252: The Technology of Fandom

Movie meltdown movie oh man get out the dvd player this is michael winslow from police academy one through infinity. And space posit now brooks movie meltdown. 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.

Our nuclear reactor pumping out one million kilowatts of power. Five more cooling in the containment chamber. To your stations, we have a movie meltdown. You don't have the technology or the steady hands to pull off a procedure like that, so ha! What's up and welcome to Movie Meltdown.

I'm Brian. I'm Dave. I'm Lucy. I'm Marlena. I'm also Dave.

I'm not a Dave, I'm Ben. And I am Greg. Once again, we've broken it down with two Daves for some reason, just to confuse you guys. Well, you need a critical mass of Dave before you can get going, you know? Or, you know, you need a spare in case one blows up.

It's true. This is our main Dave. This is the emergency backup Dave. Again, we have posh Dave from previous episodes. I believe that's auxiliary Dave.

Thank you very much. And our conduit Dave, as you were, was, again, from Tower of Tectobabble, so. All right. Well, as this week, you know, for. Our geek activity, we're getting into a very technological based discussion later.

So, you know, seeing as how we're going to get to that, I wanted to ask about a new innovative kind of movie and see how many of you have seen it. I know one of you hasn't because they wanted to go sneak into it earlier. Who has seen Gravity? I have. I have.

I have. Can I leave the room? Well, that's the thing. We're not going to spoil anything. I don't want to go down.

Can't you give Greg and I a couple hours? We'll come back. I don't really think you can spoil Gravity, though. You can. No more so than the filmmakers already did.

What? Oh! Okay, that's what I wanted to get basic feelings. You're saving me ten bucks? Is that what you're doing?

I was willing to bet money you were not going to be happy. With it, Lucy. So I kind of want to hear your take on it. Well, okay, here's my take. Actually, I both loved and hated this film.

I thought it was, they spent so much time making it look Amazing. I mean, it looks amazing. It's like you're in space. It really is. And it seems like they could have used maybe one one-thousandth of that time to write a script.

Just a script. I've heard that a few times. Mostly everybody's like, oh my god, it was amazing. And then there's one out of, you know, however many that's just kind of like. What is that dialogue?

Well, but those are just terrible. There's no amazing to them except it's amazing people keep giving him money. But no, these, I mean, technically it is just phenomenal. You are immersed in space. And some of even like just the filmmaking stuff that he does.

Like as a director, he has found new ways to do stuff and is making use of them within the first movie. You know, it's like nobody has ever been able to do a shot like this. And I'm going to do it, and it's going to be spectacularly done. So everything from that aspect is done. I will give you...

I mean, there's times when it's just sort of. As I described it, that became the fill-in-the-blank part. It's like, okay, we're going to get these really cool effects. We're going to do all this cool camera movement. We're going to get all this other stuff.

And then people got to say stuff. You are describing Star Trek the motion picture. Avatar. I feel like the... I mean, like...

It definitely did get kind of boring at times because you're just watching stuff and not listening to stuff. But if you notice, there wasn't a whole lot of background music. There wasn't a lot of anything. It was silent, and there was very sparse speaking. I mean, she talked to herself a lot.

But you almost feel her isolation. It felt almost intentional, but it was kind of like, there's. Something cool going on. I haven't seen it, but do you think the casting has anything to do with that? I don't hate Sandy Bullock.

I think she does a good job. As good as she can do with the material. Yeah, I just, I get the feeling just, you know, reading up on it, like this is, yeah, it's a revolutionary movie, but then the producer steps in and says, but it's got to have to have Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in it if you. Want the money. No.

And I really didn't even have as big a problem. I think I was more in your camp, Marlene. I felt like it was supposed to be that way, and some of the things that are said are kind of silly, but It's almost silly on purpose as like we're in an extreme situation now and these are the things we're going to have to say to kind of keep ourselves going. Even if it's ridiculous stuff, it's us trying to keep ourselves distracted from this or. Keep ourselves focused on what's going on over here.

You know, it's like I think some of it felt like it really was put in there on purpose and sometimes it may have just been lazy. But, you know, overall I still think it's an amazing movie. Well, I was actually offended by the way that they wrote her character because she just wasn't a smart character. A little. And the only way you knew she was supposed to be a smart character was because at the beginning, the man, George Clooney, says, you're a smart woman.

And we're like, oh, okay. Wait, she's supposed to be smart. He's a space cowboy. You've got to listen to anything he says. But, yeah, when I walked out, I gave it a new tagline, which was, in space, no one can hear you yawn.

And that was basically my synopsis of the film. Technically, it shouldn't even be gravity. It's orbital momentum. Yeah. I mean, eventually some gravity comes in.

Well, sure. But yeah, for the most part, it's not much of that. It's inertia. It's inertia. I mean, it was just so beautifully done.

It's just her backstory, and it just, all of it felt silly. There was a moment, and I'm not going to spoil anything, but there was a moment where I think the movie could have gotten really weird. There's sort of a disorienting. Moment where you're like, what is happening now? And I feel like that could have taken a turn where it could have gone someplace really interesting, and then it just didn't.

Later you'll have to tell me which way you're taking it, because I'm taking it in a really weird. Place right now. Question from someone who hasn't seen this. How did they get into space? Were there American rockets?

They're astronauts. Well, they actually have to bend the chronology because they're on a space shuttle. Oh, okay. I don't want to see it. And we don't have any of those anymore.

It's funny because they're in a space shuttle and the Chinese space station, which is under construction now, comes into effect and it's done then, so there's this weird dichotomy of. It exists in its own universe. Exactly. I don't know what the year is because none of this stuff happened in the first place. Maybe they're saying we need to have the space shuttle.

Exactly. At the rate we're going, maybe so, yeah. It could be a used space shuttle. She bought it off herself. Like at the beginning of the movie, it came out.

There you go. All right. Plot hole solved. What year is it supposed to be? It doesn't say.

It's just when they went in space. I feel like he was. In the 60s. No, wasn't he? I think they intentionally made it vague.

It's got to be pretty recent because there's so many other people up in space. It's got to be in somewhat recent years. But still, it doesn't have to be pinpointed because if you try to pinpoint it, it doesn't fit a timeline of any sort. How many stars were on the flag? 67.

It was weird. It was the Circle Stars. Is that a... Seems kind of dated, but. The president was taffed.

They were wearing them serenity uniforms. They look kind of cool. It was kind of steampunky. Yeah, it was pretty cool. They're ruining what I wanted to see.

They're saving me money. You should go see it. And when you see it, you should definitely see it in 3D. Do not bother not. Seeing it in 3D.

It does have the benefit of being basically the only movie I've seen in 3D that deserved it, I think. It's worthwhile to see. Even Avatar, because I thought that did a good job. Avatar in this was probably the... This especially.

This actually adds to the. Story, I think, in 3D. As much as I hate the stupid glasses and it's why I don't want to watch most 3D anymore, other than the fact that it's not worth it, but even then, the glasses are just kind of annoying. Like, within this, it almost works because... they're wearing the helmets and so much of this you're kind of in their pov and it's like it kind of feels like that like it works on so many levels because you're wearing these dumb glasses you're so uncomfortable because it's yeah it's like it's here's a little taste you don't have to eat toothpaste for dinner. But this is what it's sort.

