then that was Jaws 3D.
Okay.
Jaws 3 was Jaws 3D.
So Jaws 3, Jaws is a weird one, right?
I think from what I remember, uh, it went a bit of the way of the alien, the
original alien trilogy, where the third movie was about a mother and a baby.
That was a fully grown baby. And I'm pretty sure that the third alien movie was something
about that as well.
Cause yeah, Ripley doesn't Ripley have sex with the alien at the end of the third one
or she has a baby? No. That's four, I think.
I think that's four.
And she's half alien.
Her DNA becomes fused with an alien somehow when they clone her, or something.
Sure.
That sounds right.
The third one is the one on the prison planet.
David Fincher.
Alien 3 with the hypertext 3.
Yes, the little three. Alien cubed.
Yeah, Alien cubed.
That was, I think David Fincher's first movie was Alien 3 and apparently he never wants
to talk about it again and hated it as a filmmaking exercise.
There is a funny video that's done around recently on the internet of the whole point
of Alien 3 was that the chest buster came from a dog.
So it is inherited properties
of that creature, which is something that we hadn't seen in previous alien material,
was that if the alien comes out of a dog, it's going to be a bit more like a dog.
It's like, where did this come from? And so the dog alien is very quick and slightly smaller and
runs about very quickly. So the thing is, originally, instead of using CGI, which they didn't actually use CGI,
it's they blue screen a puppet of the alien into the footage,
which is why it looks like shit.
But one of the other options was they were going to dress a dog up as an alien.
Yes. And run it around.
And if you look at the footage, it just looks like a dog in a funny costume.
You can see why they didn't do it.
But so that's Alien 3.
She does die. Spoiler
alert. There's a chest buster at the end that is in her and she throws herself into a furnace
and dies in a terrible shot. Really awful shot. The alien bursts out and she holds it
close to her and descends into the furnace. I don't know how deep this furnace is, but
she turns into a little dot at the end before she hits it. It's awful. So that's Alien 3. Alien 4, Alien Resurrection, is a dreadful, dreadful film. And I thought that all the
Prometheus and the other one, I can't even remember what it's called, were also dreadful
films.
Covenant. Romulus was the recent one, which wasn't so bad.
Yeah, it was bad. It was bad.
It was, I mean, considering like-
Oh, you mean the most recent? Sorry, I haven't seen it yet.
Yeah.
It was honestly...
Not bad apparently.
Felt like a bit of a reimagining.
I will say this, certainly from what I've seen people saying it was good, I've got to
ask, could it have been any monster?
And if the answer is probably, then is it really an alien movie?
Like I feel like the aliens were so core to the film and the same obviously for
alien, that I don't know if the most recent one, Romulus could have just been basically
any monster or not.
So we'll have to watch it.
But I'm concerned that it's not alien enough.
It's just a basic teen horror, isn't it?
I think that there's two schools of thought here. One is that there is already such a strong series behind it and following behind it.
And the originals were so good that sequels are always going to have to live up to that.
And that's inevitably going to bring them down, being compared to the original.
Also remember sequels always, you've lost that original idea, that original shock, that original surprise, that
original unknown. In the first movie, you don't know what's going on for a long time,
until you finally see the alien. When you watch a sequel, you're going in with that spoiled.
It's always inevitable that a sequel will never be as impactful as its original. Unless you can
reinvent it somehow, or rebuild rebuild it somehow or rebuild it.
The other thing is that when you have a string of terrible movies as sequels and then you have
the ninth one in the series or whatever is finally good. Is it this great sigh of relief?
It's like, oh, finally a good one. Do you see what I mean? Or finally someone that's watchable.
I'm wondering what impact that has. So yeah, I mean, part of me is like, I enjoyed it. Part of me is like, is this just because
everything I've seen so many bad ones, or is it because like it's finally a good one? You know,
I don't know. So if we think about that, I think this idea of franchises, right, is where it started.
So idea that you don't just have sequels, it's part of a franchise.
So let's take the Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland.
Right. I wouldn't say that the sequels have been progressively worse.
I would in fact say that they they were really good.
And like Spider-Man Homecoming is probably one of the one of the better ones in the series.
Well, the original Avengers movie is really, really good.
But Avengers Endgame and and and that whole sequence, there are sequels, but they're really, really good. But Avengers Endgame and that whole sequence,
they're sequels, but they're really, really good. And I just want to know what was the
tipping point? Where did we go from making sequels and expecting them to be bad to sequels
being expected to be part of a longer thing? And when did it become okay to brand them
as a franchise? Because when Die Hard came out, people didn't say this could be the start of a franchise. They had no idea. And it was expected that
Die Hard 2 and 3 and however many were not going to be as good. So when did it change?
That's what I want to know. What was the film that invented the franchise?
Yeah. I think that this has been a thing since ever though, right? I think even in the Victorian era when fucking Charles Dickens
was writing his shit, people were like, oh, give us a sequel to this one that's done well.
In fact, he didn't write a lot of sequels, did he, Charles Dickens? That's a bad example.
