After a year of offstage shout-outs, citations and cameos, Ainsley Hawthorn comes on the show to complete the Hawthorn collectors set, and also to talk about the 1985 animated spectacular Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer!
Does Rainbow Brite fit the definition of superhero? How is this movie a functional rebuke of Orwellian dystopia? Why can't anyone in Star Trek: The Next Generation figure out how to use a bed? And how many Akira tattoos does Anthony have secreted around his person?
PLUS! We rate history's greatest horses in our new, short lived, quickly off the rails segment "Horses More Magnificent Than the Most Magnificent Horse in the Universe"! We're still workshopping the title.
Get ready for a deluge of obscure references being described with even more obscure references as the team loses all touch with modern reality and dives into the pot-o-gold at the end of the Rainbow. YAY RAINBOW!!!
Look folks, your hosts are old, okay? They're from the twentieth century. They remember video tapes and also when it was a hip idea that Tony Stark was dating Shannon Elizabeth. But they're not as old as Norse mythology, so they're going to stand next to Thor: The Dark World in public just to seem young and with-it by comparison and see how that goes.
What's the scale of technological development on a world that has laser guns but still uses swords and ox-drawn carts? Why is Natalie Portman's character, a doctor of physics with three degrees, written to speak like a tweenish babywoman? And if you are investing a few billion dollars into twenty movies and five or six television series to build up to an epic story about the Infinity Stones, why the hell can't you get even the colour of the stones right!?
Anyway, enjoy this second foray into Thor, hey? Or else Andrew and Anthony have to commit Norse Seppuku.
PS: The amazing Ring Cycle comic we are talking about which we did not have at hand and subsequently forgot all the details of is The Ring of Nibelung by P. Craig Russell (and not Charles Vess. Sorry. But you should go check it out.
Andrew and Anthony turn the superhero genre upside down and see what happens when instead of action and adventure you dial up the horror and existential dread with the superpowered sci-fi series Stranger Things!
What makes this story of a kid given strange powers by lab experiments and running away to have adventures different from 99% of Marvel comics? How is our reaction to Eleven formed by gendered archetypes we've been beating at since The Odyssey? And why the heck does everyone like Barb? She's pulling a reverse Friday the 13th! But hey, maybe there's a little Barb in all of us.
Welcome to the Kid Danger genre! Plus, the guys wax poetic about Stephen King's It, catch a powerful case of Anthony's Disease wishing the CG Demogorgon was a rubbery '80s abomination instead, and lose their sanity gazing into the impossible unknown of Katsuhiro Otomo's linework in Akira.
This week we take to the skis! Sorry, skies. And blast off with the cult 1991 Disney adventure movie The Rocketeer!
How is it that a movie this in love with flying never got off the ground? Did Dave Stevens somehow grow Billy Campbell in a lab to look exactly like his drawings? Is Cliff Secord the living embodiment of male entitlement? And where does Andrew get off hosting a movie podcast when he has apparently seen next to no movies?
Tell him No Time for Heroics is back from vacation with new episodes. Tell him Howard Hughes said so.
PS; This one's in memory of Jon "Ten bucks a shot" Polito, who passed away just two days after we recorded this podcast praising his work. He joins a cast of top notch character actors. Enjoy!
PPS: Here's the books Anthony recommended at the end of the episode!
Five Came Back