Read it and Weep

Star Wars was too good of a story to be constrained to just a few movies. No, the kids of the late 80s/early 90s craved more of all of it. That’s where the Expanded Universe Legends novels came in: filling children’s heads with name-droppy corny Star Wars stories.

Heir to the Empire is one of the most well-regarded of these novels and we regard it, um, well enough. It could be a lot worse. But it could also be good, which it really isn’t. But they nerfed the Force so that’s fun.

Famous internet troll Curtis Cook joined us to disrepect the Star Wars world, having seen only (get this) A New Hope, Phantom Menace, and the Christmas special. What a weird world.

In our second straight week of 80s musical remembrances, we watched Prince’s Purple Rain. Besides Tanya, we didn’t have a ton of experience with Prince but we were pretty convinced by his outfits, dancing, guitar playing, and practical joking.

The movie itself is basically a glorified Battle of the Bands with some amazing Prince concert footage that’s worth the price of the awkward, incoherent other scenes.

Plus! Check out the debut of Tanya’s mini podcast The Culture Call where she explains pop culture to you.

We didn’t deserve David Bowie. He was too grand for this earth. In fact, it’s almost like he fell from space and started drinking gin and inventing cameras.

That’s the premise of The Man Who Fell To Earth, the 1976 cult science fiction film starring the delightfully haired singer. It’s weird, a little slow, and has a scene where people have sex using a gun as a prop. We had a split decision about whether or not it’s good.

Thanks to Kelly for sponsoring this episode!

We’ve read a lot of fantasy books on this show where the main plot element was torture. We’re not fans. But sponsor Sam thought he could show us that torture fantasy can be good. Sorry, Sam, no refunds.

The Chosen takes place in the bronze age in an alternate universe with some dinosaurs but not enough. There’s a brutal caste system and lots of people are blinded or maimed for no reason, all while trying to create a brokered convention in the election of a god/emperor. We really didn’t like it.

This episode is brought to you by The Sea Eternal by Lynnea Glasser. Find out more and support your fellow Meat Suits in the Meat Market.

A Japanese company made a cartoon inspired by the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. An American company turned that into an insane piece of comedic performance art.

Three inexplicably robotic cats run a pizza shop in Little Tokyo. And fight crime. And make jokes about American pop culture. It’s absolutely bonkers and at least one of us thinks it was fun.

For our third annual #PODCRAWL, we teamed up with TBTL w/ Luke Burbank and The Flop House Podcast to watch one of the top three talking babies franchises of all time, Look Who’s Talking.

Kirstie Alley is pregnant but her boyfriend won’t leave his wife. Fortunately, she has slightly creepy cab driver John Travolta to constantly babysit and wait patiently for Alley to fall in love with him. But what makes this classic rom com a bit different is that baby Mikey has a mostly adult inner monologue voiced by Bruce Willis.

But if you think having a vaguely racist Die Hard voice-over of a baby sounds like a delight, you’d be mostly wrong! It’s pretty weird. For example, why does the baby have many adult concepts but then sometimes not? How can the other babies hear what Die Hard is thinking? And most importantly, how is this baby so big? Fortunately this is a Superhost episode so we have Ezra to tell us the answers (he has a baby so he knows everything).

If you ask a woman out and she says no, that’s it. You don’t keep sending her flowers every couple days, you don’t spy on her from a tree, and–and I can’t stress this enough–you don’t surgically remove all her limbs and hold her hostage in your mansion. You just don’t. It’s super uncool.

But that’s what Julian Sands does. Or at least, what it seems like he does until it turns out it was all a dream and we just wasted 90 minutes watching a movie about a thing that didn’t even happen in the reality of the movie.

While the movie is a complete failure, there is something here. A metaphor, a feminist idea, a creepy horror film. There’s something. It’s just that the acting and the screenplay and the directing are all not up to the task they set for themselves. On the other hand, Bill Paxton wears leather pants and that’s pretty fun.

Imagine if the show Survivor was made for kids. And looked like it was produced by kids. That’s Endurance.

A group of early-teen kids are stranded on an island, or rather are camping on a beach outside of a resort town. They compete with physical challenges, like stacking blocks, or mental challenges, like Rock Paper Scissors. Some of them go home, others win. But everybody learns something.

We watched the first part of season 2, and generally didn’t care for it. Especially Curtis who has rather violent fantasies but is secretly a really sweet guy.

If there’s one thing we like, it’s competence porn; watching people be good at their jobs. And that’s what you get with Road House, the 1989 movie starring Patrick Swayze’s mullet and a shockingly attractive Sam Elliot. Only the job he’s exceptionally competent at is being a world renowned bar bouncer.

Patrick Swayze stars as an over-educated bouncer who gets hired to clean up the rowdiest bar in the country, the Double Deuce. But while the new sheriff only came to town to clean up the saloon, he’ll also clean up the whole city and more than a few hearts.

At least 75% of the movie is flawless. In fact, it’s a fun if somewhat silly romp if you ignore the mass murder at the end. And even then, it’s still kinda fun.

Thank you to our sponsor, Kristine from Fayetteville. Thank you to all educators. And thank you to our special guest Hutch Harris. His band, The Thermals, has a new record out called We Disappear. Buy it now from Saddle Creek Records.

Aaron Sorkin opens his show with a monologue about how watered down and bad TV has become. Like that monologue, the whole season of Studio 60 is preachy, unfunny, and completely unselfaware.

We live in a golden age of television, so it’s hard to watch Sorkin tell us that everything is bad when we could be watching House of Cards or Deadwood or 30 Rock for crissakes, the perfect version of the crappy thing he did. But the biggest problem is the way women and relationships with women are portrayed. Caitlin Gill, always ready to come on and share her righteous fury with us, has a few things to say about that.