The World's Only Podcast™ about bizarre, overlooked, and misbegotten media
Tim takes the reins to enthuse about a shockingly creepy British TV series for kids (?!), Children of the Stones.
Tip us at ko-fi.com/hystpod!
Watch the entirety of Children of the Stones on YouTube!
Hear the Reese Shearsmith-led podcast adaptation of Children of the Stones over at the Beeb.
Want more folk horror? Sample our collection of same!
Jen welcomes Darren Herczeg to help her rhapsodize about a movie even director Ken Russell didn’t like, Valentino!
The wonderfully-named Phallic Frenzy gives Russell his due as an audacious filmmaker, and describes Valentino in complimentary terms.
See Nureyev fully commit to the bit by dancing “Swine Lake” on the Muppet Show in 1978.
The book on Fatty Arbuckle that Jen mentioned is called Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood, and it’s well worth a read for anyone interested in early Hollywood.
Can’t get enough Darren? Check out our collection of his appearances on the show!
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!
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!
Tim and Jen are surprisingly hard on Disney’s amiable comics-based misfire, The Rocketeer!
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!
Jen and Tim return to Gumbasia to discuss the legacy of a complicated man: Gumby creator Art Clokey!
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!
An extra-mellow and profoundly aphasic Bitter Karella steps in to help Jen explicate the other, crappier version of The Warriors: Streets of Fire!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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!