Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - The 'Burbs (2026), The 'Burbs (1989)

Welcome back midnight viewers to Father Alone's weekly round up. I am Father them Alone. Not joining me today observing a day of silence is Ripley Jane. I just want to take a moment we both do, to send condolences to my friend Jasmine and her husband Garrant. They just lost their pug, also named Ripley.

All our love to both of you. That's too uk pugs we've lost recently Ripley and of course the legend mister Puggles. They're sorely missed. And I'm sorry to start so somber, but respect must be paid. Okay, let me tell you a weirdo story real quick.

So one of my absolute best friends is a gal named Jackie. She and I served in the Paranormal Trenches together, which is actually true. We were employed at the Haunted Museum. Years ago. Jackie gave me a hardcover compendium of the original manga for Space Battleship Yamato.

That was a wildly popular comic when it was first published, and then it got turned into an animated TV show, and when that show hit our shores, it was re christened Starblazers. I talk about formative entertainment a lot here on the roundup, and this one is pretty fucking high on that list. A serialized animated show about the desperate mission to collect technology that will rehabilitate Earth's atmosphere so we can return to the surface. That's just one of a dozen really horrible concepts of young Brain shouldn't be processing anyway. I was obsessed with the show.

I have the DVDs, and when Jackie gave me the book, I realized I had never actually laid eyes on the original artwork or storytelling, so I devoured it pretty quickly and then put it back on the shelf. Being basically a nomad, most of my possessions end up in boxes, which is where like ninety percent of my library is currently. So yesterday I'm out combing through the boxes looking for one thing in particular, when I find that Yamato comic and I think to myself, I didn't take the time to read it correctly and actually luxuriate in some of the art. So I spent most of the day reading it, and then I went to sleep, and then I got up at my usual ungodly hour. And since I've convinced myself to do an episode about the Yamato experience.

I want to keep on reading, but it's one am and I'm blear eyed, so instead I put on the first season of the show. I have three episodes in and I get a message on my phone. It's past two am now everyone except for my UK friends are asleep, so naturally I assume someone's in trouble or someone's dead. No, the message is from Jackie and it's a picture of a Yamato T shirt and the messages this made me think of you. And in the background I can see that all of the items for sale in the store are labeled in Japanese because she's in fucking Tokyo, like out of the blue, and she sends me a Yamato picture while I'm watching him Moatto, which I'm only doing because I found the book that she gave me earlier the previous day.

That's fucking bizarre, right, am I crazy? I might be let me know email addresses in the show notes. If you write in, you might beal from a row. On our episode about Star Trek's first contact, I asked viewers to write in to let HP know how wrong he is about the Borg Queen. He argued that the Borg are a collective and giving it one body in one voice was ill advised, and I argue that HP is a tune ahead sci fi.

Aaron wrote in to say, quote, I agree with Father Malone here. They needed a central villain to fight defeat in the film. They did without on the next generation with the best of both worlds, but on a cinematic level, you need something more tangible and viewable on the big screen. The Boy Queen works for me. Also the film vision.

This really changes how you see the Borg and all of Star Trek forward from this point on. Couldn't agree more. Paris Spooky, these are Instagram handles, by the way, although Paris Spooky Malone has a pretty good ring to it. Anyway. Paris Spooky writes in about data's restraints, quote, I just didn't like the Spencer Gifts electronic light they tested his head on takes me out every time.

Good God, I can't believe we didn't mention those. I'm shocked at the Borg drones weren't wearing Fundies you remember those. Every kid stared in wonders at the packaging for Fundies and Spencer Gifts. And that's the end of the mail. This week hit the show notes, if you've got something to say in the meantime, let's talk suburbs.

Suburbia, those rows of houses that are all the same and no one seems to care. Monkey's reference. Suburbs are not a new idea at all. The villages that grew up around the perimeter of Castle Walls are technically a suburb, But if you say the word now, it's more likely tied to the postwar boom of everything that included the settling of towns around major metropolitan spots that would then spurk growth in transportation. We need roads for these folks to get back into the city for work, but we also need new shopping centers closer to the action, or lack thereof.

It all started around New York and Boston, but then the concepts spread nationwide, and with the GI Bill and literally millions of new homeowners, suddenly the national focus was less urban playboy and more leave it to beaver. In fact, all of those houses, in all of those gritted out neighborhoods looked like everything you were seeing on TV. At least that's what they kept telling us. Bland, uninteresting folk having mild adventures with little to know actual human drama, and it was all so darn pleasant. Fiction authors were the vanguarded, seeing the potential for dread, both real and existential, that could breed in these shiny new habitats.

