Episode 37: Five Elements Alien

Cambridge Rashon is a weird way media podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to Movie Lance, black Box super Horizons. Today you will become part of the motion pictures Halloween, Altered States and Alien. Your host will be the renowned stage and film personality Vincent Price, who will be your guide through this special attraction. And now, mister Vincent Price.

Hello and welcome to Cambridge and Mashon, a podcast by two weird guys about the weird things that they like. I am one of the weird guys, Mark Begley, and I am Ronnie. Aka Skelevator over there on the YouTube's Oh. You didn't call yourself weird? He just left me hanging there.

Okay. Cool? It goes without saying cool, because that's I'm now where we're going now today? Got it? Okay, you're the cool.

Guy, I'm the cool guy, You're the weird guy. Got it? Isn't that the dynamic of the show kind of like Yeah, Abbot and Costello, that plays. Out what we talk about today. People agree they can leave a comment somewhere.

All the people in our audience are scrambling right now. They're like trying to remember which of us is their favorite character? And why, oh god, I can't even imagine who cares. We did get a recent contract from Warner Brothers for a series of cartoon shorts where it is sort of like a who's the smart one, who's the silly one, who's the cool one, who's the weird one? Cartoon version of KG with Sean And so keep an eye out for whatever.

Wait I said Warner Brothers, I should have said paramount. Where does Warner Brothers stream their stuff? I don't even know. Is there a Warner Brothers streaming platform HBO HBO Max. To keep an eye out on HBO Max for the new Cambridge with Shawn cartoon that.

John krick Fallutesi is going to draw. Yeah, John krik Fallutzi obviously his name, and it's produced by the SpongeBob people, And you know, it's very it's really exciting, really exciting news. And also you'll really get a chance to see which is the cool and which is the weird one. Absolutely, you who listen to this show, you already know the truth of who's the real weirdo here? Yeah, and who has talked about the coolest things?

I kind of know in my head who that is too? So yeah, I kind of know too. It's all based on who talks about the most popular ip, the most popular thing on the show, and we all know who that. Is, your rial bulb. So today we have kind of a theme episode Lost and Found.

You hinted at this last time, and so I was thinking, I knew I had like two or three things that I could do that match that. This is a good one, I think, because it's one of those multi year what was this movie? Oh? Okay? The way I found out what it was was very much like the comic book Ghosts that I talked about way back when.

It parallels that very much. So I was like, oh, I'll do that one and save the other couple that I have for some other time. But that led me to listen to some of the other Lost and Found episodes. In particular, this all had to do with the one plastic rock ball Yeah yeah, and your rediscovery of the Hoosker Doo song. Oh you mentioned it on one episode.

Pretty much found out what it was like the next day after. We recorded Yeah yeah exactly. And then that made me think of music because I mentioned to you at that point, I don't think of music that way, like I can't think of a song. What was that song that I loved? They have to reintroduce themselves to me.

M h. And I had that happen within the last couple of weeks as well. I'll get to that. So I have two things. One of them is quick, but we'll be starting with your rediscovery.

This is damage control. You can't get them out the doors again. Wait a minute, maybe they can get through the ventilation shift. I'll try to get the frenchelmen. This is one of two things that I want to talk about today.

The first thing is that sort of lost and found item, and then I thought, you know what, it would be a good opportunity to briefly at the end of this episode talk about how the zeitgeist is in full effect in regard to our interests right now, especially with Comic Con going on and stuff happening over there that seems to align perfectly with the weird shit that we're interested in. This lost and found thing. It's another one of those situations like the Husker Dooo statues song, and like kind of similar to your rock ball situation where there's this thing, you remember, this thing. It's hard to figure out or pinpoint where the information is coming from if your memory is skewed, or why am I having a hard time online finding this information?

What am I missing from my keyword search? That's keeping me distanced from the truth? Did my memory mess everything up? Is it like? So?

For a long time I was wondering about this thing. I was having a hard time figuring out what it was. And part of the thing that was standing in my way, what was keeping this the truth of this memory abstract in my search was that I kept associating it with Universal Studios for some reason, every time I would type in this search, I would think of it as part of the Universal Studio tour because as a kid my mom's side of the family, if we were going to go down south, we'd go to Disneyland. On my dad's side of the family, if we were going to go down south, it was all about getting the Hollywood Map and trying to find movie stars homes or going to Universal Studios and in this case, going to a strange location like the Movie Land Wax Museum.

I finally thought it's funny when whenever you and I we have these ongoing searches, I don't know. I don't, I shouldn't say you and I I'm just going to say from my perspective, because this is always the case for me. As soon as I come up with the right question to ask, I'm always like, oh no, yeah, duh, I should have just done it this way. We've talked about that shaking a different tree, or shaking the tree differently. That Beatles book, which was another one of those things.

I did it a little bit differently, and it was like, oh, there it is. There, it is right, and sometimes that tree is right in front of you. A few weeks ago, I was how can I approach this research in a different way? And that it occurred to me who was driving us down there constantly, who probably came up with the idea to do this experience? And it was my dad.

So texted my dad is like, hey, do you remember the black room from when we went to Universal Studios. He's like, no, that was the black box and it was that movie land Wax Museum. Well there you go. It was that easy. It was that easy just to backtrack a little bit.

For many years, I've been trying to figure out this one memory I had of a recreation of the Alien movie set where there was an alien creature hidden in one of the greats that you know, the light would flash on it. There was really cool atmospheric sound. I remember there being like dripping slime or water, even the flashing lights, And is the classic hallway from the original Alien movie which has been reproduced in really amazing ways recently, like an Alien Earth and an Alien Reserve? Was it not a resurrection? What's the most recent movie?

Romulus? Romulus movies that have really been trying to recapture the original energy of that first film. So I had this memory of us walking through this space. I thought it was Universal Studios. I thought it was some sort of horror movie walk through thing.

