226: The Found Footage Festival

Hi, this is Nick from the Found Footage Festival. You're listening to Movie Meltdown, the meltingest podcast around. It's showtime. The following feature has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is intended for mature audiences and parental discretion is advised.

Powered nuclear reactor pumping out one million kilowatts of power. What's up and welcome to Movie Meltdown. I'm Brian. I'm Fred. I'm Marlena.

I'm Christian. Do we want to introduce the other guests? Well, we have with us the woman who lives with Fred, I think. All the listeners probably are fascinated to know that there is someone who lives with you all the time and has put up with you for many, many years now. Yeah, that's just the way I wanted to put it as a kind of, I don't know, legend or myth.

It's something, all right. So yeah, she has come along, but probably... Very smartly wants to have nothing to do with us. We are coming to you live via digital recording from the steps of the Clifton Center, where we have just watched the Found Footage Festival. So do we want to go right into initial reactions?

Are you still in shock from some of these horrific and amazing things we've just seen? I didn't know what to expect. And my first reaction is that I'm relieved that they didn't find any of my footage. I was a little worried going into it. There's a lot of scary stuff of you out there.

We know that. What was your favorite line, Marlena? Let's do aerobics unto the Lord, I think. Bless her size. Something to that effect.

We saw a baby being born. That was before the show even started. I was really shocked by that. I thought it was going to be fake. No, there was really a baby being pushed out of someone's vagina.

She even made the comment of, oh, my God, this is really happening. Yeah. The show or the baby. I'm not sure which. But they're both amazing.

And then they were selling the DVD. And they said it had the full birth. It was like 22 minutes of it. That's a pretty short birth, though. Good for that woman.

Yeah, but it's a pretty long training video. I'm also guessing you don't get a whole lot of anesthesia in the back of a car when you're having this child. I just want to. What type of mother would volunteer to have a baby in a, like, disgusting car? Like, she volunteered for that shit.

One who was civically minded. She was helping to show what happens when, you know, you're going to give birth and a cop needs to help you do it in the back of a car. I feel like she probably got a lot of cash for that. And they did point out that it was 56 years ago, so I don't think there was a lot of anesthesia available at the time. From what I understand, they, like, knocked you out and took your baby.

If you didn't need anesthesia. There's a frying pan involved. Yeah, yeah, like frying pans, whatever it takes. Maybe a shovel. Like, I don't know.

I don't know how it worked then. I just want to say that's John Stuart Mill's utilitarian theory, like, put to work right there for the greater good. Oh, wow. They did say they tracked down the baby. Yeah, yeah.

And they're going to interrogate the baby. They want answers, damn it. They want answers. I want answers. So, yeah, we got an interesting take on that.

And now, as you may be able to hear, we're actually sitting on the steps outside of the place as everyone's leaving, going to their car. I love doing on-the-spot podcasts. We're live, immersed in the middle of the wonder. So, yeah, if nothing else, we actually talked to one of the two guys who has put this together. We actually talked to Nick.

He and Joe put this together years and years ago, as you'll hear. And it's inspired by a horrible how-to video at work, which then I felt a kinship and had to share my horrible how-to video at work. So, yeah, we'll go ahead. We'll take our break here. And when we come back, we will talk with Nick.

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Treat to equal the crisp, delicious. Flavor of hot popcorn that's bathed in real melted butter. It's at the concession stand now. And then, on a quiet tree-lined street, evil has arrived in a most ordinary way. An old television set.

October's next feature may change the way you feel about your television forever. The Video Dead. Why in the hell don't you leave it. All on me? The slaughter's begun already.

Exactly how does a TV set kill somebody? Don't you find it a little creepy living in the murder house? Living in the what? The video dead. Once you've seen them, you'll never forget them.

Hey kids, it's Brian. So you're listening to this episode, and it sounds pretty good, right? That's because we're using our new mics from the Doo-Wop Shop. We are using the VLH SM2000s that are made specifically for the Doo-Wop Shop. And if you want one, you can go get one yourself.

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They certainly did with us for the mics. So, yeah, go to doo-wop.com and check it out. Are you tired of film podcasts where the hosts exist in a constant blissful state of agreement? I mean, the main characters are two of the dullest main characters I have ever encountered in any film. Well, you're in luck.

That means you shoot a chin-stroker and punter. One is an ex-film. Student with a penchant for David Lynch and art cinema. The other is a man on the street... Listen, the perplexed and horrified terror has made terror parts one film a week.

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It's part of your problem, you know. You haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are. Answered in the movies. And now, on with the show.

When I'm at the pearly gates This'll be on my videotape My videotape And if a star flees It's just beneath. And it's reaching up To grab me This is one for the good days. And I have it all here. In red, blue, green In red, blue, green. All right, we are here with Nick, the co-creator of the Fountain Footage Festival.

I guess I want to start at the very beginning. Even before you started with the videotapes, I guess as a kid, were you interested in film in its basic form? Yeah, totally. I mean, I was making movies, and I think every kid does that. You know, your parents could be just Cam Carter.

And so, yeah, I grew up. making movies and uh and also just really interested like when we got a vcr i was just ecstatic i mean i could not believe people forget now but i could not believe that you could control a movie in in your home i mean it was just remarkable and um so yeah i i uh have always been interested in film and that joe is the same way uh he's the other curator and founder and um We've known each other since sixth grade and soon got interested in film, but one thing we also shared was a love of things that were so bad they were good. We did not really excel at any other academic pursuit or anything else, but we had a really advanced sense of irony. So one of my earliest memories with Joe is watching the TV show Small Wonder.

Are you familiar with this at all? Unfortunately, I am, yes. Well, yeah. I mean, our friends in middle school were watching it seriously, you know, and being like, did you see this in Small Wonder? And we could not believe it.

We somehow thought we were tapped into some different wavelengths. They were not watching it ironically the way we were. And that was the first time that maybe... uh... we've developed so we went through irony cuba the early early in life so uh... we're fairly promiscuous in that in that we're we have viewing parties of small wonder and and uh... another you know bad videos and things like that from pretty early. Age ironic before it was cool to be a character i see. Exactly that's what i'm trying to say exactly.

That well it's that's true i i do My sisters used to watch that, and they were younger than me, and I just sat there in awe of it. I'm like, they were watching it just like any other show, and I'm just like, I'm still a kid at this point, but I'm like, this is terrible. It's just written so bad. For listeners, I think one of the first shows that was nationally syndicated, so it wasn't created to go on a network and then syndicated later. It was first-run syndication.

I think it was the first show to do that. So it looked cheap, and I think they skimped on the writing and hiring professional actors, too. And was it shot on video? Because it looked like it was shot on an actual video camera back when nobody used to do that stuff. Yeah, I think it was.

It definitely wasn't film. I mean, it must have been some kind of beta tape or something. But yeah, I mean, it was the robot little girl, and... we would just plan time around it and watch it. And then when we got VCRs, we'd tape it off TV and re-watch it. So that was kind of our first dabbling into that kind of material.

Well, I guess Small Wonder was good for something. At least. If nothing else, yeah, that good thing came out of it, yeah. So you did, in the beginning there, start like getting friends together and watching just that show I guess when did the first tape you know when outside of that did you find that you know that magical tape that sort of changed everything. Yeah well there was like a key moment I was a freshman in high school this would have been 1991 I think and I was working at a McDonald's in my hometown Stoke, Wisconsin pretty small town And I was in the break room one day, and my friend was training to become a manager there.

And he had to watch like a series of 35 different training videos and sign up things saying he'd watch them. And that was part of the training. And while I was in there one day, he was watching this one called Inside and Outside Custodial Duties. And it was a training video for McDonald's janitors. which, you know, already, our McDonald's did not have a janitor. So what, you know, I didn't really know.