I feel like big trilogies, big sequels were probably started in the 80s, but before that
you would have had a looser collection of films in a series if you like.
But I don't know if you necessarily had to watch them in order, whereas like a like a full trilogy, like, for example, like Star Wars, the trilogy
or like Aliens, the Indiana Jones movies, those trilogies,
as a Jaws trilogy, I guess.
So if you think about sequences or franchises, as they are called now of films.
Yeah, I think horror movies was one of the things where it was quite typical
for you to have a horror movie where you've established that there's a scary villain.
I mean, you've got Friday the 13th, you've got Nightmare on Elm Street, you've got those kind of movies where they're like, we can just make more of these.
Halloween.
Yeah.
People just want to watch a horror movie, but they were seen as schlocky and kind of shitty.
to watch a horror movie, but they were seen as schlocky and kind of shitty.
And if you look at like Robocop, Robocop one big film, Robocop two pretty shitty. Toy Story, the first film in that franchise was obviously huge, but the sequels didn't feel like I'm
expecting this to be shitty. At that point, it felt like this is going to be better.
And I think this Toy Story films have all had really good sequels.
Like, I don't think I've seen a Toy Story film that I haven't liked.
You know, they've all been really good.
I don't think some of the sequel movies characters were as big as like
the original characters, for example.
But the movies themselves were all very good.
Yeah, you know, they weren't they didn't feel like, oh, you know, two and three
should have just gone straight to home video.
But it felt like what it is.
I mean, the Godfather one and two.
I don't think anyone thought that Godfather Part Two was a dogshit sequel.
It was like a part of the book and a continuation of the story.
Yeah. Three was not good.
But the point is, it felt like back then you had to have a good reason to have a
follow on movie.
Like I had to continue the story.
I had to be part of a trilogy or something like that.
Or people would say, this is a clash grab.
Whereas all of a sudden we're like, oh, it's a franchise.
That's fine.
And we've almost bought into something that the movie studios must fucking love
that they can find a film like the Avengers, make a bunch of money from it and go, we could just make another one.
And no one's going to be like, it's a cash grab sequel.
They're going to be waiting to see it and they're going to be invested in this franchise.
I just wonder where that tipping point came because it happened between the 80s and now.
At some point.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
But I think, again, I think there's always been this push by, certainly by publishers,
but okay, like Sherlock Holmes, he famously hated Sherlock Holmes, you know, because anything
else he tried to write was not popular.
Sherlock Holmes hated Sherlock Holmes.
He hated himself.
He hated, famously hated himself.
He looked in the mirror every day and he said, I hate Sherlock Holmes.
I can't stand this guy!
And it happens all the time, right? To writers and everyone who gets something successful
and then they get typecast effectively, they get stuck with their thing. When you talked
about Amity, I'm sure that's probably a reference to the Amityville horror, right? Maybe? Which
is a really famous...
No, Amity is the... Oh, you mean, what, in Jaws it was a reference back to the horror?
Yeah, I would imagine, right? Because that was very famously the whole true crime...
Was it even true crime? I can't remember. It was like a novel, but it was like a semi-realistic
sort of story of murders that happened, right?
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I think they just tried to make a very pleasant sounding seaside
town. Holiday destination.
Yeah, DeFeo Jr. was an American mass murderer. So, yeah. And then the Amityville, because it was
real, they couldn't copyright that, I guess, it's a real place. And it's
had, you know, absolutely tons and tons of books and movies and horror movies based on
this, you know, about some murderer going around, you know, God, look at this.
God, Jaws scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. I was really small and it was on
TV and I was, I felt like I was like traumatized for life. Do you know what I think that oddly enough, a video popped up on my feed the
other day saying the scene that terrified a generation was the scene.
It's not all the scenes with the shark, although the scene where the young girl
at the start goes swimming and gets pulled down is I was really traumatized
by that as a kid because it was so realistic.
That was awful.
But if you think about the way horror movies were made, a lot of the time
there was like eerie music build up and it was like, oh, don't go in that
creepy house or don't go down to the basement.
You sense the peril coming.
If you look at the scene that I think was probably the most famous scene,
certainly the most famous shot is when they're all on the beach
and the little kid gets attacked.
Yeah, that does that. The famous zoom.
It wasn't made by Spielberg, but it was made famous by that shot in Jaws
with a background recedes and he comes forward, that famous sort of counter zoom.
I think they do it with his.
I think you dolly backwards and zoom at the same time is my.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That shot.
Yeah. The reason that that sequence for me was so scary
is because there's no scary build up
in the same way. It looks very realistically like a bunch of people having a day at the beach and
they're all acting very naturally. So you feel safe. You feel almost like you're watching real
life. So when the horror happens, you immediately think this is like I've actually seen this in
real life and this is horrifying. And there's no gap where you're like, this is obviously fake or that monster looks so rubbish.
It really feels horrifying and real. It stays with me. My sister didn't go in the ocean
for years after seeing yours.