Books like Peyton Place and I Am Legend laid bare the grim reality behind the apple pie illusions. Meanwhile, Rebel Without a Cause is as much about suburban on Wi as it is teenage rebellion. The only real bucking of the newly minted ain't America great formula? Were they families Adams and Munster, allowing a bit of the crypt to squat nicely amongst the picket fences. Now, if you listen to the show with any irregularity, I mean midnight viewing overall, not necessarily the roundup, you have heard us cover Rod Serling's Twilight Zone follow up, Night Gallery, But you might not know that midnight Viewing mutated from an earlier podcast that one's called Dreams for Sale, the Twilight Zone eighty five podcast.

So you know, I've got a lot of love for mister Sterling. I beat up on them a lot during Night Gallery because he deserved it. But there's no denying what fucking juggernaut he was in the world of television, and how important as a dramatist he was overall. And I think his finest piece of fiction can be found in the first season of the original Twilight Zone, a show just too vast in number to ever commit to a critical appraisal on my part. Believe me, that was an episode called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

You know it. Power goes out in a suburban neighborhood without explanation or word from the outside world, and within hours the residents have whipped themselves into a frenzy about invasion, and none of their fellow homeowners are who they say they are. It's a tight, incredibly economic, and highly intuitive and pretion portrait of everything wrong with forced community. It's kind of a yarnstick that any investigation into suburban Gothic must be measured against, or at least acknowledged us the legend that must be overcome, and boy heaven they tried. There were sporadic jabs at suburbia throughout the sixties and seventies, but it was the eighties when those suburban kids finally got the keys to Dad's movie making machines that the floodgates were open on examining every aspect of that life high low and indifferent.

On that low end, the hey, you know that environment actually fucking sucks. And you had flicks like Nightmare and Elm Street and Parents and the Stepfather. But the one that actually gets it right, the one that quite handily takes that monsters are due on Maple Street metric and puts it out on the curb with the rest of the well manicured refuse. That's David Lynch's nineteen eighty six masterpiece of blue velvet. He mixes the seething, writhing, wriggling black heart of suburbia into a crazy cocktail that's equal parts of bitter realism and wild hallucination.

It's not a nuts and bolts, Hey, their neighbor, I see, you've got to do model Chevy in the driveway examination of life around a cumdesac. But then again it is Meanwhile, the world's biggest booster of the glories of prefab settlements was Stephen Spielberg. Granted et and Close Encounters did enough heavy lifting toward the notion that there's nowhere safer than suburbia. You'll notice the aliens will snatch your kid out of a remote farmhouse, but they never go near Roynier's neighborhood. He has to leave the safety of those will It streets to meet them.

But it was the films that he produced or executive produced that really laid a new Neon Halcion glow on the concept of the suburbs. The Goonies Come On Man, the Money Pit, and of course the film that manages to lionize the suburbs in two separate timelines back to the future. Interestingly, it would be Spielberg to take the big studio swipes at the suburbs as well Poltergeist, even though he was too busy to direct it and not allowed by the Guild, so we know it was Toby Houper. Poltergeist began its life in a script by Spielberg himself. I highly encourage everyone to give it a read.

If you can find it, maybe I will link it in the show notes. Check there later. It is nearly identical to the movie we got, with some finer character shading added by Mark Victor and Michael Grace. It's filled with everything that frightened him about his early suburban life, you know, the one that he recently ladled the big old double gauze over with the Fableman's The Fablemen's like their storytellers. Gee whiz Now.

Poltergeist is a great film, But it's amusing to me that the filmmaker under Spielberg's banner that would deliver the darkest critique of suburbia wouldn't be the one who made Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nope, it's the Pirana Guy. Gremlins, as originally intended, would have been a nasty little horror flick that teens would still gather around generationally to view with no more or less weight than I Know what you did last summer. It certainly wouldn't have been the worldwide success that somehow manages to be a warm hearted view of a simpler way of American living while delighting in its absolute evisceration. That is because of Joe don Day.