Yeah, exactly. It was everybody's job. And we were watching it, and unlike a lot of the other training videos, this one tried to have a plot to it. And so it had all the normal pitfalls of training videos, where everybody's a little too chipper and perky to be doing the things they're doing. But more than that, it was just trainees' first day on the job.

And this overly perky crew trainer, uh, told him that he needed to try to see, find McSee. Um, and McSee, it turns out, it stands for McDonald's Queen. So she's constantly saying like, okay, buff those windows. Did you see McSee? And, uh, he's like, I don't, what do you mean?

He goes, well, I'm sure she's around here somewhere. So it's just like this mythology created around custodial work at McDonald's. And, uh, I mean, my thought was this cannot stay in the break room. This needs to be seen by everyone. And, uh, so I took it home, smuggled it in my backpack, showed it to Joe and we would have viewing parties.

We, we invited everybody we knew over to my parents' living room and we'd just watch the show and make jokes along with it. And, um, we even made a short film, like a fake training video based around, you know, this video. It was an obsession. And, uh, There wasn't much else going on in our hometown, so this was our entertainment, our cheap entertainment. But, you know, you asked what the first video was, and that really was the springboard for, you know, what else is out there?

There's got to be more stuff out there like this to keep us entertained. And it turns out there was a lot more. Just to veer off into my own personal sad part of this, yeah, around that same time, more or less, I was at, I'd say I won't name them, but we were actually just talking about me working at this corporate-run video store. It was actually sales, mall-based. You probably know which one.

And they had all those training videos, too. And I guess what's worse, at least if they're, like, earnest and dopey, you know, you can just kind of laugh at them. But when they become self-conscious and they started trying to be cool in them, that's when it was scary. Because as they went on, like, in the beginning, they were just very cut and dry. But as they went on, they started trying to Again, we were a video store, so they would start trying to mimic other movies or popular.

So you would have people trying to put on, you'd have them doing a film noir version of this training video with bad black and white footage. The one I really remember, there was one around that time when Wayne and Garth were huge, and I think the movie had actually come out. They did one called Dwayne and Garth. And they were training you how to be a wonderful employee and still were doing the party on kind of nonsense with bad wigs. Okay, you're blowing my mind a little bit here.

Go on, but I have a story to tell you after this. Well, I mean, that was it. It was just, it was like 45 minutes of them, you know, party on, woo-hoo, and, you know, just bad wigs and T-shirts and, like, just some idiot that worked at a store in another city, I'm sure. But, oh, man, it was painful. This is incredible because in, I guess it was maybe the mid-' 90s, no, I think it was, like, the early 2000s, Somebody told us, like, they knew that we collected training videos, and they said I had to watch one at Suncoast, a Suncoast video where Wayne and Garth took you through the, you know, through what to do.

And so we were obsessed. We tried to get it. I think we went to a Suncoast in Minneapolis. That's their headquarters. Yeah.

We were living there at the time, so we asked just a store in a mall, like, Is there any way we could borrow your training video? So we told them what we did. We kind of leveled with them. And they're like, no, of course not. These are heavily guarded corporate secrets.

These are serious. So Joe actually applied for a job in a mall in suburban Minneapolis and got a job at the Suncoast. Went through the application process, got hired. Showed up for his first day of work. Worked a four-hour shift.

And then. during his break went back and and took the entire stack of training videos six of them put them in his bag and and then. Um that's internal theft damage. Well yeah that's part of that's. Part of that's one of those videos he took. Yes so if we get a hot tip that's what we'll go after so this is probably as far as we've gone but So, um, he took them home, dubbed the videos, then went back the next day and said, I can't work here anymore, sorry, I quit, and handed the training videos, you know, to the person working, and they were kind of like, well, why are, you know, they, I think they had a little confused look, but they said, oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

So then we, we went and watched all the training videos. There was an anti-shoplifting video, which is, I guess, a little ironic, um, and, and, uh, There was also one where they did like a Siskel and Ebert parody. And they had, you know, we saw one where it was like the employee, the crew trainer was like, of all the video stores in all the world, you had to pick this one. And it goes into black and white. You know.

Just tiresome. But the Wayne's World parody one was not in there. So we were always wondering if the true was the legend true, and now I guess it was. I watched it, and as I stayed there longer, I then had to bring other people in and make them watch it, which made me feel a little better, actually. Oh, yeah.

I mean, part of our show is about commiserating. I mean, there's no way I could do the show alone, so it's good to have other people there to share in here. And the suffering. Definitely. Well, that, you know, your McDonald's and my son Coe's, they were sort of the key to all this.

But I guess at that point, how did you go about finding more in the beginning there? Well, you know, one thing we did already was spend a lot of time at, like, Salvation Army's and Goodwill's and St. Vinny's and stuff like that. And we were just looking for stuff that entertained us. I mean, and clothes.

You know, we'd look and find a great T-shirt. for like a bikini car wash or something and buy that. We started collecting answering machine tapes we'd find, like we'd find old answering machines. That's a whole other rabbit hole to go down. Yeah. So we have a ton of those still.

But then, you know, once we saw the McDonald's video, we were like, let's start looking in thrift stores for these. And we'd find tons of them. We found like a Mr. T educational video. We found a potty training video, a lot of exercise videos.

This was already in the early 90s. They were ending up at thrift stores already. And so we just find these, share them with friends, and that was sort of the beginnings of the Found Footage Festival, just sort of us doing this for friends privately. It was kind of an inside joke, really. And then, you know, we went...

As we got into college, we worked at our campus TV station, and we found, like, all sorts of old videos that were made there. Like, Kato Kaelin went to our university and had some shows on the air back then. So, of course, you're making dubs for yourself. And then after college, Joe had a job at a company that rented film equipment in Minneapolis, but he also would duplicate videos for companies. Of course, the collection grew exponentially then.

You got a lot of videos ending up there where people wanted dubs of them, and anything that looked interesting, you know, we'd make an extra copy for ourselves. So the collection grew there, and we started expanding and, like, actively going to, like, estate sales where somebody died and they're getting rid of all their stuff, and we'd go there and sometimes we'd find, like, an old video camera in addition to tapes, and, you know, you'd You buy the camera, it's only a couple dollars, and sometimes the video's still inside. They found some pretty bizarre home movies that way. You know, and once you know you're looking for VHS, you find it in the weirdest places. I was taking out the trash from my apartment building.

I find a stack of tapes in the dumpster there. You know, you find them lying on the street. So, yeah, really, now that we know what we're looking for, it's everywhere. And nobody wants them at that point. Yeah.

As soon as DVD happened, yeah, I mean, it was such a quick turnover that, like, people, like, lived and died for VHS for, like, a decade there, and then as soon as the next thing came along, they were just like, what is this junk? And they didn't even have the thing looked up anymore and started tossing it. What's so weird to us, too, is that, you know, vinyl has been this collector's item for years now. I mean, even after record players mostly went away... there's still tons of vinyl collectors, and it kind of has this, like, sex appeal, and, you know, it's kind of cool if you're, like, a guy with a record trade who's finding old, weird albums. But, you know, I feel like VHS is the same way.

I mean, for the same reason that people collect records, it's that, you know, you find some rare and one-of-a-kind things and some weird, esoteric, you know, albums because vinyl was so cheap to produce. It was the same with VHS. Mom-and-pop operations were making small-run videos and testing the waters to see what might catch on. So VHS was the same way with me because it's plastic and kind of clunky. It doesn't have the same sort of appeal.

