Wonderful! - Wonderful! 247: The Oatmeal Cream Pies Get so Big

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

Rachel’s favorite short-form recording device! Griffin’s favorite size-disproportionate stories!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFair Elections Center: https://www.fairelectionscenter.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. And this is wonderful. This is a show we talk about things that we like, things that are good, things that we're into. And this week is a special, it's a very special episode this week. Ooh. And when I think about what makes it special.

This is the talented improv skills of Griffin McElroy. When I think about what makes this episode very special, it's, it seems to me. Yeah. As if we, what, when I,

what this episode that we're doing right now. Oh, the pacing. You're listening to it right now. And you are, because you're listening to it, you're part of it. Yeah.

You're, you're in it with us too. because you're listening to it, you're part of it. Yeah. You're in it with us, too. Like, you're not making it, listener, at home, but in a way you are. Because. Can I say what I think makes it special? Yeah. I bought a new duvet cover. Do-do-do-do-do. It came today.

It's been a while since we've had to bust out the air horn it's running low on compressed air so it's it's not as vibrant a sound but yeah you did buy a new duvet cover our last one was this sort of mustard color and then you brought you bought i would say a marigold colored headboard for our bed and then when you you put the comforter down on it, it was like, this looks outrageous. Yeah, it was a little yellow on yellow. I will say, so everything is smaller outside of Texas. True.

And so we needed a smaller headboard for our smaller wall space that we now have to put our bed against. So I got the smaller headboard and then we got out the old duvet. The old duvet. And it was a clash of the titans, by which I mean primary colors.

Had to switch her up. But yeah, it's still- So that's why it's a very special episode. It's because of the duvet cover. Yeah. This is a show where we do talk about that. I'm so tired, babe. I'm trying, well, listen,

we try to keep it pretty posy here around these parts. But this ding-dang baby of ours is really wringing every last drop of parenting juice out of us that we have in our bodies. He makes me feel like a mad scientist because I feel like if I find the right combination of things, he will sleep through the night every night. Yeah. And so I've been playing around a lot with how much food and what food and how much milk. You have to balance his humors just so. What milk would happen and what pajamas and what bedtime. pH balance of the, yeah it's what nap time i really feel like you know what i need to get myself a dry erase board and i need to just list out all

of the factors and all of the combinations and then identify which combinations have the most success yeah so uh yeah i'm not gonna bs y BS y'all. I'm pretty tired right now. Have been for a minute. And I know my lovely wife is too. But we're going to come out here swinging because it's a special episode for reasons we've already covered. Do you have any small wonders?

Oh, man. I can do one. Yeah, go first, please. The bear. And that's my funny way of that's my joke that i pretty sure i'm the first one to do about the show the bear on uh i guess fx by way of hulu i believe yeah we're watching it through hulu we're a little late to this show very late to this show we're late on a lot of the the good drama that's happening on television right now but uh yeah it's a show about a highfalutin food and wine magazine chef who uh returns to chicago to help run his family's chicago beef is family's ailing

chicago beef restaurant yeah uh and it was sold to us as like a very anxiety inducing television show which is why we were hesitant to yeah i don't like that i don't need because for reasons understandable we stopped watching shows like ozark for example for that reason but this is not ozark this is not ozark it's got a this is a joke we tell a lot but it's got a lot of heart it really does it really does uh and it's funny and it's got great characters like really great characters yeah interesting dynamic between the characters yeah it's uh it's phenomenal i'm and also like real heavy-handed with the chicago which does not hurt me no i love i mean it does hurt from a like long a deep yeah longing i will say we talked about this last episode we watched that

right above their chicago beef restaurant is a billboard from malort which feels like a bridge too far and the the main character has the 773 area code tattooed on his arm which is also a little nice so good man we also talked about this it's been a kick ass year for TV

there have been so many good new TV shows and I feel like we've talked about a lot of them on this yeah on this podcast but yeah

did you was that enough time for you to think of A Small Wonder or you just got so excited to think about Da Bear this is what happens is that I start engaging with your topic and then I don't take that valuable thinking time to do my thinking. Because I haven't said and eventually will say proximity here in D.C. to, you know, high quality theater performances.

