After Lunch

As Hasbro begins building its cinematic universe in real life, Michael and Rob welcome Jeeg and David May to talk about how they would do it. Following the MCU model, each person has picked a Hasbro game or toy to adapt into a movie that then connects somehow into the other movies, all leading to an Avengers-style crossover blockbuster. Madness or genius? You decide!

While Michael and Rob wait for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One to come out, they follow up Henry Cavill's performance in Fallout with another Cavill spy movie, Guy Ritchie's The Man from UNCLE.

Since we just talked about On Her Majesty's Secret Service last episode, now seems like a good time to revisit this conversation from Michael's old Sleigh Bell Cinema podcast in which he talks with Carlin Trammel about the movie and how (or if) it functions as a Christmas movie.

After some Goldfinger and Thunderball trivia that you can play along with, Michael, Rob, and Karen Flieger talk about George Lazenby's grounded and human James Bond, Diana Riggs' lovely and kickass Tracy di Vicenzo, and Telly Savalas' tough and brutish Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It's an unusual entry in the series, but is it also good? Once they settle that, the panel wraps with some On Her Majesty's Secret Service trivia, too.

Michael, Rob, and Michael DiGiovanni talk about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Star Wars Visions Season 2, Ted Lasso Season 3, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, the Our Man Flint movies, Hammer's Frankenstein movies, Peter Pan and Wendy (2023), streaming service avatars, Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Silo, Disney's Stan Lee documentary, how our buying and reading of comics has changed, aging and wisdom, budgeting entertainment time, and other things they've been watching and thinking about.

As Pax recovers from vacation, Evan returns to the Lounge for a bit with Michael, Rob, and guest-lounger Michael DiGiovanni. In this first half of the discussion, the conversation includes butt tattoos, underwear preferences, Joe Hill, nepotism, how horror works in books vs film, jazz trombone, William T Riker, Fourth Chair Carryover Questions, the difference between the book and movie versions of Prisoner of Azkaban, The New Classic Film Jerks, the Off Panel comic book interview podcast, the Purple Stuff podcast, letting your kids introduce you to new music, celebrity podcasts, Action Comics, Dawn of DC, Star Trek: Double Double by Michael Jan Friedman, Cassandra Cain as Batgirl, and X-Men comics.

Michael and Rob welcome Erik Johnson and Noel Thingvall to create a fourth season of the Adam West Batman series by crossing it over with other late-'60s TV shows. In addition to the new guest-characters, some of the stories also include new villains pulled from comics of the day and played by popular actors of the period.

Michael and Rob finish their Mission: Impossible movies catch-up with a discussion of Fallout. Henry Cavill, Vanessa Kirby, and Angela Bassett join the series while other favorites return. But is that, plus emotional closure and fantastic stunts, enough to make this one of our favorite in the series?

Michael, Rob, and Pax experienced some technical difficulties in the lounge before they got around to thinking about anything this month. But they did get to talk about what they've been watching, including Perry Mason, Season 2, John Wick, Chapter 4, The Super Mario Bros Movie, Renfield, Sisu, Strange New Worlds, Air, Fast X, Bruce Lee, Philip Marlowe, The Black Phone, and Star Trek: Lower Decks.