But I think for the same reasons that vinyl collectors are digging through old bargain bins for a gem, we're the same way with VHS. Yeah yeah no i've definitely i mean you don't want it for the video quality necessarily but for me it's it's all the other stuff like i i got so interested in the box art as it went on and i've tried to pick up a few again i don't find hardly any good ones anymore it's all that very last run and mass produced you know just poster art slapped on there or something but yeah there's a few of the big box the good stuff from the beginning that i've got the My Exterminator 2 box is sort of my pride and joy of all those. Nice. It's classic. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's another thing, too. It's like, you know, I mean, and certainly I like streaming media. I like the convenience of watching a movie on Netflix, for instance, and all that stuff. But there's something to be said for having a physical piece of media in your hand. Yeah.

And being able to look at the cover art and read the description on the back and all that stuff, it's just more tangible. There's sort of a low-budget charm to a lot of it, too. We collect VHS covers as well. There's some great cover art. There was.

The 80s in particular. It was a whole new world. A lot of neon shapes, a lot of little squiggles. Airbrush and lots of Fine airbrushed knockoffs of Boris artwork on the front. Oh, yeah.

I mean, we do this thing in our show now called the VHS cover slideshow. And, you know, that was one of the frustrating things about doing our show where we're sharing footage was that we'd find all these incredible looking videos, but then the footage did not live up to the cover. So, yeah, now we do the slideshow where we share it and zoom in and point out things that we noticed from the from the video covers, and actually it was so, proved to be so popular that we released a book last year of over 300 of our favorite VHS covers, along with our commentary about it. So it's kind of a, it's a handsome tome to keep in your bathroom. Yeah, important pieces of history we need to preserve.

Yeah, it really is. There's no, you know, there's no temperature-controlled bulb at the Smithsonian for the Angela Lansbury exercise. You know, there's no organization that Martin Scorsese is, you know, the chairperson of that's preserving these kind of things. I think I remember stocking that one, by the way. Yeah, we're doing our part as much as we can.

We've got a spurt locker. In Queens, New York with about, you know, 6,000 tapes in it and continuing to grow. So we're doing our part to hang on to these things. Nice, nice. I guess you're compiling them at that point and you're doing the shows for friends.

At what point do you actually... see it evolving into something more? I mean, were you conscious of it in the beginning there that it was becoming bigger than that? Not really. I mean, I started looking at the Dave Letterman show and I'd be sharing my videos with co-workers in the conference room and stuff and a couple of times I ended up on the show and being a collector and Um, so I knew that maybe there was some more appeal to it than just our immediate circle of friends, but you never really know. Um, but...

I think it was, yeah, it was 2004, like April of 2004, and, um, I had seen a friend's comedy show in this back room in, uh, the East Village in New York, and, um, it was just kind of a small room, maybe like 50 seats, but I noticed they had a screen there and a projector, and I thought, well... maybe we could try and show up our favorite finds here one day. Maybe people would come see it. And I didn't really think anything else of it, but then we were working on this documentary called Dirty Country, and we didn't have any money to spend on it, and we didn't have any, they weren't giving a government grant out to this documentary either. It's about a guy who sings raunchy country music, so they weren't, They weren't giving out big grants to help make movies like that.

So we didn't have any assets, so we couldn't get a loan. The only thing we had of value was our VHS collection. We thought, let's try it. Let's see if anybody shows up and wants to see our goofy videos. That may be the only time somebody's made that statement, actually.

Yeah. It was a stupid idea, you know. And this was pre-YouTube, and there wasn't this shorthand about, like, oh, it's funny exercise videos. And people could be like, oh, I've seen the Tracy Lord's exercise video on YouTube. That didn't exist yet, so...

But we really had no risk. We were just doing a 50-50 cut of the door. So they gave us this back room, and I sent out some press releases to places. And amazingly, I think maybe we were just at the right time when people were ready to look back on the VHS era. And so press really picked up on it.

And I think there was something in the New York Times about it. And we had a line of like 200 people out the door of this tiny little bar trying to get into our show. Like, whoa. I mean, we were just, it was shocking that this thing we thought was an inside joke actually had some appeal beyond our immediate group of weirdo friends. And so then we started getting offers to come bring the show elsewhere, and it kind of evolved from there.

I guess, as it's gone on, maybe not what's currently on the tour, but I guess overall, through the whole run of it, like, what is some of, Your favorite ones, you know, that have just really been sort of the best ones of the run for you personally. I always like, you know, for us, the story of how you find something is almost as interesting as what's on the tape. So we always like to do detective work and track down some of the people in the videos. So the ones that I come back to are the ones where we've met the people in them. Oh, wow.

There's one we found in college. our friend was working at a lumber store called Menards in college, and he was doing their video production stuff. And he said he was looking through, actually we were there with him, and he was looking in his warehouse, and we're like, what are all these old boxes? And in one of the boxes we found a videotape, and it was labeled sell, sell, sell. Just three words on it. And it turned out to be an excerpt from a home shopping show, a regional home shopping show from 1983 starring these two guys, John and Johnny.

They had their own show on this. This was one of the first home shopping shows, and it was mostly in Wisconsin and some other affiliates. And the two hosts of this show, I mean, I wish there was more footage of them, but we only had this half-hour excerpt. They are just... So hyperactive.

I mean, the home shopping hosts are inherently obnoxious, but I guarantee nobody tops these guys, John and Johnny, because they're stumbling over their own words and, you know, dropping things. They're so excited about selling, you know, Ferrari sunglasses and things like that. And so that was a big hit in college among friends, and that became a big hit in our first touring show. And we later got to meet these guys. We tracked them down.

One sells Persian rugs in Seattle, and the other one is still a home shopping host. He's on a home shopping network in Tampa. So whenever we've been in those cities, we've gotten a chance to talk to them about it. And so that's definitely an early favorite. And, of course, Jack Rebney, the world's angriest RV salesman.

Oh, yeah. Have you seen that footage? Yeah, I have. I bet most people are familiar with it, but that was another really early find of ours. That took on a life of its own and a movie.

Right, they made a movie about it called Winnebago Man. But this was something like we were working on commercials and other crews, training videos and stuff as production assistants in Minneapolis. And whenever you're there, you know, working on crews, there's a lot of downtime, and you kind of share horror stories of the worst shoots you were ever on. And we met this camera assistant who told us about this shoot was on in 1989 in Iowa for Winnebago RVs, where the crew very early on realized that the host of this video was kind of in over his head and had a bad temper. And. kept losing his cool on, you know, during the shoot.

So they, uh, I mean, God bless them. They kept the cameras rolling between each take, uh, just never, never hit stop on the, uh, video camera. And they captured this guy's basically his descent into madness. I mean, he's having a really bad couple of weeks on the side of this, uh, our promotional video. And, um, so he, you know, the crew had kind of put it together, their own private tape.

So they had a little memento of this horrible shoot and he gave us like the raw footage and we cut together our favorite angry tirades from the shoot. And, uh, so that was a big hit at our first show. We closed the show with it. And, um, and then the version ended up online and then that became one of the first viral videos. And, uh, uh... a filmmaker years ago decided to track him down we we have tried to track him down to i mean this guy was the holy grail of people we want to meet but that we we thought he was dead of an ulcer or something else could not find them so the filmmaker hired a private detective and found him living like a hermit in northern california and uh... this movie about it ends with him appearing at our show in san francisco where he he gets the subject of the video gets to see people react to it for the first time.

It's pretty incredible. Definitely a career highlight for us. Yeah, he's sort of beloved now, even, you know, for all these different people. It's interesting, especially when it comes full circle like that. Yeah, I mean, it's so great, because you can see, like, he's a comrade, I mean, when we met him, he was very prickly, and he was like, you know, who are these lunatics coming to the show tonight?

