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 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.
Tim and Jen welcome Alex Rancourt of the Saucer Cinema podcast to discuss a concentrated version of the political correctness panic of the 90s, Disclosure.
Subscribe to our Patreon and get two bonus episodes every month, plus access to our back catalog and Discord for just $5/month!
If for some reason you need to subject yourself to the gross-out video Alex dropped in the chat while we were recording, here you go: Michael Douglas eats an oyster.
From 1995, this Vanity Fair article about Michael Douglas covers some of the production of Disclosure. Also highlighted are Douglas’s personal struggles at the time, including a reconciliation with wife Diandra (who’d file for divorce later that year).
If you just can’t get enough 90s tech references, check out this history of SiliconGraphics, the company that created a lot of the computer imagery in Disclosure. It’s a UNIX system! You know this!
For more Michael Douglas (dunno why you want more, but you do you), listen to our episode about The Ghost and the Darkness!
Jen and Tim pick their top five favorite subjects from the first one hundred episodes of the show. It was supposed to be their most and worst faves, but they just talk too damn much! Looks like they gotta record a whole other episode to air their least faves of the first hundred.
If you watch just one episode of the (sadly few) remaining of the British series Dead of Night, “A Woman Sobbing” should be your pick.
Outsider art enthusiasts: walk, don’t run to catch Romeo and Romeo. It truly is something special.
Horror Express is pretty easy to find, but a lot of poor quality versions are out there. This one is quite nice, however.
Threads has grown in reputation such that it often appears on streaming services like Shudder and Criterion Channel, but you can always find it at the Internet Archive.
Ghostwatch, the show that scared an entire country so badly they put it in a lockbox for 25 years, may also be viewed on the Archive!
Part 2, where we name our least favorites of the first hundred episodes of HYST, will be coming shortly, so stay tuned!
Tim and Jen finally give the departed William Friedkin a proper sendoff with a discussion of his once-maligned masterpiece, Sorcerer. Guest Darren Herczeg provides his usual able assistance.
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To clear up an anecdote Jen related during the episode: she says that Paramount president Charles Bluhdorn freaked out when he spotted himself in the group photo of oil company executives in a scene from Sorcerer. The source of this story is screenwriter Walon Green, who describes Bluhdorn as having had a “shit hemorrhage” during the screening. However, a review of the offending scene reveals only other Gulf+Western execs, not Bluhdorn.
“To me, they looked like a bunch of thugs,” Friedkin said (as quoted in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls).
Catch the documentary Friedkin Uncut on Tubi, where the man himself evokes Hitler in the first five minutes. We’ll miss you, Billy.
Want to hear about another Friedkin flop? The Guardian very much fails on its own merits.
Tim and Jen bring back one of horror’s heaviest (lol) hitters to talk about a movie William Friedkin couldn’t be bothered to mention after he made it, The Guardian!
Get this and two bonus episodes every month for just $5/ month on our Patreon!
Tim’s quip about Q’s on Wilshire refers to a 2000 incident in which screenwriter and director Eric Red plowed his Jeep into a crowded bar following a fender bender, killing two people, then attempted to slit his own throat with a piece of glass. The linked LA Weekly article draws some tenuous conclusions between Red’s work and the bloody mess at Q’s, but as of 2023 he appears to have stayed out of trouble and written several novels.
KCRW memorializes Deirdre O’ Donaghue’s incredibly influential playlists with its Bent By Nature podcast.
The ballerina clown of Venice remains in situ, where it has been since 1989. Presumably, it makes the CVS underneath it easy to find for out-of-towners.
Do you love Tim and Bitter Karella, but have had enough of Jen? Hear the former two discuss a beloved childhood favorite in our Ernest Goes to Camp episode!
Jen and Tim come to a tenuous agreement about a once universally loathed Martin Short comedy, Clifford. Also, Tim punches down ruthlessly on a twenty pound miniature pinscher [who could lose a little weight].
For just $5 a month, get two additional episodes a month over on our Patreon!
The Slate article about Martin Short that riled everyone up may be found here, but if you want to skip right to the synchronized swimming sketch from SNL, you can watch it on Vimeo.
The Vulture oral history of the making, the release, and the eventual cult fandom around Clifford is as exhaustive a history of the film as one may be expected to tolerate.
DNA specialists identified the Boy in the Box as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, 65 years after his death (be careful if you search for info on the case; the police distributed postmortem photos shortly after he was found in an attempt to generate leads).
Tim is beside himself that Clifford is not this movie.
While Clifford is the exception, why not check out one of our several other episodes about traumatizing children? Or look at this awful little kid from Woodchipper Massacre?
Jen and Tim quibble over Bobcat Goldthwait’s directorial debut, the seedy comic tale of Shakes the Clown. Also, Jen drops some hard truths about Robin Williams.
Patton Oswalt tells his story about the world’s worst party clown to Conan O’Brien.
Are you new to Have You Seen This? Have you yet to hear the good news about Pervy the Clown? Tune your Roku to B-Movie TV every Friday at midnight!…if you dare.
Or, if you’re subscribed to our Patreon at $5 and up, direct your Pervy-related questions to your hosts in the show Discord!
Apropos of nothing, apparently the children’s show Little Clowns of Happytown was developed by Chuck Lorre, the guy who went on to runaway success with a bunch of sitcoms that Jen hates with every fiber of her being.
Can’t get enough clownin’? Listen to our episode about the Terrifier franchise!
Tim and Jen review a film of great technical genius and great vacuity of story: Natalie Wood’s final film, Brainstorm. But Jen liked at least half of it. Also, please send Tim all of your uneaten candy corn.
There’s a rundown on the Showscan process originally intended for Brainstorm from Douglas Trumbull himself on YouTube. Too bad it’s in 360p. This fine Japanese documentary on Trumbull is in much higher quality, though.
If you’re super into the dialectic and want to go beyond Noguchi’s and Lambert’s account of the death of Natalie Wood, former prosecutor Sam Perroni has written a well-researched look into the case called…Brainstorm!
And if you want more mind-bending visuals that weren’t appreciated by the public at the time, listen to our episode on the Wachowskis’ update of Speed Racer!