223 – Alien³

When a xenomorph comes along, you must whippet

Jen and Tim rationalize David Fincher’s unlucky first feature, Alien Cubed (aka Alien³). Turns out that Tim has A LOT to say about Alien movies!

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Read a 1992 interview with David Fincher, in which he’s quite candid about “the worst thing that ever happened to me”— that is, the production of Alien³.

A helpful fan wiki has provided a transcript of William Gibson’s first draft screenplay for the movie.

Love Fincher? Listen to our episode on a movie that people steadfastly refuse to engage with in good faith, Fight Club!

222 – The Rocketeer

Burning out his fuse in a failed Disney franchise

Tim and Jen are surprisingly hard on Disney’s amiable comics-based misfire, The Rocketeer!

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See Rondo Hatton in The Brute Man, but let the MST3k crew accompany you through this murky noir.

The Cocoanut Grove fire has been widely covered in media. The Fascinating Horror channel has an excellent recounting of the disaster, in the dispassionate and non-sensationalized style of the best YouTube channels.

This 1979 BBC biography of Errol Flynn offers illuminating interviews with people who knew him, including David Niven, Olivia de Havilland, and his daughter Deirdre.

You can purchase a copy of the Traveller supplement featuring “Vehicle Handbook: Airships of the Imperium” by a certain Tim H. at DriveThruRPG. Intrigued by the endless possibilities of tabletop space travel? Find more resources Tim created for Traveller at his personal website!

221 – Art Clokey and Gumby Dharma

Art is God, says Art, Gumby’s creator

Jen and Tim return to Gumbasia to discuss the legacy of a complicated man: Gumby creator Art Clokey!

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The documentary that sparked the discussion, Gumby Dharma, may be viewed free on YouTube via the channel for Bay Area PBS station KQED.

Pay a visit to Clokey Productions to see some behind-the-scenes footage!

Here’s an example of that Lego wizard hat thing Tim mentioned. Clever!

If you missed our episode on The Gumby Movie(aka Gumby 1), listen to it here!

220 – Streets of Fire

These streets straight fire, yo

An extra-mellow and profoundly aphasic Bitter Karella steps in to help Jen explicate the other, crappier version of The Warriors: Streets of Fire!

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Hear the bangin’ soundtrack on YouTube, which includes “Deeper and Deeper” by The Fixx (which you won’t see on the Spotify version of the soundtrack even though “Deeper and Deeper” IS on there. Who knows why).

Yes, there are some tidbits about Streets of Fire in this 2003 interview with the immortal Jim Steinman, but the whole thing is worth a read for the Meat Loaf stories alone.

If you would like to experience what Karella surely considers the sexiest Gumby cartoon, “Grub Grabber Gumby” also may be viewed on YouTube.

219 – Our Worst Favorites, Episodes 101-200

Our Worst Favorites 101-200

Having spoken about their most favorite topics from the last one hundred episodes, Tim and Jen scrape the bottom of the barrel for their worst favorites.

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Lexx, Witch Hunt, and Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus may all be viewed at the Internet Archive.

The game Jen mentioned is indeed Warlords and you can play it online with those heart-stopping Atari graphics and everything!

Curious about our worst faves from episodes 1-100? Listen here, and find our favorites from the first 100 episodes here!

218 – Our Most Favorites, Episodes 101-200

HYST Most Favorite!

Jen and Tim reflect on the last one hundred episodes (holy crap, we made it to 200 and beyond!) and each chooses five favorites from the mixed bag!

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On YouTube, you can watch Penda’s Fen, The Jericho Mile, and Pavel Klushantsev’s delightful Planet of Storms.

Tubi has the taut thriller Money Movers, as well as the unjustly overlooked Heart of Midnight and George Romero’s feminist drama Season of the Witch.

We also chose our most and worst favorites for the first one hundred episodes— take a further look back with us!

217 – Phase IV

…it’s no picnic!