You know, very skeptical people. And you could see him, you know, we were watching his reaction to the video, seeing the video in front of an audience for the first time. And his arms were folded, you know, he kind of had this, you know, this kind of frown on his face. But as he saw people, like, double over in laughter, like, I don't think he realized how much joy this video brought, or legitimately brought to people. So, you know, all of a sudden, this smile came over his face, and.

We compare him to, like, the Grinch, where his heart grew three times its size that day. You know, you could just see it. And there's a standing ovation, and we were hugging him at the end. And so, you know, tell us, we always say, like, this is a guy who called a fly a goddamn jackass. You know, like, he's just a poet.

He's got his way with words. So we were honored to meet him and be part of that story. That is pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, that's sort of the high end of it.

I guess to go to the other end of the spectrum, what's, like, that stands out as, like, the weirdest or creepiest? I mean, you run into some scary stuff, especially on VHS. So, like, what's one that just has stuck with you as something really creepy? Oh, man, there's been a lot. I mean, there's one, you know, I was talking about at state sales.

We went to one in Queens, New York, and, uh, it was apparently the old man who had passed away. It was his camcorder. We bought it for five bucks, took it home, plugged it in, and there was a tape still inside. And it. Started off kind of like a normal home movie.

There's a teenage girl dancing to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, wearing like a costume dress. And then it cuts, and then the old man is wearing the costume dress without a shirt. He's just topless, but with a skirt, gold lamé skirt on, staring kind of creepily into the camera, dancing to the Phantom of the Opera as well. We joke that, are you sure this wasn't David Lynch's estate sale? It just has that sort of vibe to it, that sort of Silence of the Lambs guy vibe.

But then it cuts again, and it's the same guy. Now he's behind the camera, and he's filming the demolition of a house across the street from him in Whitestone, New York. And the foreman says, what are you doing filming here? He goes, well, I have a rewrite to film. And they get into this huge, like, stereotypical New York, you know, screaming match over whether he's allowed to film the demolition.

Of his house. And then the tape ends. Like, the entire tape's five minutes long. but it covers the gamut of all that. Of insanity. And then you can't see his poodle at one point.

It covers the gamut of insanity. So strange. That one sticks with me. But there's one, actually, in this new show that we're on tour with that we've been lucky enough in that we can't be everywhere at once, so people will actually donate videos to the cause, and that's always our favorite thing in the world. But sometimes...

We think twice about it. Because we were in Vancouver last year, and this guy came up with a big stack of tapes for us after the show and said, hey, I found some stuff for you. And I guess he'd heard that a government office in British Columbia was getting rid of all of its VHS collections, and he could not let that happen. So he went down, rescued anything that he thought looked interesting. And the tapes that were leaked, caught our eye that we couldn't wait to watch.

It was labeled Handmade Love. White letters on a black label. We had no idea what... I mean, we had some guesses. We really didn't know what was on it.

I don't think even our guesses got close to what it was. It was this educational video put out by a company in British Columbia. It was basically a masturbation instructional video for developmentally disabled men. And their heart was in the right place with this video. You know, they're obviously trying to do a good service here, something that maybe not people don't want to do in person, so they made a video.

But they did not have the resources production-wise to make a competent video, so it's very homemade. Like, they didn't have a tripod, so it's all handheld. God. The audio is really bad. It's shot in sort of this depressing-looking apartment.

And it just... You know, just the premise alone is unsettling. So combine that with, like, you know, the production values of, like, a snuff film, and you kind of get a vague idea of what this video is like. And then we also found out that they made a sister video for women called Fingertips. Clever name.

So we... called up this company and sort of pretended to be educators, and they sent us this tape as well. So in the show, we show just enough to not make people walk out of handmade love and fingertips. It's kind of a one-two punch. Wow, those titles. Normally you play a video and people applaud afterwards.

This one just kind of gets a stunned silence, but we're okay with that. Like, it's, again, it's the titles that, like, I can see them wanting to, like, earnestly go into doing this for whatever reasons. You know, I guess it's necessary to some level. But, yeah, then giving it this funny title is almost, you know, I mean, that's what I would title that kind of video. Right, exactly.

It's like they're almost trying to be too clever or cute with these titles, and who are they trying to appeal to here, you know? Like, They also made another one about how to put on a condom, and they called it Undercover Dick. And it's like, what are you guys doing? You know, on one hand, you seem sort of like you know what you're doing with the titles, but the videos demonstrate otherwise. So, I don't know.

Very strange. The people you're trying to appeal to aren't quite going to get these references or jokes or realize that it's even a joke. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

So, yeah, it's one of those head-scratching ones that, you know, sometimes we like to get to the bottom of certain videos, and this one I think is just better left. The less you know about it, the better, probably. Yeah, just that's unsettling enough right there. But we still show it. Well, of course.

I mean, yeah. I mean, you have to show it. But actually, we got a little sadistic and, like, A lot of times people, like if somebody's sponsoring our show in town or something, like we're going to be in Louisville and Wild and Bully Video is sponsoring us. The one thing we started doing is a particularly graphic shot in Handmade Love. And we'll pause it and say, you know, I think this is a good opportunity to say thanks for coming out.

And thanks to, you know, Wild and Bully Video and their ultimately they're sponsoring the show and are responsible for everything you see on screen tonight. And we just take way too long to do these thank yous while there's something that most people don't want to look at in close-up. And I don't know, it's almost a sadistic thing. But, you know, we suffer through videotapes. We kind of, I don't know if we enjoy torturing people, but we, there's part of it.

I appreciate your sadism, so. Thank you. I think I do that with some of our stuff, too. I pick some of the scariest movies and then make everybody else watch it. I mean, that's part of the fun, right?

It is the sharing in that misery. Yeah, I think as movie fans, you sort of do that anyway. I can't believe how bad this is. You have to watch it, too. Yeah, exactly.

We did one thing a few years ago called The Boring Montage. You know, most of what we watch is just the most dreadfully boring, not even entertainingly boring stuff in the world. And we thought, well, give people a little taste of what it's like. So we picked out the most boring parts from the most boring videos we'd ever found, like a video called Adventures in Management and, you know, like a conference call that was taped on a camcorder and things like that. And we played just little snippets from them.

And we did that, and nobody liked it. No one liked it at all. And then we thought, well, let's put up a little window in the corner that has exciting footage, like a fire-breathing, car-eating monster truck thing. Footage tape we found in a topless arm wrestling video at Motocross and stuff. So we put that in the corner.

So if you got too bored, you'd have something else to look at. But even that didn't help. Yeah, you guys have to suffer through a lot of that, because having seen more instructional videos than I need to back at work, I've avoided them in my personal life. But there were so many of them, we're like, okay, we have to at least know what this is. Yeah, there's so much downtime on those.

Like, even to get to the funny parts, you've got to sit through 45 minutes of boredom. Yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, sometimes you'll watch an entire video, We found this crafting instructional video called The Magical Rainbow Sponge that's in the new show. It actually kicks off the current show. We watched the whole thing.

It was about an hour long. We're like, well, it's kind of a boring instructional tape for this crafting technique. But then we thought the host was funny, but it wasn't until after we watched the entire thing without fast-forwarding that we realized, you know what, she gets way too excited about these crafting things she's doing, like way too excited. So we went through and we watched it again, and we realized she does all these little excited little yelps and saying, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, whenever she's making, you know, using the sponge to paint different patterns of paint on paper. And so we thought, what if we just cut all those together in a row?

Just the part where she's squealing with delight at what she's done. And it turned out to be really funny. But, you know, you don't even realize it until after you've seen the whole thing. So you do have to suffer quite a bit sometimes before the true what you're looking for reveals itself. Nobody should get that excited about a sponge.

No, no. Certainly not a crafting. Sponge, I mean. Yeah. This one just, I mean...

