WALL-E with David Ehrlich

[00:00:02] computer defined podcasting. Podcasting, a series of tangents involving two friends where bits and contacts match harmoniously with bullshit.

[00:00:32] What's being replaced there, especially with bullshit? The actual line is a series of movements involving two partners where speed and rhythm match harmoniously with music. Right, the dancing. Yes. And we are dancing. We are dancing. A lot of creative liberties taken. We're in an eternal dance. It's rare that you get quite so much room to free jazz in these intros. You didn't want to just do... I thought about it. I mean, this series is called Podsy.

[00:01:00] And I was like, can I just do the dialogue where they're trying to explain each other's names to each other? You were able to sell him on Podsy? I was. There's not a lot of options. I mean, it's either in the pod of a cast or, as Griffin suggested, Podsy. Becca Alter, last week's episode, did throw out, would it be funny to just call it Podcaster for John Carter and remove... Yeah, but we can never blow that. We can never do this sort of like, you know what? That's it. But there's just called like, podcast.

[00:01:27] There's the meta joke there of being like, how did this end up with the title that makes no sense and has zero juice? Well, you do like a meta joke. Yes, but Podsy is... I'm fine with it. If you perform it, it's gonna look so good visual with the double D. With those double Ds on that fucking artwork there! Podsy! Make sure Griff has a giant rack on our pod artwork, Pat. No, Ben's wavering on that. Pat Reynolds, throw those double Ds on there! I wanna be a stacked robot!

[00:01:56] Oh, a fucking bodacious fish, Pat! This is my new character. When... and what is it? And what is this character? Not even during the Becker talk was I quite as confused. We're gonna find it by the end of this episode. Good. We're gonna locate this guy and we're gonna figure out what makes him tick. How's Becker doing? We're not going down that road. Okay, sorry. He's coming back, right? He's gotta be coming back. Listen, Malcolm in the Middle's back. This is exactly... In the world of like a sequels, they're gonna keep digging until the world collapses.

[00:02:25] Becker colon life is unfair. Any interest in Malcolm in the Middle life is unfair? Anyone watching that? I've heard it's fun. Once you lose Eric Pear Sullivan, I am out. That is always my favorite thing in the world. He's just like, no, thank you. And they're like, everyone's like, they offered him so much fucking money. Right. They were like, this guy's playing such smart, horrible. And he's like, I actually just have no interest. No offense. And I'm sure they're offering him so much money to be, to do nothing. Like, it's like, you know, you're just gonna be the seventh guy and you're just gonna go like, you know. And he was just like, no animosity.

[00:02:54] I love all of you. I wish you all the best. I have no desire to do this again. It's very impressive. I mean, someone who has no desire to watch that show. I feel like I understand where he's coming from. I love Malcolm in the Middle. Like when it was on, like I was a big fan. It was a show that I tried to rewatch during COVID. I can't imagine. In my classic kind of, you know, in the COVID way of like, well, this could be something. And I watched the pilot and I was like, there's nothing wrong with this. Like this is well executed. I remember it fondly. This is so its moment. It's yeah. I'm not feeling a desire to return here. Yes.

[00:03:24] There's something telling to me in the fact that Malcolm in the Middle has not had any like Gen Z. Yeah, sure. Rediscovery. Right. Despite Cranston's, you know, career. That it feels like this show is purely nostalgia for those of us who grew up with it, which I mean, I'm nostalgic for Frankie Muniz's tweets about death. Frankie Muniz seems like a very well adjusted gentleman. I was about to say, I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:03:53] Do you remember that period where he was like racing cars and he gotten so many car crashes where he was like, I have no memories of Malcolm in the Middle. I do. And now he's like out there promoting the Malcolm in the Middle reboot. And he was like, it was so nice to get all together again. And I'm like, don't you not know who Brian Cranston is? Just that great moment where he was like doing a talk back with Cranston. And he was like, by the way, your wife on Breaking Bad, what a shitty character. She's always in his way. And he was like, you realize I was playing like a sociopathic drug dealer.

[00:04:22] It was so funny to be like Cranston and a gun fucking Vince Gilligan. I feel like have been so consistent in talking out against that line of criticism. Yeah, he's always been very good. And be like looking right back in mirror. And to have Cranston there with like his fake TV son and be like glowing and be like, it's so nice to be all together. And then watch the terror on his face where it's like, you have this fucking opinion, too.

[00:04:49] I mean, not shocking again that essentially a brain damaged child star would have that opinion. No offense to Frankie Munez. Someone who was not working during the exact years that Reddit began taking over everyone's brains. Right. Frankie Munez is like triple crown of press was I think Skyler's the villain on Breaking Bad. Two was I made Shia LaBeouf's career by turning down holes. And three was did I make out with Hilary Duff? I don't know.

[00:05:17] Well, there was also the sub story about how because Hilary Duff's mom insisted that she was going to be an agent Cody Banks. He blocked her from being in the film because he was like, you're stepping on my turf. Yes. He was like 12. She is in both of them. Is she not? Certainly the first whatever. There was some story recently some actress's mom. I think it was Hilary Duff. Yeah, who was a stage momming for her daughter essentially and saying like, oh, she'd be perfect for the lead in whatever your next movie is.

[00:05:48] And I will admit to not being totally off book on my Frankie Munez. Well, because we are doing Frankie Munez next on Patreon. Sure, sure, sure. So it's two Cody Banks. Was he in the bar mitzvah movie with Giamatti? The bar mitzvah movie with Giamatti? What movie? Am I inventing movies now that I want to see? Well, it was Piven in the bar mitzvah movie. That's Keeping Up With the Steins. Oh. That's that's Gary Marshall nepple baby movie. Right. That's sort of aspirational Jewish casting. It's like I wish Giamatti were one of us.

[00:06:17] No, Munez, you got my dog Skip. You got two Cody Banks. You got Big Fat Liar. And I feel like that's the canon. Right? It is. It's the American canon. Do you know what else is really funny? I'm sorry. I'm just remembering this. And it sort of makes more sense now that Munez is like, well, they were begging me to do holes and I turned it down and like Shia picked up my scraps. Calling a movie holes. Calling a movie holes will never not be funny to me. I'm sorry. Yes. Show holes.

[00:06:47] It was what kids were demanding to theater owners at the time. Mm hmm. Don't like it in that. The way you say it. Don't like that. Show holes! Show holes. Uh, at, I think around the time that Wall Street, uh, Money Never Sleeps came out. Shia did some interview where they were like, you've had five or six consecutive number one openings in a row. Like, are you the guy now? And do you feel worried about maintaining that track record? And he was like, yeah, but like, look at the things I was in.

[00:07:14] It was like Transformers and Indiana Jones and a Wall Street sequel with Michael Douglas. I'm not taking credit for that. Frankie Munez could have opened these movies to number one. And I remember that feeling like such a weird burn at the time. Like, who's got negative juice? Shia LaBeouf, our finest comedian. Very level headed, uh, movie star. Yes. Anyway, go over to our Patreon if you want to hear the films of Munez. Uh. Munez. From the Earth to the Munez. Yes. That's what we're calling it.

[00:07:43] Um, that's not what we're talking about here today. Today we're talking about one of our finest movie stars. His name is Wallace E. Is it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. His name's Wallace E. No, he's a waste allocation, uh, load lifter earth. Correct. Waste allocation, load lifter, earth class. Yes. Uh. Because later in the film we see the Waleys. Yeah, and there's the Bernies and all that, right? There's all the, there's all the guys. But the Waleys are Axiom class. Yes, they're big boys. They're big boys.

[00:08:12] Of the same, of the same deal. Yes. And they still make Cube. They still make Cube. They make Big Cube. This movie is about Make Cube. Hyper Cube. There should be a Wale that makes Hyper Cube. Well, Garbage Cube, let's say. Sure. That's an important distinction. Yeah. But do you- What's the robot MO? Mo. The best performance in the movie? Yeah. I mean, we'll talk about how my wife sexually identifies as Mo later. But we'll get there in due time. Okay. Today on this podcast, which is called Blank Check with Griffin and David.

[00:08:41] I almost fucked up the name of the podcast. It's called Blank Check with Griffin and David Earth Class. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers, such as making one of the 10 highest grossing films of all time, the highest grossing animated film of all time, Fish. He said, what if Fish were lost and people threw money and Oscars at him and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want? This certainly classifies.

[00:09:08] Sometimes those checks clear, this movie, and sometimes they bounce next week. Maybe. This is also true. It's a miniseries on the films of Andrew Stan. It's called Patsy. Patsy. And today we're talking about Wally, his true blank check. And also it feels like the culmination of like a blank check moment for Pixar at large. I would say both correct on both for sure. Yep. Obviously, John Carter is a huge blank check as well.

[00:09:37] But at least with that one, you can argue like it is a known property of sorts and blah, blah, blah. Whereas this is, it's truly like him being like, I think I want to push my capital on this and Pixar agreeing like, I think we should. Right. And we will get into this, but it's the thing I'm fascinated by endlessly, which is because of the nature of the deal that Pixar had with Disney, a deal that everyone thought was going

[00:10:01] to end acrimoniously after Cars, the final movie that Pixar owed Disney from a 90s deal. Pixar just started with Steve Jobs' help, self-financing and self-producing movies with no outside interference. There are three movies they just make completely independently, knowing that when the Disney deal is over, everyone is going to want to be in the Pixar business and they just go to the highest bidder. Iger takes over. Eisner leaves.

[00:10:31] Iger immediately resets the table and figures out how to make good with Pixar and inherits Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up, which are the last three movies they make. And the only three movies they make with just like zero commercial consideration, zero outside interference, zero studio pressure. And you could feel it even in how these three movies were marketed. Griffin, you sound like someone who has a vested interest and passion for Pixar, which feels far out of your wheelhouse. That's a surprise to me.

[00:10:59] I'm introducing this thread of my interest to our listeners today for the first time. And people were like, why the fuck would Blank Check cover Andrew Stan? Is that a David push? What? Me? This is the joke. It's a bit. Okay. Okay. What were you going to say? Me? Yes. I like WALL-E. WALL-E's a really good guy. WALL-E. I've only grown to like him more. Producer Ben, have you seen this movie before? Yes. Okay. Because this is the era we found out last week. Not a cartoon era for you. That you hadn't seen Finding Nemo. No.

