WUH: Movies with Dad

Wake Up Heavy is a weirding Way media podcast. Welcome to Wake Up Heavy, the world's greatest horror movie podcast. In this episode, my weird dad will. Be talking about Hello and welcome to wake Up Heavy. This is Mark Beagley, your host, and I am back doing a solo episode.

It's been almost a year since I did the Why Didn't I Rent This on Motel Hell, and there have been some episodes out since then, but I haven't done one solo in ages. This is something of an unexpected episode, not one that I necessarily planned on doing or even thought about doing after this happened. But as things go with me and my brain, once I started entertaining these thoughts, an idea popped into my head for an episode. So if you follow me on social media, you may have seen last month that I posted that my father had passed away on August twelfth, and really had no plans other than social media posts to get that out there. Around that time, a little after Christashi and I started talking about doing an upcoming episode for the show, or a joint episode for Wikipevy and the Culture Cast, and I thought, well, maybe I'll throw something at the beginning of that for whatever reason.

I don't really think this is something I need to talk about on my show, but I thought, oh, maybe i'll throw something on at the beginning, just as a passing note. This is one of those big life experiences, the loss of a parent, so I thought I might tack it on at the beginning. And then I started thinking, well, what would I say? And unfortunately I wouldn't be able to say, oh, thanks to my dad, I love movies, or thanks to my dad, he showed me The Exorcistic Way too young an age, or something like that. I see posts like that all the time, people talking about their grandmas or aunts or uncles or parents that showed them stuff and that's where their love of movies or their love of horror started.

And I can't really say that about either of my parents. I think their relationship with movies is vastly different than mine, and in no way similar to how I interact with Cleo with movies, and how I really like to show her the movies that I appreciate and to discover new movies together. And I hope for her in twenty years or whatever, that those are fond memories for her. Maybe she'll have her own podcasts and I talk about it. Who knows.

So no family members really inspired my love of film. My sister and I were movie buddies movie cohorts in our teen years when we would go and rent movies constantly, so I guess we influenced and informed each other's tastes. That first whole season of my show is basically movies that she and I watched a lot and loved. So when I started thinking about doing a little intro and couldn't say that, couldn't say, you know, thanks Dad for giving me my love of movies, I thought, well, what in the world could I talk about? And then all this stuff from my childhood started rolling in, and all the kinds of movies that we did watch and TV shows and and a lot of it really did inform later tastes.

There are certain movies by certain actors that I still love to this day that we watched religiously. And I also think that I brought some things to him that he may have never experienced before or would have sought out on his own. So this is about those things that we caught mainly on TV and enjoyed together. Who knows. Bloody looked in the heart of men.

A shadow knows. So a little bit of background on my dad. He was born in nineteen thirty four, so he made it to ninety. Just a little past his ninetieth birthday he passed away, and my mom and dad also hit the milestone of their sixtieth wedding anniversary, so all that happened over the summer, so he got to hit both those milestones. His death was unexpected, but not a surprise.

The last. I mean, you know, once you hit eighty, every hospital visit, and he had numerous hospital visits over the years, especially since they moved into their assisted living facility. Every one of those was kind of a wait and see type of situation. He got COVID during one of his hospital stays and I thought, oh, well, this is it. He made it through that virtually unscathed, So this was unexpected.

But you can do a lot worse than making it to ninety sixty years together with your spouse. And he was there mentally and with it and stuff until the end, so he knew those things happened. I don't think going back to the movies, I don't think that as a child, and I never really discussed any of this with him, but I don't think he was a big movie goer. I don't think that was part of the entertainment of his young life that his family, you know, went to the movie all the time. I mean, movies had been around, not for very long, but they're around.

When he was five, you know, that was a big year for movies and thirty nine Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind. I don't know if he saw those when they came out. I know that he and his dad would go and see a lot of the LA sports events, so baseball games, college basketball, I know was big with them. They went to wrestling matches when he was a kid, and then I think the other big entertainment was radio and growing up. He would regale us with those old tunes like and Twin Peaks.

Fans you'll recognize this Mayor's He Doats and the Java Jive, I Love, I. Love, I Love, and Love me Covent And. He would talk about the old shows like The Shadow and all that stuff, and kind of reminds me of Ralphie in a Christmas Story, a movie that we discovered together on TV back then, you know, after it kind of bombed at the box office and then became a staple of TV, and I remember him kind of lighting up when those scenes around the radio would come on. I don't think movies were a big deal for him. Radio, music, sports, all that stuff took precedence over movies growing up, although we did as a family go to the drive in pretty regularly.