There's a point where it sounds sexual, where she's just almost orgasmic with delight over this craft sponging technique. She really likes it. But I'm almost envious. I don't get excited about anything in life as much as she does about these sponging patterns. What am I doing wrong?

I wish I had that enthusiasm anymore, but it's been beaten out of me by all these tapes, I think. Well, yeah, I certainly feel that way, too. Well, I mean, you've been touring around and having the shows for years. What I was kind of wondering is the fan base that you've sort of created doing this, especially over the years, it's like, what is that like? Because I know just dealing with movie geeks normally, you've got nothing, but like, when they get together, it's just constant references and quotes and, like, they barely exist in the real world.

When they're together, it's like a whole different thing. So, like, what is that like for you? Oh, I mean, well, it is kind of a weird thing because, you know, everybody has these sort of things you do with your friends and these inside jokes. But now all the inside jokes that Joe and I had and our friends had are public because everybody else who likes the show does them too. So all these things that we quote, you know, I have just found their way into other people's lexicons now too.

So it's weird when somebody that you don't know or maybe you just meet after a show will come up and start quoting something to you and you're like, how do you know that? And they're like, oh yeah, this is. I keep showing it to people. Yeah, exactly. So it's very strange, but it's fun, too.

It's almost like this collegial atmosphere. And, you know, for us, the thing that's missing from YouTube, and certainly, like, it's great. I mean, you have all these crazy videos that would never otherwise surface. So we're not knocking YouTube. But the thing you miss from that is you don't have the communal aspect of it.

I mean, you've read YouTube comments. That's not a community. That's, you know. That's just people cursing, usually. Yeah, see, what you miss is getting people in a room together and watching whatever it is, a bad movie or this footage that, in our case, that you're not really supposed to be watching in public, or, you know, it's not meant to be watched in that context, but here you are with a group of a bunch of people, and especially with our show where you're projecting it on a big screen somewhere. in a place that serves beer, usually, and you're giving people permission to laugh at, for example, a training video that's similar to one you had to watch where you couldn't laugh, you know?

So it's almost cathartic in a way, and it's contagious, and it's kind of like this communal thing, this sort of happening that everybody's sharing. And I think that's why, even in the age of YouTube, people will come see our show and and even, like, screenings of things like The Room, and, you know, because it's about that experience of being together and doing it, and experiencing it, rather than just watching it on a little two-inch window on your laptop. Yeah, I think that's, in all kinds of movies now, that's coming back, because so many people aren't going to the theater normally, even just to see movies. You can watch them on demand, or you can just, you know, wait until they hit Netflix or whatever.

I think a lot of that normal viewing has gone down. But when you can add a show level to it, when you actually have, like, a communal experience going on and interactive kind of stuff, I think that keeps bringing people out. And I think that's sort of finding a whole new rush these days because, yeah, it's something that people don't get sitting at home watching the other 95% of stuff they watch. Yeah, and that's encouraging, I think. And, um.

And for us, I think more accidental than anything else. Like, it wasn't some grand design. Like, let's bring this community together. It was more just like, this is what you do. Like, that's how we grew up was sharing these goofy finds with people and somebody's, whoever had the biggest living room or the biggest TV or, you know.

And now it's just doing that same thing, but for strangers in a bigger venue with a bigger screen. And that almost amplifies how funny it is. You know, you're watching a a training video that was supposed to be watched on a little break room TV VCR unit, and you're watching it on the 60-foot screen in a movie theater or some other performance venue. Sometimes we'll be sitting there watching it being like, I can't believe that this video that we found in a garbage can, and here we are playing this at this grand movie palace or whatever. you know, in Paris. You know, it's the strangest thing, but I think, yeah, I think we just got lucky in that people were ready to kind of have that experience again.

Yeah, I guess you would have to say that. I mean, sitting there going, I can't believe we get to do this. And other people enjoy it, too. Yeah. It is very weird.

I mean, everybody has their little inside things, and certainly, like, most of our comedy projects over the years have not found a huge audience. I mean, the documentary that we made that we spent five years of our life making that we ended up funding with the Found Footage Festival. You know, it's on Netflix, but I don't think a lot of people have seen it. We're proud of it, but it wasn't widely seen. But this, you know, goofy little hobby we did is now this thing that we do for a living.

It's very strange, but it's pretty fun. I guess this, as long as it's going on and people are enjoying it, you will continue to do it. I mean, you have... written and directed and, and, you know, different types of projects. Is that something you want to continue doing or, or at some point see yourself moving into, you know, exclusively? Yeah, no, I mean, definitely we're, we continue to do things and direct videos and, um, you know, it's on footage festivals, like the other, other work, like, uh, there's a film festival in Brooklyn.

They just hired us to make a, uh, intro to the, all the movies that play this year. So, uh, You know, we're doing a countdown to it using exercise video reps, you know, like 10, 9, pump it, you know, that kind of thing. But in addition, we do other comedy films and projects like that. So I think we'll continue to be doing that. And we're also pursuing the Sound British Festival, like, to see what else we can do with it.

Like, we're on the road. We've been on the road for about... 13 months now with this new show. And it's been great. We've found a lot of videos.

We've been to, I think, 12 different countries with it. And, um, uh, all 50 states. We have five left under 50 state tours. So, um, it's been amazing, but, uh, we're ready to kind of maybe find a way to get it out to people without having to tour so much. So we're working on, um, we've got the book out, but we're working on a television show too, that, uh, we hope sees the light of day, but we didn't, we're not sure.

And, uh, and, and yeah, we're just pursuing other things like that. That's, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, you would think with this many years of doing it in this year, you would start to run out of stuff, but there was just such a, just mass production of VHS stuff. Like it, it's, it's amazing how much is out there that people don't know about and hasn't seen the light of day and, and weird personal videos.

And yeah, so, uh, I guess really even this far in, there's no danger of running out of stuff. Yeah, not that we're seeing. I mean, we're finding fewer videos that we haven't seen already. I think that's just because we've been collecting for over 20 years, so we've kind of seen it all. But when you find a unique video, it's incredible.

And we still find a lot of them. We just spent over $ 100 on videos that were a dollar a piece. So we got over 100 videos at a thrift store in Memphis yesterday. And they're all stuff that we'd never seen, hand-labeled videos and other things that were unique. And so, yeah, eventually maybe we'll dry up.

I mean, we have talked to people who work at thrift stores who say that they're not even accepting VHS as a donation anymore because nobody buys them. Yeah, yeah. And we always say, please reconsider. It's very nice. But, you know, I think that's the main reason we were super ambitious with this tour over the last year is because we want to hit everywhere we can before these things are, you know, just gone forever.

So that sort of lit a fire under us. But, you know, I think what's cool about VHS and what people forget is how revolutionary it was when it came out and how it's kind of a unique moment in time that would be hard to replicate in this day and age, but You know, like I mentioned, when VCRs came out, you could have video and movies and stuff in your home and stop them whenever you wanted. You couldn't do that before, really, without spooling up a film reel. And it became so cheap and affordable to do. And then, you know, one of the first videos that was priced for the home video market that wasn't priced, you know, like $ 170 for a video store.

Was James Fonda's Workout. I think it was 1982. And it sold millions of copies. And that was... I think that was basically what started the gold rush.

You know, it was like all these mom-and-pop operations. So, well, let's get into the home video business. It seems affordable. And so, because of that, you got... Not only did VCRs reach market saturation, you know, like everybody had one in their home, but it was cheap to make them.

So. you've got all these weird esoteric things and people just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what's stuck. So you've got things like video fireplaces and, you know, I remember those. Video cat sitter. Show things that'll entertain your cat while you're at work, you know, and just really weird. You know, we have a video called Rent a Friend, which is like if you're lonely, you put this in and the guy on screen is your virtual friend for an hour.