When I mentioned tonight's topic a few weeks ago, I said, Dante seemed to be having a moment. It was the animated Gremlins show on HBO. They've recently announced a third Grimlin's film, and now a TV series based on his film The Urbs. It's great that everyone's recognizing how influential he's been on popular culture, but I've also noticed how little work everyone is throwing him these days. You think Spielberg, who will continue to benefit from the new sequel, would break him off some DreamWorks money to make that biopic of Roger Korman.

He's been trying to get off the ground. When I spoke to Dante's Hollywood Boulevard co director and lifelong friend Alan Arkish, he told me they'd tried to get a streaming series going about Corman's studio during the nineteen seventies when they were cutting trailers together there, but no go. So what gives? Why is Dante relegated to co hosting a podcast with Josh Olsen. Here is my impression of the movies that made me.

Yeah, blo op op boh blop, Taxi driver mop op op bop blop oop, sweat glistening bob bo bo bo Lee, Marvin b No. That was actual Idelapino in a terrific picture from nineteen fifty three, and scene like all those tours I mentioned when I was talking about Sam Raimi, Joe Dante's name belongs four square beside them. He came out of the cinematic gait with an already cemented visual style and better. He comes from a place of love of every genre, of every picture and manages to blend them all seamlessly. How do you go from the wackiness of Gremlin's dressed like a gangsters and flash dancing to the Santa Claus story and did not give the audience whiplash?

Good luck, Chris Columbus, I'm sure that third film is going to be great. Dante followed Explorers with the Dennis Quaid Martin short miniaturization Flick Innerspace, during which time he was developing his next feature called Little Man Tait, eventually made by Jody Foster. Meanwhile, over at Imagine Entertainment, they were touting a screenplay referred to as Ozzy and Harriet Meet Charles Manson by its author Dana Olson, a parody of Rear Window called Life in the Burbs, inspired by the fact that every town seems to harbor a story of some crazed, murderous event by some seemingly normal suburban guy, and the fact that every neighborhood seemed to have a house that was run down and frightening.

That's the fact that Joe Dante seized on when the script landed on his desk, having had his own experience with the neighborhood house. Gone to Rack and Ruin. After a brief flirtation with Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks was cast in the lead, and the rest of the film is peppered with Dante regulars like Dick Miller and Robert Priccardo and Henry Gibson And I could go on. All Tom Hanks wanted was a quiet vacation at home. This is what I need, Carol.

I need this. Welcome to Mayfield Place, a typical street in the Burbs. Why Walter, where nothing much ever happened? Aren't just stick a dump on Rumsfield's longing? Until the Clopex moved in Clopex klopex klopex, no one goes in, no one comes out, neighbors from.

How it was a nice place to live, he said. He thinks the Klopex are evil incarnate. Well you're much too smart to fall for that, aren't you, honey? But no, Carol, you wouldn't want to visit there. Right, This is Walter, the Burbs.

I'm going over the fence when I'm not coming back till I find a dead body. Great, do you wanted to take your family kidnap and tear their livers out and make some kind of satanic pantake. We thought, Walter, we got a real problem at the gas not Ron. I love this street, Tom Hanks. I think we are overreacting.

No, the Urbs. It's one hell of a neighborhood. Hey, Hi, I think we should move. But they had to go on immediately. Nineteen eighty eight saw one of the most bitter writer strikes in the WGA's history, and the Burbs as it was now called, needed to be in production to beat the May start of the strike, which they did all on the Universal backlot on Colonial Street.

Now, this tiny piece of real estate, this typical American suburb street, is the perfect place to deconstruct the myths of suburbia because these buildings and those sidewalks have been featured in everything that taught us what suburbia was meant to be. The monsters, leave it to Beaver, the hardy Boys, Adam twelve, Dragnet Gremlins. It should be noted, Marcus Welby Murder, she wrote, and eventually Desperate Housewives. Apparently this and Fletch Lives were the only films in production during this period, and because they had no chance to rewrite, Dante relied on the more than game cast to improv as much as they were on book, and to that end shot the movie mostly chronologically, so that anything mentioned early might reappear later.

I have read the script, so I can tell you that a lot of the more memorable lines and bits of business came from the cast, but just as many came from Olsten's script. I figured satanisgood, sat Nish was probably from Rick Dukeman, but he didn't expect to run to me, run to water to be in the script. And there it is Dante wise man that he is new with contemporary Jimmy Stewart and overall likable guy Tom Hanks, that the original ending probably wasn't going to fly, so he shot three. When you watch the movie, everything happens as scripted until Ray throws himself onto that gurney and then gets in the ambulance. Be throwing himself on the gurney was Hanks, by the way, and that gives us the ending that we received, which is the clopex are the villains, and then they're defeated, and rey Go's on vacation.

