Wonderful! - Wonderful! 268: Pants! I Get to Wear them Now!

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Rachel's favorite IRL interactive experience! Griffin's favorite revolution in advertising!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaEquality Florida: https://www.eqfl.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, Rachel McElroy. This is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. This is a show called Wonderful. It's a podcast which is like a radio you download. And on this one, we talk about things

that are good, that we like, and that we are into. It's The Calm Before the Storm. Oh, yeah. Next week, the Maximum Fun Drive kicks off. Yeah. And we're gonna fuck you up with this one there are listeners that already consume a lot of mclroy content yeah and you're in luck because there will be even more

hundred million thousand pounds of it it will be so much you will have to measure the bits and bytes in weight, in sheer tonnage. And we're so excited to dump all that on you. This week, though, we're taking a flyer. That is the language Max Fun wants us to use, is dump. They want us to specifically use the verb dump. Okay, good. Which is not what I would have gone with, but who am I to, you know? It's always good to be in compliance. Sure, sure.

The compliance officers that they sick on us are like rabid dogs. Like, are you using dump? You're saying dump, right? You said release. You must say dump. Do you have any small wonders before we begin our thing? Yeah, I wanted to say Griffin and I were talking about how we hardly saw any movies at all last year. But one movie we did see was Everything Everywhere All at Once.

And it won a lot of awards. And so we feel like, hey, we did it. We did it. Yes. I would say my two favorite films that I saw last year were everything everywhere all at once and rrr which won all the oscars that i needed them to win yeah very excited very happy about that yeah what a fucking flick it's how have we not re-watched that one again i guess we don't watch a ton yeah we like walked out of the theater like oh we're gonna re-watch that one and then we haven't yet um i

would happily anything you know hockey season doesn't last forever, especially if your team don't make the playoffs. Yeah, which is very... To some teams it happens, man. Very, very likely. They can't all win. What's your small wonder? We've been watching a new show

that has existed in Japan since like 2008, but it's just now on Netflix, which has continued its streak of importing Japanese reality competition and game shows. This show is called Run for the Money. And it popped up on our suggested feed a lot. And we saw it and I said, that looks kind of corny. I don't know about all that.

I know, right? Like we watched the first episode and I would say we were still uncertain about whether we could continue. And then we watched the second episode last night and I was like, I Like we watched the first episode and I would say we were still uncertain about whether we could continue. And then we watched the second episode last night and I was like, I'll go wherever the fuck this show wants me to go with it. Basic premise is that there's like 30 Japanese celebrities, a mix of comedians and musicians and athletes. And they are in a big theme park, I think in like Nagasaki. And it's modeled after like bruges essentially and uh

the game is that they release a bunch of hunters to chase after them uh and they just tag them they just tag them there's no most dangerous game uh although sometimes when they're running away for here's what i think when i have to run away from something my legs lock up and i fall down a lot oh okay um if i was on this show i would be grievously injured just from running just from running away from a hunter um that's the basic premise of the show where it really succeeds and i think where they sort of uh where it hits its stride in the second episode is they introduce a bunch of other mechanics like little missions that you can run out to do to increase the pot but it sort of exposes you to the hunters a little bit more there's a whole trader mechanic now where like you can tattle on the other there's like

there's i guess there's kind of a host but there's no real host interacting with the contestants no but they each have like a what is basically a phone and they get updates on that phone. There's a host who is playing this like Machiavellian over the top, like a mastermind who is controlling the game. Yeah. That's hit or miss for me. There's also a woman who does voiceover

all the whole thing. Who has the most sinister, incredible voice that I've ever heard from a voiceover person and is hysterically funny it's very easy for me when i'm reading captions to kind of not pay attention to the voiceover but i would recommend it she demands respect there's also a lot of people in there from documental which is a show we've talked about before so it's like fun watching you know japanese tv and seeing like recognizing people from the circuit uh and and yeah it's it's a lot of fun man i think if you i think you know probably just from that description whether or not this is a a show for you but uh it's it's