[00:11:28] And this is an era where you were opting out of a lot of the mainstream culture. That and just kids' movies I wasn't interested in. I feel like Trash Planet is up your alley though. That's Trash Planet being the original title. Yes. But did you see it in theaters? That I locked it on. No. Yeah, you caught up with it later. When do you think you saw it for the first time? God, I could not tell you. I'm just curious if it was like shortly after or like if you saw it in the last decade for the first time. In the last decade? Yeah. This movie has a lot of Ben shit in it.

[00:11:58] I really relate to WALL-E. He's a really good guy. I feel- Were you ever best friends with a cockroach? No. Gotta try it. No. Not yet. I really relate to just being a rusty garbage boy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our guest today is someone who's made a legitimate bid for most of times watching WALL-E. I think I was thinking about this. I think it's entirely possible, if not probable, that I have watched this movie more than any

[00:12:27] guest on this show or host on this show for that matter has ever watched any of the movies you've covered with a possible exception being Sims and Ponyo. But I think my son's WALL-E fixation was so specific and unrelenting that I may have taken that particular ground. Not that I'm proud. When we finally committed to doing this series, when Toy Story 5 got dated, we just typed you in immediately. You're right on the list.

[00:12:53] It took months before we even went like, we should ask, or like, we should just like double check. But there was an extended period where, as you described it to me, my son thinks WALL-E is movies. That's right. And he's not wrong. I don't understand that there's any other movie that's ever been made. Correct. We were, we were on a plane and the only way to pacify him was to put something on. What was that?

[00:13:22] I said Nirvana over here because they have a song called On A Plane. Although of course it's a different, they mean a plane like. We were on Disney's planes. Oh, sure. Disney's planes. Fire and rescue. Fire and rescue. I can't go by. A movie I am very glad he has yet to discover. And yeah, we needed to pacify him while he was on the seat back screen, courtesy of Delta. And I think he watched it six or seven times. Six, seven. Jesus Christ. Before we're doing the hands. We're doing the hands.

[00:13:49] And that was it for the next calendar year. Yeah. WALL-E once a day, twice on rainy days. It was, it was one full year basically, right? Yeah. Of the WALL-E year. Yes. Yes. You probably watched it 500 times. Or it was in your home 500 times. It was. But you're not always watching. I think at a certain point your eyes glaze over and you actually begin to retain less of the movie than you did originally. It just sort of blurs together as out of self-preservation. But, uh, um, and you'll find that I think I have less of a handle on the details of this film than someone who's only seen it two or three times.

[00:14:19] It's been abstracted. It's like a magic eye. I had a little bit of that rewatching it last night. You know what? I did as well. I, I actually had to like make an active effort to kind of reengage with it. We talk about this sometimes on the podcast. Can I try to watch this movie fresh again? Can I try to like really engage with it rather than take it for granted when it's things I've seen so many times. And I, this movie at the time was the most I had ever seen a film in a theater. It might still be.

[00:14:49] And I watched it so obsessively for years. It might've hit 10. Like it might've, it was certainly eight or nine.

[00:15:27] All right. I did have children first. I will say if someone's copying someone here, it ain't me. I will never forget David. I'm sure I've brought this up before being at the theater to watch beautiful day in the neighborhood. Hmm. Good movie. A movie. I always say I saw it in 40 X because I saw it at the Alamo and I ordered a cup of tea and some cookies. That's good. Um, I rewatched that movie recently. It's a great movie. It's really, it's a really good movie. Yeah. I've always been a fierce defender of that movie. Same. Same. Uh, so that's Thanksgiving 2019. Mm hmm.

[00:15:57] I had helped you bring a snoo up your stairs that day, that morning, I think. Yes. I suppose that it was about seven minutes before we left for the hospital. You had texted me being like, Hey, we really need to get this up the stairs. It's a smart bassinet. It's a, you may, you may find yourself with a snoo one day, Ben. Like who knows? We can talk snoo whenever. Snoo should advertise on the show. It's a, it's a great product. I did use snooze myself. Um, and, uh, like, Hey, can you bring up the stairs? And then you texted me while I was in the movie. Oh Lord, he coming.

[00:16:27] Oh Lord, he coming. And Oh Lord, he came. Uh, little baby Wally. Uh, you did name him Wally, which kind of maybe forced the issue on it being his favorite movie. Our guest is a little bit of nominative determinism. Anyway, say my name, David Ehrlich, bitch. Finally, after, uh, this parade of no name hacks and losers that you guys have had for guests to start 2026, someone of real cultural importance, someone who had the, the, the

[00:16:54] foresight, the gall to tell the world Lee Cronin's the mummy. Not great. That is what you're going to be. I thought you hadn't seen it. I sure have. Oh, okay. Have in and reviewed. And you liked, uh, did not, did not care for it. Let me see what you said. Mm. Not a, not a fan. That's not Lee Cronin enough for you. Right. That's what it did. It did be more delivers on Lee Cronin feeling anyone, uh, any identifiable, uh, C minus.

[00:17:22] Look, the obvious position they were in there was universal kind of push Blumhouse off of the classic monsters, right? Clearly Blumhouse was like, eh, these are all public domain. Can we keep doing our like takes on them? So they set up a mummy movie at new line. They don't have the universal branding. And then they find out that universal is going to reboot the Brendan Fraser mummy when there's already been three different universal movies just called the mummy.

[00:17:51] And their pivot is was Brendan Fraser in this one. I can't remember. No. Was to call it Lee Cronin's the mummy. Why didn't they just call it mummy? Yeah. Mummy reborn. Yeah. Yeah. If they called it mummy reborn, I think it would have like, we have real mummy at home vibes. Yeah. I think also like if they because of the Brendan Fraser convention of why don't they call it here's this this will distinguish it from the mummy tomb of the dragon emperor.

[00:18:21] There's certainly never been a movie by that time and put Brendan Fraser's face on the poster, but then be clear in small text. He's not in the film. All I could think about what we just admire his work. Great. Lee Cronin's the mummy is how hilarious it would be if Brendan Fraser cinema's biggest goofball walked into this dire as hell story about child death and possession. It would be like Brendan Fraser walking into like a Serbian film. Well, he's got the girl. Hilarious. He's got the girl. He's got the girl.

[00:18:47] The all time quotes from from whom from Marty Scorchese. You never remember this when people were asking him about the Fraser casting in killers of the flower moon and he said he had the look. He had the energy. He had the girl. Yeah. Today we're talking about Wally. Wally. This is one of my favorite movies of all time. This is a movie and this was the other thing about watching it. So you think Nemo perfect. I do. But you do prefer this, right? I was swinging back and forth while watching this.

[00:19:14] I mean, this movie is it's just very personal to me. And in a way watching this, I was like, God, this thing was fucking laser targeted at 20 year old Griffin. It could not have been more of a like direct hit. So it was interesting to rewatch it and and and feel nostalgic for what it meant to that guy at that time.

[00:19:41] Not that it feels this personal unpersonal now. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally understand. I mean, this was a movie that when it was announced, I was so hyped by the premise that it did at the time under deliver for me. Right. I was my expectations for this were so high that I think I had the experience that a lot of people had at the time that we will talk about of the second act hitting a little less hard for me and me being like, right. It's a Pixar movie like it, which I love Pixar movies, but I was like right.

[00:20:11] Fundamentally, and I grew to love it much more once my daughter got into it. I had a whole real love affair with Wally and now I prefer the second half to the first. That's interesting. And well, I just love it. You say half, but this is yeah, I know it's like even movie. Yeah. Yeah. Third, third, third, right. It's like the first third is Earth, but I prefer the the axiom stuff. Yeah, but I love it all to be clear. Yeah, I love I love it all too. We're gonna get into it, but I mean both of you saw it at that time.

[00:20:41] I remember I saw it at the villages. I remember similarly I saw this almost every theater in New York City, but I I remember even before it was officially announced there were swirling rumors of Andrew Stanton's next movie is a rom-com about robots in the style of silent comedy.

[00:21:02] And I was like that feels fake. There was a nervousness even at like the the the rumor of the vibe of the thing that was so my shit. Yes, right. All right. Is this movie Steve Jobs greatest contribution to society?

[00:21:20] It's a great question. I was digging through all the the criterion extras and the only Disney movie in the criterion collection certainly the only proper Disney movie with a Disney fucking logo at the top. That's a great question. I have no idea. Yeah, you might be yeah, I'm like maybe there's like another like touchstone mirror max is no longer owned by Disney, but you could say that Disney commission at the time. This was a a la carte, you know one off choice. Yes, a personal relationship. Exactly.

[00:21:49] Of a larger tray. Although who knows fucking Disney just laid off shut down its entire home media department in order to replace it with Wally's. But what was I saying here? Oh, there's a thing on the criterion desk where he said when he was running things by Steve Jobs Steve Jobs biggest question slash note was what is the business model that makes sense for axiom to be running the star liner? Oh, I mean, I've had this question. Yes.

[00:22:18] Like profiting. Right. Like how does this work 700 years in and I always just kind of like settle on like, well, they just want to be alive. So the self perpetuating and they just kind of yeah, but Steve Jobs who never designed anything that did not fail after five years. Well, by design. Right. Would never develop a spaceship that lasted for seven centuries. Correct. Correct. And it's obviously a still a like a highly consumerist culture. Right. You're not seeing transactions. Consumerist how?

[00:22:48] And you're like, who's getting the money from where does the money go? Right. That's what's fascinating about it. But I mean, I don't think there is money. No, I agree with the axiom as sort of the Apple store and all of the transactionality is happening sort of within. Yes. But the Apple stores do tend to hold up against wear and tear, I suppose. I feel like it's more just like the axiom built these ships for profit long ago. Excuse me. B&L bought the ships. Sorry. B&L built the axiom ships for profit long ago. They made the money. The ships took off. Right.

[00:23:16] But then after that, right, of course, like human commerce just ceased to exist. Because they assumed they would actually get back to Earth. Sure. And whatever transactions they made on the axiom would then translate back to a world with whatever fucking digital fiat currencies. What do they eat, though? Well, they. On the ship. Yeah, they have the food in a cup. They're not growing anything. No, it's all just fucking, yeah. Just like goop. Energy clop. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Pizza in a cup. Whatever.

