Read it and Weep

Alex is in Portland this week recording his debut comedy album (Saturday Oct. 2nd at Mississippi Studios) so the boys talked about what it takes to make a hit and keep the band together with Thomas The Hank Engine's directorial debut about a group of one-hit one-ders.

In our final installment of our series on the Universal Monsterverse, we dig up the one real gem in mummy movie history, the one with Abbott and Costello. It's so completely weird and bonkers that I think I love it? I might love it? Who knows. My brain has been removed through my nose with a straw at this point. Do you know of a franchise that needs saving? A universe that needs creating? A mummy that needs meeting? Email us.

And next week we're talking about That Thing You Do to celebrate Alex recording his debut comedy album in Portland on October 2nd.

It's a bonus episode in our continued search for a good answer to the Universal Monsters Universe problem. We went all the way back to 1999 when Brendan Fraser and battled the mummy and everybody (but Alex) seemed to like it.

Mentioned In This Episode

They're bringing back mammoths.

To round out the three most recent attempts at a Universal Monsterverse, we watched the 2020 low-budget Horror Film The Invisible Man. It's the best of the series so far but doesn't fit well into any universe. So we try again to fix it!

Mentioned in this episode:

Book recos from Katie

The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Series by Theodora Goss - fun, fast paced stories about the daughters of Jekyll, Frankenstein, etc set in the 19th century.

Dead Djinn Universe Series by P. Djèlí Clark - so far only a few short stories and a novel about a sort of magical FBI, set in an early 20th century Egypt that's very different to our own. Most importantly, since the return of magic people have started worshipping the old gods. As Chekhov's Sleeping Ancient Gods famously says, if you have sleeping ancient Egyptian gods in the first book…

As part of our continued excevation of the corpse of the Dark Universe, we re-watched Alex Kurtzman's 2017 Mummy remake starring the Cruise missile as a sexless action puppet.

Mentioned in this episode:

Our previous review

The Green Brothers discuss Irn-Bru (minute 25)

Hannah's Rec: The Collector’s Daughter by Gill Paul

We set out to fix the Dark Universe, the cinematic universe that universe-name-having Universal Pictures failed at three separate times. First up, the dreary, boring revival of Dracula that deserved to remain untold.

Mentioned in this episode: Bats are cute and/or weird.

The thrilling conclusion to our Paul Verhoeven mini-series. Take a quick co-ed shower and then let's go to space!

Arnold goes to Mars. OR DOES HE?!?

If you're in California, please vote in the recall election!

It's a horrible dystopian future that's somehow less bad than the present. But at least the murder robots work!

All the squibs Alex missed:

Space Jam is back and they've replaced Michael Jordan with LeBron James and the alien villians with a new, more sinistar evil to contend with: Warner Brothers themselves. That's right, it's a weird choice for WB to make themselves the villian but they're absolutely right, they did BAD.

Alex's celebrity doppelgangers (according to some dumb website).

• King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo (Anthony)
• In The Woods by Tana French (Alex)
• What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad (Alex)
• Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller (Ez)
• Maniac Of New York #1 by Elliott Kalan (Ez)
• Megg, Mogg & Owl: Winter trauma by Simon Hanselmann (Hunter)