neat and i get why it's been running in japan 15 years now, because I think it's a concept with a lot of potential. And it's, man, it's so goofy. One of the challenges is that they are going to add more hunters to the game. They're going to add five more hunters to the game to hunt the players down. But they're in these boxes, like these little coffins, essentially. boxes like these little uh coffins essentially and to keep them from coming out they players had to work together to move these coffins into these cages and the visual of seeing these like masked hunters inside of these glass coffins being wheeled into a cage and then having the voiceover person saying they've they've conquered the hunters it's the cage also like when they close

the doors it's like a knee-high door it's like a knee-high there's no way this would actually restrain there's so much they lean into it so much and and it walks that line between earnestness and humor just like perfectly um so yeah having a lot of fun with that one. Hey, what's your first thing, babe? I mean, your only thing, babe. Are we, are we doing that now? What thing? What are we saying about? Yeah.

It's a term of endearment. I, I'm sorry, Rachel. I'm sorry, Rachel. Thank you. I've had, I have this new thing where I just have dice or small balls in my pockets always because I don't trust Gus to not eat them. I just always have some little piece of garbage in my pocket. I was thinking of last night when you threw yourself at the coffee table because I had broken pieces of granola bar into dice-sized chunks. Yeah, I thought my son was just gobbling down dice like Skittles.

Another food he probably shouldn't have. He would definitely choke on Skittles. Yeah, for sure. For sure, for sure. What do you got? My thing this week is Meow Wolf. Yeah. I didn't know a lot about it.

And so I was like, hey, this could be a good opportunity for me to learn more. I would love to know more about Meow Wolf. I think it's one of the raddest buildings I've ever been to, the one in Denver. Yeah. So Griffin went on a trip to Denver this past year and had an incredible time. And I had been wanting to go to a location. And when I found out that there was a conference in Vegas and a location in Vegas, I got very excited. And the first day I got there,

I was a little bit early to check into the hotel. So I went and it was incredible. It's the Omega Mart location in Vegas and it's phenomenal. and so i wanted to learn more about this whole collective that is creating these you know interactive experiences all over the country the one in denver oh the omega mart is sort of the like framing device for that meow wolf the one in denver is like it's like a uh transit hub yeah like almost like an airport authority sort of situation um i want to hear everything yeah so meow wolf came out of santa fe uh and it was just this group of 10 friends who were all artists uh in the years 2008 and they can't you know basically make a living being artists um kind of the santa fe experience was really driven by

tourism and it was just a lot of like turquoise you know like they just couldn't find a place for like experimental art in that scene um so love turquoise by the way yeah no i also love turquoise. And so they started doing exhibitions kind of around the Santa Fe community, but using other people's space or renting space. One of the big things they did was what they called the Due Return, which was a life-size wooden ship in Santa Fe's Center for Contemporary Art for two months. It was a space pirate ship that took around 6,000 hours to construct. And so it became kind of clear, I think, from that experience that they were into big projects and they needed their own big space. So what happened in 2014, they found a patron in the Santa Fe community, somebody who owned a cinema in Santa Fe,

and that person is George R.R. Martin. No kidding. Yeah. That's funny. I had no idea. I hope that if I ever became fabulously wealthy to a George R.R. Martin level, I would spend some of that money at least on something as outrageous as a Meow Wolf. I mean, I don't know. It's hard to say.

The thing that is so exciting about Meow Wolf is that it's not something you could just come up with on your own. True. Like you definitely need a group of very artistic experimental people. Can we take a beat and kind of explain like what you see when you walk into a Meow Wolf? I mean, I'll get there. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm building towards that. What it is, okay. Yes. So one of the founding members was working as the marketing director at the cinema that was owned by George R.R. Martin and approached him kind of with this idea. And George R.R. Martin gave them about $3 million to make it happen.

