The Maryland-based writer and critic Jessica Ritchey is my special guest for a show that compares the current decline in the interconnected comic book movie business to the collapse in the late sixties of the Roadshow Musical with a look at the notorious 1969 musical western Paint Your Wagon (starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood) with 2022’s box office disappointment Black Adam, meant to launch a new DC superhero franchise for star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Hubris connects these two movies: Paint Your Wagon was a troubled production that was extremely expensive to make and not nearly the hit Paramount expected it to be, while Black Adam was The Rock’s brazen attempt to take over the direction of the DC Universe but released at the moment a new regime took over at Warner Bros’s DC unit.

Black Adam came from the Shazam saga but Johnson consciously distanced the would-be franchise from its source and even teased a future battle between this antihero and Henry Cavill’s Superman that also helped to doom the following Shazam sequel to box office oblivion, leading to public feuding between its star Zachary Levi and Johnson.

Jessica and I discuss the cultural conditions that swallowed up these two films in their respective eras, the questionable politics of these films, and why the Simpsons parody of Paint Your Wagon works better than the original!

There are over three dozen premium episodes of the show available exclusively to patrons: some notable previous Patreon guests include Jared Yates Sexton, Jacob Bacharach, David Roth, Bryan Quinby and Will Sloan. More to come! Sign up at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/junkfilter

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Trailer for Paint Your Wagon (Joshua Logan, 1969)

Trailer for Black Adam (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2022)

The legendary Simpsons' takedown of Paint Your Wagon