The World's Only Podcast™ about bizarre, overlooked, and misbegotten media
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
Jen puts Tim in an arm bar until he agrees to talk about a backyard martial arts movie from a determined auteur: Fight Ring!
Sean Gallimore had a successful animation career for many years, including many top-of-the-line films for Disney. See a gallery of his artwork, which includes expert 3D modeling work as well as his signature pinups.
See more Gallimore pinups here!
If you love outsider indie films as much as we do, don’t miss our episode on a towering work of queer drama straight from the trailer park: Romeo and Romeo.
Tim and Jen invite their favorite internet crank Bitter Karella to help them analyze a bewildering major release that no one liked, Argylle. It’s so confounding a project, it leads Karella to use the phrase “Brechtian distancing mechanism.”
Listen to our Apple TV+ episode, in which we rend the entire platform to filth. Fuck you, Tim Apple!
Read this Deadline article about the production and marvel at how out of touch these people sound. At the end, director Matthew Vaughn throws in an enthusiastic endorsement of the Apple Vision Pro.
Read the incisive opinion piece Tim invoked when discussing the sexlessness of Argylle, R.S. Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” via Blood Knife.
Jen and Tim just can’t figure out why audiences were so lukewarm about this fun pulp adventure, The Phantom from 1996.
Phantom creator Lee Falk enthused about the movie in a 1996 interview, singling out Billy Zane for particular praise.
As Tim mentioned, The Phantom struck a chord with the people of Papua New Guinea. See examples of war shields of the PNG highlands featuring the character.
Tim and Jen welcome Rifftrax stalwarts Bill Corbett and Sean Thomason to discuss a cheapie high fantasy film that thinks it’s a spaghetti western, Hawk the Slayer!
Bill and Sean have brought their Ringheads podcast to a close, but if you crave some Silmarillon chat, find it on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform.
The Rifftrax version of Hawk the Slayer is free with ads on Tubi, or you can secure your very own copy at the Rifftrax website!
In the Realms of the Unreal does not appear to be streaming as of this writing, but you can find out more about outsider artist Henry Darger at the documentary’s official website.
Also, don’t miss Bill’s previous appearance on our show to chat about the 1979 TV movie version of Captain America, starring Big McLargehuge aka Reb Brown.
Jen and Tim journey to Gumbasia to experience the vision of a lovable madman, The Gumby Movie, aka Gumby 1!
The story of Henrietta Lacks and the immortal cell line that bears her name is a remarkable one, encompassing topics of institutionalized racism, scientific ethics, and medical marvels. Adam Curtis made a fine documentary about Lacks and the HeLa line of cells in 1997 for the BBC.
The video for “All The Things She Said” by Simple Minds presents a fine example of the then-cutting-edge video work of filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczyński.
And after you’ve seen that, really blow your mind with Charles and Ray Eames’s head-spinning 1977 short, Powers of Ten!
Tim and Jen spice up their lives with a fluffy little movie about five assertive young women, Spice World!
Read a contemporaneous account from Rolling Stone of the Spice Girls at the height of their global fame, in which they pick their noses, pee on things, and generally lark about.
The VH1 commercial slamming ELO that Jen mentioned is the first one in this compilation.
Yeah, what was the real Fox Force Five? Since there’s a wiki for everything, check the one for Pulp Fiction:
‘This premise inspired the theme for the Spice Girls’ 1996 music video for their song “Say You’ll Be There” in which the girls adopt similar fictional identities.’
🤯
In true user-edited wiki fashion, this one is incorrect about the Code Name: Foxfire series mentioned. There were actually eight episodes that aired from January to April 1985, not just a pilot.
Jen and Tim mildly disagree on a Sam Raimi film that didn’t quite hit with audiences the first time around, the gender-swapped revenge tale The Quick and the Dead.
You can watch some deleted scenes from the film, including the love scene between Sharon Stone and Russell Crowe (or “liebesszene,” as it’s described here, because it’s dubbed in German. A couple of the non-sexy scenes are missing audio, probably because those elements were lost after the theatrical edit was finalized.
Jen raised the notion that women are better shots than men, but there’s no real consensus. This study indicates that men and women are equally good at sharpshooting, apart from a slight advantage displayed by men with pistols. Well there goes the whole premise of the movie!!
Yes, Sam Raimi did credit Joss Whedon with helping him on the ending of The Quick and the Dead, but we won’t hold that against him.