[00:23:43] It does raise the question when you see in the movie the sort of like advertisements for the new products or like everyone's switching from red to blue or whatever. You're like, is that one loop that's been repeating for 200 years? Is the thing just fully stuck in like every generation switches from red to blue? Yeah. Someone also. Or it happens like once a week or once a year. Someone did the math also that humans basically live like 160, 180 years on the axiom because of the amount of captains there have been. Yeah.

[00:24:12] Like you see the sort of list of them. Because it's 750 years. 700 plus years. Yeah. Explained by microgravity where you would have no stress on your muscles or your organs. Your bones get little. Right. I have so much stress on my bones. Yeah. I mean, it does. Steve Jobs' note and his involvement in this movie to begin with does sort of speak to the commerciality that was at the heart of the Pixar ethos in a way that I like all of their movies, particularly early on.

[00:24:40] You know, thinking about Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Now WALL-E, which is sort of sort of an auto commentary on all this are rooted in precepts of capitalism in a way that I always found as sort of not a barrier to entry, but like a low ceiling on how much I could love them. It was just they were so distinctly American in that way. Sure. And as opposed to something like the obvious comparison of like Studio Ghibli, which just were more of an invitation to wonder for me.

[00:25:07] And I think WALL-E, which is so rooted in wonder, if anything, is an act of trying to reclaim that and merge it with the capitalistic impulse. Well, you're also forgetting that fucking A Bug's Life is about communism and collective action. I mean, A Bug's Life, you know, a remake of Seven Samurai. But even, you know, even that is maybe further afield from. No, but you're right.

[00:25:29] It was a lot of the Pixar thing was putting adult structures onto fantastical characters in children's films. Like I went on our friends, Emily St. James and Philip Isco's podcast, Podcast Like It, and did a Monsters, Inc. episode with them. I think came out earlier this year.

[00:25:50] I was like, this movie is a kind of like ground zero for a thing that becomes a cancer in children's films, which is what if magical thing was a business? And Monsters, Inc. still is the one that's done it the best. But also Toy Story says what if business was a magical thing? And so it is sort of rooted in Pixar. Right. What if the dynamics of your toys talked like bored sort of like office workers? And yeah, yeah.

[00:26:17] And then this movie is the one that's sort of, I mean, I remember the amount of reviews at the time that were like, this message is nice, but also every store is littered with Wally merch. This movie is being released by Disney. This is true. You know, it has a happy meal. This is the world we live in, of course, yes. Yes. But if you want to make a $180 million movie, right, you're probably going to have to sell some toys. The call is coming from inside the house. Twas ever thus with capitalism. Ask Boots Riley.

[00:26:42] Yes. But you're right that the framework is different in that this is a movie of like someone trying to break down that system and that structure. Yeah. Or at least look for the cracks in it to, you know, have opportunities for wonder to sort of bridge. I mean, this movie is in many ways, which talk about sort of bridging two worlds. And I think in this particular regard, it's bridging the world of art and commerce in that sense, which is obviously implicit to everything that Pixar does.

[00:27:11] But this is doing it a little bit more literally. But yeah, they you got to eat. You know, these movies are made for profit. You got to eat. Wally. Unless you're Wally. You can just drink up those sweet, sweet sun rays. I'm opening the dossier. They fly too close to the sun, which famously, not something you should do. Yeah, but it helps them recharge really quickly. Really quickly. Boom. It starts, of course, with lunch. Wow. JJ's getting like kind of narrative with his research docs these days.

[00:27:38] Lunch at the Hidden City Cafe in Port Richmond, Point Richmond, near the headquarters of Pixar. Famously the teaser trailer for this movie. I remember this teaser trailer and I was excited for this movie. I was like jerking a big dick watching. I was just like, get the fuck out of here. Do you know about this, Ben? No. So speaking of Disney, like making the deal, inheriting these three Pixar movies that they had no say in. And it's like, good luck. Your next three movies to market are a movie about a French rat who believes in high cuisine, right?

[00:28:08] At a time where like Americans did not fucking care about food. A silent robot comedy and an old grumpy old man whose wife died in a flying house. And they're like, the fuck are we going to do with these? And the Ratatouille teaser trailer famously has the thing where it spells out the title phonetically. And it's all like a made up scene of the character direct addressing the camera, explaining to you what the premise is because they were like, fuck are we going to do with this?

[00:28:34] And then the Wally teaser trailer is Andrew Stanton talking about this experience at the Hidden City Cafe. Like the trailer only has like 20 seconds of animation footage in it. It is basically all trying to explain to you, trust us, we're Pixar. Is that the trailer where they have the Brazil music? I think so. Yeah. Anyway, it talks about it was Lasseter, Doctor, Joe Ranft, him, and they hammer up Bugs Life, Monster, Inc., Finding Nemo.

[00:29:04] And then the last one they talked about was Wally. Yes. So basically, they're in production on Toy Story. They're like, should we be coming up with other ideas in case this thing's a hit? And they ask us what our next movie is. We shouldn't be unprepared. So they sit at this one lunch and all of those movies come out of that one lunch. Obviously not fully formed, but that's what they're fucking framing in the teaser. In fact, let me tell you, right, Stanton's actual report on that slightly massaged kind of advertised version.

[00:29:32] But the massage of the teaser is, this is the most magical lunch of all time. I'll have what she's having, am I right? Yeah, what do they eat? Every movie that came out of this has been beloved. Trust us, this is the final movie from that. They drink story juice. Oh. Yes. And they ate movie sandwiches. So Stanton has said, look, we had ideas that inspired those movies. Obviously, we did not like come up with a bunch of finished things. It would be fun to have bugs. What if you make a movie about like monsters in children's bedrooms?

[00:30:03] Yeah. He said the bulk of the lunch was a bug's life. We truly came up with a large chunk of the movie in that lunch. And then probably the second most concrete idea, even though it was half-baked, was the last robot on Earth, a machine left running, not sure what to do with itself idea. There was no name, no storyline. It was really just a character. It was really just a character, but we liked the character. Like, we liked that idea. We're in the middle of Toy Story, and we have been really struggling to make Woody appealing.

[00:30:29] So I think they were really into this kind of like Robinson Crusoe robot because they're like, that's appealing. That's like a good guy. You're already rooting for that guy. Exactly. Although also, a little sad. Kind of a sad, because I remember saying to a friend of mine when I was like really hyped for this movie before I came up, where I was like, it's about like a garbage robot that like Earth is just a pile of garbage and everyone's gone and he just keeps, and he was like, that sounds so depressing. And I was like, right, but like, that's crazy, right? Isn't that cool?

[00:30:58] Like, so the film was initially called Trash Planet. Trash Planet, Ben. I mean, I like, Wally's a good title, but Trash Planet really draws you in. The pitch was Pete Docter's. Andrew inherits it. There was basically a Yankee swap. Just like the very, very basic pitch. But for a period of time, Stanton was trying to crack Monsters, Inc. and Doctor was trying to do Wally. And then they end up swapping and Stanton ends up also coming up with Finding Nemo, which then supersedes. Thank God they switched.

[00:31:28] If Doctor had done it, there would have been like a droid named Loneliness and he would have been like, you know, there would, yeah. But that's why Doctor gets the co-story credit, because he basically was the one who incubated a very different version of this first. So Stanton's working on Nemo. He starts dreaming of Trash Planet again. It basically becomes his like Barton Fink to his Miller's Crossing while he's working on Nemo, where when he's hit a wall, he's like, let me, let me noodle on this and type some shit out. He said basically that the first act, his quote, fell from the sky.

[00:31:57] He was like, that felt like so complete to me. Right. What do I do? And then I never knew what to do once he leaves the planet. But then he's like, well, the opposite of loneliness is love. So it should be a love story. Okay. He was seduced by this idea of like, he falls in love with another machine. Okay. So where did the machine come from? Right? What does that machine have interest in? Now, this is, as you've noted, the man is religious. The greatest commandment Christ gives us is to love. But that's not always our priority.

[00:32:25] Us is doing a lot of heavy lifting then. So I came up with this premise that could demonstrate what I was talking about, that a rational love could defeat programming, right? You got these two robots with the base directive, but then the love kind of overrides it. Yeah. This is what he's saying, not me. No, I, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to sit on my read on this movie for a moment. Okay. So, you know, obviously this is a risky thing. They are a little worried. They do have the blank check status of Pixar's huge success and especially Nemo's huge success

[00:32:54] that like, I think Stanton can sort of ask essentially what he did, which is like, can you leave me alone? Can I try to write it? Like, let's not do this sort of big edit room like together or whatever. And, you know, like, can I write like an original sci-fi movie? He loves sci-fi movies. Alien. Star Wars. Yes. These are big. 2001. I've seen them. Eventually, Jim Reardon, who's a Simpsons guy. He directed many of... Comes in to co-write.

[00:33:24] The best Simpsons episodes of all time. Such as what? He directed King Size Homer. The one with Kid Rock? King Size Homer. You know what? King Size Homer is pretty funny. I'm going to give you a list in a second because it's actually astonishing. No, it's often just amazing when you see those Simpsons vets where you're like, oh my God, everything it did is amazing. And you're like, of course. Yes. Everything the Simpsons did was amazing. He kind of had a reputation for a while.

[00:33:49] He was a CalArts guy as well of being the best animation comedy writer of his generation. He became more of a writer guy, but then he directs many Simpsons. He worked on the Mighty Mouse cartoon under Ralph Bakshi with Stanton, which is where they became friends. His big breakout was his student film was called Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown. That was a Peckinpah version of Peanuts. That was semi-viral in a tape trading kind of era. I vaguely remember, right. Yeah.

[00:34:18] Episodes he directed, if I can just fucking like... Give me a couple. Yes. Itchy and Scratchy and Marge. Bart's Dog Gets an F. Brushed with Greatness. When Flanders Failed. Trio Support 2. Homer at the Bat. Dog of Death. Bart's Friend Falls in Love. Homer the Heretic. Mr. Plow Duffless. Marge and Chains. Homer Goes to College. Oh, God. Like insane lineup. Homer at the Bat is huge for me. Bart of Darkness. Bart of Darkness is so fucking good. Lemon of Troy. Lemon of Troy is so good. He directed like a lot of the best ones from the best era. The Simpsons. It was a good show.

