Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to the podcast that is 462 episodes into hiting its stride!
This week: almost perfect; garden variety exploding bodies; who will inform the children; sibling resentment; early memories; leaves on a tree; old-fashioned racial epithets; animals mean no; bad apples; fresh food; boil your boiling water; gift cake; sorry, but Dave’s family doesn’t want to hear his work stories either; there’s a limit; collecting vs. hoarding; book value; mean clean; the neighbours run our lives; pools are cool; porn brat; fucking 8 to 4; jazz screw; starstones and jet-treks; more busted; musicianly mix-ups; a dollop of Trollope; the sun also sets; super thoughts; and, finally, fake Canadian high school.
Thaks for listening.
Question of the week: What were the rules about keeping the house clean when you were growing up? Were your parents strict clean freaks or somewhat easier going? Are you the same as your parents or did you react against them?
Sub-question of the week: Do superhero movies work for you? If so, which one do you connect with the most?
Sub-sub-question: Flintstones or Jetsons?
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Sorry to bring back this old topic but: interestingly, even though David was poo-pooing Marie Kondo on this show back when she first made waves, his philosophy is exactly the same as hers! When people were getting all up in arms about her, they were fundamentally misunderstanding her method and mostly going by a misquote (they mistook her saying she personally only keeps 30 books as “everyone should only keep 30 books,” which is not something she ever said. She never pushes a numerical restriction on anyone).
She stresses her method is not about choosing what to discard, but choosing what to keep. Her cleaning method is about finding the perfect amount of stuff, not getting rid of everything. It’s about going through all your things and asking yourself if it truly makes you happy, or if you’re keeping it just to have it. It’s about making sure the things that make you happy are treated with respect instead of shoved in a box and kept in storage.
According to her method, if 30 tabasco bottles and 50 beehive honey containers spark joy in you, you’re totally fine to keep them — as long as they’re being displayed or at least kept in an accessible place. Otherwise, do they truly spark joy if they’re left boxed up and out of sight?
Also, I’m not a fan of either, but I would choose Jetsons over Flintstones any day of the week.
I don’t remember many rules about cleaning when I was a kid – I think it was mostly “keep it to your room” because the house was always neat but mine and my brother’s room was always a bomb site. Right now our whole house is a bomb site so our kid is learning nothing. Oh well future wife (or husband)! Sorry! We didn’t even try!
For Jetsons or Flintstones I would choose Jetsons because I remember seeing the Jetsons movie when I was a kid and did the Flintstones ever have a movie? No! So I choose the Jetsons. (I’m not talking about those live-action abominations. Just a real honest-to-goodness 90 minute version of the cartoon with better animation.)
I’m going to skip the superhero question and talk about Degrassi for a second here because I’m Australian and you will come to find it’s a real “thing” with Australians in particular. Why? Because most of us only had two channels when Degrassi was shown on TV and at 5:30 in the afternoon it was that or watch the news with our parents so of course we’re all going to scream at our parents that there’s something better on, now get out! That TV is OURS. For kids of a certain age (I’m 41 now) it’s all we had. For kids who didn’t watch TV, they hated it because their only exposure to it was at school in health class to stop you having sex and affirming your choice to be doing better things at 5:30 I guess. For us nerds, it was eye-opening (especially since the show was actually full of nerds) and it belonged to US, and what is this far off wonderland called Toronto…? I must go there! (Spoiler: I did!)
Now, I recently had the opportunity to work on a Degrassi comic pitch with Pat Mastroianni (Joey Jeremiah) so the 12 year old inside me has essentially died squealing, but my wife and I recently attending a mini-reunion (just Joey and Caitlin) and showing of the movie in Calgary that Pat organised. He greeted everyone before the movie, I didn’t say who I was, we all watched the movie (still great), then there was a big Q&A afterwards and I stood up and asked if he had ever thought of pitching Degrassi as a comic book (there was big excitement from the crowd) and proceeded to outlay our entire pitch as a plot example and it slowly dawns on him, “hey… wait a second, what’s your name?” and I got to surprise him and give him the cover art to our issue one that never happened and it was a fun night, so now the 41 year old me can die squealing (and it’s not from the brain tumour!)