I remember the word black being involved. Is it a black room? I was like, it couldn't be the black box because that's like, you know, the thing in the airplanes, Like, why would they call it that? That would be confusing. Of course, that's what it was called the black Box Experience that was at the movieland Wax Museum from nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty five and very short lived experience walkthrough at the movieland Wax Museum in Duena Park, California.

That's also different from what I imagined, too, because I pictured every time we went to a wax museum it was either the San Francisco Boardwalk wax Museum or the one in Hollywood, which like was super even back in the eighties, it was you know, I remember these locations being like a little bit weird, a little bit off putting, and you know, not quite perfect, not quite you know, exactly what you were hoping it would be, or what you saw on the brochure, always a little bit disappointing. I think those institutions like Ripley's Believe It or Not and the wax museum walkthroughs that are at these touristy locations still kind of are that way where it's like you can pay a ticket to go into this thing, you think it's going to be amazing, and it ends up kind of feeling you feel icky afterward, like you just went to the Fresno Fair.

I found not to downplay the Fresno Affair because I have a deep love for the Fresne Affair. But yeah, well a lot of those you see images online of the failed wax figures and hell, oh yeah, supposed to be so and so, and it's. Like what I think that we are. If you grew up in this, you know, seventies and eighties, you really understand the Uncanny Valley, I think more more than any other generation because there was Chucky cheese, wax museums, all these things really exploded in the early eighties onto the public market and it was really exciting for people. Every time you go, it's like, this is super weird.

I don't know if you've ever been met. Something I want to talk talk about in the future is also the Cannery Row walk through experience with John you know what wax John Steinbeck, and it's like it's crazy too. Anyways, once I knew the keyword search, I dug in. I found a Facebook page. I think the membership is like four hundred people or something like that, which is more than I expected.

I'm just throwing that number out there. I think that's around that. I found out a lot of information from that group. In fact, I found even some photos that I had to really dig deep to find these photos, and they're not very good. I was hoping that there would be more images online of this stuff, but there really isn't.

I've found several versions of the brochure that was released between nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty five. There are a few different versions of the pro sure they always use the same image. And you're going to see, folks, because we're going to post this on our Instagram, so you'll be able to see images of what we're talking about. For the brochure image that advertised the black box, when I saw that pop up on the screen again, it took me right back to my bedroom, pouring over this brochure and just staring at that one particular image. For I must have just stared at that image for hours on end.

And I actually found a brochure on eBay for eight bucks that I've been tempted to get. It's pretty reasonable, pretty reasonable. I'm like, anything under ten bucks to me is reasonable. Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree.

And I'm always hesitant to buy something like a pamphlet because I'm like, where am I gonna What am I going to do? Frame it? I mean, I'm gonna shove it back here behind me, you know, between two books so it doesn't get damaged. What am I going to do? So I've been having other ideas, like maybe I should use a tea public account and create a T shirt of this image.

No one's doing this, Like, maybe I should do something like that instead, because the image is absolutely iconic for me. It's a giant black box, it's lit from behind, it's nighttime. It's a minimalist landscape, dark blue or purply sky, sort of concrete ground, and the box is kind of glowing from behind, and it's black and it's ominous, and light is coming from the doorway and there's like five or six people running and screaming from the box. But here's where it gets really interesting. The walkthrough was all over the place and there were only three different rooms that you walked through, so it was a very small amount of space.

It was three thousand square feet, which seems like seems like a lot, but when you think about what was in there, it must have been a little bit squished in. But it had a budget of one million dollars. Wow, so it's a pretty big budget. They hired Vincent Price to do part of the narration and to be a voice from a coffin at the very beginning, animatronic coffin that's like shaking and he's it's super funny I'll send you the audio clip of this mark so that you can good sample it. It's really really great and super cheesy, mister Price.

Mister Price, keep you waiting. Oh it seems like I'm temporarily indisposed. Oh what a shame. I had this beautiful speech already for you, But my notes are on my desk anyway, it's too dark to read in here. At the beginning, he's pretending to wake from a nap because he's in this coffin.

You hear Vincent Price's voice emanating from this moving coffin, and he's just waking up to say, I'm unprepared to tell you what you're about to do because I forgot my script and I'm just waking up like That's basically what he's saying. What does this have to do with alien? Is my question? Well, what does it have to do if you are the three movies that are the focus of this walkthrough, and I totally forgot about the first two. First, you walk through a Halloween movie set, so the movie Halloween John Carpenter's Halloween.

You walk through this little basically like a bedroom with ominous music, and the pretense is that we are on a Hollywood movie set, but all goes wrong because Michael Myers is real. His wax figurine emerges and it's scary. How meta? Yeah, so meta, it's breaking the fourth wall. Right, you're on this tour, You're going to a movie set, and the murderer is a real murderer.

Sure, sure, I believe it. It's like Universal, the whole premise of Universal Studios. It's almost like they were taking from that. Then you can tell you walking through, and here's where it gets really interesting. You enter then the experience of Altered States.

The movie Altered States, great movie, by the way, amazing movie. Super weird choice to incorporate that. That's nestled right between Halloween and the movie Alien. That kind of makes sense. I can see why they would choose that too, because there's the sort of sci fi movie sounds that are happening, and then that gently evolves into the Alien walkthrough.

And it's really interesting when you hear this, the sounds from the Alien walk through, you can tell that they were trying, well actually, for all of these things, so Halloween, Altered States, and Alien, they're trying to emulate the familiar sounds of all three of these movies without copyright infringement. They're getting close to but not quite utilizing or sampling what you would have in the films. Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the set of the motion picture Halloween. Ladies and gentlemen, Well, welcome to the Salt Submersion Center. Here we engage in mighty submersion experiences.

Waitlessen free. The mind is released from its usual function and it is free to explore its altered state. This is dex seventeen. The alien's just gone by. This is sixteen.

He went through here and was last seen in the Katroro. To go back a little bit, it opened on June sixth, or there was a ceremony June sixth, nineteen eighty two to launch this. Vincent Price is actually there, which is cool. Wow, I imagine. Gosh.