Sure. We are going to go see a show later this month. And I am very, very excited about it. Me too. Because that is not something that we did a lot. We did see touring companies in Austin of various productions. But the DC theater scene for, I mean, I don't know why. Maybe proximity to New York.

Maybe it's just always had its own thing going on here. But it's very rich. Very rich and dynamic and exciting. Yeah. And I think it's nice. You know, the weather here is starting to get kind of nasty. And it's very easy to be like, oh, my God, what have we done when it is cold and rainy every single day? I love that shit. Does it feed your dark soul?

It feeds the darkness of my soul, yes. But reminding myself, like, how much more opportunity we have for a variety of arts and culture things is exciting. It's so dope. You go first this week. What do you have for us today? So the thing that I have, and again, this is another thing where I thought we talked about it and I searched any number of keywords and could not find it. So I'm going to assume it's new. The idea actually came to me from watching the episode of The Bear last night. Oh. And that is the answering machine. Huh. There is an episode where a character talks about his outgoing message.

Yes. And it made me think about answering machines and just the whole phenomenon for a very brief window where people would have a machine that when somebody called and nobody on the landline picked up, you could leave a voice message. Right. I mean, that does exist on cell phones, too. But gosh almighty, gun to my head, I do not know what my outgoing message is right now. Oh, I mean, I'm talking about the old school, like physical. Sure, sure, sure. But I mean, we have a digital replacement for that, essentially, that lives inside of all of our phones. I wanted, I specifically wanted to tap into what the McElroy household answering machine, do you recall?

Pretty straight laced, if memory serves. Really? That's so surprising. Yeah, I'm pretty sure my mom ran a pretty no-nonsense sort of. I feel like your dad would want to try out so many characters on that thing. I mean, he, that was his job, you know? He didn't really bring his work home. No. Very serious man at home.

No, but I mean, he wasn't doing skits on the answering machine. I may be misremembering because I have such a bad memory, but I'm pretty sure it was pretty straightforward. Pretty sure our mom handled most of the outgoing messages. We did not have an answering machine for what felt like a very long time. I don't know that we got one until I was in middle school or high school. That's wild, babe. Yeah.

So if someone called you and you weren't there it was just like try again later out of luck that's bananas it was tough for me because i became a big phone person uh around middle school where it was just like constantly like working through a variety of like social appointments with people via phone and uh and you never like screened calls and stuff like that which like you could not do without oh no wow no the number of times that we would be home on the summer and the phone would ring and none of us would answer it and then we'd go to voicemail and we would hear our mom coming in over the voicemail like answer the phone you're like oh yeah yeah no we um i mean again, this is before caller ID.

You know, this is before it was like built into the phones. I had a phone and it had like the little physical like tape deck in it. And I remember like working very hard on getting that message just right. That's very charming. That's very delightful. that message just right. That's very charming. That's very delightful. I do remember when I first got a cell phone, spending a lot of time and energy on that. But honestly, in college, once I started working for Joystick, I was using my phone for work so much that I couldn't do one of my skits and sketches on it. I wanted to keep it pretty straight. Because what if, you know,

Reggie Fils-Aimé called me up like, hey, I got that new, I have a scoop for you. It's Mario Kart 50. Griffin, I'm calling you specifically. Yeah. Because I want to tell you. And I don't want to be doing,

you know, here's my, here's what, here's Jack Nicholson. You can't handle this answering machine message. Something like funny, but like that, but funny. Did you have anybody that did like the- Hello? Oh, yeah.

And then just like let it ride? Oh, yeah, such a nightmare. I was going to talk about like the applicable song. So for example, one of my friends had her own private phone line, which I was super jealous of. And her answering machine was no doubt spider webs. Oh, that's fun. I just remember thinking that was the coolest thing ever. It'd be cool if your name was Tyrone and you could be like, you've called Tyrone.