Maybe my wife will find someone who will teach our son how to clean his room.
There was a Flintstones movie. Loved it as a kid. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3vles4
I stand corrected. Still, was there a Flinstones movie on at the the theatre when specifically I was a child?! No!
Thankfully my parents weren’t clean freaks by any means, although I was expected to keep my room reasonably tidy. The cleaning strategy I developed as a kid that I’ve kept as an adult is to keep everything tidy except for one closet or drawer or whatever, which I then pile up with any junk that I can’t find a tidy place for anywhere else. Out of sight, out of mind.
As for superhero movies: I’ve enjoyed almost all of the MCU movies I’ve seen, but there have only been a few of them I’ve really loved (so far, Thor: Ragnarok has probably been my favorite). I also liked the Nolan Batman movies, but apart from them I’ve found the grim n’ gritty approach of the modern DC movies to be off-putting. I’ve become so tired of that approach that I haven’t even been able to watch The Boys, despite hearing so many good things about it. I suppose that’s why I was never able to get into Game of Thrones either. I always saw it billed as “like Lord of the Rings, but with more sex and violence”, which to me is not a very appealing combination. Oh well, to each their own.
Hi Ian and Dave All I can say Is I love your podcast and could you tell the opening piano riff
thanks
I’m a neatnik and I’m incredibly good at cleaning, always have been. That being said, my folks never had any trouble with me pitching in to clean or organize. I always kept my own room clean and organized which I was accountable for. The one thing that used to drive my Dad crazy was when I got the urge to rearrange my room, he never understood the need to do that. So one time I decided to rearrange my bedroom, Dad showed me a trick. Dad took some graph paper and drew up a scaled down version of my room on the paper so that each square was equal to a square foot. Then we measured all my furniture and scaled that down on paper too. I cut out the furniture shapes so I could rearrange them first on the graphed out drawing of my room making sure everything fit before moving the real things around for hours. That’s essentially my Dad the engineer, it may have driven him nuts, but he helped me with a better plan to drive him less nuts.
Outside of keeping my own room clean my folks weren’t all that imposing on the rest of the house, just common sense stuff like rinsing plates and putting them in the dishwasher or picking up a mess if it was made. My Dad did task me in the summer with mowing the grass and sweeping the garage since he had terrible asthma and would suffer greatly while doing those chores. I was outside anyway and I didn’t mind, I was good at it too and I received an allowance.
I suppose it was passed onto my kids, who are also neat and organized. It was never a heavy-handed discipline either, more of a “learn by doing” and setting good examples over time. My step kids are a different story altogether but they get a wild hair every so often and go on a cleaning spree, so all is not completely lost. I just shut the door to their rooms if I don’t want to see it. The eldest was the worst but he’s on his own now and finally learned that he has nobody but himself to clean up after him. One down, two to go….
You know full well that superhero films work for me, they might even work too well. I literally drew and designed movie posters for The Avengers, X-Men and Justice League when I was a teen as if they were for feature live action films, so you can imagine the payoff of seeing all this unfold in the last 25 or so years. I would actually “cast” the films by finding photos of actors or models who I thought looked like The Vision or Beast or whoever and draw them as lifelike as possible into posters for the films. It wasn’t as spectacular as the way Alex Ross paints them but more of a designed way of featuring the characters as if I was actually designing a poster for the film. I’ve written to you before about how I define the “Comic Book” films vs. the “Superhero Films”, so I’ll just discuss how the superhero genre has affected me. For comics and not films, I was a Marvel reader first and DC came later for me. DC always seemed so top-heavy with all the Infinite Earth stuff and so much to keep up with and Marvel was just on one world and easy to follow. Then I saw Superman the Movie and I was a DC fan overnight. I still consider Reeve in that role as the quittessential Superman and Gene Hackman as the greatest villain ever in the role of Luthor. I will never stop loving that film and all the elements that pull it together, it’s still my number one. Then I went through the same thing again during my last college summer with Burton’s Batman, it was everything I wanted that summer. I look at the experience I enjoyed leading up to and during these films as my own way of measuring them against one another. So I would have to say that if I had a foothold in reading Marvel Comics first, that DC was first as far as films are concerned.