Of like but that it i think that sort of plays into the the whole effect they. Should have done that they should have given you. Like Space helmets. No, just candy out of pouches. Frozen ice cream.

Are you going to see gravity? Okay, you have to eat this popcorn, this liquefied popcorn out of a baggie. Astronaut ice cream. That's what they need. And Tang.

Here's a packet of Tang. Man, the concession stands should have been loaded with this shit. The movie is more successful at creating tension than maybe any film I've ever seen. I mean, it's really, it's really impressive. It really doesn't let up.

And it has a genius setup to it that becomes cycle-like, and that, like, adds so much to it. So it's worth seeing. Like, it really is really well done on so many levels. Maybe not all for some people, but. You know what I've realized?

This is how I see movies now. I don't actually see movies. I just kind of hear people talking about it, and I'm like, I'm good. I blame podcasts. Yeah, I.

I haven't seen a movie since 1996. That's why I. See everything opening weekend. I don't want to hear anybody say anything about anything. I want to be the first to bash it, damn it.

I know he's listening. Okay. So you always go to an opening weekend. So there's always people dressed. Were there people dressed up as astronauts for opening weekend?

Sadly, no. They were dressed just as stars. Because I want to breathe. They're making this 50 Shades of Grey movie. Are there going to be people dressed up as characters for that?

I hope so. Oh, yeah. Just a lot of bored housewives. Yeah, some of them will just be stumbling in in their normal weekend attire anyway. I mean, the only people that read that are people who actually are not into fetish things.

So it's going to be people's gross misinterpretation of what that. Culture actually was. It's the slutty outfit they bought at Halloween. They're like, this is what it's like, right? It's going to be made with like... really uncomfortable handcuffs or something.

Is that the costume? The slutty housewife? The slutty bored housewife? Can you get that at, you know, at the costume shop? I'm sure it's out there.

I mean, they've made slutty sriracha bottle costumes. I'm pretty sure they probably made that. That's a sticker? Yes. They've made it slutty bag of peanuts.

What's the slutty bag of peanuts look like? A slutty bag of peanuts. Oh, you should see her peanuts. A slutty bag of nuts? Is she wearing like a monocle?

A slutty monocle. It's not that clever. It's just a little, it's like a tiny little low cut, very short dress that looks like a box of peanuts on the front. Is she handed out on an airplane? A sexy airplane?

They don't think that deeply about these slutty costumes. They're just like, it's an object. It exists in our world. Let's make it into. A slutty costume.

Can we make it slutty? Do we have the technology? Slutty what? Slutty Paul McGann. There's very, very many slutty TARDIS costumes.

They've got slutty Daleks. Slutty dollars oh yeah. Saw lots of pictures of those on the internet yeah right after. Halloween see fans ruin everything. No it's i i hate people that is.

My that's my words to live by well. I have a newsletter you may be interested in i mean did you all see the the thing that fred posted right before halloween about costume it was like slutty first edition version of old man in the. Sea dude that was hot come on now No, what was my favorite? What was the one that was like utter depression or. Whatever that one was?

Slutty depression. That's a great costume. It was like hot slutty melancholy or something. Slutty on weed. Slutty, aren't we?

All right, on that slutty technology note, let's take our break, and we'll get back and get into our not-so-slutty technology. Sluts are fun. I'm not a slut. I just love love. What's it called?

You'll be my little friend. You'll be my little friend. You'll be my little friend. And it's just like me Way up there, thank you, man I'm a slut like you You say you're looking for me And I'm just like me too I'm gonna let you know the truth I'm a slut like. You Okay, look, you want a videocassette recorder, right?

Right. And you know that RCA sells SelectaVision, their four-hour videocassette recorder. That's the one I want. What are you waiting for? What if we threw in a free cassette?

Okay, two. Two? Okay, double it. Four cassettes? 14 hours of blank tape worth almost $ 100 free if you buy now.

What do you say? I would have bought it at two. SelectaVision's almost $ 100 tape giveaway. We don't know when to quit. I would have bought it at one.

What are you doing? Making a long distance phone call. Beijing Hotel. The year is 2021. Reloading or not?

The world is wired. Your storage capacity? I can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in my head. Information is power. And secrets are a thing of the past.

Unless you hire a courier, Like Johnny Mnemonic. Hit me. How do you feel about letting. Your head anyway? I had to dump a chunk of long-term memory.

You had to dump a chunk of what? My childhood. For Johnny, inputting the data was easy. Let's just start with what you got in there and what it's worth to the world. The hard part is making the delivery.

Double cheese anchovies? You weren't on the menu. Charlie! They were waiting for me, Ralphie. Johnny.

I'm loosening. The information you carry. You must protect it with your life. Keanu Reeves. You can't shoot me.

Not in the head. Johnny Mnemonic. Hey, Lucy, is there anything else we should watch? It's funny you should ask me that, Brian. I was just thinking that people should go see The Counselor because it has been, I don't know if there has been as much negative press about a film maybe in the history of cinema, and it is so unfair.

It is categorically unfair. I thought it was great. That's all I'm going to say. I'm just going to give it a ringing endorsement and walk away. I've not even.

Heard of this, so I'll go and check it out. You go watch 2005 Doctor Who. I'll go watch Castle. It's a trade. You're on.

I think it just wasn't sold the way that it was supposed to be sold. And everybody's really upset about the Cormac McCarthy script. And I don't know why they were expecting anything other than exactly what they got. I thought it was fascinating. So it's very talky.

It's very literary. There are explosions in it. That's good, because I have CGI fatigue like you would believe, so I'm all for some talkies right now. Yeah, I thought it was great. I mean, it's weird as hell.

I think a lot of people have said that their problem with it was that Cormac McCarthy doesn't know how to write a script, and that's what I loved about it. I mean, it's like nobody gave him a copy of the story and said, this is how you do it. He just kind of did what he does. Totally didn't know how to write a novel, didn't stop doing it. And they made three movies out of that first one.

He didn't know how to end a novel. No, that's Peter Jackson. Neither is Peter Jackson. He doesn't know how to cut. Shoot the film, let God sort it out.

He's like, let's just throw it all in there. Kenneth Toronto, just throw him in there. A transforming robot. Whatever. There's extra footage.

Just throw it in there. People should go see the counselor. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created... will also cease to exist. Tweaked Audio, your source for high-performance, noise-reducing earbuds.

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Sounds better. Dave, I do not get superheroes. Oh my god, I don't get you. What don't you get? Well, the meatbags were going to say that if you're a geek and like podcasts, then you could try Tower of Technobabble at www.toweroftechnobabble.com Then this started.

Well, it's up to you, I'm gonna get my taser and put a stop to this. Tower bot out. Okay, monkeys. It's nap time. Hi, this is Nick from.

The Found Footage Festival. You're listening to Movie Meltdown, the meltingest podcast around. Oh, wouldn't you be in. Good shape if your life was on videotape? That's part of your problem, you know.

You haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are. Answered in the movies. Now, on with the show. Where did we get all these wonderful foods?

These gadgets and gizmos we desperately need. The World Wide Web in the palm of your hand. All of technology starts with demand. Like someone who walked around barefoot all day Decided he can't go on living this way With blisters and boils all over his feet There must be a better way to walk down the street He gets an idea and then starts to draw A brilliant solution to protect his past. The first prototype of something so new.

He saw it was good and he called it a shot. All right, we are back and it is time for the grind. In this segment, we discuss a specific topic or question related to movies or general geekiness, and this one certainly is. This week's topic comes more or less from Ben, but I've sort of honed it. Ben was throwing out a question more like, hey, remember when you could be a fan of TV?

I'm paraphrasing. Be a fan of TV and movies before there were VCRs and DVDs and all that stuff that we have now, and back when it was a challenge to be a fan of that kind of stuff. But I'm assuming not everyone listening or seated here remembers those times exactly. So I thought we would broaden it a little and we would do more of an overall discussion of technology and the way that it's changing in the last century or so and how it makes it a bigger topic. So then we have to look at how each time the technology updates, how it changes your being a fan.

So the technology of fandom and I mean, the invention of the movie camera itself is It's pretty recent in the grand scheme of things. So, I don't know. Each year, things change. It updates stuff. It changes the way we look at it.

And does it change you as a viewer is what we want to throw out there. So, where would you. Do you want to go start with the old school stuff, Ben? The reason I wanted to bring this up is... The Doctor Who again.

Imagine that. Imagine that. Well, when that show started in 1963... About the first six years were in black and white. And as of 1978, every copy that the BBC held had been either wiped or burnt or trashed or thrown out.

And it's an interesting story. Why, actually? It's because in the 50s, whenever TV recording first started, or not even recording, whenever TV first really started, all of the TV shows on BBC were pretty much plays. They were like televised plays. And they weren't recording it.

So if they ever wanted to do a rerun of said play, they would hire the same actors to come back in and basically shoot the show again. Man, they should do that all the time. Bring back Happy Days. The Happy Days game just gets older and older. Come on, Henry Winkler, get up here.

Hit that jukebox. So for actors in Britain, it was seen as just another, you know, they do theater, they go do TV, and... problem was this thing television recording started and the agents of these actors started to get worried because they thought well you're just going to be able to film one of these plays and then just keep playing it over and over and over and our actors will never get work again this was an actual fear so they started writing into the contracts whenever an actor would agree to do a TV show that if the show was to be played a second time, they would have to pay a fee. And if it was to be played again after that, the fee would be so astronomical that it would actually be cheaper to just make a whole new show.

So the idea was they were protecting their actors' livelihood. Nice. I mean, you could see this being a legitimate fear, especially at that time when people really didn't understand the technology yet or how they could get ripped off. From the BBC's point of view. It was too expensive to ever show a rerun.

So they had, and not just Doctor Who, pretty much every show they had was just sitting on the shelves. And they were all taped on videotape, and videotape was really expensive then. So it got to the point where they were looking at all these old shows, and they were like, we can't show them again. We need the videotape. So they started to tape over them.

Something else that was going on was they were... selling the show to other countries that had been British colonies, where there was still a big English-speaking population, like Australia or Hong Kong, a bunch of countries in Africa, Canada. And what they would do is, they would actually put the shows that they had recorded on videotape onto film. And the way that they would do it, I think it's called cine-recording. Kinescope. They would actually show.

They would actually play the show on a screen, have a movie camera. In front of it in film. They'd film the monitor. And then that way, because film is a more universal media than videotape, they could send it out to all these different countries. So all these different countries were getting these versions on video.

I'm sorry, on film. And then, in theory, they were supposed to watch it, send it to the next country, and then the country was supposed to send it back. Where, again, they would have the same problem where, because they couldn't show it over again in Britain, they would have to burn it. So, basically, by 1978, they had a whole bunch of them missing. And a lot of it is because these films that would come back, The company that was in charge of the videotapes, they thought that they were films, and they didn't want them, or they didn't think it was their responsibility.

The part of the BBC that was in charge of films, they were like, well, these technically aren't films. They're film recordings of videotapes, so we don't really need to take care of them. And they just assumed that everyone else had copies. So stuff was just being burnt, thrown out. And crazy fans of Doctor Who got wind of this.

And one fan actually went down to the studio, somehow got in, And there was this big pile of. Them that were being slated to be thrown out. And he basically almost tied himself to it like a guy up in. Chained himself to a tree. Chained himself to a tree.

And so eventually all this was stopped. And about when all was said and done, because a lot of the films had not been returned from overseas, so some of them were sent back. But when all was said and done, about three years' worth of six years... of Doctor Who was gone. And for other shows, it was like none of them existed. But Doctor Who was a bit more popular, so there were more copies.

And so the thing is, though, for a British fan, from day one, there were British superfans of this show. And because it would never be rerun, the only way that a British superfan could kind of document the show and keep it they would take their tape recorder, put it up to the TV speaker, get everyone in the house to be really quiet for 20 minutes, and they would audio record that show. Because it was the only way that they had of hanging on to it. And a bunch of people did this. And so, in the 80s, when they realized how much stuff was missing, these fans realized that they had the only actual.

Version of it on audio. So these audios started being tossed around and circulated, and In the 90s, the BBC decided to get the best versions of them, clean them up, put on narration. Long story short, the only way I have of actually experiencing a bunch of old Doctor Who episodes is through these fan-made recordings. And on my iPod now are a bunch of recordings that some guy in 1960 did with putting his microphone up to a TV thing. And I think for kids.

Today, that's unheard of to think that You can't just go to iTunes and look at anything ever. And it's so precious in a way that all these things are missing. And it was just announced a couple weeks ago. You probably all saw on the internet this hoopla about. I forwarded you the link.

Yeah. That's the first thing I thought of. And I had already you know but i was glad to see yeah you're a geek you already knew but basically so in in africa they found at a tv station two almost complete stories that should have been sent back in 68 but they but they or they remain in six in 68 but they were from the 70s when they were sent there but Long story short, these things were found. They were released on iTunes overnight. And these were stories that I had been listening to the audio of for years.

And I knew word for word the audio. And I was seeing the pictures actually for the first time. And it was like... You can ask my wife about this. I was laughing for an entire week.

I would just be sitting there and suddenly I would go, I can't believe I just watched a web of fear. It was unbelievable. She's a good woman. She's a strong woman. It just got me thinking how there was a time in our lives, I think we're all old enough to think back to this, where Before there was VCR or whatever, and if you missed something on TV, you missed it.

You didn't know if it was ever going to come back. And I was just wondering, back in those days, when you don't have a way of going to your shelf or going to iTunes, how do you become a fan of a movie? How do you get to know it frame by frame if you have no way of actually owning it and watching it frame by frame? That's... It's like.

It gets harder the further back you go, too. At that stage, I guess you would wait around and maybe sometime on the late show they would play it again. But think before TV. Those people in that era where there was movies, and they loved movies, but they had to just keep going to the theater week after week. And if you loved a specific movie, at that point they weren't doing revivals.