Oh yeah, no it was. It was scary, yeah.
I think it's that, I don't know if you've ever been somewhere before
where somebody's collapsed or somebody's hurt themselves or whatever.
And when it happens, it feels surreal, but also the whole tone of everything around you changes, right?
There's like, you can, you can feel like a panic and a worry in everybody around you, like everything, right?
And I think, I think a scene like that probably captures those elements too, which makes it feel like a bit, you know, you might relate it back to something that you've seen in real life or witnessed or been around where you where you can feel that feeling as well.
Yeah.
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Three months? Oh my god! expressvpn.com slash triforce. Thank god! Do it now! Well, what do you guys think of all these fucking, like, shit movies?
Like they're amazing.
There's tons and tons of really-
Man, I don't even watch movies anymore.
I honestly can't remember the last time I went to see a movie.
Like, I've taken my kids to see stuff, but I've... very rarely now will seek out a movie.
Because there's all these very low budget, like, that'd be filmed by a 12 year old camera
phone in some sort of 24 hour movie challenge, do you know what I mean?
And with Amityville, like, just in 2022 alone, okay, there were one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve... Twelve movies called Amityville something.
God.
There's a movie called Amityville Death Toilet. There's a movie called like,
Yes.
Amityville Christmas Vacation.
Yeah.
Just trying everything, you know?
Amityville Gas Chamber, Amityville Vampire, Amityville Christmas vacation. Yeah. Just trying everything, you know? Amityville gas chamber, Amityville vampire, Amityville moon.
It's nonsense.
You see, I mean, the thing is, I think it's a natural thing to want to capitalize on a
previous success.
You see it on YouTube all the time, right?
I'm sure we've all tried to do it before.
We've done something that's worked
and then you've thought, fuck, you know,
let's do that again or maybe just change it up a little bit.
But like, you know, even some of the best parodies
on like YouTube or whatever,
though there will be some sort of follow-up
that is just not as good or nowhere near as good
in some case, you know what I mean?
Like I think it's a pretty natural thing
for people to want to try to case, you know what I mean? Like I think it's a pretty natural thing for people to
want to try to do, you know, like, uh, you know, recreate a success or recreate like a big moment,
but it, it's weird because the first one, like the first one always just, the more you think about it,
it's the first one's always such a fluke, you know, like it's, you can't, you, you can't plan the first one. You're just trying something and hoping that it works. But with the second one,
you're trying to understand what made the first one so special and then recreate that. It never
works. And yeah, they know exactly. They never quite get it. Yeah. Yeah. Like they, they,
they always assume there's some other reasons behind why it was success. But having said that, sometimes, like the first movie, I mean, there's a whole bunch
of examples of this in the 80s when James Cameron did the sequels to movies, right?
He always did part two.
He did Terminator 2, which was amazing.
And he did Aliens, which was amazing.
And you know, like, it's just a completely,
bring in a completely different person
and let them go with their vision of what a sequel should be.
I feel like has a better chance of working
than having the original person do a sequel,
especially if it's a sequel that is not already planned, you know?
Like, if you have, like, a set of books
or you have a set of scripts that it's like, this is the
first movie, this is the second movie, which is a continuation, and this is the third,
which you know, like the second movie is going to be this bridging movie or whatever, then
maybe, fine, yeah, it'll work.
But I think in those cases, bringing somebody else in and letting them just kind of go nuts
with what they think is going to be a good sequel can work sometimes too.
I mean, it did work.
Those were huge movies.
Yeah. I think that taking a movie that's unexpectedly done well and making it better is not always...
And it hasn't always worked, right? But people do want more of something they like.
The first Terminator...
It feels like there's money in that. ALICE The first Terminator was pretty fucking bad.
It was lucky to get a sequel. And even more so lucky to get a fucking amazing sequel.
The second movie blows the first movie out of the fucking water. It's not even a contest.
The first movie was dogshit.
ALICE Wow, compared to the second one. That is quite the take. I think it was okay.
It was bad.
Compared to the four more recent ones, that is definitely still stands up.
I don't think I disagreed with a take less.
You like the first one better than the second?
In the history of this podcast.
No!
You prefer Terminator 1 to Terminator 2?
No, but to call it dogshit is incredible.
Compared to Terminator 2, it is dog shit.
I'm sorry.
It's not dog shit, dude.
They're both good moves, but Terminator 2 is obviously the superior Terminator.
I mean, how much fucking money Terminator costs to make?
Let's look at that, shall we?
Yes, it does.
We're competing with...
Okay, here's a little pop quiz for you.
Can you name one of the other...
Name the other Terminator movies.
Name one of the other four. Terminator Darkinator movies. Name one of the other four.
Terminator Dark Fate.
Terminator Salvation.
Terminator Genesis.
Spelled wrong.
It's all fucking continuations of Skynet and shit.
Well Genesis was spelled like Jen-
Yeah it's supernamed Genesis.
Yeah.
Aw, why did they do this?