That's nice of him yeah they ended up uh purchasing a a large space and 135 artists began creating the 70 rooms that make up the house of eternal return in santa fe didn't our friend eric work on like do some sort of work on mia wolf um Meow Wolf? I am not sure. I mean, it employs a tremendous number of people now. The House of Eternal Return opened in 2016. They wanted to have 400 or 300,000 people visit in the first year, and they had 400,000 in the first nine months. And they turned in 6.8 million in revenue in the first year. 400,000 visitors, by the way, is almost six times the population of Santa Fe. But yeah, so what it is, it's a large space, and they create kind of an everyday premise. And then kind of behind the everyday premise is this kind of fantastical world with like this really rich lore. There's lots of, you know, like effects related to it. There's a lot of like neon and blacklight and various levels and like different little ecosystems within this like experimental space. It's incredible. I'm just now remembering when I came back from that trip where I went to Meow Wolf, I think I talked about immersive art in a wonderful episode.

So I definitely have talked about Meow Wolf on the show before, but not to this degree. Not like the history. So one thing that I would like to check out and haven't, there is a full-length documentary that premiered at South by Southwest in 2018. Cool. And I have not seen that yet, but I imagine that gives a much more kind of comprehensive look. Yeah. So, yeah.

So, this experience in Santa Fe, there's a – and neither of us have been to this location, but it is like a Victorian house that is built inside a bowling alley. The bowling alley is like a 20,000 square foot space, and you kind of enter through the house and then discover this whole separate world. One thing that happened that kind of delayed a lot of later construction was the pandemic. Right. I've heard of that. The Vegas location that opened in 2021 was actually supposed to open in 2020. Denver was supposed to open in 2021. And then D.C. was supposed to have one in 2022 that got canceled.

So I don't know if that's ever coming listen i can't scrape together three million dollars meow wolf but if you need a i would say a more sort of uh low low stakes patron i could i could much much lower amount i mean me and i could get some buddies together and we could try to pool it would not not be $3 million. Yeah. That would be to have a Meow Wolf in DC that we could take our kids to would be. I know. I mean, it's the kind of place.

A game changer. I told Griffin as soon as I went to the one in Vegas, like I could go again tomorrow. Yeah. Like the idea is that you are able to entirely explore the space like it's some kind of escape room. Yes. And that you like open drawers and you like space like it's some kind of escape room and that you like open drawers and you like open doors that aren't marked right you are encouraged to just like use phones and look at recordings and right omega mart in particular when you enter it is it

looks entirely like a functioning grocery store and the shelves are full of products and every product was like uniquely designed for this experience so there is like infinite opportunity to really learn this attraction i spent two hours or so at the denver meow wolf which was not nearly enough time i think for me to absorb everything there but from a like scene shop design perspective the way that they create environments and and do so much through like environmental storytelling there is nothing else quite quite like it out there and it's also like i would say pretty well catered to my sensibilities. Like there's one room in the Denver location that's like this giant prismatic castle and then there are like battle mechs surrounding it, which is like about as cool as it gets. Yeah, the Denver one was, I think, a little contentious briefly because there was already

a really vibrant art scene and they were i think very concerned about meow wolf coming and you know in a way kind of like gentrifying that community you know like bringing a lot of tourists in and kind of sucking up a lot of the the space um meow wolf has worked to do a lot of kind of corporate responsibility work now that it is such a huge entity um it's in in one year they donated 250 000 to denver non-profits uh and plan to continue to do that um and engage kind of local artists in the work all right um but yeah i mentioned i went to omega mart it's interesting the two people that run that are artists that actually had conceptualized the idea of Omega Mart in 2009.

Wow. And they kind of teamed up with Meow Wolf to kind of make their dream happen. That's cool. So yeah, so that one opened in 2021 or in the same year that Denver did. I wish the guy who made City Museum hadn't died because I feel like he would have really jammed on Meow Wolf. I know. So this is also coming to Texas.