You just never saw it again. It was just material to be consumed. And films got destroyed. That they used any means possible, like with TV, like the kids in Britain who were taping Doctor Who on their audio records. I used to do that before I had a VCR.

Well, the question is, was there rampant fanship like that if you couldn't do that? I mean, were there any movies from the 1940s that people just had to see? Or did they just say, oh, it's a movie. Hey, that was good. Next movie.

I think it depends. I think there's always somebody like that. There weren't as many, I guess, because technology makes it easier to do that way. But, I mean, there were huge movies then, and think how something like Gone with the Wind, how huge that was. And then everybody had to buy the book.

Even if they hadn't written the book beforehand, then it became that crossover. So you're holding on to this as a version of that movie that you saw, if you did it in that direction anyway. You know, something else, back to the Doctor Who in the 60s with BBC was... whenever they were throwing it out because they knew that they couldn't play it over again as a rerun without paying all these fees, at the time, they couldn't conceive of a home video market. So they didn't see the potential where these could be sold and beyond every Uber fan's shelf. And so when you talk about a movie from the 40s and all that, I sometimes wonder why they didn't remake more movies back then.

I mean, they could show the movies again. I guess that situation hadn't happened, but they just didn't have reason to. I mean, there wasn't the revival thing, so there were so many new movies, I. Guess, that you. Studios would re-release films.

They would. From the 60s, because every few years they would just send something back. But even then, that was like 60s. It took a while before people started getting to that, let's look at this old one. But since they already owned the property a lot of the times, there were rampant remakes in the 20s and 30s, and even into the early 40s, because these things would run in the theater for a week or two max.

It wasn't like the era we grew up for. Star Wars ran for a year and a half. This was programming. There was no television. There was no competition.

So films would be churned out, and films would be remade pretty constantly, especially between the silent and the talk era. Did audiences get mad if a movie was in a theater longer. Than a week? A lot of the time, films would change midweek. You'd see films that were only through Wednesday.

You'd see films that only played Saturday, Sunday. It was just how they lived. Now in bigger cities with more theaters, you'd have longer runs on pictures. I brought that up recently. People always complain about remakes now, but I'm like, when I was looking back, pulling music for State Fair, I'm like, there were three versions to State Fair in a 40-year period.

The problem now is that it drives the industry. Yeah. Everything is a remake or a reboot. It's gotten worse, obviously. I think something I'm wondering, like with State Fair being remade over and over and over, if no one had seen, or if people couldn't really remember what that first State Fair was like, would they know to be upset that it was being made over again?

Probably not, because it wasn't precious to them. Like, we've watched Star Wars a million times, they can't remake that. So when did the aspect of a precious fan geek begin like how does that. Happen you know i mean i don't remember anything even like stories of people like having that kind of attachment until and again i think it's a generational thing i think it took almost that maybe right before but but it definitely set in by that gen x thing because you know everybody before that had a life and they had stuff to do and you hit that generation that was just like Kind of spoiled and hung out at home and watched reruns all day. It was a different world.

Starting in the mid-70s with Star Trek. Yeah. Where they had the first Star Trek convention around 1973. This was years after the show went off the air. Now it was still in syndication.

And it was generating a bigger audience in syndication. And here it was on Wave TV at 11 a.m. on Sunday. Yes, it was. It was the alternate religion. I subscribe to that religion.

People would congregate at conventions to watch 16-millimeter prints of Star Trek or to watch the blooper reels, which were kind of the holy grail. And it kind of grew out of that with general science fiction fandom, which was mostly literary or like old movies. And it grew, I think Star Trek planted that seed in, like I said, the early to mid-70s. And on its heels, pretty quickly became Star Wars. And that's when science fiction impacted pop culture so much.

But, you know, I'm as old as Doctor Who. I was born in 63. And I'm on my 12th life. You're almost out. I remember that era where I recorded stuff off the television constantly.

You mean with the tape recorder? I even had a reel-to-reel. That's how old I am. I had a small reel-to-reel that my uncle gave me, and then I had cassettes, and I would record shows and movies that I liked. I knew a hardcore collector here in town who recorded movies off Fright Night, the old WDRB show, and then he would dub them down without commercials, and he would listen to them in his car as he delivered newspapers.

He was a fanatic. But the same fate befell that because that show was on videotape on WDRB. Well, that tape was too precious, so they'd tape an episode... Show the movie tape over it. All the movies were still on 16 millimeter.

Most programming, because television was so movie-based when I was a kid. Yeah, which is totally changed now. 60s and 70s was constant movies. Every network had movies every night. Local television was tons of rerun movies and shows, all without film.

If you were in a network, you might be showing something like All in the Family on tape or a big movie on tape. But usually you're showing film, which is why they had so many technical difficulties. The film would snag and burn. Please stand by. That was going on still.

It surprised me when I looked into it. In the mid-' 80s, they were still showing 16mm prints on local television. The last go-round with Universal Classic Horror locally was Memories of Monsters on WHAS at midnight on Friday. They were still showing film. This is a really stupid question.

How did they show the film on TV? Did they literally project it? It was a reverse kinescope. Literally, they would film the screen. And they had a sync videotape camera that could get rid of the flicker.

It would be synced to the film rate, so there was no flicker. And was it too expensive to put it on the videotape? Back then, yeah, they didn't even consider it. Because, you know, I guess the first VCR, home consumption VCRs were in 1975. Yeah.

But who could afford that? Very few people. These things were like $ 1, 200, $ 1, 500. And the tapes were like $ 80 a piece. Yeah, very expensive.

And if you wanted to buy a pre-recorded movie, it cost about as much. And it was a very exclusive market. My friend Bob, who works at the theater, was the first guy I knew with a VCR, and he had a beta, and that was around 1980. What did he record with his first VCR? Everything.

Since he was a genre fan, he recorded tons of sci-fi. And then there were guys who were trading... There was a whole network of guys who would trade tapes. And they would try to cram as much. Everything was on EP.

Because they'd try to cram. As much as they could onto that tape. And it would be like, is that a man? Is that a man? It's a colorful blob.

And that's how I saw a lot of films for the first time. Like, you know, Phantom of the Paradise. I first saw it at Bob's house one afternoon. It was like, some guys in makeup. I don't know.

I just remember when I would record TV shows with my tape recorder and have everyone be real quiet in the house. Yeah. I used to dream, wouldn't it be great if there was a way to keep the pictures, too? It just seems so impossible. It was hard to wrap my head around how they were doing it.

They're recording images. on a tape. How do they do that? I'm just trying to figure out how it's like a pre-programmed thing into kids to just want to do that. It's just that ingenious thing, I guess. Because that's the thing.

I was doing the same thing. I didn't talk about it with any other kid, but long before I had recorded Star Wars on VHS, I had it on a cassette tape. Oh, yeah, I did too. I remember mine was almost feral when that came out. It was like, I'm just keeping my family shut.

Small-gauge film. You could buy 8mm. Or 16 occasionally. And you could get movies that way, but you had to be a pretty hardcore collector to get that stuff. Like with the kids in the 60s watching Doctor Who in Britain, it was a serial show.