Another ending, which after the way Explorers ended. I was convinced when I saw the film that this had to be the actual ending. The Clopex are totally innocent in all of the suburbanites are monsters, and then the actual scripted ending. I said, everything up until the ambulance was the actual end, but it actually goes further than that because Clopec reveals himself as a murderer. The ambulance speeds away with raised, muffled screams receding into the distance.

He was right all along, and no one will ever know. The movie was thought of as a fly at the time, which is bizarre. It made fifty million on a budget of eighteen. I guess everyone just kept expecting Gremlin's numbers, which is unfair at best. Where it definitely did fall down was critically, with Dante noting it was the worst received film of his career.

Fuck him. It's a cult classic now and it's got a killer fucking soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith and Dante would return to the world of off kilter suburbia just a year or two later with the one season Wonder That was Eerie Indiana. There's a wildly underappreciated series, and I hope if anyone were to revive it, they'd let mister Dante play a significant role in its development, because if you don't you get the Urbs headline. I can't sleep. I'll toss the Tom Campbell's past.

You must be Ron Fisher's wife. Welcome to Ashfield Place, the safest town in America. We went from city love to law and so fast. I know living in my parents' house wasn't exactly part of the plant. The every day is the same thing.

Look crazy, mister Babes. So what's the deal with that old Victorian house? It's haunted as there have been whispers of murder. Who would move into a murder house. I did see him in the woods.

I'm not sure what he was up to. I had to give him space. I was nude in the woods. I was moon bathing. House needs a lot of work, that it has good bones.

Who says the house. The girl from the suburbs disappears in the thin air. He's hiding something. I think we should investigate. I feel like Sherlock Holmes.

I think, if anything, I'd be shallow. Homes don't act that privilege says. You can't just break in. From a legal standpoint, We're not breaking in, Okay, We're walking into an unlocked house. She keeps asking questions of the house across the street.

Would you tell her? What is that to tell? If I just pete a little. Well, it's like him. We need to be worried about.

You learned that from a podcast? Oh no, what's happening? Which one of us is the murderer? Your face. Share?

The safest town in America has a lot of people desperate to leave. This is the podcast, A little bit complicated. One small Town's just the best. It is the safest, safest, safest town in America. What are we doing?

Let's go. I think this place is going to grow on you. Okay, I'm always murder adjacent. Executive producer Seth MacFarlane, Well, you know it's going to be good. The actual writing and writing of the show are done by Celeste Hughes, who was a producer and writer on Oh You, pres and Dead to Me and Palm Royal.

I have seen none of those, but having watched this series in its entirety, I get the gist. On the surface, The Burbs is a natural for a limited series. The inner workings of a neighborhood and the way it implodes when a new element is introduced. Dramatize that over eight to ten episodes, and it could be great. I imagine more than the Clopec House would end up detonating by the end.

What new and horrifying images can you make of nocturnal trash being beaten or backyard digging? Turns out not much at all, because this new series isn't interested in anything the film had to say. I'm not sure why it's called The Burbs at all, other than we all love that movie. And that's kind of infuriating, kind of because it's impossible to be mad at this series or anyone involved. The cast is a murderer's row of lovable character actors Kiki Palmer, Paula Pell, Julia Duffy for Fock's sake, and it's shot on the very same backlot, using the very same houses that we know from the first film, and there are some analogs to the original film, though Ray Patterson is now Samira, who's home, not because she's bought into the idea of Suburbia being a vacation unto itself, but she's on maternity leave.

Although she and her husband are the transplants, having just moved to the neighborhood, though her husband did grow up there, which explains his English accent. Can Jack Whitehall not do an American accent? Is he the one modern English actor still fumbling around with hard rs? So he said, fuck it, I'll just make everything as confusing as watching an interview with Gillian Anderson in nineteen ninety five and watching one. Now, that's a nitpick, you know.

It isn't the fact that they've basically abandoned everything that made the Burbs fun in interesting and memorable fine go in a whole new direction. Remakes shouldn't be carbon copies. Carpenter's thing is a pale echo of The Hawk's original, but the new and innovative path this series has chosen is nothing more than a bald faced ripoff of only murders in the building. This is no longer a what is that family up to? It's who in the neighborhood is committing murder?