Then came the Marvel revolution with X-Men, which I worked on over three jobs for the entire 20 years of the franchise, The Fantastic Four which I also worked on and then the Marvel Studios run. This was a dizzying experience and a complete odyssey for me considering I’d been waiting for it since I was twelve years old. I think what it would be like to go back in time and explain to my twelve or fifteen year-old self about what was coming. I truly love it all and I know that some consider the genre so saturated at this point but for me it’s a dream come true.
If Marvel was a week long Woodstock-like rock concert with fifty bands in attendance, then DC is like an opera…this my best way to describe the difference between the Marvel and DC films now, and I love both rock concerts and opera. Since reading DC comics came later for me, the twenty year-old in me was also waiting for The Justice League, Batman v Superman, Joker and WATCHMEN films from DC. I know they’re highly criticized but I still enjoy the experience each one has given me. The worst thing would have been if the DC and Marvel studios tried to mimic one another, so I’m happy with the fact that each studio has its own style of film. I love it all and I’m ready for more, onscreen, streaming, animated…everything. Except that Josh Tank piece of shit.
Flintstones all the way! I enjoyed Fred and Barney and their friendship, poor George Jetson didn’t have a best friend or a Lodge to hang out at. He didn’t even bowl! The Flintstones seem to be a bit more fossilized (sorry) into pop culture…they transcend time. One of my favorite appearances of Fred and Barney is from an old black & white Winston cigarette commercial where they’re hiding behind the house and sneaking a smoke while Wilma and Betty do all the work. https://youtu.be/FqdTBDkUEEQ
They’re just Rock (sorry again) Stars. I also liked how when celebrities showed up and they were given Flintstone-esque names like Stoney Curtis or Ann Margrock. My joke has always been that if Sharon Stone had starred as an animated Flintstones character she wouldn’t have had to change her name at all.
As far as Hanna Barbara themes? True, Jonny Quest was badass and the Jetsons was jazzy and fun…but the best theme of all was Top Cat, paws down!
https://youtu.be/I72514NyuQ8
With an honorable mention to Dick Dastardly and Muttley’s “Stop That Pigeon.”
https://youtu.be/sj6-LG5VpGk
Did I make it in time to grab my fedora this week?
We had weekly chores when I was growing up. My mother explained that it’s easier to do a light clean-up regularly than a deep clean-up when it becomes absolutely necessary. When I moved out, I started playing “chores chicken”, but eventually I figured out that life is generally better when everything is put away and things are generally clean. I can’t say I’m the best at doing it (I have too much clutter!), but I’m working on it.
Superhero movies work to me as spectacle, but I have a hard time connecting to them. I did, however, really emphasize with Wonder Woman during the WW1 part of her film. From being horrified that war is even a thing, to her trek across no-man’s land, and then her disappointment that there wasn’t some big bad that caused the war, just people. That was all great. Everything after that with Ares didn’t happen.
Uh, Jetsons! I watched the Flintstones more growing up, but I don’t think I could go back.
Ian, you can turn those sub-par apples into an applesauce or a chutney that you can use as a tasty topping for pancakes, French toast or waffles or as an accompaniment for a pork or poultry dish.
I like superhero movies like Deadpool that don’t take themselves too seriously and acknowledge the absurd or ridiculous aspects of the genre with self-aware dialogue. I also prefer stories that are on a smaller scale. You can only take so many motion-capture CGI-enhanced villains out to conquer Earth before that gets boring.
This is going back a few podcasts, but I enjoyed the Dirty Harry Minute fan fiction episode with short stories inspired by the movie, amusingly read by Dave. There are some very clever takes on some very minute aspects of the film including Dave’s own story, “The Brute” which casts a spotlight on the kind of guy you hire to rough you up when you want to frame someone for police brutality.
Did you guys get my entry this week?
yes!
Love you guys!!