Okay, that's sad. You know, things that you just cannot believe. That's sad. Yeah. I think it really was a revolutionary time and something that definitely can't happen again because we're so saturated with media at this point that there wasn't anything like that before, and I don't know.

I mean, the closest thing to it, I guess, would be when the Internet hit, and it completely took over that scene. But, I mean, I don't think anything has had that much impact short of the Internet hitting on society. Yeah, you're right. I mean, the occasional things will slip out where people sort of lack that self-awareness and that you'll find that on the Internet. So when it does, it's really refreshing.

You know, like there's that whole thing of like old people trying to use webcams, you know, and the reason that was like a meme was because these are people who are not self-aware and didn't, you know, weren't super savvy with the technology. And it was refreshing. And that's what's so great about VHS is there's sort of this wide-eyed innocence, this sort of naivete about the format and about how things work that it would be hard to duplicate in an Internet age where everyone's usually very aware that what they're doing may be seen by the world, maybe, you know, there's no... And they just, you know, the fact that every laptop has a built-in webcam now, it's... you have to be aware of how you use those things and aware of irony and all those things in the internet age.

So, I mean, I guess if there's any good news, it's that formats change, but bad ideas don't. They'll always be around. So, if there's a place for it to evolve, it will involve people with, you know, a lot of ambition and maybe questionable talent. That's sort of the, a combination with Tom comes up quite a bit in our show, and that still exists. Today, too.

Oh, yeah. That'll never go away. Yeah, yeah. Thank God. Well, we just kind of do a lot of general, you know, different types of movie talk.

I guess in general, I wanted to just sort of see what your, outside of the insanity of the stuff that ends up in the show, what your taste in movies is. Like, what are some of the things that you like to watch just as a somewhat regular movie as regular as we can get when you've seen this much stuff. I mostly, I mostly watch documentaries. Um, like I, I, I mean, I just, I see a lot of those in the theater still. I'll go see those.

Um, you know, I really like, uh, American movie and King of Kong and, you know, the less blank, uh, documentaries and things like that. So that was one thing early on that I was really into and why I was inspired to make, uh, feature length documentary with Joe so I still do watch a lot of those yeah I thought last year one of my favorite movies was the forgetting the name of it about the people who bought the huge house in Florida and then they economy tanked and they had to they were trying to sell it oh Queen of Versailles loved that movie thought it was a fascinating character study Um, and I appreciate, like, I guess maybe that's my taste in things that are more real in, uh, uh, but, um, but yeah, other than that, I watch a lot of, um, independent movies and foreign and, and, uh, you know, and I'll go see the Avengers and stuff like that.

So I do, you know, watch about a movie a week in the theater when I, whenever I can. So, um, I guess the documentaries, especially those type of documentaries, it doesn't surprise me because that's almost that same thing we were talking about of being unaware. It's like most of those, they set out to make one movie and they end up just stumbling upon this much bigger story. And some of those are perfect examples of that type of thing, which is, again, what you find in what you do anyway. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a connection there.

I mean, I really like Errol Morris and the Maisels and all those sort of documentarians or. Big influences and big appreciators of them growing up. Definitely. Well, yeah, as you said, you've been out on this tour for quite a while now. Is that the most you want to do is just kind of get the word out about the tour and tell people to go find you that way?

Yeah, I mean, I think the call to action I always have is that Joe and I can only be in one place at a time. It's usually only for an afternoon. So we're hitting thrift stores and looking for VHS tapes whenever we're in a new city. But I would just say that if you go to a thrift store, check out their VHS section. If there's anything that looks interesting, funny, or weird, let us know about it.

Our website is foundfootagefest.com, and we've got an email on there and actually our physical address, too, in Queens. Cool. We love it when we get a package of videos in the mail. It's like Christmas morning for us. We tear it open and can't wait to see what's inside.

So, yeah, we'll give these videos a good home. So that will be my main thing. And, you know, we continue to tour and probably are coming somewhere near wherever you're listening to this. So. go to our website, find out when we're going to be in your town, and if we're not in your town, email us, and we'll come there. Yeah, I always try to look at the VHS in the Goodwills and stuff like that, but yeah, it's just getting sad anymore.

It's all that very last run of stuff, stuff that was like, wow, I didn't even know they put this on VHS. That's about all that's left. Yeah, I mean, there's these, and we always see the same tapes, like you see, kind of Air Force One, that had a huge, must have just gotten a huge distribution on VHS. And it was a movie that's ultimately pretty forgettable. So that's straight off to the thrift store.

There's a children's movie called The Buttercream Gang, which in our early days, we'd pick that up because there's like this group of kids on it. It looks like a stupid kids movie, but it's just a boring kids movie is what it is. And we see it at every single thrift store. I mean, you go to, I'm sure if you went to a thrift store in Louisville, you would find at least one copy of The Buttercream Gang. They're just littering thrift stores all over the country.

I feel like there must have been this free thing that churches handed out or something. I have no idea why this found such wide distribution, but it's a running joke between Joe and I, where it's just like, hey, what do you know? They've got a buttercream gang. Yeah, sometimes they give that stuff away. That's why you saw an abundance in that first wave of DVDs. there was a huge, and it would be an every used DVD shop, would be Stepmom with Julia Robertson.

Oh, yes. Because they gave them away with the DVD players. And like before the secondhand places started to realize that, they were just like, wow, we sure are getting a lot of it. And there'd be like six of them and everyone would go to it. It's like, it's because everybody got it for free, didn't want it, and turned around and tried to go get another movie for it.

So I'm sure the VHS was the same thing. Yeah, like, I think for that same reason you find, like, a lot of, like, we find Babes in Toyland, or Toys in Babeland. I'm sorry. I rented that one. That's a different one.

But, yeah, Babes in Toyland with Keanu Reeves and I think Phoebe Cates or something. Yeah, yeah. It's a really unremarkable movie, but McDonald's was giving those away. Like, if you bought, like, a value meal in the 80s, you could either buy that Mr. Mom, or one other movie.

There was a Wayne's World run of that, too. Yeah, that's why there were so many of those. Back to Wayne's World. Exactly. So it is, you know, it's one of those anthropological things, like, you know, I think the most common CD you find at a used CD store is Please Hammer Don't Hurt Him.

So it's interesting to me, like, what has staying power and what doesn't? What's immediately at the thrift store and And then also what's on the widest distribution. You can tell those things by just looking at your local thrift store. Yeah, I have noticed that in CDs and movies. Yeah, you can tell what...

It's pretty fascinating. Yeah, and almost in a way it has its own staying power. It will always stay at the thrift store. So it's like you'll always have access to it until you just totally melt them all down, I suppose. Right, yeah, it's not going anywhere.

So.... I guess at least those will be like the cockroaches that survived the apocalypse will be Babes in Toyland and Mr. Mom. That's true. We'll be in an underground bunker somewhere surrounded by cockroaches watching Mr.

Mom. That doesn't sound too bad, really. That doesn't sound too bad. Yeah, Michael Keaton, I could deal with that. That's a classic, man.

I can watch that with cockroaches. Yeah, Toys in Babeland would be its own form of hell, or Babes in Toyland. Why do I keep. You just like hitting the behind the curtain room. That's what she's on.

Somehow the... I don't know if it's a national, I think it's just a New York sex shop called Toys and Babelands. And for some reason, that's taken the first seating in my brain. For some reason. Yeah, for some reason.

I don't know. Maybe I just walked by it. I don't know. Well, yeah, we could definitely, yeah, foundfootagefest.com and tell people to send you videotapes and go there and figure out what the schedule is and come out and see you live. Sounds like a plan.