Like- I mean, it's a cool character and they want to make more movies.
I think the thing is people aren't automatically assuming a new Terminator movie is going to
be shit.
And I'm not up to a point anyway.
Eventually, they're like, oh, these have been dog shit.
But there was Terminator 2 Judgment Day was obviously a great fucking movie.
One of the best action movies ever made.
Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines was shit.
Rise of the Machines was pretty bad. Was God. Terminator three rise of the machines was shit. The rise of the machines was pretty bad.
Was shit. Terminator Genesis was shit.
Terminator Dark Fate is all right.
It's actually wasn't too bad.
It was pretty bad, but it wasn't too bad.
And then Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was a TV show.
I had no interest in that.
I don't know. I feel like I think the only thing I wanted to wear
a whole franchise afloat is Terminator two. I think without it, I feel like Terminator 1 and 2 were enough. I think the only thing that keeps that whole franchise afloat is Terminator 2.
I think without it, it would have been...
I don't even think they would have bothered to make as many movies as they did.
I think they only made that many movies off the back of Terminator 2, basically.
Because it was so big.
So James Cameron's first movie was Piranha 2, The Spawning.
So it was like a schlocky horror sequel to the movie Piranha, and it was like a big, I think.
And what was George Clooney's first movie? Don't look it up. What was his first film?
I don't know what his first movie was, but he was in Roseanne for a while. That's the first time I
ever saw him. He was one of Dan's working class friends in Roseanne.
So he was in a film called Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
Oh yeah!
I remember that movie.
You can look it up, he was in that.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes!
Yeah, I remember that.
That's a very 80s movie.
That was a parody, right?
That wasn't like an actual, that was like on purpose.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Silly, right? It was a comedy, it was supposed to be a comedy maybe? I don't know.
I mean, some of the movies that came in the 80s, the action movies, all the Schwarzenegger,
Stallone movies, Bruce Willis, man, it was exciting times for movies, wasn't it? Every summer,
everybody's like, what's it going to be this year? Oh, what's the, what's the big movie going to be?
It was, it was, it was pretty, it was pretty good times.
This is funny. I'm not, I'm not trying to advertise,
but I just put out an hour long essay on YouTube
about what makes a great action movie.
And it's interesting to hear you talk about them, sort of fondly.
You did this recently, didn't you?
I put it out this morning.
And it's just-
Didn't you do another one of these though, last year?
No, I didn't do an essay.
I was going to, but I was thinking of ways to do it.
What I was going to have was clips of these movies in, but it turns out that doing that
is a fucking nightmare.
Like putting movie clips in your video.
Am I having like, a deja vu? You definitely made this movie at some point. You definitely
made this video and I watched it before. Did you show me like a-
I might have shown you the script, I don't know.
Did you show me this before? Like, did you show me a demo version?
No, I did not do a video about a great action movie. No, I recorded this and put this out this morning.
What the fuck? Am I having a breakdown? I'm sure we-
Did you watch the video I did about apes in movies?
Yes, that will probably be it. Yes, the great, great ape war. You put that out during a podcast.
You told me about this at the pub. Okay. God. Thank God.
It's just what makes a great action movie. And the funny thing is, so I don't want to
go into this again, because it's all in the vid, but I'm going to list you some movies. Okay. And you tell thing is, so I don't want to go into this again because it's all it's all in the in the vid, but I get it. I'm going to list you
some movies. Okay. And you tell me what you think of them, Siv. All right. Here's the
list. Die Hard. The first one. Die Hard. Yes. I loved it. I loved the Predator, the original
Predator. I really liked that too. Okay. Some, but just just to sort of give you some context
around this. A lot of these movies I haven't
seen since probably like 1992.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
So at the time, I loved them.
The first Matrix, I loved it.
Yeah.
Rambo First Blood, the first Rambo.
I loved Rambo First Blood.
Aliens.
Aliens, the second one?
Aliens.
Oh, I loved it.
I don't know if you've seen Police Story, the Jackie Chan action movie, Police Story?
No, I don't know if I've seen it. Great. Terminator, obviously,
we've heard your opinion on Terminator. Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yeah, all the Indiana Jones movies, at least the original, like Templar Doom,
Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. I liked them.
What about Heat? Did you see Heat? I liked Heat.
Okay. What about Lethal Weapon? Lethal Weapon, I liked, yeah.
Did you see a Korean movie called Oldboy?
No.
Okay, what about Point Break?
Point Break, yes, I saw it, I liked it.
Keanu Reeves, right?
Yeah, what about Leon?
Leon, yeah, that was the one with the older French guy and the younger girl, right?
He's protecting her.
Star Wars, the Star Wars trilogy. Yeah, the original Star Wars. Yeah, for sure.
And what about the original Mad Max movie?
The original Mad Max movie, I've seen it, but it was so long ago.
It was 1979. Yeah, it's all theming and stuff like that, like, like, like the aesthetics,
but I don't remember the story or anything. Right.
So that list of movies, 48 sequels from those movies discounting star wars which i mean some insane number.