It's like each week ended on a cliffhanger and it went to the next one. So there was this built-in continuity. And I think for fans, it was like they wanted to have the whole story to be able to go back. And there was no other way. Like there weren't any. books on it.

It was just the show and every week. And they knew that it would never be shown again. And they kind of felt like it was precious and they had to keep it for somehow. And you know, actually, all of the Monty Python episodes, those were scheduled to be tossed out. And I've heard it was Terry Jones actually went down, stopped it, got him in.

He kept all the videotapes in his, I think, in his attic for years until people started wanting to show them. PBS started running them, you know, and all the affiliates. I remember Monty Python was being run in the mid to late 70s here. And I had seen, you know, Holy Grail cut up on the CBS late movie where they cut the good stuff out. And then I was watching it one afternoon on PBS and they didn't cut it at all.

So I got to hear, you know, how do you know he's a king? Because he's got shit all over him. For the first time on regular television. Like, wow. Yes.

This was an event. Really like, oh, they're British. It doesn't matter. I think as kids, you know, it's like you see this thing and you just innately know that this is really neat and they're not going to show it again. I need to hang on to it.

I don't know why I feel that way. Kids just like repetition, I think. Like, I mean, if you ever... Like, my niece will want to watch the same movie over and over. I mean, when I was a kid, I watched Beauty and the Beast every morning and every night.

Yeah. Every day. I mean, I couldn't do that as an adult. You had accessibility to do that. Yeah.

That's the weird part. I couldn't imagine that as a kid. My daughter used to watch Destroy All Monsters every morning for breakfast, you know. It was the sense of event. Yeah.

But, I mean, like, I think all kids just want to watch things over and over and over, so they're, like, they're ingenious in a way they're just like we're gonna find a way to make this. Happen that's the thing nobody ever talked about it like it's not like the kids had a meeting in the kids. Club it's not like I had friends who told me. Things I didn't by the way on my sister's tape recorder which which the funny thing was is we recorded the audio to Wizard of Oz it was like oh there's so much music and everything we were right up next to it pushing play and record at the same time and It's on every year, so it's not like. I don't think.

We ever listened to it. We just wanted to make sure we had it, and then we watched. The next year anyway. On the Wizard of Oz thing, we had an 8-track of. It, which also had all the dialogue.

It was almost the entire movie, because they went back and forth, but I remember my parents had that, and you could just kind of sit there and listen to it, and they did mostly the songs, but there was a lot of dialogue in there, too. You know, the. I was a big Marx Brothers fan. I still am. And I loved.

This is wacky, but. I somehow got a tape of the Groucho Marx thing, and it was supposed to be songs or music from the movies. And what it was, it was actually Groucho as an old man singing the songs from the movies. And I didn't want that. I wanted the actual stuff from the actual movie, which I thought was funnier and better.

But that wasn't out. So, actually, the next time PBS played Duck Soup, I put my tape recorder up, too, because that's what I wanted. And it wasn't available to me. So it's sort of like I was like, well, if I can't buy it, I'll just get it myself. I think piracy, that's how piracy starts.

That's what it is. It really is. Fans will always find a way is the end result. And now we have so much. Opportunity and technology to make it so easy.

Like, so easy that it's destroying an industry. But. Again, it's like it would have, like, if it weren't that easy, somebody out there would still be doing it. I mean, look at, like, what you were saying in the 90s. Like, well before there was an internet to pass it around, people were passing tapes.

They've been passing audio tapes for years. They were passing videotapes around at that point. Like, that basis is, you know, that network of geeks is always going to be there. It was. In some places, it was even encouraged, like Mystery Science Theater.

At the very end, they'd say, keep circulating the tapes, because there was a fan base that would tape them and give them to people who didn't have access to cable. And then in the early 90s, I remember there were certain bands that I sought out that if you found the right record store, CD store, whatever, they were putting high-quality bootlegs onto CD, and they. Charged a lot of money for them, too. But, which they were probably paying. Sometimes they weren't that high quality.

Right. Sometimes they were high quality, sometimes they weren't. You don't know until after you bought it. You know, I found one place that you could listen to it before you bought it. Oh, they liked their product.

And their people. When I was in college, it was a similar place. They would have them on, they'd press them on an album. Uh-huh. The album was so thinly, I mean, you could look at it, you could barely see the grooves.

It was very thin. You could read newspaper. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, and that entire industry is gone now, too. It's like all the money I spent and the time I spent driving, looking for these places for something that I could click.

Well, the thrill of the scavenger hunt's gone. I get mad when I can't find something that I'm looking for instantly. I'm like, why isn't this on the internet? Everything should be on YouTube now. Most of it is.

It's a scary part. To get back to the Doctor Who thing, when I first became a fan, I see a theme here, Ben. When I first became a fan and I was in my little closet, I got the episode guide from England. And I was looking at all these titles of stories like, ooh, the Daleks master plan. That sounds amazing.

And then I find out that it was burnt. It doesn't exist. And I was like, but everything exists. What the hell, man? And it's so different to think that.

Now, kids have got it damn easy. Crazy old man here. I had to walk 16 miles in the snow without shoes. On to watch Doctor Who. To steal my movies.

Let's say Jedi for me. By the time I got to Jedi, I was ready. I'd seen the two. I'd gone to Empire twice, which my family, you never went to see the movies twice. You just, you know.

And Just getting my parents to the theater once was a big deal. Twice was huge. And as early as possible, my mom took me to see Jedi. And immediately, as soon as I go home, all the friends, you go and you talk about it. You talk over the scenes.

And that repetition came because I wasn't going to be able to see it for years. I don't know when I saw it again the next time on VHS or whenever it was that I saw it. But I knew every part of that movie because I really... I think I was more ready, this is never going to happen again, I've gotta, and it's like I was a kid and I absorbed it. All of it.

And then you tell it to your friends, oh that scene, oh yeah, oh that scene. had so much of the dialogue right. It wasn't like a game of telephone. Right. Luke, I am your brother. Right.

Luke, let's totally make out. Okay. You're playing with the toys. And we did, and we had the toys, and we didn't have the right toys yet, but we could, because we had them from Empire or Star Wars, and so you'd play the scenes, or you'd get the bubblegum cards, and oh yeah, that happens. Storybooks.

I had the storybooks. And I did eventually get the Scholastic Book Club storybook from Jedi, and that That helped. A lot, too. There was, like, the album, The Story of Star Wars, I remember, which my wife can quote in her sleep. She listened to it so much in 1979, she's got it.

It's hard to remember how primed we were for Jedi, because Empire ended on a cliffhanger four years earlier. I mean, and this is in our formative years, it's like we had four years to think, and then what happened? So then it's like, we're poring over everything, every clue, it's like, did Han live? I don't know if Han lived or not. And I absorbed that.

I think more than any before or after movie ever, and You know, I don't have to ever watch it. I don't watch it. I watch the others. I don't watch it because I know exactly what happens. We had all the supplemental media.

We had comic books, gum cards, records, books, story books. And that's kind of where that hit. Like, it had been around. And now you can just get the movie. But they saw it as a...