There was one very near our house, the Sunnyside drive In, which at the time boasted the largest screen in the country. And I don't know if that means for drive ins only or you know, all kinds of movie screens. I would imagine that drive in screens are usually larger than cinema screens. And I don't know how long that lasted, but whenever I look it up these days, I always see clips about that. We did that pretty often, and one that I remember in particular, although at my specifics about it are very vague.

We saw a double feature sometime in the late seventies of either Jaws or Jaws two, with either Orca or The Deep, and I think I think it was Jaws two and Orca, but I don't know. And I would confuse Jaws and Jaws to for the longest time growing up, because I would see them on TV, and since this is mostly the same actors were in both. I wouldn't really remember what that was, but we had a VW square back, and so my sister and I would lay in the back and watch the movies from back there, and man, I know we went quite often, but really that's the only movies that I specific specifically quote unquote remember it was a aquatic horror double feature. Regardless of what the movies are that I obviously can't remember all that well.

And the only movies I remember seeing that I can recall seen in the theater with him are the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, and I remember pretty clearly it was at night, or at least we got out at night, so it may have been like the last matinee showing and we saw it at the UA on Blackstone. I remember being blown away by that film back then and the rotoscope, even though I had no idea what rotoscoping was or that was the technique that was being used. As you guys know, I have watched those with Cleo since then. They made quite an impact that movie and the others. And then I remember going and seeing the movie called The Late Great Planet Earth.

I don't know if anybody's familiar with that al legend. The author of an incredible best selling book called The Late Great Planet Are featuring Orson Wells. It is based on a book by Hal Lindsay and he also co narrates it with Orson Wells. It is basically an end Times Christian propaganda film, and we saw that at a little cinema I think that was close to the church that we went to at the time, and being just utterly fascinated by that whole idea, that predictions and taking things from Revelation and the rest of the Bible to extrapolate out and figure out when the end times were in these modern things that are supposedly matching those predictions. You know, Nostrodamus was always big back then, and so I kind of tied it in with that, and much before the Internet or any other social media or anything like that.

Those conspiracies, those Christian conspiracies of things like bar codes and the other big one I remember as a kid is the Procter and Gamble logo. I don't know if y'all remember that, and how it supposedly was satanic and all that fun stuff fascinated me and still does. I need to see that movie again. I don't think I've ever seen it since we saw it at the theater. And then the only other movie I really remember going to with him specifically, and I've talked about this on the show briefly when I did my Stephen King series is when Misery came out in nineteen ninety.

I think it was late sometime in November, end of the year. Our whole family decided to go, so me and my sister, her husband, my mom, and we took my dad and I don't think he ever forgave us because of that, because of the hobbling scene. He didn't get out of the car. And I do think he enjoyed the film, but he was not a horror guy, getting back to that, and I don't think he was happy about that scene. And as I was thinking about that and his age and the Wizard of Oz coming out when he was five, I'm thinking, well, maybe he saw that and it scared the crap out of him as a kid, and he decided from that moment on that horror was not his bag.

But he in this forty four magnet, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off you've got to ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky? Well? Do you bunk? So?

Since I grew up in the seventies and early eighties, most of what we watched was on TV, on network TV. We didn't get cable until I was in my late teens. I honestly, I know I've mentioned this on a show, think that I was seventeen or eighteen before we got cable. So it was TV for most of my childhood up until we got a VCR in the early to mid eighties, and then cable when we got that. So it was just whatever's on TV, this stuff that would play Friday and Saturday nights on the networks, And we saw a lot of big movies when they made it to TV, things that I still love today that I've talked about, things like Foul Play, Marathon Man.

I remember seeing Dog Day Afternoon, a lot of those really big seventies movies with those actors like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro and Robert Redford and all those guys. That's what we would watch. And then there was the Saturday and Sunday afternoon lineup on Channel twenty six. Action theater. Now, I would watch, of course, the horror movies.

Usually on those afternoons. My dad would be out doing yard work or god knows what else. He had a million different things going on. When I was a kid, he had side hustles galore before that was even a real term. So I would sit and watch whatever was on there.

But together we definitely watched the westerns and the action movies. And that's where my appreciation of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson come from. So the Eastwood movies, of course, the westerns, the spaghetti westerns, his westerns, which I think we both and to this day, I think I can say this, we both prefer his like The Outlaw, Josie Wales and some of the other ones. Of course I'm blinking on all the names now, but we would watch the spaghetti westerns every which way, but Loose, which is not a western but a comedy. And I watched that again recently and thought, oh, yeah, yeah, this was a good one.

This is why we liked this one. Escape from Alcatraz, all that stuff. And one of our faves that I know we caught two or three times was The Gauntlet and the Hail of bullets throughout that film, whenever the cops that are following him finally get to him, and they demolish a bus, they demolish a house, all this stuff, and that one was one of our faves. Charles Bronson, of course, the Death Wish movies. Gosh, all those movies that he made with jay Lee Thompson, we would catch.

