Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Sneaky Dragon – the tantric sex of podcasts!
This week: Southern discomfort; cross references; the road to Mondolez; the Velveeta fog; cheese block; fluff stuff; spoilers spoilers; raising Kane; Citizen Brown; the gospel according to Peanuts; hot Scotch; Romeo-erotic; Polanski patrol; Top 10 movies; even more movies; focus on Wrath; MAS*H notes; Shane on you; withering on Wuthering; taking a dark turn; Saturday Night at the movies; Walken on the wild side; Giant performance; Bligh’s spirit; Easy does it; bad fellas; heel turn; a Dandy guess; cheeses returns; torch song; totally tartar; kitchen hacks; false impressions; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; thirdy something; Shadow facts; the comment before the storm; inherit the win; Express yourself; harsh judgement; heir apparently; how Gaucho; music is love; waxing lyrics; a Sneaky plan; get smarter; synthesize me; complimentary insult; plotting along; boring companies; buffet the breakfast slayer; chopsticks; international house of Dave; and, finally, the Bert necessities.
Question of the Week: What movie turned darker than you expected?
Sub-question of the Week: What is a food that you didn’t like in the past, but now do?
Thanks for listening.
Doodle-oo!
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Marcus, thank you for the high praise, comparing my work to Zelazny’s! Whoa! Edward, Mike Kaluta is one of the greatest. I’ve never read his Shadow, but I have seen glimpses of it.
I guess Parasite turned darker than I expected, but I didn’t know what exactly I was getting into when I sat down to watch it. When we discover the secret passage and go down into the bowels of the earth by way of those narrow staircases, I was truly tense, wondering where the hell it was all going.
I was not into spinach as a kid, no matter what it might have done for Popeye, but as an adult, I found the unboiled version and loved it. I use it everywhere I used to use lettuce. It’s got great nutritional value, but I am disappointed that it doesn’t make animated battleship tattoos suddenly appear on my biceps when I eat it.
I’ll echo your taste on spinach Matthew, it’s a favorite of mine now too. There has to be a list somewhere of all the animated tattoos that Popeye had come to life when he consumed a can of spinach, and very on-brand for a Sneaky Dragon discussion. Anvils, tanks, dynamite maybe even an atom bomb, it’s all been done at some time in Popeye’s history. One could even wonder if a groin tattoo ever came to life when Popeye got Olive Oyl alone, like a cannon going off in his nether regions. I’m betting there’s an animated Popeye porn out there somewhere, there has to be…he is a sailor after all.
I remain deeply troubled that Popeye’s fast food restaurants serve – of all things – fried chicken. Where’s the spinach? The dude lives most of his life at sea – why not fish n chips? What possible connection does he have with poultry? Was Foghorn Leghorn too expensive to license? On reflection, there is that Giant Roc in the gorgeous Fleischer ‘Popeye meets Sindbad’ so perhaps I’ve just answered my own question: after cooking the beastie in that volcano he’ll have had plenty of leftovers.
Ian mentioned his magisterial Popeye impression: I remember Billy West talking about how he unpicked the voice into two opposing parts – a nasal falsetto and a deep throaty growl. Blend the two and… [Listeners – if Ian hasn’t done a Popeye impression yet, insert one of your own here.]
I have to write in here on the website so I can use Ian to berate Dave a little. The Hiland Dairy website can inform you of chains that carry their products; however, the website does not indicate which store sells each individual item. Incidentally, Grape Drink is very different from Grape juice. Anyone making that mistake is going to be very disappointed. Also, the Hiland Dairy website needs to be updated as they have left off a few chains that sell their products in Kansas.
Periodically pedantic Thomas.
In your discussion about black-eyed peas, we eat them with corned beef and cabbage as a New Year’s Day tradition. I think they’re supposed to bring one good luck and cabbage brings in money. Not sure what corned beef brings, maybe just a bad case of the meat sweats and cramping.