There is going to be one in the Grapevine Mills Shopping Center and then one in Houston in the Fifth Ward. Whoa. Grapevine's like Dallas, right? Yes. Okay. Yes. So that's the Fifth Ward. Whoa. Grapevine's like Dallas, right? Yes. Okay. Yes. So that's 2023 and 2024.

Cool. So I imagine the Grapevine one is opening very soon if it hasn't already. That's neat. But yeah, there's a lot more. Again, I haven't seen the documentary. I imagine that goes into a lot more detail. I mean, because this was a collective of artists, there's a lot of disagreement and strife and drama in the process of them creating these things and trying to kind of create this successful entity, you know, and hire the right people to do so.

So I imagine there's a lot more to the story. But in result, just really cool buildings to be in. Yeah. I mean, Griffin and I have talked about how we both love like a sculpture park. Like the idea that you can walk around in an art space and have an experience that's like very rooted in the place you are in is super cool. And I was excited to learn about the collective. Yeah. Yeah.

Can I steal your light? Yes. Cool. She won't know we're all secure in three beef and dairy all day. Max Fun Drive. Hey, Chef, we got another one. Another Max Fun Drive. People know it's the best time to support the shows they love.

You tell them our meetup day is back? Sure did. They wanted to know about the live streams, though. Those are finishing up right now. We can even send one out on the first night, March 20th. March 20th, Jeff! I'll give them a heads up. They also wanted the limited time thank you gifts for new and upgrading members.

Yep, and we got some fresh episodes ready to go, too. All right, we got exciting live streams, meetup day, fresh episodes, limited time gifts. Oh, and Boca. Yeah. Okay. Let them know that Max Fun Drive 2023 will be ready on March 20th. And it'll only be two weeks. Two weeks, chef. Max Fun Drive starts on March 20th for just two weeks.

No problem. Order up. Shoot, I forgot their water. Can I tell you my thing? Yeah. Order up. Shoot, I forgot their water. Can I tell you my thing? Yeah. Trailers. Trailers. Now, there are two types of trailers.

I'm assuming you are not talking about the tractor trailer. No, I'm not talking about one that you tow behind your vehicle. I'm talking about the little movies they show before big movies yeah and they're supposed to show you what their respective big movies are gonna be like also video games tv shows you know there's trailers for everything hell there's probably book trailers out there can you even imagine um i love a trailer man my opinion, there could be twice as many trailers before a movie starts, and I would be totally fine with that. I say that now.

When I was going to see lots of movies, it was pretty annoying, I would say. Especially if you're going to see a very long movie, and then there's also like 10 minutes of trailers up top god when we saw uh we went to see avengers infinity war uh in detroit after a live show so it was already like 11 o'clock at night again and when you say we me and the my family yeah and like and not me no and you weren't you weren't there. And that film is already pretty long and they showed like easily 20 minutes of trailers before it. And so there was an element of like, I'm actually sleepy if we could hurry this along. Otherwise, most of the time I'm all the way in for a trailer because even if you see like a bad trailer for a bad movie you have been done a great service of knowing like okay so i don't i don't need to worry about that one yeah i mean

a lot of times it's it's a really fascinating art to me because usually it's like who are the actors like sometimes that's just enough right and then sometimes it's like who are the actors like sometimes that's just enough right and then sometimes it's like we don't want to tell you hardly anything at all right uh and then sometimes it's a good movie with a really bad trailer which is also interesting that can also happen i i i think the ideal scenario is obviously you see a good trailer for a good movie because that like now you have something new to be excited about something to look forward to which i you know i love having in my life but i think it's really hard to kind of walk that that exact balance of like how much of the thing do we give away how much of the thing

do we show to like get our hooks in people without like diminishing the efficacy of those hooks when you actually see it in in the film i like i don't know how to do it i think that's probably one of the tougher jobs in like show show biz um i i think about like the types of movies that do this really well i would go so far as to say that a big reason why Christopher Nolan has had the success that he's had is that his movies trailer super well. That's interesting. I never really thought about that.