Well, let's see. Edward scissor Hands came out in what eighty eight, eighty nine, maybe ninety, and he passed away not too long after that, so you know he's up there in years when this is happening. Vincent Price was seventy one in nineteen eighty two. He died in nineteen ninety three. It probably paid him enough for like two months worth of groceries or something to be part of this.

So it opened June eighteenth, nineteen eighty two, and then it closed sometime during nineteen eighty five. By then, the special effects, like the sound effects and the lighting effects were all kind of starting to die off apparently, and so then they just took some of what they had and salvaged it for a different version of the walkthrough, which would end up being Chamber of Horrors, which would be their Wax Museum walk through until they closed shop in two thousand and five. Movieland Wax Museum was kind of amazing when it first opened up. It was really a go to place. They had a lot of events there.

It opened up in nineteen sixty two and went all the way through to two thousand and five. When I did this research, I also found out home movies from the late eighties into the early nineties, and it was really crazy seeing the tractions are, seeing the little dioramas with the audio clips and things like that, Superman, Star Trek, wc. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and it really like was the emotional experience for me for some reason. I don't know why, but I'm like watching these like really crappy VHS home movies and getting a little bit choked up, like it really sort of touched on some odd raw emotional nerve for me. Interesting.

I mean, I do know that during that period of time, I was going through a lot of stuff family wise, so maybe that's part of it. Ooh, that's weird. Even right now talking about it, I'm getting weirdly choked up. I mean, I feel like the name sort of sounds a little bit familiar to me. The black Box, Well movie Land, no movie Land.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm surprised you found as much as you did. Me too. That's kind of crazy, especially knowing that for the longtime you didn't even know what it was and had no idea but search for. But usually when I try to find stuff, it's like, oh, here's this one thing, oka, Yeah.

That's it exactly. I mean once I once my dad texted me, Yeah, I think it was called the black Box, and I'm pretty sure it was that movieland Wax Museum. Then a treasure trove of things popped up. Now I'm still missing a lot of stuff I was hoping to find, which was a VHS home movie of a walk through of that space. I would have loved to have found that.

And I'm not giving up hope because, like me, I'm sure there are other people out there that have a box of VHS tapes in their garage. Yeah, that are tough though. Eighty two to eighty five VCRs. Yeah, the only people that had new and huge exactly, the only people that had had a VHS camera or beta camera. These cameras were the size of a human torso with sometimes with an attachment that would be like a briefcase like shoulder strap, which would house the brain of the like cassette.

And it's really a gamble to hope for something like this to pop up, as is in my nature. I'm like any weirdo like us, we keep this little seedling in the back of our brain hoping that it'll pop up down the line. And so I'm keeping the hope alive that maybe walk through that well unearthed will be on Earth someday or maybe an old commercial oh yeah, yeah, And this is sort of an opportunity for me to exper I think I've mentioned this before, but I was really I was severely obsessed with tourist brochures as a kid. Yeah, I think you mentioned it one time. Sounds sort of familiar.

Anything anything I could get. We'd go to a hotel, I would go to the brochure rack, and I'd be like, any kind of a track. I would grab the brochure and just sort of pore over it. I don't have a distinct memory of this, but I do feel like maybe at some point I saw the brochure and was like, what's this That could have maybe sparked the trip down to Southern Coven. Well, we had my stepmother.

Her mother lived in Los Angeles, and so we would go down to La once every four or five months to visit her. Maybe it's even less than that, maybe once or twice a year or something. And when we would visit her, we would take these little oddball side trips, you know. A couple times Universal Studios. One time we found George Lucas's house and saw him loading up his old mid eighties I think it was like a Dodge caravan or something out in from his front yard.

We would do these little La things. That's the day, by the way, that he first thought of jeorje r binks. He's like, I've got this character in my brain and I want to put in a movie. You know what it is, jar jar Binks. You know it's because because this VW bus drove by his house that morning and this weird kid was like googling from the window and probably was making jar jar binks type of sounds, and he just thought, that's that's what I want to do.

That's my future in film right there. What a lucky day, What a legacy to leave behind. Thanks a lot running. If you have folks that don't like George ar Binks, you can just blame me. Yeah, you said, saw George Lucas.

Lucas the world's never been the same ever since. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot that I missed out on in the early two thousands when movieland Wax Museum was closing up shop, because they did a big auction of stuff that was in there, and I feel like that would have appealed to me to go and just witness this. But of course back then and I had no idea that this memory was buried in my brain. It wasn't until like the twenty tens that I started thinking about it again. There's this guy associated with it.

In my research, I found the name of this guy John Decour like cure cuir dcui R. I've just recently uncovered his name. Now I'm interested to see, like, who was this guy? Was he designing dioramas for museums? Was he one of the wax sculptor guys?

Was he a movie set designer? Like? That's been my most recent discovery, and maybe I'll have an update in the future episode about John Decour. Did you look him up on IMDb? I did not yet.

I did not yet. That's on my agenda to explain that a little bit. Periodically over the last few months, I will jump online and look up information about the black Box, and now lately every time I do so, two days ago I found John Decour his name, whereas previous research I never found his name. I feel like now things are starting to open up for me a little bit. And I've just put a message on the Facebook page hoping somebody will send photos.

We'll see, We'll see how this will evolve. Just like your rock ball, the research and the journey is continuously evolving and blossoming open for us. Speaking of the rock ball, one just sold this past week. Ooh nice, So other people are showing interest now, well, I mean, I think a lot of them. Going back to that old story.

You know, there were a lot of auctions at one point and they all sold. All right, we'll be right back after these wonderful messages with my lost and found for this episode. So as we've talked about already on here and having the past, that new search term or new point of view helps with a lot of these lost and found things. It helped me with that Beatles book I talked about. It helped me with the Saturday Night Live book I talked about.

It's helped with some other things. But there are also the instances of happenstance. I have two examples of that. One was the issue of that DC Ghost's comic book that I had been searching for for years and had no idea how to narrow that search down. And that was bizarre to me when I think about it, how that came up.