So those movies i guess with the birth of the franchise.
Because it must have been yeah because i would make in them but why why were actually the ones that had french i don't know but you gotta remember to like there was the there was like the really big action movies but then then there was like a, there was a, there was like a sub industry for action movies as well.
You have had all the Dolph Lundgren stuff.
You had all the Steven Seagal stuff in the eighties.
Remember like under siege and all of those, the, the sort of, uh, the, like the lower rate action movies were all very popular as well.
Weren't they?
And they had many, many, many
bad sequels.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of these are vehicles for specific actors though, in a sense. And you still see it today
with people like The Rock, they want to do an action movie with The Rock. And that's
where they start, you know, with the
planning for it. It's not like...
So if I may, in most of those films that I listed, most of them, the actor in the lead
role is not necessarily a film star at that point.
No, that's true.
And I think that quite a few of them, they'd either revitalise their career or made it,
and the sequels that they were in were also big. As long as the original star was still in it.
The moment that the star dips.
I think it's the star power though, right? I mean, like people would watch a Schwarzenegger
movie, right? And they'd expect a certain...
You know what you're going to get. He's the right seal of actors.
He's... I mean, I think that in a sense, looking at his
the movies that he's attached to is also like a be like a line through.
Predator was a cool movie.
What a great.
I love that. Yeah.
Just I love the whole, you know, they got picked off one by one,
but each each character was like kind of cool in their own right and stuff.
And like makes you a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus.
Oh man.
They have continued like Prey. Have you seen Prey?
Yeah, I thought it was decent.
2022.
It was decent.
No.
It was like, it's a Predator movie. I mean, and in fact, like they've done,
they've really heavily lead into the crossover with Aliens as well.
Yeah.
Which I've really liked.
It's kind of weird.
I think that's a fun thing to do.
So I want someone to correct me if I'm wrong. This started, the aliens and predators,
there was a comic publisher called Dark Horse Comics.
Yeah.
And I'm pretty sure, because I remember buying it, there was a comic called Aliens vs Predators.
There was, yeah.
And that was like the start of this whole Aliens vs.
They're in the same universe.
But I think it came about because in Predator 2 with Danny Glover,
at the end, he goes on board the Predator ship.
And one of the trophies is the skull of an alien from the Alien franchise.
Oh, right.
And I think everyone saw that and soiled themselves
and immediately decided to start making comics about it and creating a whole new thing.
It's just kind of like a nerdgasm. It's like, it probably was even just a reference, right?
That thing in the movie. But I think people love the idea, like why not? That actually
is totally, these two universes do not have to...
Yeah.
There's no reason they couldn't be the same.
But I mean, can you imagine other film franchises where that happened? I was thinking
just off the top of my head, if in Die Hard, there's a scene where Captain Kirk and Spock
beam down into Nakatomi Plaza, do some mission and then beam back up, you'd think, what is happening?
do some mission and then beam back up. You think what is happening?
But I would love that if it turned out that somehow that everything that's happening in Nakatomi Plaza was somehow also happening at the same time. There's no time travel.
This is all happening within the Star Trek universe. This is potentially not Earth.
And this is all canon now. The Star Trek exists within the same universe as Die Hard.
I'm just trying to think what would be the weirdest crossover tie-ins where a movie,
out of nowhere, another movie steps in.
Fucking hell, there's nine alien movies.
Oh my god, we need like two dice. We need like two, we need to roll some dice and just have
like, you know, two contesting franchises.
I'm going to Google eighties movies and I will just pick two full metal jacket and the
Goonies about that.
Oh my God, that's like the profits of Vietnam vets.
Yeah, yeah.
That could be it.
The Goonies could be like the precursor to to to them arriving at boot camp for a full
metal jacket.
Yeah. All the kids from the Goonies grow up real quick when they hit the fucking
whoop, I'm a puke.
You stand up straight, but I'm telling you like they had something
up the face of the drill. So you guys.
Sloth is like on the M60.
OK, all right. What about Platoon and E.T.?
Oh, man. Imagine imagine like you're you're in a foxhole, you're being attacked in the middle
of the night and everything is going crazy, whatever, you turn around and ET is just in
your foxhole with you with his little finger lit up.
Go home.
Oh my god. Okay.
Yes ET, take us.
Get me out of here.
Ghostbusters with the Terminator, but like, the Skynet is actually like a ghost.
It's like a sentient...
It's like a machine ghost.
God.
That'd be so bad.
That would be really bad, yeah.
Oh, oh god.
What about Driving Miss Daisy and Beetlejuice?
I mean, I don't think that would be too insane.
You know, like Beetlejuice in its own right is just an insane movie and idea for a movie.
I think if you combined it with anything, it would still be insane and then just spill
into whatever movie it was paired with.
You know what I mean?
It's possible.
It's possible.
What about Beetlejuice and Goodwill Hunting? But Beetlejuice is just his therapist?
Beetlejuice, I hope I turn up to your house one day and you're just not here.