I had no idea who Jaylee Thompson was or what he did at the time. Murphy's Law, Hard Times, Mister Majestic, Ten to Midnight. I think I talked about this a long time ago, but I'm sure we caught it at some point, or maybe I saw it on cable, because I'm not really sure how that would play on broadcast TV. It is possible, though, that it was on at some point heavily edited. I don't know that my dad would have appreciated the unedited version of it.

I love that movie. It's such a sleazy piece of trash and it's just great. I mean, how can you go wrong with a line like this? Warren? Do you recognize this?

Leo? What's that? Darn? You ever see one of these before? What's it used for?

What's the matter? Cut? But you're tongue. It's hard cracking off, isn't it. And I think as far as Bronson goes, aside from Death Wish and all those other ones, our favorite, and I talked about this on the Culture Cast was Death Hunt with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Oh God, Carl Weather, all kinds of people in that movie.

I know we watched that movie four or five times, you know, network TV, maybe even caught it on cable when we finally got it, and just absolutely loved that. I'm sorry, as I'm sure you can tell, my voice is even scratcher than usual, and I probably sound a bit nasily. This is one of the reasons I haven't actually done this episode up til this point. The other reason is that my wife had her second surgery. Her hip replaced a couple of weeks ago, so she is now bionic.

And we have been watching those two shows, by the way, and I caught my lovely daughter Cleo's that doesn't sound right latest cold and last week. There was absolutely no way I would have been able to do. This would have just destroyed my throat. Anyway, this is the first time I've been home alone for a while. My wife's been laid up for two weeks.

Now back to Action theater. One of the things that I brought to him was when they started showing Kung Fu movies. I don't know that he actually sat down and watched them all the way through with me. I'm sure we caught a few together. I remember seeing some early Jackie Chan films before I knew who Jackie Chan was.

Of course, Five Elements Ninja's Can't forget about that one got a couple episodes a few years back. About that whole deal of trying to remember that movie and then finding out what it was shortly thereafter. But the thing I remember is that on those Saturdays when I'd be sitting on the couch watching him, and he was off doing yard work and would come in get iced tea or whatever, And anytime he caught me watching one of those, he would mimic the bad dubbing and move his mouth a bunch and then say a couple of words in English. Hi, huh, you're trying to carry but I've just been carrying it. You got to do your part too.

It's your turn, it's yours. Look at it finished. I just told you know, didn't I? All right? We recognize that in the spaghetti westerns as well, and why that in Italian horror movies doesn't bother me or put me out of the film or any of that.

So I was used to those things from those movies, and those would come up in conversation over the years, and it always led to more of that mimicry and the sounds, the chopping sounds, and of course we would watch all the big sitcoms and dramas and things like that over the years. Mash was always popular Hill Street Blues later on Saint Elsewhere. But two shows that I definitely relate to him. One is Rockford Files, and I had to throw some of that music on it. How'd you like that opening?

I created that opening from when I first started thinking about doing this episode, and I listened to it like twenty times since I did it, and it just cracks me up. Rockford Files was big. That was I think one of his favorite shows. And then another show that he and I watched together was Police Squad, and I'm pretty sure I mentioned that on those episodes that I did with Mike and Chris. That little series you can go listen to over unwording Way Media.

That dumb humor. I think he had a love hate relationship with stupid comedies. When I think of that, I think a police squad. I'm sure we caught Airplane at some point and probably groaned all the way through it. The other big ones were the pairings of Dom Deloiz and Burt Reynolds, and he just loved those two guys together.

There was the End, which Burt Reynolds directed. We watched that one a ton Cannonball Run. I know I saw that in the theater, and I'm struggling to think if we actually watched that together on I'm sure we caught it when it came out on TVR and cable at some point. And then not a Burt Reynolds pairing. But the other Don Deloeze movie that we loved was Fatso, and I swear we watched that.

I don't know how many times we watched that, And I'm often surprised when I think of that, because I think, well, it had to just been re airings of it. I don't know that we ever rented any of those, but it's possible could have been Cable. But I just think, you know, once a TV station got ahold of these movies they just played them all the time. I know that's true of the Kung Fu films, those big packages of Shaw Brothers movies that were licensed out to local stations, and they would just run them constantly. That we watched Fatso a Ton directed by and Bancroft.

I remember noting that in my head as a young kid, a teenager, and think, you know, you don't see that very often a woman director, and not much has changed since then. Get the honey, give them in the cover them, well, get it? What else did they cover with that shot that I mean besides the orange wedges, grapes, peaches, strawberries, Junia, those big. Juicy stem strawberries are dipped into that dark doc chocolate, Jack darl. Harney, Jed died.