I saw a toy skeleton on a card back and swiped through the pictures of that and saw a photo of the inside of the comic that completely set off all the bells. Could have easily not been looking at Instagram day or never have seen that image right, never have found that toymaker that was doing those so on and so on. The one that I'm doing today is pretty much exactly the same. And this is a movie that I saw probably I want to say, fourteen years old, so I think it's from nineteen eighty two. This is another thing that we've talked about on the show Action Theater, Oh yeah, and or kung Fu Theater in particular for this case.

So at some point in the early eighties, a lot of these kung Fu movies that had been made and were being made in the early eighties got bundled up into packages that were sold to television stations, so you could buy a group of movies, you know, in horror. All kinds of distribution companies did these things where they had the rights, the television rights to these films, and they would package them up and sell them. Places like Channel twenty six would snatch them up and then you could play them as often as you wanted. Right. Action Theater was the spot for horror films, for westerns, you know, the spaghetti westerns, hammer films, drama, whatever, you know.

They'd show all kinds of stuff. Typically, though Saturday Afternoon was horror or westerns or at some point, they kind of morphed over to kung fu specifically for a good while, and I would watch them, and my dad would always come in from doing yard work or something, and he would mimic the you know, awful dubbing. The sound never matches, yep, the mouth motion. Japanese samurai are as brave as a Chinese. I'll use another sword, please wait for me.

And there was one really the only one that I have very specific memories of because it's odd and gross and really landed with me. And then, like with the Black Box, like with all these other things, I had no idea what it was called, no idea how to search for this when the Internet came around. Thought about it, you know, every year after scene and up until the internet comes around. Then I'm like, oh, maybe I can track down this kung fu movie I saw. How do you type in searches for these things right, which we've discussed.

Gosh, how many times have you written like a search that's like two or three sentences long because you're trying to include all the details? Yeah, and those never work, never work. I'll start with my memory of it, even though at this point I know that my memory is incorrect, but it's a part of this. So in this kung fu movie, I remember a fight happening in a tree top. So there are a bunch of ninjas or whatever in a tree, and someone down below is stabbing them with the spear or trying to stab them with the spear.

So he's going up from the ground and hitting them and the feed and in the legs and things like that. And I remember one of the people in the tree getting struck by this spear in the thigh area. And then as they're straining to keep their balance or to keep away from the spear, something is emerging from their shorts. Viscera is coming out. They've been hit by the spear, so something is coming out.

And I think as a kid, I always assumed it was guts, yeah, because that makes no sense to me, right, And then after a while over the years, I think it turned into well, you know, maybe that was like leg muscle and that strain that you put, you know, is making it extend down. So that's really the only thing I remembered about the movie. And again, how do you search for these things? I think on a couple of the toy message boards where people would also talk about movies and I noticed martial arts threads, and so I put, you know, does anybody know what I'm talking about here? And no one responded or anything.

Just one of those things that kept creeping up in my brain. What was that movie? What am I thinking of? How could I possibly find it? With streaming and having Netflix and Prime and stuff, I would run across kung fu movies, some with very familiar names to me, like the thirty six Chamber of shell In and One Arm Boxer and stuff like that, and the Jackie Chan films that I remember seeing but not realizing that was Jackie Chan at the time, his early early films.

Yeah, going, okay, well, I'm gonna start adding some of these to my watch list and I'll get around to them. I love kung fu movies. It's not something i'd watch a lot of. There's so much fun. They're a lot of fun.

I follow somebody on Instagram who's always posting clips and I'm like, man, these fights are just so amazing. Sometimes just the cinematography is so dynamic, and it's just like mind blowing that they were doing this and thinking of these ideas. Watch their horror movies too. The horror movies are insane, Oh my gosh, from the same companies, so we've got like Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest. I knew about these, you know, knowing Dan Davis Danky, but it would actually go to Asian supermarkets and rent movies like this, something I never did in my life learning about the companies that made these and stuff.

So every once so often would just think about it, try and search for it or ask a question about it. Nothing would come of it. Back in twenty twenty one, early twenty twenty one, I decided to do an episode of Wake Up Heavy about influences. It was mainly about the things that I would see on TV as a kid, because for someone my age or even your age, that was where most movie watching was actually done. I mean, yes, we went to the theater, but this is pre HS for our household at least, definitely pre streaming, pre internet blah blah blah.

You early eighties, most of what I encountered was via the TV. Absolutely. Tourist Trap is another one that Action Theater introduced me to that is a lifelong favorite of mine. Some of these other films I was talking about, those kinds of movies I talked about this story about my memory of it, guys in the Trees getting stabbed and viscera coming out. Within a week of recording that episode, I had an answer, and I had an answer because of the Internet and random happenstance.

Yeah. So at the time I was pretty active on Twitter. I am not anymore, still have an account, but I don't go there, so I followed mainly movie people. One of the guys I followed went by the handle Cinema Strikes Back, and I had seen a post of his of I think four pictures. That's the limit on Twitter, you can only post four pictures at a time, and it was images from a kung fu movie, and so I clicked on it and scrolled through those images and I'm like, oh, these kind of look familiar.

There were some ninjas on a bridge over a stream or something, and images of ninja's in a field. It wasn't so much the images, but his description for the pictures was, you know, if you're gonna be fighting the elements, you better be careful that you don't step on your own nuts or something like that. And I was like, that's weird, I believe. I asked him, what is this movie? What are these images from?

And he said five elements, Ninja, the. Five elements, What does it have to say about that? The note mentions gold, wood, water, fire, and earth, indicating five locations for our warriors to meet there. What is this Ninja? I'm not familiar.

You know it's a samurai skill. Uh huh, And I thought, okay, So I did a search, saw that it was on Netflix, went to Netflix, opened my account, and saw that I had already put this film on my watch list, probably prior to even wake up Heavy existing yet I don't even think I put it on there at some point along with thirty six, Chamber of shell In and these other films. So I watched it like the Ghosts comic book and like some of these other things. Pretty quickly realized, Oh, I definitely saw this back in those kung fu theater days. Definitely saw this.