Oh man.
How do you like them apples?
There's a lot of potential here for crossover. Dead Poets Societyets Society and, I dunno, Escape from New York, somehow combined to make a film.
This is the next thing.
This gotta be the next thing, yeah.
Movie mashups, where they actually take two completely disparate films and characters
and somehow work them together into a story.
I reckon there's a screenwriting challenge there.
Definitely.
You've gotta get, like, in RoboCop, a gremlin, or whatever.
I don't know.
That's coffee.
SEAN It's that, or it's like they did with Rogue
One.
They'll take some small part of a successful movie, and they'll spin off from that, you
know?
It'll just be...
RILEY Rogue One was fucking great.
SEAN It was was so good. And it was it was clever, too, because it was just like one line in Star Wars.
And then they spun off this whole, you know, side side quest,
which was a really neat idea.
I imagine they did that with like heat.
You shoot a movie about the E.R.
after the shootout or during the shootout, they're bringing all
these like people in that are, that have been shot by these guys that are having this massive
gunfight in front of the bank and stuff.
And then ET saves them all.
And then ET comes down and saves them all.
And then Beetlejuice fucks them all.
And Snake Plissken comes in.
What a great name.
By the way, if you haven't seen this sequel to Escape from New York, I think it's Escape Yeah. And snake plisking comes in.
What a great name. By the way, if you haven't seen the sequel to Escape from New York, I think it's Escape from LA. I think I'm right in that.
I haven't seen it.
There is a sequence in that where he gets in a submarine that takes him to the city,
from wherever the base is. It has to be seen to be believed. I urge you to watch this sequence and just let me know when you get to the bit with the
CGI shark, because it's one of the worst things I've ever seen.
It's un fucking believable.
Just leave it out.
They put it in.
They shouldn't have put it in.
It was really bad.
And another John Carpenter film is called, I think it's in the mouth of madness.
1994, Sam, Sam Neill is in it.
There's a there's a the special effects in that are very, very, very poor.
Some of the special early special effects are a bit like even the original Ghostbusters.
I don't even think most I don't even think you can watch the original version of Ghostbusters
now because it's been they've redone a bunch of the effects and stuff.
Really? Yeah, I'm pretty sure the like the original original version.
The effects are like a bit ropey.
Even at the time, the the the guys who were all working on and stuff were like
we were just trying anything to make it look passable.
But it was it was difficult.
I thought they did.
But then they've since gone through and they've remastered
a bunch of the effects and stuff
and it now is seamless, like looks good.
But you watch, sometimes you watch it, you're like, holy crap, these effects are really
good but they were not.
If you watch the original, they were really bad.
I mean, technically like any movie could be in the Matrix, right?
Any universal crossover with Matrix.
Yeah, because I mean, it's meant to be the real world. It's like a recreation. But, if you do that,
because you know, there was a TV show made in the, I think it was the 70s and 80s, called
Saint Elsewhere. Have we talked about this before?
What about Frozen and Memento? A guy with tattoos all over him turns up in Arendelle and doesn't remember anything and they have to figure out what how his wife
Elsewhere was like a medical show like ER or something like that. Oh really at the end of the series
It's basically revealed through this sort of convoluted final episode that the entire thing took place inside the imagination of a young autistic boy.
Right. Well, like he's literally like it pans out from the hospital,
which is like it's a snowy day and it pans out and it turns out it's a young boy
who'd appeared in the show a little bit holding a snow globe that's got St.
Elsewhere in and everything that happened.
All the series were in his mind.
That's the end of the series.
Wow. It was a big, big story at the time
because it was like shit, right?
However, there were a lot of people that appeared in that show
as characters that they played in other shows
or actors who'd played other characters in other shows.
So the idea became, how big does this rabbit hole go?
What else is connected to St.
Elsewhere and is therefore canonically
within the imagination of this one boy? And that was kind of the joke. So you can look it up,
there are loads of stuff written about it.
ALICE Because Carla, Rhea Pearlbent, Carla from Cheers.
NIGEL Right, right, right.
ALICE I don't want to spoil anything, but the end of Super Mario 2 on the NES had an ending like
that too. He said he was just dreaming the whole time.
And when you look back, you know, it was a bit of a wild game.
It was, you know, it deviated away from the original principles of Mario for sure.
So I guess it could have been a dream.
But, you know.
I want to say that's just a fun thing they added on the last episode.
I don't think they intended where they started writing it.
No, they did not.
Lost went a bit that way as well, didn't it? Remember the TV series Lost?
Well, people talk about it like that, but actually I don't think that was... I think
that's the takeaway people got from the final series. But I don't think that was the actual
entire intention. I think some of the final series was after they were dead or whatever.
Right. God, I don't know. It doesn't matter.
No, it doesn't. But, God, that show, I remember, I loved it at first. The first season was
just like, oh man, this is such a cool show.
I actually watched the first episode of Lost recently.
Oh yeah?
Didn't grip me. Oh. No. Didn't grip me. Didn't grip me.