[00:34:48] Yes. It was people liking it. It's a shit... When did they... It ended, I guess, in 90... 99, yeah. Yeah. Uh, so... Yeah. They have the idea of Eve, uh... Eve... He brings weird in. Yeah. Like, she's like got this idea of this sort of sleek, futuristic techno robot. Uh, this sort of... What if he falls in love with an iPod? Mm-hmm. First version wasn't set on Earth. Oh, interesting. It was just a trash planet. Like, we don't know what. Steve Jobs is the one like, I think you should set it on Earth.

[00:35:17] Like, I think you should have a little bit more of a commentary here. I saw there was a thing he said in the Criterion Disc where he was like, when I made this movie, I did not want to comment on or engage with humanity at all. When I was like... Relatable. Developing it. I was like, the whole appeal to me is like isolated robot, outer space, remove ourselves, distance ourselves from this. And people kept kind of noting it in a way that brought it back to needing some human connection to make sense of the movie.

[00:35:46] Now, is he identifiably in New York City or has Wally just been inspired by the architecture of New York somewhere deep in his coding to build a New York City out of cube trash? I think it's the latter. Okay. Um, so it takes him a long time to get the second half right. Bah, blah, blah, blah. The iPhone comes out in 2006. He was one of the first people to get one because... He had an end. ...so jobs gave him one. And through playing around with the iPhone, the sort of addictive quality of like a smartphone,

[00:36:15] he comes up with the kind of like humans addicted to screens living in the Axiom like thing. He said also like when I first got one and started playing around with it, I was like, I have not felt this since cigarettes. It's crazy because I feel like so much of what was compelling about the iPhone back in 2007 was like the social cachet because there was very little to do on it. There was less to do, but we made do with whatever lame. I mean, I didn't get an iPhone until 2012. I had a BlackBerry. You were a BlackBerry guy. I was a BlackBerry guy for sure. Yeah.

[00:36:44] I mean, it was a work thing. Like, yeah. It was a work thing? What do you mean? Yeah. Well, like my job gave me one. I was a little BlackBerry. Little keys. Little keys. Stanton says, I'm not making a comment on obesity. I'm trying to just make everyone a big baby. Like the idea of the humans on the Axiom is not that they ate too much. It's that they have turned into babies. Well, okay. So let me get into another thing here because there's the thing we sort of skipped over. Originally, he doesn't want it to be Earth.

[00:37:13] And then there was an extended era. They only make this change like I think about two years before the movie comes out. It was supposed to be a ship of like green gelatinous blobs who didn't speak English. There were two different versions of it. I don't know which one came first, but at one point it was truly like they are aliens. They have sent. They were gel people who spoke a language like that was like Monty Python sort of IKEA speak or whatever. Which was teeing up a Planet of the Apes.

[00:37:42] And it turns out that near the end of the film, it would reveal that they were once humans. Right. Yeah. So like a Planet of the Apes style. He talks about like there was a version where it was like they were truly impartial aliens. The implication is that humans died off. And now these aliens have abducted these robots and trying to study, you know, extinct cultures. Right. And that they have a bunch of robots.

[00:38:06] And the movie was like a robot Spartacus, as they put it, where the robots are second class citizens under the aliens. And Wally becomes like a figure of the uprising. But would it be that they're evolved? Well, so then there was a different version. I don't know which one came first, where it was the blobs are the devolved versions of humans. That is the twist that we've devolved that much and that they don't even remember or understand that they're connected to that lineage.

[00:38:34] And that's what Wally helps connect them with. And they got very far along in that. There are like animation models that were built. And they had written the whole sort of version of that and done the story reels of it. And they were just like it. The lift became so hard and heavy to get audiences to connect with the blobs who aren't speaking. It is this thing for me where I'm like, I accept and I buy. They just tried and couldn't pull it off.

[00:39:02] But the second I heard that, I was like, Jesus Christ, if they had made that work, it would have been astonishing. Listen, I say this as someone who has never found a blob that I haven't been able to connect with. We love blobbies. Sure, too. Especially blobby, the OG. But best of blobby, one of the most important pieces of media that Griffin introduced me to. But I think it's just thematically, it doesn't really square because you implicitly, there's no reason to assume that being blob is worse than being human. Right. They need to be babies.

[00:39:31] Like I said, the axiom stuff is what I like more these days. They need to be helpless. They need to have learned helplessness. But the iteration was like, right, audiences aren't connecting to this. Maybe we have them talk. It's hard for the audiences to connect to the blobs to make them feel like distinct different characters. There was an era where it was like aristocracy. There was like a king and a queen and a prince. There was a royal wedding. Right. Like modern structures. And then they're sort of like, let's put a nose on the blob.

[00:39:58] What if they're not green, but they're like flesh colored, you know? And then it slowly evolved into the baby thing. And in doing the kind of like classic Pixar research, he spoke to a scientist who said like, if multiple generations of humanity were to live in space, they wouldn't just have their muscles atrophy. Their actual physical composition would change. You see the video of the astronaut? I mean, we're recording this in the middle of April, but people just came back from the moon or going around the moon.

[00:40:25] And they had the video of the astronaut who hadn't walked on Earth in 10 days, just 10 days. And she could not pull herself along the parallel bars. She needed to be supported by the three different people. So it's like if you're the like seventh generation born into space, you don't need like muscles anymore. You don't need your bones have just sort of like shrunk within your body. They're big babies. Fortunately, technology has not had any sort of negative effect along those lines on us.

[00:40:53] And this movie has turned out to be not prophetic at all. It's the problem with this movie is it got it all wrong. We solved everything. They also couldn't figure out the ending. Or for a while, it was always going to be like, he has to give her his like heart battery. There was like a sacrifice. They never liked it. Finally, they had more the idea of like he loses his memory is the kind of crisis at the end. Need to interject with this because it's another just kind of like fascinating Stanton story cracking moment like the Finding Nemo Barracuda thing.

[00:41:20] And all of this is important set up to John Carter, where he breaks his own story roles in several ways I've never been able to understand. You know, they watched a lot of silent comedies and they watched a lot of Chaplin and Lloyd and Buster Keaton especially because I would argue that Wally is most closely aligned with the Buster Keaton character types. Even if the movie, I think, leans more towards modern and not modern. Well, there is a lot of modern times in it, but also City Lights. It's like a Chaplin movie with a Buster Keaton character.

[00:41:50] And he said the thing we we kept trying to figure out what Wally's emotional arc was and trying to force one and what's his growth and how does he change? And then we started looking at those movies. And it's like very often Buster Keaton is an unchanging figure in the center of things. And what he does is subtly affect everyone else around him. Sure. What is Stoneface, but of metal. Exactly. And so he kept being like, well, Wally has to like become empowered by the end of the movie. He has to save Eve.

[00:42:19] He has to become the dominant one. It is one of the latest major changes in a Pixar film because the last 20 minutes were basically completely animated. And they did a test screening where they hadn't done final lighting passes and whatever. And it wasn't even a note he got back, but he watched it with the audience. And I think it's on the disc. You know, there's one guy in the mall in Arizona who was like, yeah, what if what if Wally falls asleep? What if Eva was a girl boss? She had to save him.

[00:42:46] But there's a there's a clip of him going to the Pixar team and being like, guys, I'm so sorry. I'm about to ask you to do an insane amount of work. We have to redo the entire last 20 minutes. And usually it never gets that far. You you identify those issues at a storyboard phase. But it was completed physical animation. There are scenes in the trailers from that version of the movie. You can see that aren't in the final film, which like shit never gets cut that finished. But yeah, he was like, it has to be inverted.

[00:43:16] It has to be that his worldview has actually affected her enough that she needs to pick up his mission and carry it out. But you can see the like a lot of the extended deleted footage of Eva's like batteries been fried and Wally has to save her and he's flying around with her at the end. Stanton very shy about any kind of like topical discussions. Not interested in talking about global warming.

[00:43:44] Like sort of dismisses a lot of the environmental stuff because he's like, I don't have a political ban. The last thing I want to do is preach. Like all this just sort of made sense for my story. Asked about consumerism. He's like, yes, there's lots of things disconnecting us from each other and that are consumerist. But the reason I made them look like big babies because it was like a nasty guy told me, you know, that's what they would look like. Bob, you know, like he he's like the last thing I'm trying to do is make a message movie. Like he's very whether or not you want to take this away from him.

[00:44:11] He's sort of seemingly uninterested in addressing that. Wait, that's so weird, though. I agree. I mean, can I? That's not my job. May I give my read on that for a second? Sure. Because this Criterion Disc came out in 2022, right? And that is this framework of now here is an adult cineast physical media package with curated supplemental material to like frame this within an intellectual conversation.

[00:44:39] And the new material on the Criterion Disc is so much more pointed and transparent. There is a lot of I have to imagine Disney inheriting this movie. And I think it's what's fascinating about watching this movie now where like the greatest concern was a kind of like an anti intellectualism and an apathy. That's what culture is falling into.

[00:45:05] And that anything in this movie that could have been seen as elitist or critical of an American apathy would have become like a fucking talking point. Right, because apathy would become Disney's lifeblood over the last 10 years or so in the live action remake era. It does feel like there was a little bit of at the time you cannot fucking politicize this movie, right? I think so. I mean, a lot of these interviews are also from like Christianity Today and like 20.

[00:45:32] That's what I doubt that I was working for when I spoke to him in 2022. I talked to him not for Christianity for around the time the Blu-ray came out. And he was very receptive to talking about the sort of political valences in the film. The more recent interviews it seems like he will be like, I mean, of course, I do get a lot of boxes from Amazon and wonder. He said that was one of the main activating things was like early 2020. Right. He didn't say it at the time. No, no. He later softened up a little bit.

[00:45:58] I do buy that he wasn't like trying to grind axes with this movie. And I think you hear him talk about organically how the story locks into place. But also it was coming out of personal observations. Wow, I got a smartphone. I'm addicted to this. I now there's a website that sells everything. My house is filled with boxes. Yeah, I mean, my sense talking to him was that all those things are true. But I do feel like the sociopolitical commentary sprang out of what you were talking about earlier,

[00:46:27] which is this like deep rooted love for the movies, the early movies in particular, the movies that were formative for him, where he really sort of sprang to life, which was very convenient for my purposes, was talking about the movie as a expression of the joys of parenting, as the act of, you know, we were talking about a bridge earlier. So like the act of taking something from one generation, showing it to another robots, acting like humans to teach humans how to stop acting like robots.

