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!
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.
Jen and Tim struggle to understand the newly-minted cult status of a flop from Keanu Reeves’ himbo era, the cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic. They also put on hazmat suits and delve into the horror that is the comment section on Dina Meyer’s website.
For just $5 a month, hear it and over 80 more episodes on our Patreon!
Director Robert Longo talks about the rationale and process that led to his black-and-white edition of Johnny Mnemonic over at Screen Slate.
Screenwriter and god of cyberpunk William Gibson reflects on the film shortly after its U.S. release.
For more Dina Meyer discussion, listen to our The Evil Within episode!
Jen and Tim nineties nineties nineties nineties Denzel Washington nineties nineties virtual reality, nineties Russell Crowe nineties, nineties nineties nineties Virtuosity nineties!
Hear the whole episode over at our Patreon!
Read the AV Club interview with Kelly Lynch where she describes Denzel’s motive for doctoring the script for Virtuosity, as mentioned in the episode.
Per Tim’s recommendation, you could do a search on the World Wide Web, or you can check out an article about Kai’s Power Tools if you’d like to see some screenshots of that bonkers interface!
Also, if you missed it the first time around, listen to our episode about The Lawnmower Man, another cheesy 90s film from the director of Virtuosity.
No truer words were spoken about this movie than “So Fucking What.” Jen and Tim welcome Bryan Quinby of Street Fight Radio to talk about a justly forgotten 90s something-or-other called S.F.W.
Hear the whole thing over at our Patreon!
Trace the history of the beer ball!
If you want to revisit that scene we mentioned from Sleep With Me, watch it here.
Jen was wrong about Juliet, incidentally— she was intended to be about 13 or 14.Romeo was 16 or 17, though, so obviously the play is problematic due to the age gap and Shakespeare is still cancelled.
The name of the teenaged girl school shooter Jen failed to recall is Brenda Spencer. She committed the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in 1979, and she is still incarcerated.
Tim holds forth excitedly about “the most accurate depiction of virtual reality as a profound concept that is silly in its execution.” Based on the Stephen King lawsuit!
GenXers may remember Nintendo’s failed “virtual reality” console, the Virtual Boy. If you’re unfamiliar and were wondering what the heck we were talking about, you can’t go wrong with the Angry Video Game Nerd’s very funny and profane video on the topic.
Here’s that Tom the Dancing Bug comic Tim didn’t get a chance to summarize (it parodies “Flowers for Algernon”).
Tim takes charge in order to bend your ear, and Jen’s, about Trent Reznor’s cute little home movie, Broken! That Nine Inch Nails soundtrack still goes the fuck off, by the way.
Watch the Broken movie at the Internet Archive, or you can hunt on the official Nine Inch Nails website for it!
For another movie that was formative to young angry Tim, here’s our episode on The Lawnmower Man!
Matt Christman returns to talk about that disease unique to the 90s, the Tarantino ripoff! We discuss Killing Zoe and Love and a .45. We also touch on oddball pics like The Immortals and the inexplicably beloved Boondock Saints.
Matt first guested on the show to bring us the awful Larry Bishop pet project, Mad Dog Time. Included in this episode is a Matt utterance that’s might be one of the best descriptions of a bad film ever spoken: “It’s like it all takes place in a coffin.”