Did you grip you, Jury?
You giving it the old steel hand grip.
Oh man.
No, I mean, it's probably aged a bit now too.
I mean, I love the wire, but even going back to watch the wire, it feels like stepping back in time
a little bit too, you know? Like it's... Oh, for sure.
It's aged a little. I mean, it still holds up. It's still a fantastic series, but it has
definitely aged a little. It's of its time.
Try watching Hill Street Blues. It's all on channel four. Anyone who hasn't seen it.
I'd seen a little bit of it when I was a kid, but never really appreciated it. It was so far ahead of its time. It's ridiculous. Go
ahead and watch that show. Brilliant, brilliant show. Especially the first few seasons. But
that is a superb television program.
1981.
Dude, it's so good. It was hugely influential.
Some of the elements of the... I've been watching Monk, which was in 2002 or whatever, in the background.
And it's like...
You watching that on Dave?
Oh, it's on Netflix.
Every lunchtime?
Yeah, it's on Netflix.
Oh, it's on Netflix.
But it's like, it's fine. But it's kind of like sometimes a little bit like, ooh. Like
some episodes of Friends have bits, moments where they're like, ooh, that wouldn't be
okay now. Especially since
certainly to begin with, it's a comedy show mostly about this guy's OCD tendencies. Most
of the laughs come from him straightening stuff or like, you know, the classic joke
in Monk actually, and this isn't too bad, is they're in some situation where they're
trapped in a freezer or the water's rising or they're on the edge of a cliff or they're in some situation where they're trapped in a freezer or the water's rising, or they're on the edge of a cliff, or they're in a flaming car, whatever, right? They're about to
die somehow. And Monk's like, quick, grab that thing. And so they stretch and they straight,
and they grab the thing. And he uses it to like adjust the mirror or screw something in. He uses
it to, cause he's like, oh, the picture wasn't straight. Do you know what I mean? And that was
bugging him. And they're like, but I thought that was going to be the, that's the main joke.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
I feel like another series that was like, was influential on a lot of stuff that came
after it was, was Malcolm in the middle.
It felt like, like really sped up comedy, but like, it's the same kind of sped up comedy
as like, was in like scrubs and stuff like that. You know, you had like all the,
all the scene transitions were always like with that woosh sound, you know,
go like push. And then it would, you know,
it would transition just immediately into like screaming or chaos or something
like that. But it was quite, it was high energy funny. Yeah.
But when you compare that to like a show like friends or,
or Seinfeld or like the, like the, the really big prime time comedies, uh,
before it, they're so slow, you know, like everything is so like friends is
fucking so slow. Like every lead up is just like, you know,
like it just takes the whole show to lead up to a joke sometimes. And, uh,
but like I found with Malcolm in mill, everything was just like,
really fast, really chaotic.
I mean, it was like, you know, kind of like the show was meant to be like that,
but there's so many shows that came after that.
They were like that too, you know, like that, that really, the really quick,
like transition and, and like, and the chaos and stuff like that.
I think it was a lot like that.
It was like the tail end of that style of sitcom, because then the office came along
and it all came.
Yeah, and it was all awkward.
Because they took away the laugh track.
The loss of the laugh track changed the pace of comedy.
Yeah, it just wasn't live studio.
It wasn't a live studio audience.
Friends had studio audience, Seinfeld had studio audience. Fucking The Big Bang Theory had a studio audience. Although I think at that point,
you could make a decent case for having a giant trap door under the theatre and everyone who's
attended a live filming of The Big Bang Theory has dropped into a pit.
Big Bang Theory I never watched. I think it was just too old for it.
Or, you know, it just wasn't for...
No, I think you're just not insane. I think you did maybe watch an episode and realized it was garbage.
The Young Sheldon one?
It was on at the dentist the other day?
Fuck it.
Hell.
It's so bad.
Like, I just, I couldn't even hear it.
It was all subtitled because I was waiting in the, at the dentist reception room.
You have your teeth drilled.
What's better, watching an episode of Young Sheldon? drilled, because I was waiting at the dentist's reception room. You're having your teeth drilled.
What's better, watching an episode of Young Sheldon?
And I was watching this and reading it, and I just thought, Jesus Christ, who fucking
watches this shit?
It's the worst.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I mean, I already had a phobia about being at the dentist.
Now, it's even fucking worse if they play it.
I don't know how they thought that doing a full spin-off series of one,
one character show,
it's seven seasons of young child and still going.
Oh my God.
But what's well like what, when, when does that air on TV?
Like, or does it not? Is it just streamed? Like, is it on?
As CBS CBS right.
What like seven o'clock at night on a Tuesday or something do they still do that or is it. I think so it just still going people people love this people love bill bank theory they love young Sheldon.
Why how many people are we talking here.
Millions, dude.
People like NCIS.
It's still 10 million average viewers every episode of Young Sheldon.
10 million people watch that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not really that many considering.
Is that just in America?
That's a lot for TV, dude.
I know, but TV?
Okay.