So it's about this school of kung fu. You know, these kids going to kung fu school like kung Fu Pandamic, they all use this. It's always schools that are learning this, and then they've got to go fight people. The Five Elements Ninjas are like the I believe the villains in the story. So you have to go through them.

It's like a video game, you know, you go through all these until you get to the big boss or whatever. And so it's like earth, air, water, and gold and fire. I don't know why gold is one of the elements, but the gold fight though, really struck a memory with me. It's these guys with these hats that they remove and spin and then blades fly out of them, and I'm like, oh, yeah, I definitely saw this movie. That's amazing.

So here I am anticipating the tree scene, going ooh, you know it's gonna happen once they get in that tree. I believe it's been a while since I've rewatched it, but I think the tree scene. There is a tree scene in it, but I believe it happens later than the actual scene that I was thinking of. So what happens is when they fight, and I think it's just one guy maybe two fighting the Earth element. So it's on this field and I think there's like hay or straw or something on the ground.

They're walking across this field and start coming up from underneath the ground. Got it, And so this guy gets speared in the nuts and it is his nuts that are coming out of his own hanging to the ground. That's the viscera that you didn't understand. Your young brain is like, what is that? Yeah, from what I remember watching it and having listened to the episodes this past week or so, it looks like balls and he fucking steps on him.

Oh god, Oh my god, on his own. Yeah. Well, I mean they're hanging down to the ground. What are you gonna do? Right, So it's not somebody else's stepping on them, I.

Don't think so. Yeah. Yeah, And maybe I'm completely misremembering that, but I feel like I say that in the episode, there is a tree fight, you know, and they do the wire foo stuff, which you've seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you know about if you've seen nothing else. Yeah, so there is a tree scene. There's a bunch of guys up in a tree, but they're just fire each other.

There's no spears coming down from the ground. So I had completely merged those two scenes together into an almost clear memory of the movie. But yeah, I believe that I actually saw his pictures the day that I recorded the first episode, where I was talking about movies from my childhood that I had seen on TV, and then kind of went back and was like, hey, wait a minute, what is this from, and then got the answer. So I had actually seen I could have known the answer that day when I first recorded, but you know, I did a little additional episode to say, hey, yeah, I found this thing. I mean that happens right.

It's a very fun movie. I don't think Netflix has much kung Fu on there anymore. Amazon has a lot of that stuff. Now. Yeah, Amazon had a lot of it for a good long time.

I watched quite a few. They had, actually the Shaw Brothers collection, and then it moved somewhere else and they may have gotten it back since then. Like James Bond and all these other things, they go from this service service and much the same way they sold these big bundles of movies to TV stations across the country. Yeah. Similar, you know, back in the ages, moving around like nomadic media.

I don't know if I brought this up when we talked about Action Theater last time, but this is reminding me that there's a lost and hopefully someday found kung Fu movie from that same era that I saw on Action Theater that I have this one scene stuck in my brain and I'm just remembering it now, where somebody gets smacked on both temples. It doesn't bruise or bleed. The temples are cracked like ceramic. Ah. So there's this five and five is too many seconds, two second scene of pah, and then you get a quick glimpse of the temples that are cracked, and then you move on to the next scene.

I have no idea what movie that's from, but that for some reason, when I was sitting there as a kid watching that TV, that scene just was burned in my brain. Weird stuff like that. There's weird stuff like that in those movies, and I love it. And that's actually maybe a little easier for a listener to recognize Dan Davis, Chima. Dan Davis, maybe even jewels.

Yeah, let us know. I love that kind of impossible stuff. Yeah, the impossible. Like if somebody gets speared in the groin, it would be really odd situation if this piercing of the scrotum would cause the testicles to dangle down. So far, like they would just fall out.

What are those the paddle balls with the rubber balls, like. The truck nuts. It looks like the truck nuts that people have on iphices have on their trucks. But yeah, three feet long as opposed to five inches. Or tangential thing here.

But whoever created the idea of putting nuts on your truck, they should be honored in some sort of special idiot museum, like who can take Yeah? I saw that. Whoever's like this is a great idea. There needs to be a special place for people like that. I'm a big boie.

I'm a real big boy. I'm a big boy. I'm a real big boy. I got a big waiter in a drive. Around town, a big ol make the mommy.

Burn around town and have around town out a bag owen around town, a big old. Trip, a big old trip. I got a baby, big big old. Drop get drive around down, rive around down with a borgo wing, drive around town where. We can go, like to the movieland Wax Museum and bear witness to uh these brilliant ideas.

Great American heroes, right, Oh God, remember those ads? Yes I do, butdwise, it presents real men of genius, real. Men of today. We salute you, mister foot long hot dog invetter, mister. Food long hot dog inventa.

That's cool. I'm glad you finally found that film and now you can watch that scene. Yeah, I mean I found it like five years ago now, but yeah, but still from probably Like I said, I believe that's a movie from nineteen eighty two, so the earliest I would have seen it was eighty three, so I was fourteen, so not quite forty years. Yeah, Mark's math is off. It was over forty years ago.

A lot of the reason for that, you know, I have another movie that this happened with, with action theater or the horror films or anything like that, I wouldn't know what it was. Tourist Trap is an example of one I knew because that movie fucking blew my mind, and I know that I looked at the TV guide to see what it was called. Yeah. Yeah, But a lot of times, like with a good handful of these films that I can't track down or couldn't track down, like I didn't know what the title was. I mean, have caught it not from the beginning.

This was most likely called Chinese souper for Ninjas here. Probably wasn't even called five Elements Ninjas at the time, because that is one of the alternative titles for it in the US. The TV Guide may have already been tossed out. We just used the one from the Fresno B the TV guide in the mail, and I wouldn't have had any way to log the title in my brain right started half an hour in and have no idea. They never say the title on screen, so pure happenstance.