That's where they latched on to the money-making with Star Wars. I mean, I was a comic book geek at the time, and there was an ongoing series, a Star Wars series, and there were certain things they couldn't touch. It's like Han was missing between Empire, and they were on the lookout for Han, and they'd almost get him, and they missed him at the last Ward Mandel. So there was a story going on, and it actually kept that universe alive and vital. I've been noticing... that more and more it seems like DVDs have fewer and fewer extras.

There was a while there where. It's packed with documentaries, packed with commentaries, and I'm wondering if it's because downloading and everything can be here in an instant. The supplemental stuff doesn't have to happen anymore because kids are. Like, oh yeah, I already got it. Well, it's that.

And it's also an expense the studio doesn't have to incur by producing The big selling point for DVD early on was that it was like laser. And you got this cool stuff, and now you just go buy the DVD. It's the only format there is, really. Well, even now, the DVD and the Blu-ray market, even that, which is pretty mainstream, is getting to the point it's for collectors. It's for geeks, and they will do a special edition version and put it on Blu-ray.

And that's all that buys it. Because the other. People are just going to stream it on Netflix and. Say, oh, I saw that. And they don't need all the extras.

They can care less about the extras. To me, as an old school geek, it just diminishes the experience so much. But it's a different generation. First one I ever bought was The Matrix because it had like eight hours of stuff on it. I think it was a flipper disc.

It had the White Rabbit game. Basically, I bought a DVD player to get this movie at the time because it was just so... Amazing. Did we actually live through the only true movie geek period? Is the next generation of stuff going to be, yeah, movies are okay, whatever.

Again, I think it's always been around and there will always be a version of it, but we hit at that point where it became a thing and it became widespread and it became a very unique thing. Again, no generation had that before and now no generation is going to have the same experience. It's going to be different. But it'll never be like that. There's just so much media produced nowadays.

If you guys waited four years for the next Star Wars movie, you'd have to wait a week for the next thing that's going to catch your attention now. It's like Friday to Friday, new movies released. There's so much material, especially genre material, being put out. Television. Netflix series.

These things are all new. This may be the old man in me again, but I find more and more I don't like new movies. I I much prefer to watch an old black and white thing. It feels more, I don't know, it feels more honest in a weird way. This totally old man here speaking, but just.

There's a certain rush to, when a movie's released, it has from Friday to Friday to make its money because the next week there's going to be another movie that's going to be the big movie. Knock it out. It's like what last week was Ender's Game, this week was Thor, and next week will be, there's like movies coming out. I'm so far behind. I still haven't seen The Lone Ranger.

Should I see that? Yeah, definitely see that, by the way. I've never really seen movies in theaters. Why am I here? I've never really seen movies.

Well, and that's part of it, though. I think there's a good portion of the population that falls into that now. And I don't think that would have been the case years ago. Because everybody went to the movies. That was your only way of seeing it.

But now that there is a constant streaming source of entertainment that sits in your house waiting for you to get home, why the hell would you get a babysitter and go pay for parking or dinner. Or whatever else? Has technology ruined it? It's changed it. I think that's what it is.

It's changed it. I have to go for spectacle now. If there's not. Because if it's a movie. That I'm going to go for the plot or the acting, I'm probably not going to go to the movies.

If it's not like Gravity, or I'll give you the one that I did pay to go see, and that was Pacific Rim. This is big, loud, obnoxious explosions. Not Michael Bay explosions, this is going to be. It's robot fighting. If I don't go in the theater and shake.

Um and and it felt you know fill my view there's no reason to go right um i'm not gonna even watch it i'm not interested in watching it at home it's not a thinking movie that i'm gonna sit down and watch again. I understand that maneuver but at the same time i think that's become part of the problem that's what so many people do and that's what they keep making is big. Young people are still going out when my. Kids are raised and I can leave them at home and go to the movie theater. I'll go every weekend.

Party! Dad's gone! I can't, you know. I can only, you know, point to my experience working here for a dozen years. We're at the theater, by the way.

My movie attendance dropped steadily every year. Yep. Regardless of quality, because we showed all the good stuff back then. I mean, you were a very arthouse theater when this theater began. We were an arthouse and independent revival theater.

That's one of the reasons I eventually left. We abandoned that. Um. In the past year, what have I seen here? I saw Pacific Rim twice in one day.

It was astounding. Because I'm a geek and I wanted to see Guillermo on the big screen. I saw The Way Way Back, which I really liked. Sweet movie. And then I didn't see anything until I watched Wicker Man twice this weekend.

That's it. That's all I've seen here. The real Wicker Man, by the way. I'm all about the cinematic experience. I saw four movies in the theater in the last week.

And I didn't need to. One of them was a documentary that I just as easily could have watched at home, is probably on On Demand, which is Muscle Shoals. But I really like the audience interaction. I like seeing it in a darkened room with strangers, and I sort of feed off of other people's reactions. I saw, what was that last, I'm going to conflate all my end titles, but the one about the James Franco, like, This.

Is the end. This is the end. Whatever that is. I went to see that in the theater. I wound up being the only person in the theater by myself and did not laugh.

I could have watched those at home. Yeah, it was very disappointing to me personally that there wasn't like a bunch of other people there. Hi, by the way. But I actually, and the. Four movies that I saw this week, all of which were incredible, which was Muscle Shoals. short-term 12, 12 Years a Slave, and actually I really liked About Time, which I'm somewhat hesitant to say out loud.

But I don't know. For me, if I see something at home, it's easier for me to forget it, whereas if I see a movie in a theater, for whatever reason, I can remember that experience. I can remember what theater I was in. I can remember scene by scene what my reactions were. And if I see it at home, it kind of all merges together for me.

If I had my option, I would do that. That's why I didn't have children. It's largely a. Matter of having the time and having the ability to do it. But where did you see most of these?

I saw two at the Kentucky Theater, and I saw two. At the mall. Okay. And the Kentucky Theater you have a very strong relationship with. In my era of moviegoing was the Vogue here in Louisville.

That was my home. I had a powerful, strong relationship with that, but it's gone. So I'm bereft of that now. I don't have a place that is that social center. Not even here, which we built from the ground up, did I ever feel that.

So I have all these wonderful memories of seeing movies theatrically that are just like yours where I can remember everything, but it's gone. I mourn for that very much. I used to love going to movies. I don't do it as much now, and I caught myself not going as much because I think home theater has basically ruined, and I'm going to sound like Ben's old man here, Fighting old men. Fighting old men.

People don't know how to see a movie anymore. And it's not just teenagers. I mean, yes, teenagers are obnoxious, but there's a certain amount of callow youth. That you'll expect. I went actually here at Baxter Avenue.

We saw The Descendants last year with that George Clooney movie and we enjoyed it, but there were older ladies behind us. I mean, they're in late 50s, early 60s, not incredibly. Older, but Adults? Adults, yes. Responsible adults.

They were sitting, not right behind us, but they were in the row behind us on the other side. Doesn't George have a shirt like that? What kind of flowers are those? At room volume, they weren't whispering to each other to the point where I got up and said, ma'am, could you please stop? And they just looked mortified, but they didn't know they were just impending on anything.