Yeah. And that would be, I guess, the extent of it. So leave your shit. By which I mean name a number. Something like that. Yeah. But funny. You're actually speaking to a profitable business that came out around that time period.

But before I get there. Okay. I wanted to go back to kind of the origins of the answering machine. So the first one was in 1935. Good Lord. And it was a three-foot-tall machine. Was it a wax cylinder that it would record all of your? When I say three-foot-tall machine, I mean it was just a refrigerator box with a person in it who answered the phone for you.

You would press a button and the slot would open and a dude would just be like jeffrey gold um and then you know obviously that was like you know the kind of i mean like much technology like nobody had it you know it was like a thing that like was tried in one place and one person could call. It was not widely distributable. In 1971, there was a commercially viable answering machine that was only 10 pounds. Oh, nice. And held 20 messages on a reel-to-reel tape. And then what made the huge difference was in 1984, there was a restructuring of AT&T. I was going to say AT&T.

How do you know that? My mom worked. I'm pretty sure my mom worked at AT&T. Or I don't know. But I remember having a, we had an AT&T like machine in our home. That was like, it was always there. machine in our home that was like, it was always there. Okay. So what I didn't know about in 1984, AT&T had been this monopoly that controlled basically all telephones. And so there was not a lot of product out there competing, but in 1984,

that was broken up. And then you could start buying things like at a RadioShack, for example. So you could like go get an answering machine, and any kind of phone you wanted, and really customize what was available to you. So the thing I was referring to, this profitable business, is Crazy Calls, which is in the mid-1980s. And you could buy these tapes that had fun, outgoing messages on them. Like kind of jazzy parodies, for example, of popular songs, but customized to ask someone to leave a message. Yeah. Uh, and this, this was like a real thing.

It's, it started in New York and when it first started, they were selling between 200, 300 cassettes a day. Uh, just like minute one. Um, and spending every last cent of their profits on piles of cocaine big enough to snowboard down, I am assuming. There was a Beethoven parody.

There was a parody of the Twilight Zone. A parody of the song Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. Oh, yeah. And an imitation of Humphrey Bogart. Oh, man, so funny. An imitation of Humphrey Bogart. Oh, man. So funny.

So, yeah, I don't think I knew anybody with this, but I remember that being like the agenda was like how you could, I mean, you could do the straight lace like, hello, you've reached the McElroy residence. No one's available to answer your call. Or you could really, you know, jazz it up. Really jazz it up with a funny Humphrey Bogart impression. Yes, I mean, it's a small topic, but I will say, obviously, it doesn't really exist anymore. As of 2004, 78% of Americans had voicemail. So you don't really see anybody with the little tape in their house. Yeah.

But it was a charming time. It sure was. Yeah. Simpler time. There's a lot of shit we didn't have, though, that we do have now. And that's all pretty great. Should we take a break? Computers.

Yeah, I would love to. Got a couple of Billy Bobs here, and I would love to read the first one because it is for Future Bucky. It is from Past Bucky who says, Dear Future Bucky, I hope that you are doing well and that your research for your master's thesis is coming along. Have you decided where you want to go for grad school 2.0? You have made it through some very hard times recently, but you are so strong and I love you. Tonight, you should celebrate with some mac and cheese and a blizzard. Much love. When, first of all, Bucky, that's a killer plan of action, if you ask me. Yeah, did you ever do that when you were living alone, just like a box of mac and cheese all by yourself?

Did you ever do that when you were living alone, just like a box of mac and cheese all by yourself? I think you know enough about sort of the depths of my single depravity that a box of macaroni and cheese represented far too much work. Oh, seriously? For the evening's meal. Yeah. But yeah, I think a mac and a cheese and a blizzard. A mac and a cheese and a blizzard. The great saying. Can't beat it. Can I read the next one? Yeah. But yeah, I think a mac and a cheese and a blizzard. A mac and a cheese and a blizzard. The great saying. Can't beat it.