I love it. In today's story, Elena tried taking a magic potion, which she thought would help her well. She found out there aren't any magic potions. And you know what, there aren't any magic drugs either. Anytime you take one from anybody, with your parents or your doctor, you're taking a very big chance.

You're gambling with your health, maybe even your life. Drugs don't make your problems go away. They just three eight four. As you know, as a close friend, like I've been sort of trying to navigate this news. Nothing new, but like I have certain interests that come back in waves, like in large waves.

I'm due for another Melvin's wave at some point, because it's been a couple of years where I just am reminded about why I love this particular thing and then I dive in deep. For example, with the Melvins, like listen to every single album that I have in the collection, and I really get back into it for a while. So this will happen every once in a while with certain things. I've spent the last really since two thousand, I think realistically since twenty sixteen until today, I've been living deep in Masters of the Universe, and I'm sort of like pulling out of it a little bit, you know, never completely moving on to other things. And right now I'm like deep in Disneyland, like Disneyland nineteen fifty five to by the time Walt dies.

So I'm like really invested in vintage documentaries and vintage information about park and the park building aspect, the imagineers and all that stuff. And on our recent trip to Disneyland, one of the things that really stood out to me is that with interests like this and Disneyland is like a physical representation of this, with a thing that you enjoy, there's always room for discovery within that thing. Here's another example. I just bought the vinyl album of the Robert Altman Popeye movie soundtrack songs by Harry Nielsen and Van Dyke Parks. I'm listening to the record, loving it, and there's a song on there that doesn't exist in the movie, I'm like, what the hell is this?

What is that? So this discovery of a thing within a thing within a thing that you constantly keep returning to, that's magic right there, and that's like one of the greatest gifts that are no matter what media, whatever form it takes, be paintings by an artist or movies by a director. David Lynch is a great example of this, And listening to your recent three Twin Peaks episodes on Wake Up Heavy is a good example of this. No matter how time, how many times you see something or engage with something, when you return to it, your gifted. All this new information that was right there in front of you, like the journey of research that we go on.

And a good example too is you having put the Five Elements Ninja's in your Netflix watch list prior to being like, oh my god, this is the movie. I love that about our geekdom, I guess the best way to put it like, when we're hyper interested in something, you may think you've extended your knowledge to the furthest extent, but there's always new discoveries to be made. That's magic right there. And I believe if I'm remembering this correctly. I had started the film and only got in a few minutes in.

I really wish I would have just watched it, because I would have had the discovery on my own. Oh this is that fucking movie. Oh my god, that's it. But how close are you to that new information every single time you revisit this thing that you love. Yeah, now I got to go rewatch the Popeye movie to try and see if that song is embedded somewhere in there that I just never noticed before.

I used to have these dreams as a kid of my parents' homes, both my mom and my stepdads and my dad and my stepmums. They're homes. I would have this dream that discover a new alcove, a new place in the home, like those waking dreams where you're like you're laying in bed and you're half asleep, and then I would, you know, get up the next day and think, oh, well, maybe I'll find it. Yeah, I've had those. I feel sorry for anybody that doesn't allow themselves these moments of research and discovery and being open to new ideas within old ideas and seeing things from a different angle.

And I can't imagine a life without discovery. Some times those discoveries are right in front of us. Okay, we'll take another break and Ronnie will come back with his second topic. I know you guys can't wait. Oh, it's gonna be so much fun.

Ronie McDonald and friends bet Hamburgler, which is everything he touches with Turny McDonald's cheeseburgers. All right, let's get into it, man. Let's talk about that thing you said earlier. That thing I said earlier. I literally, just moments before we started recording, thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about it because it's relevant because San Diego Comic Con will have finished up by the time this launches, and so geeks like us and yes, weirdos like us probably all thinking about this stuff.

One of the things that really stood out to me is that and I know that we really pushed this out there, and that this is the reason why that we are the reason why this is happening. Neka is putting out McDonald's stuff. Now, that's a real big deal to me. I cannot wait to see and kid Robot, which is I think a subsidiary of Mecca, right, So this is exciting that little plushy Grimace that they came out with kid Robot put out is super cute. I'm not going to buy it, but it's super cute.

If I ran across those at Target, like I have the other. Ones, possibly tempting right as soon as I see what that looks like. I have a difficult time with plushies because you never know what they're going to really look like or feel like in person. I will say, though, that their funny line, which is I believe what that's a part of, are very well made. I have the Burton Ernie and count from Sesame Street.

They're very well made. Yeah, they're super cute. And I have seen those in Target and they are I've held them in my hands and they do look like they're well made. McDonald's seems to be more open lately, or putting themselves out there at acknowledging their past a little bit more lately. I think that that's because they're seeing that there's some financial reward in advertising themselves in a nostalgic way rather than what they've been trying to do over the last twenty years, which is to modernize their esthetic or whatever.

Speaking of black Box, I mean that's what their stores are now. Yeah, they're like they're beige boxes. Now, that to me is incredibly lame. But that's maybe a whole other discussion. But I feel like we're on the cusp of what could be an exciting era for McDonald's fans, like people our age, who really appreciate the weirdness of the McDonald's restaurants from the seventies through the eighties, so much so that this is coming up on topics on podcasts recently, like a podcast that I listened to on a regular basis called podcast The Ride.

They're a lot of fun. These three guys geek out about theme parks and stuff and pop culture weirdness, and they've got a whole month dedicated right now to McDonald's, and I think that we're on the cusp of a McDonald Land resurgence of interest. They've already, by the time people are listening to this, Mekka probably will have released more images of their ultimates McDonald's character line. They've already previously shown what their grimace would look like, but I'm hoping that they'll show what the Hamburgler and potentially even Ronald McDonald action figures will look like. They've just released images of their new bobble heads that they're putting out that are Grimace and the Hamburglar.