Tim and Jen invite Alex Rancourt of the Saucer Cinema podcast to marvel at Saul Bass‘s disquieting sci-fi dreamscape, Phase IV!

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View the alternate ending that should have been the theatrical ending to Phase IV on YouTube.

A couple of interesting side notes about the Oscar-winning faux documentary Alex mentioned, The Hellstrom Chronicle: it was conceived and executive produced by David L. Wolper, the TV stalwart who shepherded massively successful television miniseries like Roots and The Thorn Birds, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Additionally, Walon Green, the screenwriter perhaps best known for William Friedkin‘s sleeper masterpiece Sorcerer, co-directed and produced the film.

A quick web search proved that the busty wasp mentioned by Alex isn’t real, except perhaps in our hearts.

We alluded briefly to this article at Dennis Cooper’s blog discussing film treatments of LSD, with a fabulous collection of acid-related GIFs accompanying.

216 – Max Knight: Ultra Spy – Part 2

My god… it’s full of polygons!

Jen and Tim doggedly return to the remnants of Max Knight: Ultra Spy in hopes that it can be archived on a Zip disk and forgotten.

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Missed part one of our deep dive? Find it here! Wanna see the movie? “Log in” to the “Information Superhighway” and “point” your “browser” to the Internet Archive!

Too young to have purchased the Trainspotting soundtrack on CD? Even if you weren’t, we suggest decompressing from the episode with all 11 minutes of the remastered Born Slippy.

215 – Max Knight: Ultra Spy – Part 1

Hotter than a Pentium II trying to run Quake!

Tim gets the bit (or byte?) between his teeth and rants about the ’90s and the lost promise of the internet, and a little bit about cheapie TV movie Max Knight: Ultra Spy! Jen just tries to hold on as best she can! Oh yeah, and this is part one because we don’t know how to shut up!

Subscribe to our Patreon for part two! As a subscriber, you get two bonus episodes every month, plus access to our back catalog of 100+ episodes and Discord for just $5/month!

You can easily tell how white your hosts are by their lack of knowledge of UPN (not the only tell, if we’re being honest), which provided a home for black shows and showrunners alike. Or at least it did for a while, before a gradual whitewashing leading up to the network’s merger with the WB. The Hollywood Reporter provides a post-mortem.

[Former senior VP of comedy development at Paramount Pictures Television] Rose Catherine Pinkney believes the decision to merge UPN out of existence came down to ad revenue. “Ultimately, you want the most dollars that you can get for your ads,” she says. Though UPN’s Black-led scripted shows (which by the end of UPN’s run included Eve, All of Us, Everybody Hates Chris) were largely popular with audiences, advertisers were evidently less inclined to pay top dollar to support shows targeting Black viewers. Farquhar, co-creator of Moesha and The Parkers, recalls an advertising person saying, “We’re not interested in ‘downscaled demographics.’ ”

They still make Tamogochis, holy shit.

Can’t get enough of PCMCIA cards? Here’s a helpful explainer!

Popular Mechanics looks back at the V-chip 20 years after it appeared.

Want more 90s TV? Check out our episode on the show M.A.N.T.I.S. with special guest and superfan mugrimm!

214 – Centurion

Several Species of English Actors Gathered Together in a Cave and Hiding From a Pict

Tim and Jen enlist Gaius of the wonderful Tribunate channel on YouTube to help unearth a Romans-vs.-Picts historical epic that vanished like the Ninth Legion, Centurion.

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Jen’s personal favorite video from Tribunate is this savage takedown of Cato, but this examination of Roman concepts of race and how radically they differ from ours is another great example of the high caliber of material from Gaius’s channel. Also the triggered reactionary crybabies in the comments are extremely funny. Finally, don’t miss this compilation of filthy Roman words!

If you perked up your ears when  Jen mentioned Carry On Cleo, go check out our survey of the Carry On franchise, featuring the inimitable Bitter Karella!