Yeah, that'd be great. It's a really hard show to describe, but I think your listeners will get it. Definitely. And once people go, I think they instantly get what it is and enjoy it. And a lot of times people will bring friends, like, the next time it comes. town or something and it's grown that way and it's super cool to be part of this community that sprung up sort of by accident.

I mean it's a really encouraging thing to think about this goofy thing that you thought made only you and your friends laugh and to find out that there's a lot of other weirdos too that enjoy this kind of material so so yeah I would I would encourage people to just come check. It out definitely that sounds good well thanks for talking to us and I think that is about. It thanks for having me this is. My way of saying goodbye cause I can do my face to face and. Talking to.

I just don't understand how, like, you have to teach people to masturbate. Like, I just can't get over that. Are you forgetting that they were mentally challenged? But even mentally challenged people, like... From what I understand, well, and from things I've witnessed, don't have to be shown that they have certain body parts and what they can do with those body parts.

Well, many of them are masturbating, but only at a fourth grade level. We really need to master the technique. No pun intended. Okay, fine. Pun intended.

Whatever. When she was saying that, R. Kelly's voice comes in my head. And says, I can top that. I can top that shit.

So my friend, maybe you should bleep his name out, although I don't think he would be ashamed of this. He used to work with special people. And for some reason, there was like it was like a home for people that kind of lived like assisted, but sort of on their own. And there is a married couple that some of the orderlies would have to help have sex. They would have to, like, put her on top of him and, like, move her.

I'm just like, if you can't do it, you can't do it. I don't know. There are actually, like, international laws about that. And they feel that it's, like, something people have a right to do. But if you don't know how to.

Well, then you need help. That's what people are in the profession for. forest to help people have a rewarding life. I just wonder if one of these videos could have assisted them. It's sad that they didn't have access to it, I guess. I don't understand.

If you can't do it, I don't know that a training video is going to help. More importantly, where do I sign up for this? I think I might need help. Somebody... Needs to supply a woman.

Anyway, somebody get a hold of me with the details. Yeah, so we're back. Thank you to Nick for giving us the details of the putting together this festival, which it is amazing, like, that it's come together. The way that it has is, like, organically as it has, and then it's grown into this thing that, like, so many people kind of respond to now it's it's pretty amazing it. Was a lot more fun than i expected you hear like found footage and it's yeah okay i found footage it was funny but they had a really tightly edited uh horrifying and delightful program.

I just expected it to be, like, banal and possibly sometimes awkward found footage. But every second was fucking hilarious. Yeah. Emphasis on the fucking part. Because it was hilarious.

I mean, I almost peed. I think everybody did. I mean, it was really funny. Except for the wound. What was it?

Wound rounds live or whatever? That wasn't hilarious. It was really disturbing. And I think I gagged. I might have thrown up.

A little bit. They did. And they landed on what was it? Wheel of Wounds. Diabetic foot ulcer.

Yeah. Wait, you didn't do the dance. The crowd was like, yes! I think I need to watch that other training video of the guy dancing to be able to master that dance. I disagree.

I think that one was very funny, actually. Again, when they started showing the footage, I was like, oh, this is just going to gross people out. But when they spin the wheel of wounds and the guy starts climbing out of the diabetic foot ulcer. I'm not making that up. Go see the show.

He does it. And it's not just a bad cutout graphic. It moves with him. They went to some trouble for their special effects. Not really good trouble because it still looks bad, but the fact that they bothered to make it creepily move, yeah, it's really disturbing.

I think there were sound effects too, wasn't there? Like the gushiness of the wound. I couldn't tell if that was a sound effect or it was just the noises of people squishing their faces in agony. It was probably mine you heard. Or just leftovers of that birth explosion from the beginning.

Just to get the party started. Birth explosion. My new band will be playing all over America. What did they say? You can buy the DVD if you want to ruin your next party.

That would do it, actually. What about for the non-official opener? Yeah, yeah. That one. Any of these will probably, but the birth will definitely ruin your party.

The wounds won't help either, really, but it's still pretty funny because everybody could do that little dance that the guy does. Yeah, that was good. Didn't he look like somebody in the Bush administration? Who was it? Every guy in the Bush administration.

He did. He looked like everybody in the Bush administration, and he seemed really happy. To be there. I thought the guy that was doing the... the guitar finger exercises. It looked like John Waters dressed as Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Yeah, good call. I wouldn't put it past him. John might do that. Oh, are there other classics we're forgetting? I mean, there's...

Yeah, well, there was the magic sponge. The possum massage. The possum massage. The Get Rich Quick videos. The one, especially, my favorite was the one where she said that they didn't, like, they specifically didn't hire someone and pay someone to make it a flashy video.

Because if you're rich, why would you waste money doing that? And we didn't notice that as it starts on the trees in their backyard with the bad built-in 1982 credits that are in your camera. Yeah, it was scary. There's just so much. It's overwhelming.

It has shorted all my brain circuits. There's the potty training video. I thought in the kids' video section, they had a whole section of kids that they might have It might include one of my favorites, which is because they were talking about music and songs. Somebody gave me once a VHS of The Adventures of Young Moby Dick, which is a musical. And it's just the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

So is this like a musical starring a baby whale? Yeah. So is he like, oh, I think I'm going to need to watch this? Yeah, it's really good. I think in the beginning, he can't...

What is it whales do? I don't know. Whale? He can't dive up out of the ocean or something. He can't blessercise.

And his mom is trying to encourage him to do this. In a way, it's like the movie Happiness, if you've ever seen that. It's exactly like Happiness. Yeah. And there's like a starfish in it with a Mae West voice.

And it's young Moby Dick. It's the adventures of young Moby Dick. And it's one of those like little knockoff videos, usually with most of them have a religious quality. And they try to knock off the big Disney movies and look vaguely like them. But you can buy them for like two dollars for your kid and and ruin their lives.

I think this was sponsored by SeaWorld, though, because does anybody aside from Shamu or the new incarnation of Shamu actually do that jump in the air? In the natural world, is that really going on, or is it just, hey, kids, you'll never see this anywhere but SeaWorld. Come on over. I don't know, Free Willy. Once again, I think he was prompted by that weird little child.

Prompted by a weird little child. That Alaskan hermaphrodite or whatever it was that started. It, maybe. What movie were you watching? That's a different Free Willy that you rented.

You went behind the curtain and got Free Willy. Okay. That's what was in that room. Okay. I didn't quite understand it.

You were talking about having a religious quality. Most of the videos that were shown tonight, with the exception of the bluster size video, I have viewed at some point in my life, mostly in my childhood. you know I may have ran across them in my adulthood and like been like oh let's let's watch this again but they started out like the very first video was the power team and it was these dudes that used to travel around and like tell people about Jesus and like blow up water bottles and phone books in half and I remember my brother like being on some kind of exercise program to be like them. And so sad. That's funny because I was listening to a storytelling podcast, a live storytelling, and a guy who was a minister told a story, and it was just fascinating because it wasn't a very good story, but it had that quality that while you never think he's lying or making anything up, but it's clearly absolute bullshit from start to finish.

It has that quality like a sales pitch or something. And then in the middle of the story, he tells the story of how he tells the story of Easter. And it's a Western or something. Why the fuck are you dressing it up as Django Unchained? I don't know.

It makes no sense. I've never seen across the universe, but I'm pretty sure... That guy's pitch for Flower Power became across the universe. Am I right? Flower Power was pretty amazing, I have to say.

I would have backed that guy. Well, if for nothing else, just the umbilical cord guitar. Which you can get if you contribute to the Kickstarter fund to actually make this movie. So I want the listeners to kind of consider that in there. That was one of the things, and there were several, that after they showed it, they assured everyone that that's the last of that for the night.