They've got the Ben Cooper figures, and then they also have these Ultimate figures that are supposed to be coming out too, kind of like my pe Herman that's back here, like something that's going to look fairly realistic and be in the seven inch scale. I'm really excited about this lately. It's got to be a powerful hit to that nostalgia nail for me to really get excited about something, and this is going to be exciting. I think you need to see where it goes. I was kind of hoping that Kid Robots part in this would extend beyond the plush figures, but I don't know.

I haven't seen anything else little Vinyl collectibles or something. I'm a fan of Super seven reaction figures, and I immediately start thinking like, if Meca gets a license often Super seven, we'll try to get that license, or vice versa, and they'll share that license for a while. Once something becomes very popular, both of those companies have a tendency to get on board and put something out there, and so I'm hoping to see that the interest will actually take hold and that we'll get some interesting products. That's my other thing. I'm one to see McDonald lan come back in a very serious, serious way.

I want the restaurants to return, the late seventies early eighties style McDonald's restaurants and mcdonaldlan playlands to come back, because they can do that, they can afford to do that. I want my experience going to McDonald's to get my fried apple pie to also include the immersive experience that the restaurants used to be. You don't like the little playland box that they have in the corner of the store. Have you seen them lately? They are like dead zones.

They're like the back rooms. Those playlands now are like the back rooms. It's bizarre. It's bizarre, so uninviting, it's scary, like there's no warmth to it. I don't know why any kid would want to go back there.

Here's what's really weird to me is the pleasant miniature theme park thing that companies were doing for kids when we were young feels absent day. So we'll see what else. San Diego Comic Con shows us what's going on right now. More Sesame Street characters have been announced. They finally put Oscar the Grouch up for pre order, the Oscar of the Grouch and Neca Ultimates.

And I know that they're doing Muppets now too, so you know they're really digging deep into the the nostalgia basket. And I love this. I have a hard time resisting that Oscar the Grouch, that's for sure. You've got your New Year's resolution to think about. Oh yeah, which I've abandoned quite a bit lately.

I wanted to have record as we went along of that because I knew it wouldn't last. It's a yeah. I made it pretty far, but you know I've broken it several times since then. Music cool, none steaming, She made my bondy. Twitch walking down the car and doll.

You can hear. A hostill letton click. I wanted so much. I feel sick. The girl can't help it.

She really can help it now, alrighty well, I mentioned earlier the stuff about music, and we've talked about this in the past where they have to come back to me. For an example, I had heard a ministry song in the car with my family that I remember having recorded off the radio back then got home put it on my phone, have it now, And it's happened a couple of times watching a movie or something, and yes, I shazam it. And then now I have record of it and don't have to try and rely on my memory. And then I go the next day and go to the Apple Music Store, download it, put it on my phone, et cetera, et cetera. So I was, once again, this isn't something I was looking for, but I was because of Instagram.

I was scrolling through my feed and a lot of podcast interviews have been coming up recently, like if you stop and pause and watch one, then as you keep scrolling the oh yeah, I mean they put stuff up instantly. Yes, I was scrolling through, and I'm not sure why I stopped. I probably had the sound already on. My default is to have sound off, but I probably listened to something on purpose, and then as I was scrolling, the sound would play on the next thing. I didn't know at the time.

I had no idea what this podcast was or who these people were that were talking. The interviewer said to this gal that he was talking to, Okay, I have to ask you about this one lyric and and she was like, Oh, you mean makes me cream my jeans? Can I ask you about the lyric in there? That got a lot of attention? Oh, cream my jeans.

My interest was peaked, and I was like, Oh, what's this about? And then they cut to a clip of her quite some time ago singing this song cream. Jeans mention come on. School School. That lyric came up again and then the chorus, and I was like, holy fuck, I know this song.

This is like that music box dancer. Yeah yeah, thing that I talked about where Carlita was strolling through Instagram, totally forgotten song. I immediately recognized it and recognized it as another one of those songs like the ministry song that I had recorded off of the radio. So a song would come on, I put my tape in if it wasn't already in the machine, and hit record and make myself mixtapes compilation tapes that I would then listen to. Oh yeah, I'm watching this, and you know in the description, of course, they have the lady's name, and I think they had shown text on the screen of the song to oh I knew this.

I could figure out the song title by the chorus and the band name, and so I immediately went to YouTube and watched the old video for it and was absolutely amazed at how much of the lyrics I remembered. This is a song I know that there is absolutely no way I have heard in the last forty years. So what's the song. So it's called High School Confidential and it was by this band called Rough Trade, Yes, and it came out in eighty or eighty one, I believe. So I'm thinking about this, and the whole point of their conversation was, this is a lady singing this song about a girl who she's attracted to.

I'm thinking, Oh, I had no kind I thought it was a guy singing this song. Interesting. I don't even remember the lion cream my jeans at the time, probably didn't know what it meant. I would have been eleven, twelve years old or something. But I played the whole song and like I could anticipate the next line.

It was like no time at passed, Like no time had passed, God, maybe a year or two, you know, I mean, it was really really I must have listened to that song so much as a kid. On that mixtape I made, I was curious. Curlita's five years little more than five years younger than me, and so I'm thinking, I wonder if she has any recollection of this song. So I played them the video on YouTube and she's like, nah. They were kind of like, whoa, this is progressive for eight one, this gal singing about this not even love really lust for this girl in high school.

Yeah, when I see it watching the video, it's like, well, obviously this is a woman singing. But there were plenty of rock bands whose male vocalists didn't particularly have male sounding voices. Yeah, I mean I can And also, especially in the early eighties, there were a lot of men singing falsetto and approaching there on stage persona in a feminine way. And I mean in many ways, maybe more then than now, which is kind of odd. That's that's real.

I can see that. Yeah, I mean boy George for one example. Yeah, yeah, Robert Smith. Very many examples of androgyny, even just in But I had never seen the video, so I had no idea that this was a woman singing. And of course then I'm thinking, damn it, I should have saved that clip.