[00:46:56] The transference of going from consuming everything as Wally's done for hundreds of years to displaying that, to showing that to someone else, which is a completely revelatory and transformational experience for him. Elevate your gaming performance with Alienware.

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[00:48:35] Wally. Okay. So, in the screenplay, obviously, I guess you guys probably only know this, but I'll tell you anyway. Like, the dialogue is written even if the characters don't speak. So, he would say, like, in brackets, like, here's what Wally's trying to say. And then, obviously, later they put in, you know, all their little noises. Ben Burt. Ben Burt. The great Ben Burt. The legend, Ben Burt. Ben Burt is Ben Hosley, the man who, like, invented the entire Star Wars soundscape, among many other things.

[00:49:05] But one of Lucas's closest collaborators. And, you know, just these things we take for granted of just, like, droid languages and lightsabers and the sounds of ships. And he created that probably with a Moog, like, analog synthesizer. There's another great thing on one of the Blu-ray releases that's a breakdown of, like, how many people at Pixar have to touch one single shot of a movie. Like, how many different departments work on it.

[00:49:34] And they cut to Ben Burt explaining what his contribution is. And he was like, I was trying to find the right sound for this movie, for this shot. And then I remembered that in around 1997, I'd gone and done some recordings of Niagara Falls. And it's very indicative of how Ben Burt works, which is he just kind of fucking collects sounds. Right. Always collecting sounds. Right. So, there are things that he would sort of just, like, construct. But more often, he just was constantly building a sound library.

[00:50:04] And then being like, oh, you know what would be interesting? What if the sound of this ship is this plus this? What if he was collecting sounds one night and collected the sound of a murder? I mean, this is the question. And David. Did he invent robot bleeps and bloops being cute? Because we had bleeps and bloops. We had forbidden plenty. Let me tell you. I would agree with you that no. But he made them cute. Bleep itself, I think, was not cute until R2-D2. Right. Right? I don't know. Yes, I think so.

[00:50:33] I would love to look at a list of, like, history's robots. Like, you know, who was there? Because, like, Robbie's not that cute. All right. I'll link up best bleep bloops. Okay. So, during, while they're preparing this, Andrew stands and keeps saying, like, I need this to be, like, R2-D2. And finally, Jim Morris, who is the former president of ILM, who now works at Pixar, says, do you want to just get Ben Burt? Like, the guy who did R2-D2? Which is basically the equivalent of, like, casting Tom Cruise in your movie. It's like, this is your main actor, basically.

[00:51:02] Not only does he literally end up being the model for the voice of Wally, but it's like, this is the guy who's going to figure out whether or not your entire movie works. If he can make these compelling and distinct. Now, Ben Burt, as he puts it, had just finished what he considered a basically 30-year tour of duty making Star Wars movies and was not that enthused about robots. He was coming right off of Rangelis. Yeah. He'd just been working on the prequels for so long and was like, I just don't want to do any more robots.

[00:51:28] But that kind of Capra romance, Buster Keaton hero thing. That's an interesting challenge. And, you know, the idea also of, like, they're going to, it's just, they're mostly communicating with each other. They're so bridging the sort of robot communication gaps, right? Like, which is sort of like the R2-3PO thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He likes that. But you're removing the... The humans going like, what? You know. Well, and also, like... I mean, they come in.

[00:51:56] You know, C-3PO is human-cyborg relations. His job is to fucking translate things. And it's like, what if you're not translating it? And how do you still make it read to the audience? What a crazy guy that guy is. Ben Burt? Uh, C-3PO. But yeah, sure, Ben Burt. C-3PO. There's a guy who could use a crush. Am I right? I don't think... I think that would just make him anxious. It's kind of wild nine movies C-3PO never even, like... Carry on. Finish your thought. He never even, like, fucks.

[00:52:28] It's supposed to everyone else in Phantom Menace is fucking left and right. You know? R2 could get it. R2 could get it. And I think he is getting it. I think sometimes he's rolling off to the side and you're like, where did R2 go? And you're like, he's gone. He's hitting. He's hitting. So, uh, you know, they, you know, the usual Ben Burt thing of like, okay, now I've got this challenge of like creating character voices, all distinct, all have to sort of sound human, sound relatable. It's tough.

[00:52:59] He records in a little chamber, he says. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Takes those recordings, runs them through his computer. He analyzes the sound and breaks them into component parts. Like you would sort of break light through a prism to get colors, he says. And then you start refabricating, you know, putting it all back together again, but you can control. You can be like, maybe a little more of this, a little less of this. Hold vowels, stretch vocal cords in a way that you could never, you know, pitches.

[00:53:26] And, you know, if sound was silly putty, you could stretch it and make it longer. He says, I found a way of working on Wally where you could do that. It sounds like something I would not be good at, but it sounds very, very cool. He's a very cool guy. He also just, I mean, I've only seen him in countless making ofs, but he just seems like a friendly fella. I was going to say. Seems like a sweetie pie. Sweetie pie, super charming. He's not like, this is intense. Like, brr, brr, brr, brr, brr. I also think some of these Lucas-y guys in interviews, you're like, you're like, you

[00:53:56] are the spectrum. You seem like a nice person, but you almost like are a robot looking for another robot to talk to. Ben Burt, I think is, I got to meet him when we went with him. George Lucas to Skywalker Ranch. Cool. And he has since retired, but was there giving a tour to his friend from high school. That's cool. I mean, he's pretty old at this point. He's in his late 70s. I assume you must have talked at length on this podcast about the trip you just mentioned,

[00:54:24] but I have no memory of hearing about it. I haven't talked about it much, but it was pretty incredible. It's a very casual, George Lucas took me to his house. George Lucas did not take me to his house. George Lucas has not acknowledged us. Okay. Yeah. The way you presented it is something like that. Sorry. Sorry. Let me clarify. Yes. Go ahead. Yes. Other people within the organization like the George Lucas talk show. Darth Maul. And have always been like, I don't, I wonder if George would like it.

[00:54:53] There's always been this sort of one degree away. George does like comedy, but he's really sensitive and self-conscious. The extent to which he can find humor in himself and his work. Yes. It seems to me it's more than it was, but I'm not detecting a ton of it. It's more than it was, but also like every year at like Comic-Con, they would do a panel that was like Lucasfilm's favorite fan films and parodies. Like he's always embraced that shit.

[00:55:22] And Connor, Connor Aleph always tells the story about like the first time Star Wars was on the cover of Mad. They, they were sent like a cease and desist. And George Lucas, they, Mad responded to George Lucas's lawyer saying like, really? Because this is a letter we got from George Lucas last week. And it was George saying like, I'm so floured to be on the cover of Mad. Can I please buy the original art? But we walked into like the Skywalker Ranch library and the librarian looked at Connor

[00:55:50] and went, was wondering if you were ever going to show your face here. Wow. It feels like all of them watch the show. Yeah. Fascinating. I have to say some of the only joy I've known in the last few weeks was watching Jared Harris on the George Lucas talk show where he was just the first half of it. He's like, what decisions have I made in my life that led me to this moment? I will. That's the joy of doing the show is watching people go through that. And then by the end of it, I'm all in on this.

[00:56:20] But it was so cool to watch. Basically, we were being given a tour adjacent to Ben Burt giving a tour. And it was at a, on a day where there weren't a lot of people. Like you could walk 15 feet behind him and just hear echoes. Yeah. Is that up front? And watch him talk about him, whatever. He's a lovely guy. So Sigourney Weaver obviously is involved with this movie. As he put it to Sigourney Weaver, you get to play mother now. Right. What if your mother, she likes that idea? She does it.

[00:56:48] Sigourney Weaver, I feel like also likes to do stuff. It does feel like a great way of incepting your kids with eventually watching Alien when they're seven. It also is on the timeline. It also speaks to the tough sell of this movie where I remember like Sigourney Weaver doing fucking like the Today Show and Good Morning in America and whatever for this movie, even though it's almost like an extended in-joke cameo because they were like, we have no stars in this film. Like Sigourney Weaver's The Computer.

[00:57:14] The other lead actors are Ben Burtt, a Pixar employee, and the Mac text-to-speech program. And two men who have been accused of being sex pests in different varieties. Yes, you're right. So that's not nothing. I was doing the count in my head. Who was the other? Two of Pixar's favorite. Jeff Garland has gotten some blowback. John Garland and we're aware. And Fred Willard jacked it in a theater. No, he's no pest. Listen, I didn't say I was- He jacked it in the place you're supposed to jack it, right? He was appreciating the art. He was engaging with it in the manner in which it was-

[00:57:43] It was in a porn theater, right? It was the Diki Theater. You take that back. I didn't say sex pest in a derogatory way. You did. Well, pest is a derogatory word. You can't just be like, ah, I'm being a pest. And everyone's like, ah, yeah, you're my favorite pest. Story of my life. I would call him a sex fan. He's an appreciator of sex. Sex minister, yeah. But yeah, no, it's right. Willard, Garland, John Ratzenberger, the big three of the 2000s box office.

[00:58:12] So, Wally, you know, there is the- So, Wally, blah, blah, blah. Well, right. There is the, I think at the time for Pixar, somewhat revolutionary thing of like, we will have humans in the movie. It's still the only time they've done that. Right. Like, they've never done anything like that since, really? No. Yeah. So, you got Willard, obviously, is like, it's a good joke. I mean, it's sort of like, we will turn into CG. Yeah. We were once humans and we turned into CG. Yeah. This is also the movie where,

[00:58:40] and Stanton talks about that this was kind of his main project of like, if we're putting humans in it, then we're presenting this not as a form of like, photorealism, but we have to sell a sense of versimilitude. And so, the technology has finally gotten to a point. And this is still an era of Pixar where almost every movie is built around a new technical challenge can we solve, right? Like, there are actual basic building blocks of this medium working that still have not been cracked yet.