And another pair that we really enjoyed was Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. When I talked with Chris and Mike about the toy I mentioned that that we were more even though Cosby had his show and stuff, you know in the mid eighties and whatnot, and he was more family, more family friendly. At the time, we were kind of a Richard Pryor home because of those movies that got played and I realized as I was farming for clips for some of this stuff, and this includes you know, the Brons and films, the Eastwood films, Dirty Harry. I mean, we watched I think twenty six would show all three of the current at the time Dirty Harry movies, so Dirty Harry, Magnum, Forrest, and The Enforcer in one day and we'd pretty much watch as much as we could of all three of them.

And I realized for a lot of those films, I have never seen them unedited or uncropped for TV. You know, that would go for fatso that would go probably for the end, and it definitely goes for the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor movies because I got a stir crazy or I was looking for stir crazy clips and I'm like, oh shit, he says the F word a bunch this, and I don't recall any of that because we watched it edited, and I wonder what they did with that. A lot of times it was just not bleeped out but erasd and they didn't actually do dubbing over it. That's right, that's right, we bet uh, that's right. You don't want to know shit.

Let's say it don right, but yeah, stir crazy Silver Streak. I don't think we ever saw Seo evil here, no Evil, but we really really liked those as well as other Gene Wilder films. I remember watching The Frisco Kid on TV with him Young Frankenstein, which I talk about all the time on this show. I mean, Poo Poo Undies was in my dad's permanent lexicon because of that movie. I put a special hand from the bathroom just for your shares and the I don't want it just for socks and poopoo Wendy.

So, like I say, as I ran through this stuff in my head, I started realizing, Okay, Dirty Harry top of my list of action films. I love Charles Bronson, but I think Clint Eastwood is a little bit more palatable for me in my older age. I still need to get Clue to watch some of those. I don't know if she'd have any interest in any of them at all, but that's been a constant in my life. I know I've brought them up on watch list episodes and things like that.

Young Frankenstein of course, just comes up constantly. Haven't watched it in a while, though. Need to get back to it. I have not watched any of those prior Wilder or Dela Eese Reynolds movies and ages. I need to.

I got some clips from Fatso and I was like, man, I need to watch this again. I know I've looked every once in a while for stuff like that, and they're not streaming anywhere, but I should give them a perusal again. You know, I'm sure I could drum up all kinds of other memories. I know that we watched Dark Knight of the Scarecrow when that came out. I've talked briefly about that on episodes.

We used to watch The Wonderful World at Disney, of course on Sunday nights, I believe, And so those dexter Riley films and all those other live action Disney movies were a big thing growing up. You know, that was it. It was around the TV whatever, the three or four channels that we had were playing a lot of those movies really stuck with me. Oh. One I forgot to mention was Murder by Death, which I brought up a bunch, did an episode on.

You know, same goes for foul play. Murder by Death is kind of that smart slash stupid humor that he seemed to like. I know that, like Young Frankenstein, a lot of those, especially the Peter Sellers stuff, ended up in his. Repertoire room with empty people. Seventies, mid seventies, what's on TV stuff, and a lot of it really stuck.

So I think that's important. You know, in that time as a family, or times on weekend afternoons watching spaghetti westerns or Kung Fu or Charles Bronson blow Away a bunch of batties is important stuff. It does stick with you. So I have to thank him for that. And I think that's about it.

I thought this might go on. I thought I might ramble or get caught up in nostalgia or emotions, but I think that our relationship with films was symbiotic. We both brought things to each other. Hopefully he had fond memories as well of watching some of those Kung Fu movies and other things with me. Okay, I think that's it.

Thank you so much for listening. As I mentioned, Chris and I are planning an episode. We just have to get our schedules connected and coalescing. If you're not listening to my two other shows, the Chevy Chase Podcast with Chris and Mike. Maybe hop over to Wardway Media and check that out, and Cambridge and with Sean My show with my good friend Ronnie can always use extra listeners.

I'm kind of surprised when I check out my stats every so often during the week and people are still listening to Wake Up Heavy Gosh darn it, and I really appreciate that. And I know my output has been very sporadic, and that's just how it is, and it's going to be that way until my brain makes change or work kind of loosens up a little for me, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. Hopefully something by October with Chris and I and then after that, who knows, maybe Clion and I will watch something great that we need to talk about, or when she's on vacation during Thanksgiving we'll get an episode out or something like that. But until then, thanks for listening, and don't. Forget anything can happen when you wake Up Heavy end.

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One. Wake Up Heavy is a weirding Way media podcast