We won't have to see any more of that. Yeah, they were very scary topics, and I like that they had multiples. Within the same show, they had several appearances of certain things. I mean, I really enjoy that there's footage out there for, like, such specific things, like possum massaging and, like, Just, like, how to carve a Santa face. By Bosephus.

I actually thought that guy looked like Bono. What was it carved into? It's victim. You find a hobo and carve him to look like Santa. And then next week it's on wound rounds.

Do the dance. Do the dance. No, I was doing the dance. Yeah, you guys heard that, right? Marlena is doing the dance.

Check out the sweet moves. Yeah, that was a blast. This is a shame that this is not a public access show because we could be almost as good as Frank's weird dancing with the Italian dress or the French dressing, I guess. Dancing with Frank was... He was right.

It's a train wreck, and you can't look away. It's horrifying and confusing, and I don't know what to do with it. But I'm kind of glad I've seen it now. I don't know what to do with it. That's all right.

I had two pieces already. That was a big-ass cake. That's an ass cake. You want to break off a piece of it? Hey, ass cakes exist.

It's like cakes shaped like asses. Sure it is. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure it's something. You know.

No, I'm not going to say it. I'm going to get off topic. No, now you have to say it. And now it's time for a Marlena moment. There's only...

I recently took this sexuality class and I only learned one new thing. Why aren't. You teaching that class? I don't know. Maybe someday.

Maybe someday. They should give you a refund. But I'm only going to say, I'm not going to explain what it is, but I'm just going to say cream pie. And I feel really guilty for not knowing what that meant. But my professor was really impressed because he showed us. a Spice Girls music video and then a Killers music video and asked what those two have in common.

And I said they were inspired by Russ Meyer's Faster Pusket Kill Kill. So I got an A-plus for the class. I mean, I earned that A-plus, but I feel like he would have given it to me anyway. Did you get the highest grade of anyone in the class? I did!

I think people wanted to know that. Nerd. Sexual nerd. I was really proud because I went through a lot of embarrassing moments for that 100% in that class because when he's like, I feel like maybe sometimes his questions were rhetorical, but when he's like, does anyone know what bukkake means? And I'm like, I do.

I do. Throw your hand up. Oh, oh, oh. I earned that 100% with my awkward knowledge of things like Cleveland Steamers. Yeah.

Why doesn't someone make a video of you is what I want to know. Because it needs its own festival. I believe. Is the comic book going to happen? Yeah, I have to learn to draw.

Oh. All right. That's an installment in the show right there. I've been working on it. I drew something on April 9th.

I saw you were shopping for drawing tables. Did you get that drawing table? No, it wasn't for sale. Oh, that's right. Just stealing.

Yeah. Yeah. They do have a replica at World Market. Yeah, you tell me. It's $ 300, though.

I don't really need one because I have a drawing table that I don't use. I just use a table. I made a desk out of a door and two file cabinets, so. Damn straight. That's how you do it.

Old school. I like those old, like, drawing benches. Like, in life drawing, you stand them upright. So, I built one. I couldn't find one to get the dimensions, so after a couple years of thinking, I'll do this, I just, like, fuck it, I'll make one.

And I made it, and now I just set stuff on it. This has been making drawing benches with Fred. Yeah, actually, I ought to do that video. Be kind, rewind. You should.

Like, I've been waiting to get an accordion for, like, years and years. And in a weird set of circumstances, I acquired two in, like, a month. And I use them as an end table. Both cases are stacked on top of each other, and there's books sitting on top of it. This is issue three in the comic.

I'm like, I put my finger in too many pies. This is my problem. Back to the sexual reference. Too many pies. Did any of them happen to be cream pies?

No. I'm going to go eat my ass cake. I don't have time for this. You can not put that in the air. That was mostly for your all's enjoyment.

I think everyone enjoys your stories. We're all friends here, and I want to share tidbits about my life with you guys. And I forget that we're on air. I like how you don't remember them next week. But everybody else does.

Everybody else, remember that time, and you're like, oh, yeah. Yeah, actually. You know what's really hilarious? I have an excellent memory. Like, I almost never forget anything except things that happened to me.

But if I had to read it, if you were to, like, if someone were to, like, transcribe everything that I say and I read it afterwards, I would never forget it ever. But since it happened to me and I told the story, I'm just going to forget that it happened. You just kind of released it. I know. It's like a baby turtle.

We need to capture this. Like a turtle. All right. So all that fun and more can be had if you go find yourself the Found Footage Festival in your local area. So as we said before, it is foundfootagefest.com.

And yeah, go figure out where they're going to be. And it's quite entertaining, not just the videos themselves, but I think the guys have put together sort of a fun show around it. So it's And that's something I noticed, too. I've seen clips of this stuff at home by myself, and it's awkward and weird, but, like, seeing it in a room with a whole bunch of people is an entirely different experience. It really is a lot more fun, I have to say, being awkward in a whole room full of people.

And you know what? I just got to thinking. So they did montages of the most awesome parts of, like, videos. We should do that of, like, the most awesome parts of, like, stuff that Fred says and the most awesome stuff that Greg says. The most awesome stuff that I say and you say.

Everyone should have their own montage of stuff that's hilarious that they say. I've put minor ones together in the past, but then I don't know that anybody wants to. I don't know how to find a way. Again, we're still trying to find listeners in general. Let me know when that kicks in.

I've been waiting for that. If you guys want to hear those, let me know. And if we get hundreds and hundreds of requests, I'll put them together. College kids are really dumb. And they'll, like, do anything.

Like, if you call it an internship, they'll do anything for no money. And back to my plan from earlier. Hold on. Tie that in. At least that's my theory.

I don't know. I've never had an internship yet, although I'm about to have an internship. Would you like to have one? Here at Movie Meltdown, we're looking for interns. Yeah.

I think that's a good idea. We'll get right on it. Isn't there, like, a place somewhere that has a radio school? I just made myself sound like a mentally handicapped person. Hey, do you know how to take care of business?

Because if not, I've got a video for you. All right. I think, yeah, on that note, we should get out of here. That's the sound of us driving off. That was Todd from Wild and Wooly.

This was their birthday celebration. Yeah, 16th birthday. It's very fitting that he just pulled away. So I think it's time to head out ourselves. So with that, otherwise that about does it.

We will return next week. Same geek time, same geek feed. Thanks for listening. If your life was on videotape, wouldn't everything be all right? When your head.

Hurts the morning after, then you could roll it back to late last night. You could replay all the good parts and cut out what you don't like. Oh, wouldn't you be in good shape if your life was on videotape? If everybody had ESP Everything I'd be okay We could see trouble coming And we could step out of the way When that grim reaper comes to call, then we could arrange to be out of town. It would be the great escape, and you could put it on videotape. ¶ I don't have a video recorder ¶ ¶ ¶ I don't have a crystal.

Ball ¶ ¶ ¶. When I'm not with my baby ¶ ¶ ¶ And I don't have very much at. All ¶ ¶ ¶. I can't predict the future ¶ ¶ Baby, I sure can't change the past But I know it will all make sense If you love me in the present tense And if your life was on videotape Wouldn't everything be alright? When your head hurts the morning after You could always roll it back to late last night You could replay all the good parts And cut out what you don't like Oh.

Wouldn't you be in. Good shape If your life was on videotape Oh, wouldn't you be in good shape if your life was on videotape? I had a terrible nosebleed for like four days. Issue seven. I think that's awful.

Like, why is that so funny? Because it's Merlin. I feel her pain. It's probably from that. It's probably from that.

The snoring. Yeah. That's got to be hard. This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown, produced and edited by The Oddity Studios, with the opening music performed by The Empires. For more on how to sponsor or support the show, Email producer at moviemeltdown.com.

Talk hard!