[00:59:10] And his big pet project on this one was, can we truly make the virtual camera feel real? Unlike in 2D animation where you are the animator, also basically the cinematographer to a degree. Right. And that you are composing your shot, but you're very limited in the kind of camera movements or even approximations of camera movements you can do. CGI inherently has like a virtual camera built within it. And, you know, this is a movie where it's like,

[00:59:39] we want to make the camera feel real. We want to own the imperfections and the struggles of what a camera... Yeah, they did a lot of analog 70 millimeter tests to try and capture that kind of, you know, the lighting, the texture. And they're like, where's the barrel distortion? You know, where are the imperfections? They got both Roger Deakins and Dennis Mirren to be consultants on this movie. And he was basically like, I explained to them all these things that have driven like Russian lens makers crazy

[01:00:09] for decades that they've never been able to solve. The weird quirks of just like human limitations that then Pixar is trying to replicate rather than computer, which is always trying to perfect everything. And a thing that happens... Computer kind of bad guy. Computer kind of bad guy. In this movie. But like, especially in the sort of Le'Veon Rose montage, there's a lot of like, you feel the camera operator. And they talked about this of like,

[01:00:38] especially the scene where Wally triggers all the shopping carts and they come like rolling after him against the wall. Like the camera is struggling to catch up with Wally and keep him in the frame. There's like an overcorrection of the camera movement. That's basically the stuff they started fucking with in the bloopers. Yeah. Like the Toy Story, Bugs Life, Monsters, and Bloopers have that kind of like, isn't it funny to acknowledge that someone needs to like refocus? I don't care for those. The bloopers are funny. David, I understand.

[01:01:09] I don't care for those. You don't care for them at all? No. I liked them when I was a kid. It's funny that animation would have mistakes because you'd think they would just erase it along the way. We also, we didn't call this out in Finding Nemo, but that was one of Stanton's moves also where he was like, these movies can't start to feel like they're fitting into a pattern and a formula. 100%. Very smart. We got to break the blooper thing because like we're about to start repeating ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like the blooper thing. And this movie does not suffer from Pixar boardroom story brain.

[01:01:39] No, this is what I'm saying. He retreated from that. Yeah. Like, I mean, very clearly. I mean, obviously Brave, their best film was still to come. Change your fate. Do you want to change our fate? Was it The Wisps? Now the film begins. Oh, how does Wally fit into the Pixar theory? The witch turns into Woody and then where's Wally in this? Is Wally pre-cars? Like, will cars come after Wally? I think Wally is post-cars. Like if Wally charts the apocalypse

[01:02:08] and then, but yeah, is it post-cars? Yeah. I think it's that after the cars have died off. Wally was not originally invented to clean up, what's his name? Fucking McQueen, Lightning McQueen. Yeah, Wally is post-cars. Of course, guess what's post-Wally in the Pixar timeline theory? Onward, of course. Set in the 4000s. Fuck you. Honestly, fuck you. I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. Is it worth diving into? No, no, no, no. We'll move on.

[01:02:38] It's worth saying what it is and why we're not giving it any validity. It's not a real thing. The Pixar movies all have these Easter eggs, right? Where it's like the Pizza Planet truck shows up in every movie. There are things like that. And most of the Pixar movies include a preview of the next film. So we called out in the Finding Nemo episode in the waiting room, the dentist, a kid's reading an Incredibles comic. They would seed kind of the next movie in a little way, right? At the end of Monsters, Inc., Boo has like a Nemo toy.

[01:03:07] There's always that kind of shit. And a very annoying corner of the internet started taking it literally and being like, oh, that means they exist in the same universe. What is the timeline that justifies all these things happening? And with every added Pixar film, it becomes sweatier and sweatier. But you can watch like hour-long YouTube essays where it's like, so. I mean, I believe there was like a PowerPoint presentation at some point. When humans die, cars take over. Kick this off.

[01:03:36] Then when the cars kill themselves, WALL-E cleans up our garbage. WALL-E starts with a real shot across the bow in that you like immediately. It's just out there, you know, and it is so immediately removed from Pixar tonality up until that point. I thought about our Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon episode where you said, has any movie more quickly announced itself as a masterpiece? Well. With the opening strings. Crouching Tiger still has it.

[01:04:05] Yeah, I don't know if the quality is implicit to what all he's doing. Well, because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon begins with boom! And you're like, ah! But in context, this is telling you, you know, circa 2008 and you're sitting there in the theater, this is not your daddy's Pixar movie. No, you're also, there's no soft ease in, you know, most of the Pixar movies like have like a cold open before you go to an opening credit sequence and then they start to really minimize the opening credit sequence. This is like Disney logo, Pixar logo,

[01:04:34] the short before this was Presto, which is pretty good in theater. Pretty good! You love Presto? I think that's the best one they ever did. You think that's the best one they ever did? Apart from, of course, my beloved Red Stream where the bicycle, yeah, what's your favorite? And Lava. Lava. Lava actually should have gotten Pixar shut down. You know what I mean? Like, everyone's like, we appreciate everything and they release Lava and the government immediately is like, I'm sorry, you're done. I came home one day and found my daughter watching Lava and it was like, what, like coming in home You threw the TV out the window, I hope.

[01:05:04] And seeing your kid watching the ring tape. I was just like, I was like, no! What's your favorite of the shorts? I think Presto is so goddamn funny. I love Presto, but I'm like, the top is interesting. What's the top? I gotta think on this. It better not be fucking... Lava? Well, yeah. I mean... It better not be fucking what? I was about to say a funny one. Bounding, but I do enjoy Bounding. Bounding's lovely. He's Bounding. Yeah. I like...

[01:05:34] Yeah. Yeah, I like Lava the most. I... You look Lava the most? I mean, sorry, Presto, sorry. Yeah, I hate Lava's the... I love Bao. And I've seen Bao so many times because my daughter really loved Bao for a long time. They sent me the little plastic prop Bao when that came out. I love that. And it's been living in my freezer for like eight years now. What's in your freezer? Because I... It's a frozen Bao. I don't know. I put it up there. I hid it in the corner. Yeah, well, tell us about it. I'm like, is Jerry's Game my favorite? Is that a little bit? Jerry's Game very good. Yeah.

[01:06:04] Jerry's Game very good. He's joining the MCU soon, right? Can you name which ones won the Oscar? Did Jerry's Game win? Jerry's Game won. Okay, so Luxo Jr. won. Incorrect. Luxo Jr. was nominated. Rude. Tintoy won? Tintoy won. That's the first win. Did Knick-Knack win? No. Knick-Knack sadly lost two stack, two bodacious. Right. Jerry's Game won? Yeah, that was the second. Okay. For the Birds won, I remember that. That's the third. That was in that era where it was kind of like,

[01:06:32] are they just going to win every single time they do one? Yes, because it was too consecutive for it. Bound and got its ass kicked. Bound and did get its ass kicked. Then it doesn't win. They don't win again for a while. Did Day and Night win? No. La Luna? Uh, no. My daughter also loves La Luna. Both those nominated. Yeah. La Luna is a Luca prequel. Yes. You know, it's got like Luca style. Yes. Lava didn't win, did it? No. Thank God. Lava, not even nominated. Did Piper win? Piper won. Piper's good. Piper looks amazing.

[01:07:02] Yes. Piper just looks incredible. Yeah, but there's not a win between 2000 and 2016. And then Bao won. And then Bao won. Yeah. Bao's so good. She eat the Bao. She eat the Bao. Do you remember when they announced Bao and we were all like, this sucks. I don't want to watch a food baby. And then everyone comes out of Bao crying. Bao fucking rocks. And then of course, Turning Red rocks. Yeah. Turning Red is the best. Yeah. Oh God, Turning Red's so funny. Now I'm just thinking about it. With all their faces go funny. Anime style. It's so funny.

[01:07:29] I just think the immediate quick cuts, establishing shots of space, straight it with fucking Hello Dolly lyrics. The weird juxtaposition of like, what is the fucking tone of this movie? The Hello Dolly of it is very funny in that that movie is so flawed. I mean, this is now that movie's greatest legend. Right. But Sands also said that. He's like, I find it funny that Wally has bad taste. Well, it's like, I always imagine. He's a bit of a cheese ball. Yeah.

[01:07:56] Listen, Wally was not exactly, you know, had a blockbuster video at his disposal. Guys. He just wants to hold hands. He does. But I always do imagine like, what if Wally had found like a VHS of Citizen Kane or something and he just threw it out. Yeah. I think Citizen Kane's no fun. Right. What's the gag? Obviously not as funny. Wait, what's the gag where he throws out the good things? The ring. He picks up a ring box and he throws out the ring. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Great bit.

[01:08:20] But I think that's part of also like, it feels reflective of like, you're lucky or like that your son hyper fixated on Wally and that was the movie that had to play 500 times in your house. So there have been other much worse hyper fixations in its way. Exactly. You're like, he's like a child. Ice Age, the meltdown. For some reason, he's fucking locked in on. Meltdown's tough. It's a tough movie. So step up from the first Ice Age. No, it is not. Step down from beating yourself in the face with a hammer.

[01:08:50] One time I went over to your place and your son was insistent that we all watch Ice Age, the meltdown and got really angry when anyone else was talking to him. Oh, yeah, yeah. He loves to do that. Yeah. He's this is part of why we had such a blow up at the Alamo Draft House recently. Well, yes. What was the blow up? What were you saying? Read about it online. You didn't read Ehrlich's Draft House piece? Oh, I did. Oh, yes. Right. But that was not entirely his fault. No, no, no. I mean, there was. No, not at all. There was problems. Yeah, there was some problems.

[01:09:18] But no, Ace is, you know, very serious about taking in his Ice Age. It's not like people talking over it. Everyone has to fight. I really don't like going to... I've been to Draft House twice with my daughter, and I don't like it as much as the Night Off. Please do not even get me started. Obviously, Draft House is right. But Ice Age boiling points. The Night Hawk has been better. Draft House is now, I agree with you, the worst place to see a movie. But so easy to fix. Like, it's just like, you have the infrastructure. We can fix this. Roll it back. Right.

[01:09:46] We all told you not to do this. And now it's not going well. I can't tell. I'm holding out hope for Common Sense Prevail, but I also think that they are so deep in it and are so invested in transitioning their workforce, by which I mean... Yes, because they made this stupid technology. Firing lots of people and reducing their hours and having no more seasonal workers. That was their whole thing, too, was they were like, we're rolling this out as a test program to see if it works. Test, you know, how much it fucking sucks. The feedback was terrible. And they're like, great, we're going to go ahead and force it on everyone.

