Seen on the Small Screen Podcast

During this Thanksgiving season, let the Seen on the Small Screen crew realign your focus of thanks to something more along the lines of Valentine's Day, specifically with the video movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame II. As we foreshadowed in the sentence above, a festival of love is about to take place in medieval Paris and everyone's excited, all except one particular bell ringer of Notre Dame. He's our hero, our hunchback, Quasimodo who only has his bells and his wacky gargoyle buddies to keep him company. Also in town are a troupe of rogues disguised as circus performers with a heist in mind involving a particular bell in Notre Dame the designers thought to bedazzle with gold and jewels in its interior. And all the thieves need to claim their prize is infiltrate one of their number into the bell ringer's good graces. What's the solution to these troubles? Would you believe it involves forming a party and having a brief dungeon crawl in the Paris Underground? 

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The season of ghosts and goblins is here, not to mention haunted houses, particularly the kind that real estate agents should have talked about before we bought said haunted house. What are we talking about? It's a bag of haunted goodies from Jake, Becky, Sammy the Familiar, and our special guest Gregg Paschall from the Radio Ronin dimension; the movie is the old timey Disney classic Mr. Boogedy. When the Davis Family decides to open up a gag store in the lovely New England town of Lucifer Falls, they're given a grim warning that the house they've moved into is haunted by none other than the Boogedy man. Disregarding the advice, the family moves in and proceeds to experience the most gruesome haunts imaginable: moving toasters, dancing mummies, and green footprints you can peel off a wall and put all over you. This prompts the children to learn that their home's acreage was once the abode of an angry old Puritan who sold his soul to the devil in red satin shorts for a magic cloak that blew his house to oblivion. And there's only one way the family can restore the balance and reunite a kidnapped ghost son with his mom. Steal the Boogedy's man's magic cloak. And they'll do or at least try, armed with a jumbo-sized fly swatter, a plastic red bat, and the squeaky toy version of Mjolnir. Did this movie predict Disney and Marvel's future association nearly twenty years before it happened? 

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This episode is best described as a strange weird-on with an accordion in hand, a movie satire about a marvel who made it big creating parody songs—the biopic Weird: the Al Yankovic Story. It all begins as all movie bios do: Alfred Yankovic has a dream of writing alternate lyrics for songs in a very specific genre, a dream that lands him into trouble with his father who wants him to work in the Factory. (And just what do they make there?) It takes an arrest for playing accordion at a polka party that drives our man out into the world where he can finally begin working his dream. Two gigs and three songs later, our man finds superstardom in a matter of days and becomes the hottest music artist on the scene. It's enough to attract fame, but also a bad influence in the form of 80's pop icon Madonna who claims to be Al's girlfriend, but manipulates him into making a parody song for her. Then things take a turn when Madonna is kidnapped by Pablo Escobar's drug cartel. Can shredded Al Rambo get his gal back, make it home to try and find the cause of his father's anger, and win the music award of a lifetime? It's an infantile challenge for the greatest musician in the world, or better still, the greatest man the cosmos ever granted the breath of life? And will we ever figure out what they make in that Factory? 

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In the 1980s, he was a celebrity icon that defined a decade from the Land Down Under. His name was Paul Hogan, the star of Becky, Jake, and Sammy the Cat's latest movie discussion—The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee. This movie has no characters, only actors playing themselves, far from their caricatures. For Paul Hogan, he finds it's rough trying to get by in 2020, mostly due to leaving the massive shadow of his Australian counterpart. Either the public thinks he's Dundee...or they find it difficult to believe he's still even alive. The solution to this and other problems Mr. Hogan faces, at least according to his manager, is a knighting by the Royal house in England. But things are never easy and for Paul it means being in the wrong place at the wrong time and winding up as the top story in the tabloid headlines. Yet, what does our loveable everyman Aussie really want for himself? Simple retirement away from the glamor of Hollywood—relaxation on the shores of a forgotten Australian beach. But, with a mounting hill of troubles and misfortunes, how can he possibly hope to achieve his dream? 

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There are those who say that life here, began out there...with producer Glen A. Larsen who presented a story of star colonies far beyond our own...and all without looking like they rode the coat tails of another space opera epic released a year earlier.  Don your space Egyptian helmets and frack the turbo boosters, because Becky, Jake, and Sammy the cat are going to discuss the first of the pilot movies that launched the classic 1978 series Battlestar Galactica. The story begins with a space politics truce signed between the human star colonies and a race of chrome-domed stormtroopers known as the Cylons.  But Commander  Adama of the Battlestar Galactica suspects foul play and sends a single patrol out to test the galactic waters. What the patrol gets in return is an ocean filled with enemy ships who have forgotten to entirely give up on their "destroy all humans" ways. In one swift stroke, the battlestars are destroyed and the human colonies are laid waste, leaving the Galactica at the head of a survivor fleet in search of a lost colony, a shining planet known as Earth. But, the search may be over before it begins for a lack of food and fuel. The solution to both problems is a rendezvous with the mysterious planet of Carillon, a casino world that doubles as a fuel depot in the middle of nowhere, a little like Vegas. Commander Adama's Cylon sense starts tingling and he suspects a trap despite those around him feeling they've finally found a refuge. What happens next involves the greatest cover-up of all time and a nightmare-fueled elevator ride into the depths of an alien world. Can the gallant warriors save their space folk and shoot their way out of dodge before the enemy's full hand is revealed?