They watch television a lot. We've thrown far more adults out of this place than we ever threw kids out. Oh, yeah. And they should know better. Texting is bad at movies now.

Even though it says not to, it's really bad. My favorite experience with an inappropriate talker was I was at a movie theater in Los Angeles, and a woman's phone rang, and we all had that moment where we were like, seriously, your phone's ringing? And she answers it, and she says... I'm in a movie right now. And then there's sort of this collective sigh of relief.

Like, well, she answered the phone, but she's doing the right thing. And then she says, but it's not that good. What's going on? Oh, my God. Amazing.

I think everybody needs a hitter with a bag of pennies. At this point. I think it's okay. I think as a society we should allow that. I think it's funny that even the theaters have just gotten on board with, look, everybody's got their damn cell phone, they're going to be texting.

So now our stupid games at the beginning, we're inviting you, get out your phone, text us an answer to this stupid trivia question that everybody knows the answer to. But they have, there's now like the sleep mode, you get coupons if you put your phone in the sleep app or whatever. It's so ridiculous. And then they've actually gotten really aggressive at the Cinemark, which I kind of love. There's now, it used to be kind of like, don't do this, and if you don't mind, and if it would be okay with you, we'd like you to.

And now there's like, I don't know if you've seen it, but there's like, we will, and there's like a stick figure and then a target. Gets placed on them. And it's just like this angry voice saying, we will throw you out. We will do this. For a while.

We are watching you. A few years ago, there was actually damping technology being used where they were jamming. That's great. They had to stop. Because I spend way too much time going to the theater.

They were knocking out all signals in theaters. Nice. And they contemplated it here, and it's like they started saying, well, that's really against the law. Stupid law. Just put up a sign that says if you don't want to don't come.

In yeah don't come to this theater I think that would win people over. That is a complaint with a lot of people. If you started advertising as, you know, we're going to tell you up front, your cell phone's not going to work here, so don't bother. I would go there. What they need is segregation.

I want the theater for cell phone people. There are those draft house type theaters where it's adults only, no kids, no phones. You use your phone, you get thrown out. I read somewhere Madonna got thrown out of her own film. Festival or something where she picked up the phone and they threw her out.

I would go to those theaters. I mean, that would be a selling point for me. They are doing it. Yeah, I would pay a premium to do that. There was a big controversy a couple years ago because some restaurants started having signs saying children will not be.

Served or something. Kids, they're a lot of trouble. Well, it was something like crying children parents will be asked to leave because the whole thing was it was a more expensive restaurant and people... The economy is tight. They're paying to come out and have an experience, and they didn't want to ruin it.

I think the sign should be parents will be asked to parent. Do something about it. No, no. Wouldn't want that. No, I had this conversation with my best friend today because her kid is like, I mean, she's absolutely my favorite person on the planet. but but they could be brats we i mean we weren't doing anything we were doing everything to make her happy but we both were just at the point we're like we're gonna shake you don't.

Don't shake the thing. Because like i was telling lucy earlier she's like i want this i don't want this no i want this no i don't want what do you want i'm gonna choke you yeah like it has you know like That's the thing, and I'm not a breeder, so I feel like my opinion might not matter that much. But whenever you don't have kids and you look at a parent with a really annoying, bratty kid, you're just like, what a shitty parent you are. But no, kids are shitty. Sometimes you're an awesome parent and your kid is shitty.

Sometimes it happens. Yeah. I love my nieces and nephews, but sometimes they're just bratty. What are you going to do? And this, I mean...

I was like, if I ever have kids, I'm going to build a padded room. Or I was like, no, that's probably illegal. Not if they don't see it. I was like, I'm going to soundproof the walls of their bedroom, and when they're bad, I'm just going to lock them in their room until they stop screaming. Have you seen Carrie?

Are you going to have a closet? I'm not going to lock them in a closet. Go to your closet. It's a nice padded room, not under the stairs. It's their bedroom.

It's just their room. They just can't come out of it. Some kids respond to example. Some don't. I was lucky raising Allie.

She's, I've got to be honest, a pretty angelic child to raise. It was pretty amazing. But she's had her days. And when she has those days, you know, she'll suffer for it. It's time to leave the zoo.

We did. That's what people should do. Conduit Dave went so far as to build a theater in your basement so you wouldn't have to deal with. All the play theaters. He has a big screen.

I don't even let my wife in. I was using my cell phone there the other night. He hit me. Rightfully so. I had it coming, I admit.

It's because I love you. I was texting you. He's trying to parent you. You need to learn some lessons. Spare the rod, spoil the band, I always say.

But it was amazing, because you actually made your own screen. You figured out a way to keep it taut and staple it down, and it's amazing. I feel like when you watch a movie there, you feel like, I've earned this movie. That's right. I control my environment.

If they're screaming, it's me screaming. And I think a lot of people have gone to that now. I think it became that once we can. Do it at home, it's like. I don't have to put up with anybody else.

I can, you know, watch whatever I want to watch. I can pause it when I want to. I can, you know, I don't have to deal with other people texting and talking and being an idiot. And when you, when a DVD, by the time you pay for you and your wife, when a DVD is the same price. Yeah.

You can buy the movie. And you know, when you throw in a babysitter or whatever, it's, it's just not worth it. Just not worth it. That's a sad thought for the movie geeks out there today. But as usual, you get a bunch of geeks like us together and invite them to talk about fandom and technology, and they're going to dive deep into that topic.

And that's what we did here. So this conversation goes on long enough to spill over into the next episode. So we'll cap it off here for now. But as a little bonus, we're going to round out this episode with something extra. Since you don't get many DVD extras these days, we'll give you a podcast bonus feature with this last bit here.

And of course, it revolves around Star Wars. So enjoy that, and we'll be back next. Time with more on changing technology and how it affects the geeks of the world. And with that, we will return next week. Same geek time, same geek feed.

And now, on to your bounty hunter bonus feature. Are you going to. Ask your Boba Fett question? Oh, no. Brian is the one that sent it.

I sent it to you, and I was like, what the hell? This dude has way too much free time. What's the Boba Fett question? I've got to know now. It's a theory.

I'm shaking over here. Wait, wait, hold it. You need to press recording in and put this out as an extra. This is a DVD extra. Bonus episode.

Boba Fett is actually the one that murdered Luke and Leia's aunt and uncle. Well, Luke's aunt and uncle. Luke's aunt and uncle. I guess technically Leia's, but she doesn't know him. And the reason why was Darth Vader would have been protecting them because he would have known they were there.

He's been to their home already. There's no way, and that was his only family that he knew of that still survived. Otherwise, he would have been there long ago. Other points were Empire wouldn't have had no reason to murder them. In fact, all the Empire ever did was just take people and interrogate them.

Detain people. They never went out and shot them up. He would have had the same style, since he is a clone, to have done it. He probably would have been competing with the other bounty hunters that would have gone to the site and looking for the stolen tapes. He was at the scene because in the 97 re-release.