[01:10:15] And it was like, this was your plan all along. You didn't care how anyone felt about it. Yeah, of course. Right. Some real B&L shit. It is some real B&L shit. But I was trying to think of the other movies that I've had to endure this many times. He's now really into Big City Greens, which is not a movie at all. Yeah. It's a show that I had not heard of until he happened to find it. You mentioned this, so we have never heard of it. It turns out that like roughly 60% of the guests who have ever appeared on Blank Check have done voice cameos on Big City Greens.

[01:10:44] Yet not one Griffin Newman. Not one host. No. Zero hosts. Hosley's been on it. Yeah. He's a regular. He's pretty good. Yeah. But yeah, that's his latest thing. I'm still trying to figure out what it is. Hi, Ben. My name is David Ehrlich. You might remember me from such Blank Check episodes as Wally.

[01:11:06] So I figured that I would send you a quick voicemail because something has really been troubling me since we recorded our Wally episode a couple of months ago. So, you know, any number of things that I've said on Blank Check over the years have plagued me. But nothing has really kept me up at night quite like how callously I dismissed the children's television show Big City Greens.

[01:11:29] I think at the time I was miffed that my six-year-old son Asa was forsaking the infinite riches of children's cinema in favor of a streaming television show during his limited after-school television time. But it turns out that Big City Greens is a fucking masterpiece. It's basically The Simpsons for eight-year-olds or younger. I think it ages a little bit aged up for my son, but he seems to rock with it anyway.

[01:11:54] I mean, it's actually a gateway drug to The Simpsons that I came home one day to find my son watching completely unprompted. Didn't even know he's aware that The Simpsons existed. Marge versus the monorail, which was a really profound moment for me. Anyway, in summation, Wally good. Big City Greens, very good. Chip Whistler evil. That's what I got. Thank you. Love you. Bye. Here's a question for you.

[01:12:22] How long had it been, do you think, since Asa had seen the movie last, after watching it hundreds of times? There's been a bit of a gap when he discovered other movies. Right. Until before last night, when I had to sort of, because he's so resistant to anything that is no longer his choice. Anything that he thinks is his sister's idea or preference is not going to fly. So I actually, thinking that he would be just sort of enraptured by flashing lights, as he's prone to do.

[01:12:49] I had my beautiful wife, Moe, turn on Wally as I was bringing the kids up the stairs. Yeah. So that when he walked in, it would just be there. And sure enough, you know, Slackjaw, you know, like he's the thing from Batman Forever. Yeah. Just fucking watching Wally. It did immediately suck him in. It did. And they ended up watching the whole thing. Yeah. But it had been, it had been probably three years. And your daughter had never seen it before. Never seen it before.

[01:13:16] Immediately, immediately fell in love with Wally, a la Wally falling in love with Eve. However, it came from a place of profound concern. I think my daughter, unlike my, I hesitate to call him sociopath on a podcast that will outlive me. But the love of my life, Asa. But he's not quite the natural empath that my daughter is. But like every three seconds, we'd just be like, Wally, no, is he okay? Wally, Wally. My daughter is. He's constantly in peril.

[01:13:46] My daughter would get so anxious about when the rocket lands. Because that is, I guess, in the first act, pretty much the only moment of real peril. When he's chasing the red dot. Yeah. And then like the flames. And because she would just, you know, and she had to always be reassured. I'd be like, he's fine. He's fine. Also, Eve does shoot Wally several times. She does. But like, that's played more for laughs, I guess. Like you never really feel that threat. And then the later existential threat, if he loses his personality. Yeah.

[01:14:15] I think didn't quite land with my like three-year-old daughter. Right. She didn't really get the peril there. Uncle Griffin did buy a, I think a Wally and an Eva. Or maybe I bought the Wally. I think you bought the Wally. They're still making new Wallis and they haven't made a good Eva in a while. And I bought a vintage Eva. Pretty good. No, it's pretty fun. I mean, it doesn't fly. None of them do that. It's, please, trust me. I did the work to get the best one I could, but it was vintage.

[01:14:44] Like, I don't think they've produced a compatible Eva. It does have a cannon. In like 15 years. Yeah. Which has blown several holes in my apartment walls. Is there an Eva Funko Pop? Yeah, of course. Yes. Yes. But. Right. Her name is technically Eve. Her name is Eve. But it's just that Wally calls Eve. Eve. Eve. And she says, Wally. And can we just say that she's hot? Or should I just, should I not do that?

[01:15:09] Like, I walked out of the movie with two, at the time being like, well, I really liked that. It wasn't quite as transcendent as I was hoping at the time. I remember. However, I am rock hard. But then my second thought was like, that bossy robot. Well, sure. She is a bossy round face. She is a bossy round face. Her face could not be rounder. Correct. And she could not be bossier. She's an upset down egg. All she does is go, Wally. And he's like. You know what moment I really love? Please.

[01:15:36] After she kisses him and electrocutes his face. She does. In space. And he's like frozen and floating away. She goes, Wally. Wally. For the first time, she's like, kind of like, come on, you old silly goose. I know that my sexual power is totally fried. Wally. Your operating system. She like waves her arm over. David. Yeah.

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[01:17:57] David. Yeah. If I'm being honest. What? Don't lie. I'm the most radically honest person in America. It's time for radical honesty. Okay, honesty is on the table. Sometimes it is 1 p.m. Sure. And all I've had is coffee. Uh-oh. No breakfast, no lunch, just caffeine. And whatever movie I'm three rewatches deep on. That's actually. That sounds like you. Yeah. I can't believe that's in the ad copy. A little tuff on the tummy. Lately, I've been keeping Huel around to stop myself from doing exactly that. Huel is sponsoring the podcast. Tell me of Huel.

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[01:20:53] All right. We start with, though, Wally Lips. As you said, Stanton's like... You start with out there. Well, that's true. But I mean, re the first act and the silence and all that. And, you know, Stanton says we were breaking rules. This obviously was not a done thing. But this is my point. You start with the fucking Blair of, like... Yes. An obscure musical song. And you're like, this is not how this movie starts. And then it winds down to absolute silence. But then it's also... Like, as we get closer to Earth.

[01:21:20] The pivot that they make to the first notes of Thomas Newman's score, which are very ominous. Score very important. And that is a huge... Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. That is a huge jarring moment, I think, similarly unexpected, where you're like, oh, we're going from the joy of that song to something is unnerving. The palette of the first three minutes is already, like, throwing you totally out of whack of, like, don't expect this to conform to the comforts of the usual Pixar movie. Why are they using, like, an old Hollywood song?

[01:21:48] Why is there now just kind of silence and isolation? And they film Wally from, like, such a distance. And you're sort of focusing on the spaces and then watching him cross in clear frame. And not even clocking, necessarily, that he built everything we can see. Totally. Right. And then the Thomas Newman score only kicks in once we sort of zoom out and understand, oh, he built these structures. And he's sad and alone. You watch the process of him, Sans Music, doing the cubing, stacking the one, the sort of pride he has in doing it precisely.

[01:22:18] There's a great Stanton clip on there's a there's a like 20 minute feature on the criterion. Ben, to your question, you asked famously in the early days of podcasting, how how do you direct animation? Draw faster, right? Yeah. There's a really good like 20 minute. I don't know, but also better. Yes. Sort of like a mini documentary of showing what directing animation is. And it's just kind of a compilation of reviews that Stanton's doing.

[01:22:45] He said basically that like, as he puts it, directing animation is you have to make a choice every three and a half minutes. He's like, I arrive every morning. My assistant gives me what they call the dance card. And it's here's everything you need to review today. And the list is so long that basically on average, every three and a half minutes, you have to make a definitive choice about something, whether it's approving a design thing or sound thing or an actual shot, giving a note, you know, deciding when a thing is finally

[01:23:12] finished or what needs to be adjusted or any of that. And there's a really good clip of him in a meeting with a lot of the story team, the design team trying to figure out, OK, how are the robots going to work? And much like Finding Nemo, where he said, I really didn't want to anthropomorphize the fish. I wanted to find a way to make the fish expressive while sticking to basically the physiology of how a fish could actually move. Secret. What if Jewish solved the answer? Right.

[01:23:41] But for Wally, he was like, I don't want them to mirror our bodies that much. I want to play with limitations. I think that's fun. Right. Right. It's more interesting to me if their bodies can do a thing that we could never do. And so Angus McLean, who was a big part of this movie, later directs Lightyear, which rewatching this, I was like, oh, yeah, the whole fucking design language of Lightyear is ripped off from this movie. It is what if Buzz Lightyear had Wally designs.

[01:24:09] Even all the tech, all the ships have the same kind of weird like rounded. Is that the movie that's the origin story of the action figure? Oh, my God. Ehrlich. It's not a movie about the action figure. It's about the real man that the action figure is based on. Because in 1995, a young boy watched a movie. I'm pretty sure he made a joke, the same joke on the Nemo episode. We'll keep making it. So I think we'll just maybe have to do it every time. There's a lot of life there. During this series. He has this great line where he's saying to Angus McLean, he's like, can I make the

[01:24:37] argument for giving him elbows? Right. Like Angus McLean's making this plea of like, it's going to make all of our lives easier if we can give him an elbow. And Stanton goes, I'd rather give you a wrist than an elbow. And everyone in the room goes like, huh? And you watch him explain for the first time, like it's coming to him. Like, what if his arms are like this? What if they're small and they're out like this? And his wrist can extend in this sort of way.

[01:25:02] And that's now coming up with a language of movement that you couldn't do with a human being, which is I think so much of what Stanton finds interesting in animation is like finding these midpoints between the language of live action film and the language of animation, which is like, how do you kind of shoot and cut a movie in quotes with what we understand from live action, but depict on screen things that we couldn't ever film and find the sort of midpoint between human

[01:25:31] behavior and what kind of characters are projecting. And with Wally and so many of the robot characters in this movie, it is all in the eyes, which are obviously a cheat for animation. You know, whenever they're trying to anthropomorphize something, but I think is so resonant here because Wally is really kept alive, not so much by solar power as he is by curiosity and wonder. I mean, this is what separates him from all the other Wally units that have been decommissioned. It's that he gets off on discovering things about the world and that has sustained him for centuries.