10 million over here. Yeah. the population like 70 million, 10 million.
And that's a population of 400 million.
That's not that much.
Yeah, but they've got a million channels.
I guess anyone's time they could be watching anything else.
They're watching that shit.
It is Thursday nights at 8 p.m.
Oh, I said you fucking watch his voice.
That used to be 8 p.m. Thursday.
You should be out. Yeah, that used to be 8pm Thursday. Yes, Neil Young Sheldon is out.
Yes.
No, that used to be the slot for like either Seinfeld Friends or Simpsons in the 90s.
That's your big one.
Thursday night at eight o'clock.
Yeah.
God knows why.
Maybe, maybe this is good.
Maybe this is a good show guys.
What are the ratings like on it?
Uh, I'll tell you, I can tell you though, from watching it briefly at the dentist
office, it did not seem like
a very good show.
But I could be wrong.
Maybe I gotta give it a try.
I feel like you gotta watch a season or something.
No.
To be able to comment.
I'm not watching a season of Young Sheldon.
How many episodes per season?
Is it standard, like, network television?
22.
24 episodes.
Let me blow your mind.
22 episodes.
There have been 141 episodes of Young Sheldon.
I know.
141.
Okay.
Okay, but it's about a kid.
Kids grow really quick.
So they've had to change the actor around a bunch of times, right?
I have no idea.
They would have had to.
There's no way you're doing six seasons of a show about a kid and that kid is still,
I mean even Macaulay Culkin became an
adult at one point and nobody ever thought that could happen.
Cause he was like, same kid.
He's been doing it for seven years.
It's, he's got to be like 30 years old now.
He's 16.
So he started off at nine and now he's 16.
Did you watch Modern Family?
The kids grow up in that.
Is that the one with Al Bundy in it?
No.
Yeah.
He's, he's one of of the one of the guys.
I tried watching it. I couldn't get into it at all.
That's what my youngest absolutely adores that.
Really? It's it's it's quite funny in parts.
Like it's genuinely quite funny.
What's that other one?
They it's like called like This Is Us or something like that.
I think it's more like emotional, like sentiments.
What? Oh, yeah, I can't remember the name of it, but there's there's so many shows that I haven't heard about.
Well, here's my recommendation so far.
The Penguin and really good so far.
If anyone would like telling me about that.
Yeah. The Penguin, Slow Horses.
A lot of people that have missed that show.
Great fucking show.
Yeah. Really, really, really, really good.
And 48 hours, 24 hours of police custody.
If you haven't seen it, brilliant.
I love me a bit of 24 hours.
That 24 hours, baby.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's it.
I'm writing them down.
Young, young Sheldon.
One season of young Sheldon just to just so you can safely comment on it.
I've been watching industry, which is pretty good.
Been been into it. It's it's good. It's very raunchy, but it's good. Industry.
Before that, what did we watch? We watched...
I watched Chaos on Netflix, which I really... I enjoyed it.
It's a TV show. It's got Jeff Goldblum in it as Zeus.
Oh yeah, yeah. And I thought it was good fun.
I've got to say, I thought it was good fun.
Season one of Love is Blind UK, I would not recommend it.
A new series of Married First Sight Out as well that we haven't started watching, but
inevitably we will watch.
We should criticize with what we watch.
Do you know what I mean?
We're like shitting on Young Sheldon while we're watching Monk and Love is Blind and
80s movies.
Man, if you want to die on the young Sheldon hill though, be my guest.
Like if you really think that that makes you better or clever or whatever.
Also, I'm gonna be honest with you.
I think there's a difference between watching a very light drama like Monk and a show which
is meant to make you laugh and is meant to be
a comedy. Because to me, it's more offensive if it's bad comedy as opposed to just bland
background drama like Monk. Like Monk is low stakes. It's fine. Sometimes you've got quite
a clever reveal or a cool story, whatever. That's fine. But Young Sheldon and Big Bang Theory are
meant to be funny. And when you hear people laughing at something that is objectively, objectively, not funny,
I get upset.
And I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
I just think it's a hard sell to get an adult into something.
I think a lot of these shows maintain their popularity because they're things that people
started watching when they were a kid and just continue to watch it because there's a comfort
factor or whatever to it.
I've got some news for you guys.
There's some latest news out of Thorpe Park.
They're opening their new franchise ride, the Young Sheldon
Bazinga.
I hope that there is a
a faux American ad that plays on loop with lots of farting and diarrhea in it.
I got terrible diarrhea.
I just watched Young Sheldon and I can't stop shitting.
Oh whoopsies.
Oh no.
That's literally what it was like by the way.
Oh god.
Right, well that's enough of this.
Hell yeah.
We missed Lose News.
We'll pick it up next time.
Yeah, we'll have to do it next week.
Yeah. Double next time. Holy crap. Alright, Lose News. We'll pick it up next time. Yeah, we'll have to do it next week. Yeah.
Double next time.
Holy crap.
All right, take care everyone.
Bye.
Goodbye.