Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 552 of Sneaky Dragon – recommended by 1 out of 5 dentists who bother to recommend podcasts!
This week: breakfast time; Smith’s on first; over-explaining; odd premises; buy in; unnecessary rewrites; sometimes a cigar is just a wand; after a long research; rage against the hype machine; a real loss; mall-minded; NFTs with a fridge; mad about the multiverse; super ventriloquism; organ regret; living in a bubble; dropped nuts; closing vents; first among sequels; movie-lanche; trust issues; E.R.G.O.T.; coroner’s report; our summer replacement show; low risk; Guinness pigs; anomalous soap; the 260 club; Dork Shadows – Charity Bawl; LGBTQ-urious films; local skinhead; Dune buggy; the village Smithee; one small step; fat possums; a Dreddful movie; resurgent tunes; bad at stuff and lazy; and, finally, armed chickens.
Question of the Week: What is something you saw on TV that scared you as a kid?
Sub-question of the Week: What is something odd that has obsessed you?
Thanks for listening.
During the show, Ian mentioned a sitcom featuring Martin Short. Here is the first episode:
Peter was also kind enough to send along a link to R.L. Burnside’s white-hot collaboration with the Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion A Ass Pocket of Whiskey:
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Here’s the episode of The Associates that Kliph Nesteroff brought up, the scene we talked about starts at 12:58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7EOEp7g9vY&t=772s
When I was a kid, I was scared by “Balok” from the Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” He was a typical B-movie alien with a bulging cranium, elongated face and reptilian eyes. It turned out he was just a mannequin used to scare off invaders by the actual Balok (played by child actor Clint Howard). But puppet or not, as a kid I found his look disturbing. Also, his was the final image in the montage of stills than ran under the end credits so I’d have to see his frightening face each week.
To me, the bookstore bombing subplot in Better Than Chocolate (1999) was a very relevant part of the story and really set the movie in Vancouver, not just a generic North American city. It was based on the real-life bombing and harassment in the 1980s of Little Sister’s bookstore. It showed the risk of being out, not just to your family, but to the general public. And to Canada Customs as well. The owners fought a long legal battle to stop officials from seizing their book shipments at the border for having obscene content. Unfortunately pride flags, rainbow crosswalks and art installations are still being vandalized in Metro Vancouver. I could see that being depicted in a coming-of-age, coming out movie if it were made now.
Poor Clint Howard, he never had a chance did he? I guess it’s great that brother Ron loves him and includes the entire Howard family in almost everything he directs. I saw Clint in person back in the late 70’s while Ron Howard was filming the television movie “Cotton Candy” at our mall in Mesquite, Texas. He was well beyond Balok and all smiles as he played a 19 year-old drummer in the band Cotton Candy.
Hellooooo Sneakers!!
I need to reply to last week’s message from Peter Ayres. There’s something in me that loves that widely hated “League of Extraordinary Gentleman.” I know it was a film with a troubled production and it pales in contrast to Alan Moore’s vision, but I love that crappy movie for some stupid reason. I’m all for a remake, the story is well worth it and can be greatly expanded upon.
Having never seen MGM’s “The Wizard of OZ” in a theater, I waited all year long to watch it on television, usually in the Spring. No DVR, no DVD, no video tape, you watched it when it aired…period, it was not to be missed. OZ was my favorite thing ever back then but the one part of the film that scared the living shit out of me were those apple trees. I remember watching that scene with Dorothy and the trees from behind a chair in the living room, I couldn’t imagine trees looking and acting like that! They were horrific. Most kids were scared of the Wicked Witch, the Flying Monkeys or even the Great Flaming Head of OZ himself but for me it was the apple trees in the forest. My Mom tells me a story about just how scared I was of those trees. We were outside and a tree branch caught my jacket and snagged it from behind. Thinking it was one of the apple trees from OZ, I slid out of the jacket screaming in panic and ran into the house leaving the jacket snagged on the tree branch. My imagination always got the best of me, in any circumstance….damned trees.
I’m obsessed with style guides and I have a collection of over 350 of them, both printed and digital. In my industry, when the time comes to design ads and promotions for anything, a movie, television, sports, etc., a style guide with all the proper digital graphics is sent to the designers and art directors as a kind of “Bible” to work from. The first style guide I ever collected was from the first X-Men film in 2000, and we were working on it a good year in advance with a promotional tie-in with Dr Pepper. The art was the best ever and ready to use, straight from 20th Century Fox, various high-resolution images of all the X-Men, logos, backgrounds and iconography, it was perfect. We used it to design Dr Pepper cans, store signage, magazine ads and packaging. When the promotion was over, they sat on a shelf…forever, so I gave these style guides a home. In the years that followed, I acquired guides from the films of Spider-Man, 007, Star Wars, Pixar, Shrek, The Lord of the Rings, Superman and Batman, just by working on them and gathering the guides when the work was done. Back then you could also find them online, usually when a company had them backed up on an FTP server with zero security. I found a goldmine of style guides once, it was a children’s shoe company in Boston. When I connected to their FTP server, it was like Nicholas Cage lighting that torch to the National Treasure room, there were so many style guides in there it took me over a month to download them all. They’re harder to find these days and I still stop everything to get one whether it’s on eBay or I’m trading someone for one. They live on two 4TB drives and all are backed up on 50GB Blu-ray Discs.
My Holy Grail Style Guide is the CBS Studios Consumer Products Star Trek Universe Style Guide or any of the Justice League guides, 2017 or Snyder’s release. There’s always one around the corner, these two have just eluded me thus far…
So yeah, I’m obsessed.
My best to all, love and sweaty hugs from the blazing hot Lone Star State ya’ll…
Greeting Podcast hosts.
Nice show. keep it up. two treats.
Answer of the week 1: A while ago, Whats-his-name put a “relaxing Cat Video” to play upon our television ‘for little Zakira’… With the large screen, it looked like those damn (not cute) mice were as big as me ! Not cool, dude. man, they’re ugly. ffft.
Subanswer: Odd obsession. There’s this 2 foot long piece of white cotton twine around here that I have tried unsucessfully to ignore… but it keep showing up. Just when I think it has been bit within a inch of its stupid life… it pulls me back in.