232 – The Earth Day Special

Beaches II: The Revenge

Jen and Tim look back at an all-star polemic from 1990, The Earth Day Special, a plea on behalf of Mother Earth that made a powerful impression on a young Tim. Also, we better not catch you pouring any old house paint down the drain.

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Watch the special at the Internet Archive (and if so inclined, maybe throw them a small donation for collecting all that health data recently purged from US government websites).

According to this recap from Living Life Fearless, soap actor and Teen Witch (1989) star Dan Gauthier played Bachelor #2 in the Dating Game segment. He is apparently uncredited in the special.

Anarchist publication The Fifth Estate provides a leftist perspective on The Earth Day Special in a contemporaneous review, and they ain’t wrong:

But the same powers of manipulation continue to function: the chemical manufacturers will plant some trees, and even the “forest products” magnates will, as they generally do, plant some trees. George Bush has called for the planting of a billion trees—but none of the rulers or their allies mention the possibility of refraining from cutting a billion trees (in particular, say the last few remnants of old growth forests, but also anywhere where woods are coming under the developers’ blades). These forces, these institutions are concealing their grisly daily business with a multimedia extravaganza, a spectacle that converts a natural love of what is alive into a pointless civic ritual.

Market Realist has an easily digestible rundown on who actually founded Tesla and who merely came on board shortly afterward to leech off other people’s work and push the founders out of the nest like a shitty South African cuckoo.

200 – Disclosure

Disclosure
What did you eat, woman?!

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.

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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! 

160 – The Ghost and the Darkness

Val Kilmer, John Kani, and Michael Douglas in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Tim and Jen enlist animal expert Emma Bowers (Hyenas and Gin on YouTube) to explain why the fascinating story of two man-eating lions resulted in a boring movie called The Ghost and the Darkness.

Watch a 1996 documentary about the man-eaters of Tsavo, which includes brief interviews with stars Kilmer and Douglas and director Stephen Hopkins. One interviewee theorizes that the local lions’ taste for human flesh stems from generations of slave traders who left injured or dying captives to their fate in the bush.

This 1996 Entertainment Weekly article sums up how bad Val Kilmer’s reputation got to be in Hollywood.

As Richard Stanley, who directed Kilmer for three days in The Island of Dr. Moreau before being fired, recalls, “Val would arrive, and an argument would happen.” Says John Frankenheimer, who replaced Stanley: “I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.” And Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher calls his onetime star “childish and impossible.”

Entertainment Weekly, May 31st, 1996

You can watch the tiger attack video Tim mentioned, with added context. Rawr!

There’s even a mineral named Tsavorite which was discovered in Tanzania and named in honor of the area.

Finally, listen to our episode on the shockingly ill-conceived movie Roar, with special guest Emma!