He was there. Oh, he was walking around, you're right. Yeah, so I mean. He's at the scene of the crime. He has motive and opportunity.

He has far more thought than George ever put into it. And then they. Start to point out that in Empire Strikes Back, whenever Vader is using the bounty hunters, he keeps making specific. He keeps. Giving specific directions to Boba Fett as if he knows that.

In the past. Like last time, you bastard. Boba Fett did something a little bit above and beyond and he wants to make sure that nothing bad happens again. In fact, Remember, Boba Fett's going to shoot Chewbacca in Cloud City and Vader stops him. See, I remember having theories about that years ago.

Vader's given Boba Fett on a short lease. Now I've got to watch all these movies again. Whenever they're on the start of the story, he's given them the instructions. He goes up to Boba Fett and he says, no disintegrations. Not like last time.

Very pointedly. Yeah, so he hired him to go find the stolen data tapes. Interesting. And to cover up his track, Boba Fett killed his aunt and uncle. That makes sense.

And my addendum to this is that I can totally believe that. And the only reason we think that it was Imperial Stormtroopers that killed Uncle Owen and Aunt Bruce is because Obi-Wan told Luke. That's true. And I'm thinking Obi-Wan probably knew that it was Boba Fett. He's a notorious liar.

He is. A lot. If there is anyone in the universe who has a beef against the government, it's Obi-Wan. He's sort of like a teabagger guy. He wants to bring down the government.

And so he's thinking, you know... Luke is a potential ally. He needs a 9-11 moment to really get him going. Let's wind up Luke and point him at the Empire. Yeah, because think about it.

It's been established that the Imperials, they're not going to drag people out in the streets and kill them. A locked door stops them. You know, it's like, if the door's locked, just move on. All Uncle Owen and Andrew had to do was lock their doors, and the troops would have, like, left. No wonder Vader hired Boba Fett, because the Stormtroopers would be really, really mad about this sort of shit.

I maintain that Obi-Wan, he wanted the government to be brought down, so he was like, yeah. Luke, it was. Only there this besides and you know that we see nothing about that the moment that he sees their charred bodies you see on his face that is the moment where he's like yeah i'm gonna bring down this government and obi-wan's like. It makes it so much better and you know lucas didn't do anything That's some rich backstory right there. The huge loophole in this theory.

Yeah, he said, your dad's dead. Darth Vader killed him. It's true from a certain point of view. The huge loophole in this is I've seen troops. You killed him, son of a bitch.

I've seen the footage, damn it. I know how it went down. Obi-Wan says only stormtroopers are this precise. It's like, and we never see them be precise. But they are that precise because.

He is a stormtrooper. They're cloned off of him. That's why they're not good is because they're not true on all two. Of copies. They're the VHS copy of Boba Fett.

Jango Fett had an astigmatism but he had corrective lenses and he never gave those lenses to the stormtroopers. That's why he had two guns. He was like, one of these will hit. By the way, I'm really nearsighted. Nearsighted.

God, that memo never got me. You know, at first I was like, oh, that's me. Then I thought about it. That makes sense. It fits.

I thought about it all day at work that day. I was like, Obi-Wan Kenobi is an old hermit living in seclusion just like a guy in Montana stockpiling ammo and writing manifestos. Hey, leave me out of this. Ted Kaczynski, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yeah, it's the same thing.

They all have white beards. It's the same thing. Counting? I mean, Alec Guinness was an old drunk anyways. Space team party.

Who's the most despot in Mandalorian? War is over, I'm a piece of Mandalorian. The story is stumped, Star Wars historians deep in debate, but they play at benefits. Rhyme renegade, show to penetrate. First and second offense, I won't hesitate.

Got a job to do in Darce, the guy that delegates. Got something against Skywalker, someone he really hates. I don't give a fuck, I'm after solo For all I carry, could be hiding at Yoda's dojo Gotta make the money, credit's no good When a Jabba's run a shop in your neighborhood Think you can cook, I got a grappling hook Let's make this quick, cause I'm really booked I'm a devious degenerate, defender of the devil Shook on all the trash compactors on the detention level My backpack's got chits, well I'm Boba, the vet Well I bounty hunt for Jabba Hut to finance my vet Well I chill. In deep space Our mask is over my face. Will I deliver the crown?

But I still narrow my eyes. Cause my time, I don't like to waste. Get down. I'm a question, wrap inside enigma. Get inside a slave bar and find your home and signal.

From Endor to Hearth, Ripley to Spock. I'll find what you want, but. There's gotta be a cost. Say my name is Boba Fett. I know my shit is tight.

Start acting right. Yo, fuck on the carbonite. Got telescopic sight. Flamethrowers on my wrist. You still don't get the jet spike.

Pussy made the kick. Talk is a made a hit. You think I give a shit? Your mama is a bitch. I'll see you in the Sarlacc pit.

You just flipped my switch. Integrity's been ditched. You scratchin' on my itch. You know I shoot to get. I got Fabina's circotina's way to lick my lusty lips.

So I'll let you get back inside your little spaceship. Give you a head start, cause I'm a sportin' con. Consider the startin' line a sneaky smile. Hide inside, hope you have hyperdrive. Pray to stay alive.

Don't try to slip me five, cause I never take a bribe. Do the beat of a different drummer. Baddest bunny heart. Let no man put us under all else. Be put under as in six feet Got an imperial fleet backing me up Gonna blow up any attempt to defeat They got a dead star Got four payments on my car Handed over to Hammerhead At most I see bar I used to carjack And he's a bar back Just go to show how you can get back on the right track Guess for me that's not an option Can't say that with more clarity Me.

Going legit would be like Jar Jar with. Speech therapy My backpack's got jets Well I'm boba, the fat Well I brownie hard for Java hard to finance My bed, well I chill in deep space A mask is over my face. Will I deliver the pride? But I still narrow my eyes. Cause my time, I don't like to waste.

Get down. Face it open like a tom-tom. Faster than an automobile. Or a motorbike. I can try and do the deed.

I'm living on gum. Jabba has to hit the fit. Contact a recipient. Overcode the plan. I'm focused on politics.

It's legit. Back in the day when I was a slave. Living life in a vast lane. Lacking a pod race. Mean street tweak.

That became a basic case. So the space aid put that place postage. Took up a number of cars. Called a Clone Wars Lifestyle all about girls and cars Gettin' fucked up in fucked up bars See I'm not a retard Or gay like the barge I'm large and uncharged with a face so scarred A cold black cart that's been torn apart The Sith wish that they had a dick so hard Cause it's long long ago when a pussy far far called me master Cause I'm faster than Pryor on fire I no longer have to hot wire I'm a hunter for hire with no plans to retire And all the sucker MCs can't call me star My backpack's got jets Well I'm boba I bounty hunt for a job. I hate to finance my family.

Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye. It's going to ramble forever. But I read that and I was like, son of a bitch.

No geek rambles like a 40-year-old geek. That's years of geekness just pent up. Oh, Grandpa, settle down. This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown. Produced and edited by The Oddity Studios.

With opening music performed by The Empires. For more on how to sponsor or support the show, email producer at moviemeltdown.com. Talk hard!