Can I read the next one? Yeah. It is for Jenna and Davo. It is from Matt and Mandow. Jenna and David, by now you are married. We're sure we had lots of fun dancing through wedding season. Thank you for introducing us to the McElroy world, being the best couple friends we could ask for, and always adventuring with us. We look forward to many more years

of wine travels and spoiling each other's pets. Love, your BCF, Amanda and Matt. I bet that that wedding was pretty lit from what I've heard through the grapevine. Jeno and Devo, I mean, yeah, that was the one that I heard about. They danced through the night. Those sound like grapevine. Jeno and Devo? Yeah, that was the one that I heard about.

They danced through the night. Those sound like party people. Jeno and Devo? Yeah. Yeah, babe. Clearly those are party people. And I'm just glad that they've taken some time out of their tight party schedule to apparently listen to some of our entertainment programming.

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The answer can only be found at MaximumFun.org. What's your thing? Shrinking fiction. Size diminution in fiction. Narrative belittling. So you're not talking about society shrinking interest in novels? No, I'm talking about society shrinking in novels. Oh, like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, kind of, but in a book.

Yes, but in a book, or a movie, or a TV show. I mean, fiction in the broader sense. I've been playing a game for besties this week that we're gonna talk about, and I guess you'll be able to listen to later, called Grounded. That is like a survival game akin to Minecraft, but you're teens, and you've been shrunk down

in a backyard, and the backyard is filled with bugs and plants and detritus for you to go around and repurpose as you try to survive in this world. And it's made me realize how much fun I think shrinking stories are. Stories where people get shrunk down or are shrunk down and have to interact with normal sized not shrunk down stuff have you figured out what exactly is fun about it for you um i think it's because it forces you to kind of look at the world in a different way okay like a comprehensive different way and the also the oatmeal cream pies get so big it's like when you lay down on your back and you think about walking around on the ceiling you ever do that all the time yeah all the time uh i thought there'd be a better name for this genre other than shrinking shrink size

change fiction but um googling it turned up nothing but there's lots there's so many stories that lean on this trope uh one of the earliest like real deep dives in film was the 1966 sci-fi film fantastic voyage you ever seen that one no one where they get shrunk a team of scientists uh getting a shrunk down submarine to do brain surgery on another scientist that has like military secrets. Oh. But is like unconscious with a blood clot in his brain. So they have to shrink down

and they have 60 minutes. Wow. To like remove the blood clot. But there's like a saboteur aboard. It's a great play. It does sound good. It's very good. It is a wild movie.

It establishes I, a lot of stuff in a very specific part of shrink down fiction. Obviously, it went on to inform inner space and I guess Osmosis Jones. I wouldn't count Osmosis Jones in this genre. That's like its own. We all know that that was the pioneer of like a bold new genre of immune system storytelling. See, I was thinking Magic School Bus. Magic School Bus. I have much later in the article. But yeah, Magic School Bus, obviously, like they get small to study so many different things. And then in books, like obviously you got your Alice in Wonderland is a sort of like huge example you have gulliver's travels where you meet the

lilliputians yeah i was trying to think if that was actually an example because they're not like so they're not really interactive but in that one i guess it's a a big gulliver interacting with a tiny tinier world but doesn't he go to a big world too? And he's the, I don't know. Yeah, I think that's true. But none of this is like supposed to be sci-fi, right? It's just supposed to be like, oh, he happened upon a world with unusual sized people.

Right, but it doesn't have to be sci-fi for it, right? Like The Borrowers is one of the like seminal like book pieces. I think there were like five Borrowers books in the series. And it was just about a family, the Clocks, I believe were their name, pieces. I think there were like five borrowers books in this series. And it was just about a family. The Clocks I believe were their name. And they lived in the walls of a house. And so they borrowed

things from the inhabitants of this bigger house than them to get by. I didn't realize Studio Ghibli made a movie called The Secret Life of Variety. And that is based on The Borrowers. Never put that together.