I can remember going to the dollar theater in Mesquite back in the 80’s with my group of friends, we saw what we thought was a funny rom-com starring Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith. “Something Wild” went from rom-com to grim-dram when the story turned into an obsessive stalker tale with Ray Liotta in a manic rage as the jealous ex-boyfriend. Didn’t Daniels barely make it to the end in one piece? After the film I can remember all my friends comparing me to Daniels character in the movie, as if something like that could happen to me. Thankfully it never did, I don’t need a rabid Ray Liotta after me. The movie was enough to scare the shit out of me.
I really had a distaste for nuts when I was young, with the exception of peanuts I couldn’t stand pecans, walnuts, almonds or pistachio nuts baked in anything or even alone. I’m not sure when my taste changed but I’m good with just about every variety of nut there is now. I love them in cookies, pie and breads or even munching them right out of the bag. The unsalted roasted peanuts are still my favorite and when Ian mentioned mixing them with shelled pistachios, I had to try it myself. We had to make double because Susan enjoyed them too!
End of questions.
I owe you a Bert sketch…or maybe Ernie?
And how about that Fantastic Four First Steps trailer!?
I’m all in with Marvel’s first family….
‘Nuff said and Excelsior true Sneakers!!!
I’ve mentioned Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) before. Yes, the reviews told us it was a look at life and death inspired by his real-life heart attack. But for a musical movie, it goes surprisingly dark about the creative process, show business, relationships, substance abuse, medical care… There is a particularly brutal scene when director-choreographer Joe Gideon is about to go into surgery. The producers of his still-in-rehearsals musical are meeting with their insurance rep. A manager itemizes the expenses the show has incurred thus far while an accountant totals them up on a calculator. Fosse intercuts this with actual close-ups of an open-heart surgery. Then the insurance rep tells the producers if the show goes back into production, his company isn’t liable. But if Gideon “expires” and the production is abandoned, they’ll pay out on a million dollar policy. The accountant, played by a young Wallace Shawn, cheerfully observes, “You could be the first show on Broadway to make a profit without really opening.” Fosse pulls off a magic trick by making the subject of his own demise highly entertaining. It’s like a confession and an apology and a boast all at once.
I never liked broccoli when I was a kid but now it’s one of my favorite green vegetables. I never liked coffee until I had an 8:30 am geography class at university. Then it became my good friend.
I initially misheard what Ian said about cheering oneself up by drawing “Bert.” I thought he said “a bird.” But drawing a bird works too, so I did.
I have a feeling that this will be the only mention of the movie ‘Sonic 3’, so just for the record:
It goes surprisingly dark in the final act, with (spoilers for Sonic 3, for fuck’s sake) Jim Carrey’s Grandpa Robotnik offhandedly falling into a particle accelerator and being anticlimactically snuffed out of existence on screen – mainly so that Jim Carrey’s Dr Robotnik can drop all the affection he’s been developing throughout the film to say he was ‘zapped like a bug’. In common with much slapdash writing, everything that happens in the movie is undercut by a smartass aside, so nothing matters, nobody cares, and jokes are telegraphed rather than be funny.
The movie itself is insidious bilge. Every time two characters meet, they bash each other until tired and say ‘why are we fighting?’ so we get to have the cake of violence and eat the heavy handed moralising. The darkest hour comes at the finale: my 5 year old left the cinema saying that ‘Shadow killed himself to save his friends’ – a rather bleak takeaway for a kids film, prompting our first chat about suicide.
So to summarise: Sonic 3 is a pile of crap with no redeeming features, save for one infuriatingly well made scene – a dance sequence with the two Jim Carreys dancing through a laser security grid, set to the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Galvanize’. Watch it online and skip the movie. And wonder what the heck is everyone up to making such utter twaddle.
Keepy Sneaky til next Weeky,
Petey.
Hi guys,
I’m a few episodes behind so forgive the tardiness of my reply, but I had to chime in about the question on what food did you used to dislike but now like…
For me it’s butterscotch—I used to hate the taste as a kid, but now I absolutely love it in any form, whether it be pudding, butterscotch chip cookies, pie, you name it.
I also wanted to say how much I enjoyed your list of Citizen Kane/Rosebud mentions in Peanuts—my husband is also a huge Peanuts fan, so I played it for him and he got a great laugh from it.
Thanks as always for all you do.