Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to Episode 458 of the podcast that will soon number Episode 459!
This week: separate yet equal; bumbling butler; easy doctoring; outer monologue; pegging; nerd reversal; development hell hell; the Golden Age of Blockbusters; French characters; date killer; Appleby’s is garbage; more bad slogans; road food; laundered sushi; so-so steakhouse; stone jail; another lost show; he’se the b’y that builds the boat; DIY robot; change his mind; all-time longest song; ghost mail; horny angels; ape shit; extraordinary garbage; proving the exception; so much older then; D.C. Hulk; hilarious commies; comic book movies vs. superhero movies; terrible Oz; colourful costume dramas; Dirty Harry fan-fic; and, finally, as in the word “vase”.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the week: What do you take pride in?
Sub-question of the week: Have you ever had a disappointing road meal? Or a bad experience eating on a trip?
Sub-sub-question of the week: What is the correct pronunciation of “Nazi”?
Despite Dave’s terrible sales job, would you like to listen to some fun Dirty Harry fan-fic? The correct answer is yes and you should go here!
Here is Ed Draganski’s nomination for worst adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz book series – made more bearable by Rifftrax japery!
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The Tom Baker Doctor Who story Dave mentioned is The Stones of Blood, but it wasn’t filmed at Stonehenge. Instead, it was filmed at a similar site, the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. Within the story itself, the stones are referred to as the “Nine Travelers” in “Boscombe Moor” (a fictional location). In typical Doctor Who fashion, these turn out to be a group of rock-like aliens called “Ogri” who can move around (slowly) and suck blood.
As for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: as Peter Ayres mentions in the Episode 457 thread, the books do feature several different incarnations of the league throughout the centuries, including a 16th century version with Prospero and Don Quixote, and an 18th century version with Gulliver and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Sadly, neither of these ever got a full-fledged comic devoted to their adventures, and instead the League books move forward in time until the final volume is set in the present (though still with plenty of flashbacks to the past). This means there’s a lot of tiptoeing around copyright. As Ian mentioned, Harry Potter shows up, but never gets called by name, and doesn’t really look or act like himself. Also, the Victorian League is run by a spymaster called “Campion Bond”, then in the 50s a young spy called “Jimmy” shows up who is said to be Campion’s grandson. Etc, etc.
Maybe because of these copyright issues, the later League volumes move away from the “team-up” angle. So there are League stories set in the 50s/60s/etc, but they don’t quite feature leagues of fictional characters from those eras. Instead, some of the Victorian era members gain immortality, and the later stories are mostly about them adapting to changing times. The final volume though does feature a side story about Mina forming a league of public domain superheroes, which is pretty great. I think Alan Moore over time mainly lost interest in the Victorian and superhero parts of the League, and got caught up in the freedom the series gave him to combine any and all types of fiction. There’s plenty of stuff I like about the later League volumes, but overall they seem unfocused compared to the Victorian era ones.
Ian has mentioned several times throughout the podcast that limits are actually a good thing for creativity, and I think the League books show that. The first two volumes stick strictly to the “Victorian superhero team” idea, but that provides something to hang all the more obscure references on. The later books lack this core, so while they’re more ambitious, they don’t hold together nearly as well. Peter Ayres mentioned the Nemo trilogy as a return to form, and while I agree that they’re probably the best of the later volumes, they’re maybe still a little hard to get into on their own (for one thing, they star the daughter of the original Nemo, so you have to read League: Century to get her backstory).
One last thing: the villain in The Stones of Blood is named “Vivien Fay”, which by an odd coincidence is the same name as the head ballerina during the big long nightclub musical sequence in A Day at the Races.
“Chicago” is one of my fav movies of all time and I was ecstatic when it won Best Picture ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh, and I think that guy is right about the pronunciation of “nazi” (hard A, as in the A in “cat”). I have to admit, I always found it odd whenever I heard it pronounced the other way on this show, but I shrug it off.
I think people in the UK say it with the short O sound: (“NOT-see”). Maybe the other way is more common in North America. My guy used to perform a commercial parody with his sketch group. Their tagline was “Why be a patsy when you can be a Nazi?” But my go-to website for rhymes (rhymezone.com) rhymes it with Potsy, Stalkerazzi and Koyaanisqatsi. I say it somewhere in the middle, so for me, there are 3 different vowel sounds in the phrase, “Not Nazi Cat!”
Well, 4 including the ‘i”.
Update: turns out Bob pronounces it your way!!
I’m glad you liked it. Pia loathed it so much it’s a toxic subject to this day.
Yeah you’ve slandered it more than a few times on this show, haha. I bought the DVD and soundtrack and have watched it many times. It was just incredibly refreshing to have a fun, sexy musical with a majority-female cast win best picture instead of a historical war epic or something.
About the Academy Awards’ new diversity rules for Best Picture which take effect in 2024. A movie can still have an all-white all-male all-straight non-disabled cast. It just needs to check the boxes of any TWO out of the FOUR areas:
1) Actors and subject matter
2) Behind-the-camera production staff
3) Paid apprenticeships and training opportunities
4) Audience development (marketing, publicity, distribution)
I don’t think it will be hard for a multimillion-dollar production to meet the requirements. I never felt bad when I was hired because producers wanted gender diversity on their staff, especially early on in my career. I got work experience and made contacts. They got a team with a wider variety of perspectives which made their productions better.
‘Nazi, schmazi,’ as Tom Lehrer once put it. I’m a flat ‘a’ guy myself – nazi rhymes with patsy hereabouts. However, Winston Churchill would disagree with all of us. ‘Naarzi’ – with a soft ‘z’ – was the way he pronounced it, though he may have been the only one. Here he is in 1939, telling it like it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWqf4wxam14