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To begin this episode summary, we have a question: What do Disney, Karens, and being stranded on deserted islands all have in common with each other? The answer is the cinematic subject material of June's episode, a Disney vault classic remade for the small screen—Beverly Hills Family Robinson. As mentioned in the title, we meet a family with the last name of Robinson: they're an entitled family of proto-reality television stars who allow their camera crew the right to film them during a companied-sponsored vacation. But, when they wake up a day out to sea, they find their ship hijacked by a crew of three pirates, the likes of which are easy to subdue in a few hours and set adrift in a life raft. It's not piracy but foul weather and rogue waves that inevitably drive the ship onto the shores of an uncharted island without a single luxury aside from a perfectly functional hydro-electric grid that in turn powers a host of other modern conveniences. And when their castaway pirate pals show up as uninvited guests, it's up to the Robinsons to defend their new tree pad, even if they have to resort to every trick in the Home Alone playbook. Doug Robinson, the family patriarch, is an orthodontist after all.  Novocain needle traps and nitrous oxide bombs, anyone?  

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It's back through the wardrobe for a second round, a chance for Jake, Becky, and Sammy the Cat to prove their wit discussing the final part of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When we last left our group of youthful adventurers, they were hiding while one of their beaver guides went to investigate a disturbance, which turns out to be a visit from none other than Father Christmas, the Jolly Old Saint Brit himself, and his toy bag filled with non-plastic weaponry. Thusly armed and with winter on the thaw, the children sally forth and meet the next creature on their journey, Aslan the lion and a host of creatures ready to do battle with the White Witch and her army of XP-heavy monsters. But, for there to be a victor in this conflict, a sore battle must be waged for the fate of all. And to the victors go the thrones of Narnia, their heavenly laser crowns,  and a surprise trip in time at the end. And why must the land of Narnia be the only locale in the multiverse that has a flying lion attraction? 

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Prepare to enter a world of fantasy, something like the NeverEnding Story with the special effects of Classic Doctor Who, an origin story so well known that Becky, Jake, and Sammy the Cat may as well be talking about the origin story of Batman. What we're talking about here is a BBC adaptation with actors speaking in bona fide  accents, all to be found in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The time period is the Second World War and siblings Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy are taken by train from London to a rustic English manor. There they find little to do, that is until they find a wardrobe that transports them to another world, a surreal locale populated with fawns, witches, elves, and a host of other humanoids trapped in a perpetual replay of Neverwinter Nights. First Lucy, then her brothers and sister, brave the magical wardrobe and meet a pair of beavers eager to supply them with hefty dinner portions and exposition about a lion. Afterward, they leave as fast as they can when they find out that brother Edmond has pulled a maneuver worthy of a stealthy Robert the Bruce. From there, it's a rush against time and the literal elements as the party flees on foot, pursued by a  pack of wolves and the one of the best wolf roars our podcasters have yet heard on this show. And this is just the first part in a children's fantasy yarn full of heroism and hexploration.

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Around 38 episodes ago, Becky, Jake, and Sammy the cat set out on an adventure to watch all the films in a heart-warming franchise about some dragons and their medieval buddies. That enterprise now continues in, Dragonheart 3: The Sorcerer's Curse. In an alternate history of England we have Hadrian's Wall, built more like the Wall of China, effectively keeping the northern tribes and magic users in their neck of the hood. Meanwhile, in a random southern settlement with no name, a knight-in-training named Gareth goes off in search of a prophetic meteorite that has fallen on the wrong side of the wall. His solo hex crawl nearly gets him killed; but, it also nets him a few party members and an unlikely, albeit enchanted bond with an interstellar dragon—the keeper of a bunch of brood eggs stolen by a rogue druid. After a raid on the enemy camp, the party flees south with their Fabergé haul towards the wall and a final showdown with the arch druid and the dragon afflicted with a curse, one that will enslave the mystical creature with a desire to burninate the castle and its knight defenders unless our typical band of heroes can find a way to stop it. 

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February's episode of Seen on the Small Screen welcomes back a special guest, meaning the only guest  to have graced the mics with Becky, Jake, and Sammy the Cat. Our good friend Gregg Paschall (welcome any time he wishes) has brought along with him a movie among movies from wealthy architect turned movie-maker Neil Breen directing, producing, and starring in the film Fateful Findings. The greatest journey to uncover the truth begins in a forest with two kids making the discovery of a lifetime—a mushroom that morphs into a geo cache. They take a bracelet and an onyx d6 out of the magical box and put some pebbles lying nearby back into it, fulfilling the code of the cache. Years roll by and we find one of the children, whom I'll call Neil,  walking to his car on a random day when he's sidelined by a lady in a black Rolls Royce we never see again. Fighting his way back from death in a hospital room that looks more like someone's house, our man immediately unplugs himself from life support and heads "home" where he makes out with his wife in the shower, still sporting hospital gauze and corn syrup blood. Bizarre imagery aside, Neil fully recovers and goes back to his old job of writing the next bestseller among the many  hardcover props he has all over his office. And he's got a new side gig; he's on the Internet, determined to hack government and corporate websites for all their buried secrets. And no amount of friend trouble, drug use, personal affairs, kidnappings, psychic powers, shadow councils, or mental black garbage bag rooms will stop our friend Neil from standing before us, all in order to expose the greatest conspiracy of all time. Act now. It's our only hope for the future. (Awkward, distant clapping follows)

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