I think about like the first time I saw a trailer for inception, uh, in theaters and you see the shit where like the city curves backwards up on itself and you're like what's that i'm gonna go see that film based on that one shot i don't know anything about this uh but i'm going to go see it now because that was wild uh i think all of his films have that kind of like element of like what's going on here and those trailer really i remember seeing tenet the trailer for tenet was like this big media event and you see it you're like how does a gun unshoot i gotta see this fucking flick uh i also think one of the like modern sort of masters of this like i think

all of jordan peele's movies have had some of the most stellar. Specifically when you think about like how do you reveal a little bit but not too much. Nope is like the pinnacle of that because it's like nope is predicated on unseen alien horror, right? And the way that they sort of – the movie is incredibly shrewd with how it kind of meets that information out to the viewer. And so like, how do you trailer that? I don't know, but they did a pretty good job with it. The best is Us. The trailer for Us is so creepy and interesting. And it's all set to, I got five on it.

And just like, it was, I was frothing at the mouth to see that film after seeing the trailer for it. Obviously, like as someone who used to cover the games industry and I guess still kind of I do, I've seen more game trailers than the average bear. And I think that those have their own sort of like complexity because they have to do the same thing that that movie trailers do of like i don't want to give away too much but it's also like you're not showing people what they are going to be seeing you are showing people what they're going to be doing and that verb is a way more abstract one to try to communicate yeah that's a good point i also know that you pointed out to me before that a lot of those trailers are completed before the game is actually finished yeah invariably they are right and so there there's also uh there have been countless countless cases some of which have resulted in like straight up class action lawsuits where the trailers look much much better than the game actually will whether it's because they're running on super high-end PCs and not like the Nintendo Switch tiny little baby processors.

And so there can be a little bit of trickery there that just by virtue of the medium doesn't exist in movies and TV shows because what you see is usually what you're going to get there. That reminds me of the Sonic movie and how the whole thing was changed based on the trailer. A perfect example of my love of the power of trailers. Because sometimes you release them and people are like, this sucks. And they're like, oh, we'll change it. This just happened.

They're making a new game based on the Suicide Squad, the like DC supervillain team. Yeah. And it's made by this studio that made these really well-received Batman games that were like cool action exploration games. And then they released a trailer for this Suicide Squad game that looks very,

this term may not mean anything to you but like games as service style like you can get this legendary gun with plus three and it's purple rarity and you can upgrade it with this material you have to play a hundred hours to grind out and people were like no thanks and now that game has been delayed like a month from its release because people's reaction to the trailer was so negative. So, yeah, that's a good point. I think in games more than any other medium, you do see a lot of like, oh, they didn't like the trailer. Well, let's change the fucking thing then. Wait, does that mean that the community of gaming people are more likely to say when they don't like something?

I know. Outrageous. more likely to say when they don't like something i know outrageous um so the first trailer uh shown in a theater was in 1913 uh there was a an advertising manager for this theater chain called marcus lowe uh and and this advertising manager uh his name was Nils Granlund, he made a promotional film for a musical called The Pleasure Seekers that was like an onstage Broadway show.

So the first trailer wasn't even for a movie. It was shown in a movie theater, but it was for like a live Broadway show that was happening. And the reaction to it was mind-boggling.

People like, this is a revolution in advertising, which is so fucking funny because it's like, yeah, gang, it's a commercial for the thing. Yeah, of course, man. Well, I mean, the idea, like, it's such an investment, you know, to go see, like, a stage performance or a movie. Like, it's an investment of time and resources to get like a little sneak peek. Like that's huge. Nils Granlund also was the first to show a trailer

for an upcoming movie, just using a slideshow to promote a Charlie Chaplin film at one of these Marcus Lowe theater locations in 1914. Do you know why they're called trailers? This is fun little trivia. I mean, I always thought like they're attached to the big like, well, no.