That's a very charming film. But yes, I mean, the real magic of little tiny shrunk down people exploring a big world. It was sort of really fully explored in honey i shrunk the kids uh and it's and and to a lesser extent it's sequels uh honey i blew up the kid and then honey we shrunk ourselves i don't think i saw any of the sequels i did i did i think the reason they didn't make a fourth one is that they ran out of reasons why someone would for one thing like be friends with wayne salinski at all like yeah he is operating obviously pretty well outside of like the ethical boundaries of science that have been established by society but not only that it's it's just like

he's like hey will you help me move a couch? It's up in the attic. You have to know that like, that's where the laser is. Yeah. And you will end up in front of the laser and you will get zapped by the laser. And now you're very small. But at that point, it's the fourth time that it's happened.

So they couldn't, there's no like suspension of disbelief that can take place there where you're like, dude, that one was on me, Wayne. I know you, I know where you keep the laser. And I stood in front of it. See, I think there's an opportunity to get real precise with the dial, right? So it's like, honey, I shrunk the kids two inches. Oh, wow. Like honey. now the kids are a foot bigger. Or Kids, I Shrunk the Honey. And then it's like a tiny little bottle of honey. It's not really good for anything.

Whole movie. But yeah, in these films, I mean, the first at the very least is a classic. And I know that there's a, it's an old film at this point. And there's probably a lot of our listeners who have never watched it. But it's delightful. Do you think it still works like is it one of those films that if you sat down to watch today you would still enjoy it i think so i think so i mean it you know they is kids get lost in a backyard and they befriend a big aunt and it's like the best ant in any movie ever and then they really do find a big oatmeal cream pie that is oh it seems like the tastiest thing in the world it just i think we talked i think i

did a segment on oatmeal cream pies where i referenced this film yeah but the thought of being able to just like stick my whole hand in the side of an oatmeal cream pie and carve off some of it can i tell you if i found as an adult size person a whole oatmeal cream pie that was just regular i would be excited about that so the idea of happening upon a big one is it's almost too good to be true um there's just something magical about like imagining yourself being real real real little and interacting with the things in everyday life that you kind of take for granted do you ever go to that part of disney yes that's the best uh that was one of my favorite things at disney and i don't know if they still have it at disney world

at least but they had a playground that was essentially honey i shrunk the kids and so you would climb around like mushrooms and logs and soda cans and there would be ants that you could climb around on and And it was dope. I was so sad that we couldn't find that because I bet Henry would like go nuts for it. I mean, I'm sure the point of reference does not really exist for today's children. I guess so. But I do remember that. My parents have this picture of me just walking out of that just dazed.

Yeah. Because like, not only is it a very surreal experience, but you're also packed in there with like 180 other kids. Yeah. I also would be remiss if I didn't mention the season of Dimension 20 we did with Brennan called Tiny Heist, where we played little people and bugs and toys and stuff in a, in a regular size house. That was a lot of fun.

But yeah, this is all inspired by this game that I've been playing with Justin and Travis called Grounded. And it's really good about exploring all of these ideas of you can cut down a dandelion and grab the puff off the top of it and then you can

float around with it and it's very, very cool. I like shrinking fiction. It's fun. It's a fun thing. And sometimes the oatmeal cream pies get like really big. Really, really big. That's it.

Thank you so much to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to you at home for listening to this program. We sure do appreciate you we really do i know that sometimes we get we get mean i don't know i i i feel like i'm pretty good usually at thinking about the words i'm gonna say before i start talking yeah But when I, there's like a latency. I have like V-sync turned on in my brain when I'm so sleep deprived. That that's, even now, what I'm saying right now, it's jazz, essentially.

Uh-huh. Mouth jazz. I said that pretty weird, didn't I? Yeah, you did. I'm just impressed that you keep the words going. You know, a lot of people would just stop, but not you. Yeah. We get paid by word for word. Bye. MaximumFun.org

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