Potentially a murder from the past that several of our neighborhood dwellers have been mixed up and get the fuck out of here. And you can see from the very early on that that is the intent of the show, and it's a drag. But then Justin Kirk showed up as a one man Klopek family and I thought, oh, well, this is going to be interesting. Justin Kirk should be a huge fucking star. I'm not sure why he isn't.

Check out his much louded and much deserved to be louded performance in Angels in America. The man is sublime. But no, he's just another spoke in this Burbs and Murders in the Building mashup. Truly, who amongst us watched Rick Duckman's art character and didn't think I wonder how his marriage is doing. Let's spend a painful amount of time dwelling on that.

Like I said, there are nods to the first film. The Neighborhood dog is named Darla for original queeny Thespian Darla, the dog who starred not only in the Burbs, not only in Batman Returns, but she was also precious in Silence of the Lambs. Tom Hanks shows up in an old timey photo of Hinkley Hills, Yesteryear and Wendy Shawl and I'm spoiling nothing. Corey Feldman from the original film show up in cameos. This is two weeks in a row, folks.

I'm trying. I'm trying to stay positive. And you know what, this might be your thing. If you have no allegiance to the film and love a good casual investigation show, then this is for you. Lord knows there aren't enough group of friends investigating murder shows out there.

But as an update of the verbs, this is a colossal failure. I thanked the spirit of Skip of the Psychotic Soda Jerk when the last two episodes were mercifully only thirty minutes. That's right, each of these episodes is nearly an hour. It was punishing. You know what, don't watch it.

I'm sorry. As genial as it is, there are so many better examples of this type of television. I actually thought this type of television was on its way out. What do I know? I note that Joe Dante wouldn't have let this happen.

Come on, gang, let's go and watch all the Joe Dante movies. Any three random selections will counteract the effects of this languidly paced, hardly funny at all series. And that's all I got for the roundup this week. Please tune back in Monday for the latest and Hammerhouse of Horror. Mike White joins me to talk about Charlie boy As for me.

If you want to support the show desperately needed, that's Patreon dot com slash father Malone, or if you want to drop me online and become one of those pen panals from around the world, Father Malone seven to one at gmail dot com. Until next time, try to enjoy the Daylight Gang. Well, there used to be a big drug store down on the corner there. It had had a big soda fountain, you remember that. Yeah, Yeah.

The guy ran it was a was a rotun guy headglasses. His name was Skipped, lived over an elm, had a wife, a couple kids, you know, not too sharp, I mean pitt. The guy's forty years old. He's wearing a paper hat and he's making cherry cokes as since he's not running for governor. Right.

Anyway, it got hot that summer, I remember, it got real hot. It was sweltering, you know that heat where your underwear sweats and it crawls up that. Anyway, it's hot, okay, and they start they start smelling this this really vile stench over on Elm and they figured it's coming from Skipp's place. And no one wants to say anything. I mean, what do you do go knock on a guy's door?

High your house stinks, so so people are trying to nor right. They're trying to pretend it doesn't happen. And you know those pine things, they're trying to cover up with those pine things that you put in cars. People are hanging those in their porches. Oh you think that's funny, Ricky, Well yeah, well.

Yeah, let me tell you what happened next. Okay, the state Health inspector shows up, They go over, They talk to Skip. He says he's got a sump pump problem. They leave, Hey, the guy's got a little sewer problem. He says he'll look after it.

Everything's okay, right wrong. A couple hours later, there's smoke pouring out of the windows of Skip's house. The firemen show up. They go into Skip's house. You know what they find what Skip's family dead.

Murdered by Skip weeks earlier. With an ice pick. Yeah, the guy killed his whole family with an ice pick. Yeah yeah. Just put him in the cool basement, cover him up with a sheet and went back to make an ice cream treats for the townsfolk.

Only thing Skip didn't count on there being a big heat wave that summer. You know what that was that all those people were smelling over on elm Ricky. What Skip's families bodies decomposing this summer heat. Yeah, apparently one day Skip just made one too many lemon phosphates. Oh snap, I remember that.

I remember hearing about that when I was a kid. They they tore down the soda fountain that fall. Now, these towns are full of those kind of stories. Sometimes they're happening right under your nose.