Because I was thinking about it in the sense of you go to a movie theater and you see a trailer and it is something attached to the movie. But obviously that's not. Well, you're not wrong. They're called trailers because they used to come after movies. Oh, okay.

Not for very long because people were like, what's it? They're starting the next movie, guys. You gotta get the fuck out of here. People just like left. People did not stick around. I wonder if the credits

didn't used to be as long and so the idea of staying through the credits was not. Oh, of course not. I am awestruck every time we watch It's a Wonderful Life. You are weeping openly. Clarence gets his wings. He's like, attaboy, Clarence.

And then it's like, this guy made the movie and these people were in it. Bye. Yeah, like before you can even find the remote. It's like, should all acquaintance. Oh, you can even find the remote. Should all acquaintance. Oh, you're done. Okay. That was all the people that worked on the movie, guys.

We got them in on one screen and then we're done. See you later. Old movie trailers are fucking wild. When I was preparing for this, I watched a trailer for Citizen Kane. One of the most grandiose film. One of the most grandiose film. But the trailer was just weird ass 20-somethings Orson Welles just introducing the cast of the film. Just like, hey, folks, say hello to my good friend Joseph Cotton.

Look at that smile, folks. Isn't he handsome? That's all that it is. This movie is about a guy who's a real stinker and look at joseph cotton that devil dog look at him i mean there was nothing else to do right like you're gonna you're gonna come see this yeah there's nothing else out there's a war on so like you should just come hang out the fact that i'm sitting here telling you who the actors are is a blessing and you're welcome. But I'm also imagining 1940s wonderful or like that trailer for Citizen Kane was hot shit. How hype are you now? I'm fucking hype out of my mind.

That's it for this week. Next week. 1940s wonderful. Sorry. That's like a whole thing right there. It's like a whole. We could talk about that for a long time. What would we be like?

Penicillin. You heard about this one, folks? Pants. Pants. They're great. I get to wear them now? Whoa. Thanks for listening.

Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to Maximum Fun. Next week, Max Fun Drive kicks off. It's going to be a ton of fun. A lot of fun crossovers. A lot of fun crossovers. A lot of fun crossovers. We get to be on an episode

of Go Fact Yourself, which was super incredible. Which was a hoot and a half. Very excited for that one to come out. If you know things about what me and Rachel like, you'll probably be pretty starstruck. Yeah, for those of you

who haven't watched the show, the whole premise is that they invite a guest on and then they connect that guest to an interest of theirs. Uh, we're not going to spoil who our guests. No, I'm not. It was fucking radical.

It was rad. Yeah. Um, so we're going to have all kinds of stuff to talk to you about, about that next week. Uh, there's, there's awesome bonuses uh for for

members there's bonus content uh this year rachel played stardew valley for a long time and then recorded the episode and then has played it for much much much longer yeah i you get my kind of my first takes griffin uh unveils things to me that I had not heard about yet. Very exciting. It's fun. But there's also like years and years of back catalog of bonus content and content for all the shows. But we're going to tell you all about that next week. So just prepare your hearts and minds for that. And we have live shows coming up.

If you go to bit.ly slash McElroy Tours, you can find out about those. Including the one this week. Including a virtual live show this Friday, 9 p.m. Eastern time. I get this wrong every time. Just go to McElroy.family and you can find a link to everything. We're doing a live of Bim Bam virtual this Friday. It's going to be really fun and you should come watch it. Sawbones is going to open and that's a great show too.

That's it for us though. We're going to start preparing. We're going to go into our little cocoon, turn into goo, and then next week for the Max Fun Drive will be big, beautiful butterflies. So we'll see you then. I don't know why I'm getting quieter and deeper. No, I felt like we were signing off.

I was excited. That's how they do it. That's well done. On my fancy radio. Yeah. They just get quieter and deeper. Don't you care? Here. Yeah. Just get quiet. And deeper. Don't you care. Here.

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