It’s impossible to deny the charm of HARVEY, because if you do, you’re choosing ‘smart’ over ‘pleasant.’ Of those two, you know which we’d recommend.

The titular non-character might be described as an invisible, six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch, anthropomorphic rabbit, but Harvey is so much more than a “benign but mischievous creature”: it’s a highlight of the inherent value of personhood, an appeal to consciousness of the other, and a rejection of the bourgeois pressures of society – all wrapped in an all-time Jimmy Stewart performance. For a generation of people (including many of us) that came of age amid a cultural wave that deified sourness, pretense, and irony, its warmth and crucial insistence on pleasantness elevates it above feel-good cinema and into a personal entreaty.

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Music: “Hippy Hippy Hop” from HARVEY (sung by Aileen Carlyle as Miss Tewksbury).

0:00 - Episode 140: HARVEY (1950)

5:37 - The episode actually starts

8:00 - The Patented Aaron Grossman Summary

9:55 - Jason’s thoughts

15:12 - Cody’s thoughts

19:46 - Harry’s thoughts

25:29 - Aaron’s thoughts

29:49 - Empathy vs. society

34:21 - The Ghibli-like scene where Elwood peaks

41:01 - Elwood as catalyst for social consciousness

44:19 - The mystery of Harvey the pooka

50:29 - Could’ve been edited as a horror film à la THE BABADOOK (2014)

52:26 - What makes Harvey more than a coping mechanism for Elwood’s grief

55:53 - Should they have shown the rabbit?

57:39 - The implications of Harvey being real

1:00:11 - Final thoughts

1:04:17 - Cody’s Noteys: Force of Rabbit (trivia)