I don't know what the podcast was for or the view or isn't anything. So then a few days later, I was rolling through my Explore page and it popped back up and I'm like, ooh, so immediate clicked on it. Gal's name is Carol Pope was in the band Rough Trade. High School Confidential is the name of the song I'll be playing clips from. And of course yes, I believe it's a Canadian broadcasting company podcast called q okay.

Didn't catch the interviewer's name, but that is where this came from. Those things that and like music Box Dancer and even the Ministry song. It's so weird to me to have those experiences something I'm not looking for that is so extremely familiar once you hear it or see it or whatever. It's weird how the mind. I mean, it completely unlocked the whole song for me listening through it.

I had to have listened to this a ton, a ton. How do you hold onto that forty years later? It's incredible. One of my first experiences with this being a happenstance discovery of music that I had memorized from beginning to end, an entire album that I was obsessed with that I'd totally forgotten about was the band Yeaz from the eighties and didn't even know that it was buried in my brain. And then I happened to cross it on social media or something, and then looked up the album on YouTube and then played the whole album, and it was like, no time has passed.

Yeah, it's weird. I know where I was when I was listening to this. I'm realizing I had this on cassette. I didn't even All these memories come flooding back. And that's remarkable to me, the losing of a memory and the regaining of that memory from a que an outside queue.

This mixed tape thing represents a pretty small window of time for me, because then once I got into like Devo and the Beatles and Doors and start buying album fucking heads and was buying my own music, and then converting to being able to drive and then buying tapes, and I probably didn't really take those mixtapes that I had made with me. It's all late seventies early eighties stuff that was sort of the only option to hear a song over and over again is to tape it off KKDJ when you hear it, you know it. Is to put my little tape recorder next to the TV and record movies soundtracks. You know, yeah, yeah, And there are songs like the Knack My Sharona, which, oh yeah, it was ubiquitous when it came.

It was played almost every time I went in the car, and like something like that. I'm not going to forget. But this song had a very short lifespan in. My brain and probably on the radio. Yeah, but it made such an impression or I listened to it enough times to where I mean I really knew the lyrics.

It was boggling my mind. Yeah, clils like, oh, well, that's going to be in your car next week when I'm driving around with you. Yeah, I'm like, I don't even know if. They'll have this song on Apple Music, but they did had the whole album. I downloaded that song and it's now on my phone.

I love it. I wait for these things to show up on shuffle because I just shuffle through my catalog in my car. That's the way I listen to music. I love that music is such an autobiographical element for us. Sometimes we need little nudges like that to remind us.

Like I've been listening a lot to the Pixies again lately, and so many memories of hanging out with you and listening to the Pixies just kept flooding back you. Basically, I knew about the Pixies, but I wasn't really into the Pixies until you came around in my life, and I got really into them because of you, And so it's always a fond relationship to those albums by them. Tom Waite said, music is just another way to play with the air. That's true. But also it's a way to play with time and memory.

Oh yeah, music is like a way to harness ghosts. It's really incredible, this very much intangible thing that just does a number on our brains. Yeah, it's very much like smell. Smell is probably the strongest connector to memory. You know, when you travel somewhere you haven't been forever and you start smelling those smells, it's like, oh yeah, and all this stuff comes back.

So it's kind of like that hearing these songs that you have completely erased from your brain, Like, when was the moment that that disappeared from my thoughts or my memories? Yeah, A long long time ago. A long time ago. I blame a lot of that on hormones. So many of my memories about media and my ingrained nostalgic drive comes from previous to puberty, and then after that all those memories are about heartbreak, bad decisions, stupid behavior, puberty through my twenties, and then beginning in the thirties.

It's sort of like a return to that mindset or that thinking with those interests that existed before you got dumb. And when I'm thinking about my life. Ronnie is specifically talking about himself here now, not me. No, Yeah, the use of that's the second person you that's not referring to Mark, but referring to me. He's talking about personal experience of his own at this point.

Yeah, that's just Yeah, that's the footnote there for everybody. The opinions expressed in the commentary on this are those of the person themselves and not related to Cambridge on with Shawn in general, so don't sue us. And also they might be fluid too. They may change by the next time we record, so we'll see. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

Yeah, Lost and Found is that the theme of today's episode seems like it, but it also seems to be it keeps coming back. I'm going to give you a clue. I don't know when I'll talk about this, but I've got one more movie. And this wasn't a thirty or forty year search. I figured this one out pretty quickly, but it was the same experience, basically, something I caught on action theater.

Didn't know the title of My memories of that one were much clearer, Like when I finally saw the movie again, I was like, oh, yeah, that's exactly how I remembered it, and I'll just clue you in. It's a hammer film, one of the mere horror movies, or some of the werewolf Nope, Werewolf would have been easy to figure out, but no, yeah, yeah, it's not a were wolf or a vampire movie. Oh okay, okay, okay, Yeah, that's exciting. I can't wait. I had a bunch of movie books back in the late eighties and poured through the descriptions in all of them, you know, hundreds of pages with thousands of listings of movies, mainly horror movies, trying to find like a description that matched what was in my head.

I believe that's how I found it, but I'm like, spent a lot of time doing that pre Internet to try and figure it out. I love it. I can't wait. Yeah, eventually we'll hold off on that one. We're gonna make our five listeners.

Wait, yeah, all right, man, kick us out. I feel like we're done here. Okay, Remember folks, until we meet and Mark is done. He's actually walked out of the room several times. Remember, folks, until we meet again.

Have fun, and please please stay weird and keep collecting, even if it's just memories. Yeah. So, yeah, thanks for being here. Collect those, keep them, try and keep track of them if you can. Yeah, put them in your briefcase, put them in your side pack with your VCR and carry that gigantic beta camera around with you everywhere you go.

Yeah, and film your movie land experience. That's right, that's right. What's the principle. Doing? Who's that.

Is he screwing leather? What's a perfew? Tagris By. And cream mind? Jeans wepond Come on?

High school A high school confidential? A high school A high school confidential. Josh I'm gonna have to tell him about my weirdness. I'm sorry, Joshua. Cambridge.

I M. Shawn is a weirding Way Media podcast