[01:26:01] So tiny pin in this. He the other sort of part of the lore of this movie is he was at like a baseball game and he had like cheap binoculars to watch the game from the cheap seats and he got hyper fixated on the hinge of the binoculars and how he was like, oh, if you tilt them down, they look sad. Yeah, it's brilliant. Right. It's so clever, which is the starting point of the design of this character. Obviously, the trash planet idea had existed, but that kind of reactivated the like you could build an entire character where that's the only face you have.

[01:26:31] And there is the subtle thing. And it's like part of the language the movie teaches you that pays off so effectively at the end when Wally like comes back is, oh, all these robots are supposed to have a straight line for their eyes. And I mean, that's right. When he turns personality less, he goes back to it's the dream. No, no. The droop is when he gets good again. Right. Right. But that's the moment where you're like, oh, my God, our guy is back. Yeah, our guy. And he is our guy. They've taught you this thing where suddenly seeing the droop conveys so much to you in this

[01:27:00] classic like Pixar teaches you a technology that is meaningless. And by the end of the movie, it can communicate a complicated thing in one movement. I think that is sort of the defining thing that this movie is about is like it's not about artificial intelligence in a sort of designed. We want to create artificial intelligence way. It is this fascinating like what creates a personality, what creates a soul? If a robot lives long enough, do like aberrations start to happen?

[01:27:28] Which is why it tracks so well into a different context of artificial intelligence, which is as a criticism of something it couldn't anticipate necessarily, which is AI. Right. Right. And the movie being a very obvious now in hindsight broadside against what would happen if we just delegate all of our thinking and ability to automated systems. Which this movie is basically all the robots you see in it aren't trying to comfort you by seeming human. They are there to serve a specific function. Right.

[01:27:56] This is just like, what if a robot did your fucking makeup? And that's the one that needs to look gorgeous, impersonate a social interaction because that's part of the dynamic. But otherwise, it's just like, what is the one thing this fucking robot needs to do? And it doesn't need a face and it doesn't need a personality. It's just going to serve this one job that we can like clean up in some cases, literally make the robot that cleans up. All of the main robot characters in this movie are defined by a moment where you realize,

[01:28:22] oh, something has weirdly evolved in them where they now have a personality where they now take some specific pleasure in doing what they do. It is no longer programming. There is some joy in this that is basically like a malfunction. But in that malfunction, like feelings are developed. So you start with like Wally, the sense of pride he takes in the garbage. Is that the reason that he has outlived all the other models? Sure.

[01:28:52] Yeah. I mean, probably. Right. Because like that's there are all the other models burnt out, we assume dead. And you watch one interested, you know, whatever. He's making architecture out of he's doing art. Yeah. And as I say, that little gesture with the wrists is just like you see the satisfaction of like another clean wall. But he loves to curate stuff. He's got his lunchbox. Yeah. He lives in my apartment. I get this guy. I really get this. He has. I mean, I hadn't quite made that connection.

[01:29:22] But right. Kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. Because of course, like Wally, right outside, he's making towers out of bricks and you know, all that. But that's what I consider podcasting. He lives in the garbage truck with the kind of like the rotating, you know, he's got the kind of the tie rack of garbage, right? Like the curation. Right. And that was supposed to be the racks of all the other models. Right. And he hangs his favorite pieces. You know, that was one of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of ships that were

[01:29:49] just supposed to be levels of Wally's all sleeping in little boxes. He's the last one we see in just like such fucking like clean, quick visual storytelling of his tread start to wear out. He needs to find other dead models. You're like, this is how this one guy has survived. He's basically been Frankensteining himself from his dead brothers. Like this isn't even the original Wally. At one point, he just became a hodgepodge of other Wally's. But you're like, right. The other guy's all burned out.

[01:30:19] Why is Wally still here? Because Wally wants to be alive. Why does he want to be alive? Because he likes doing this. It's not just that he's programmed to do this. He enjoys it. And then in his enjoyment and also the isolation of everything else around him and the mission becoming impossible, you know, unending, he starts to get obsessed with the other objects. Well, it dovetails with what Stanton said, which is, you know, irrational. The theme of the movie for him that he would put on like a coffee cup so that everybody

[01:30:44] who was working with him could understand in every chain in the system, what movie they were making is irrational love defeats life's programming. And so it's like if you take that to a literal place, it's like his his love of this activity literally overpowers, you know, the programming and the obsolescence that's coded into his programming and whatnot. I also think Stanton is a guy who's like constantly wrestling between instincts of cynicism and

[01:31:12] sentimentality that I relate to very hard. And I think his characters and his movies are usually about that. Wait until you see, if you haven't already, in the blink of an eye. It will be seen. Okay. We have to. Do we have to legally? The first episode you do where no one has seen the movie. Legally, we must. But yes, that there's always this battle within him between the two.

[01:31:39] I also just like love the idea that it's like he finds the pleasure in doing his job and stacking the garbage. And then over time, he's starting to like pay attention to the garbage and curate the garbage and study the garbage. Not to overplay Stanton's religiosity, which I think we were talking about mostly before we started recording, but like his vested Catholicism and whatnot, that there is an issue of or an element of like stewardship over the earth.

[01:32:05] And there you could easily abstract Wally looking to the heavens as, you know, waiting for a sign from God. Yeah. Waiting for Eve, in fact, you know, to come down. Yes. Indeed. They indeed even, of course, thought about the on the nose. Do we call him Adam or something? But he just was like, Wally is the sad sack. Like I could. That's the best. Yeah. You know, like and he's very, very smart of him. He also said Steve Jobs's single biggest contribution was that the movie was originally

[01:32:33] called W.A.L.E. And he's like, I don't like that name. And then they were like, like Wally. And then it works. Exactly what Steve Jobs said. Like the rapper. I think another contribution Steve Jobs made was his money. Yeah. That's another one he made. He threw his wallet at Andrew Stanton. Yes. And said, do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, this is just like a really it's it's a rare moment that that is very, very short

[01:32:59] of just them feeling so empowered and having so much money to play with that they can just do whatever the fuck they want. And they're confident that it will have to be supported by whoever ends up releasing it. But you get the sort of like Wally activating the video screens, the sort of physical pop up ads of the by and large deterioration. This this one company, a Walmart, Costco S company has taken over all of the world. Our consumerism polluted everything.

[01:33:29] We had to leave. The robots are supposed to clean things up, except it was too late. They never fixed it. And humans never came back. It's interesting that Fred Willard's character, I mean, maybe there is a distinction made and I'm just not remembering, but he's the president of by and large. But he also seems to exert the president of the United States and possibly the world. Yes. But what I love is I feel like whenever you see his title in Chiron's, it's like he hasn't actually become the president. It's that being the CEO of BNL has maybe become more important than being the president.

[01:33:59] It is. A hundred percent. Yes. It's just right. It's like a capitalist oligarchy. It's like what we became. Does the president not matter anymore? Do they actually not exist anymore? It's not that Walmart, you know, still Walmart's still important, but like by and large feels Walmart coded. I know it's obviously also Amazon or whatever, but like and that does feel of that moment. I was there's stuff in this movie that is fascinating to watch now where you're like the culture has changed more than I thought. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:34:28] Where you're like the Walmart thing of like, right, in 2008, we all agreed was like, is Walmart the most evil company that is like going to kill us? And you're like, Walmart's so far down on the list now. There is something. Walmart almost feels cute. Yeah. There is something quaint about this era of consumerist critique because we yeah, the evils that have supplanted it stood on its shoulders are so much more pronounced and existential.

[01:34:53] But he also said like the environmental angle of this movie, he was like, this wasn't motivated by me feeling like the movie was a call to arms to shake people into action. Right. Again, that just doesn't seem to be his vibe. But it's not a polemical filmmaker. But also like 17, 18 years later, I'm like, I can't believe how much fucking worse this got. And if I knew how little we were going to do to fight this issue, I maybe would have made different choices. Yeah.

[01:35:19] But yet at the same time, it's it's sort of central driving energy about humans needing to sort of regain control over their own fates and not surrender to automation and and thoughtlessness and helplessness is as relevant as ever. Well, that's the weird thing in the movie that simultaneously feels like quaint and still prescient to me at the same time, which is the greatest concern being apathy. Right. Like people just don't want to fucking care.

[01:35:46] They don't want to think there's just like a complacency, which I think right now in America are one of our biggest issues, if not our single biggest issue, is that has basically been replaced with an overriding anger. There is like a rage that is fueling everything in all directions where the sense of being this passive is a little hard to imagine. And yet we are on the scary precipice of are people going to start opting out of having to do shit in order to have everything automated for them?

[01:36:16] Sounds fine. It does. But I think, you know, the movie sort of indulges in the sort of a I proponent fantasy of, oh, like when we have a full automation, no one's going to have to work. We're all just going to be on vacation. But then you're like, what is life? We've already seen that that is not at all the reality. No, and it is wild to watch it now. And it's like there's like network elements of this where you're like, oh, this doesn't even read a satire anymore. But the idea that they're like by the pool and everyone's just looking at their screens and not going in.

[01:36:46] They don't even know the pools there. Right. I'm just like that felt really like exaggerated in 2008 when smartphones have barely existed for two years. Right. And now you're just like, yeah, of course. The fucking traffic jams of no one looking where they're going because they're all just watching the screens. You're like, right. I get the heightening here is the hover chair. But the relationship to the screen does not feel heightened. And at the time it felt silly. World's good. World is good. Wally is good. Wally has one friend.

[01:37:16] Cockroach. His name is Hal. Cockroach. What's his name? Hal because of Howl Roach. Funny. It's a fun show. I mean, you know, I'm not laughing out loud. You went and you smiled. You got me. May the listener note that you smiled. As you already mentioned, Stanson says they watched a Keaton in the Chapel in every single day. They were very interested in pantomime conveying everything. Right.

[01:37:43] Like can we make a movie where you turn the sound off and know what's going on? The kind of Chuck Jones axiom. This axiom, of course, also is the name of the shit. There's a true challenge of like, let's actually test our fucking bones as animators to see if we can tell a story through movement. And when you remove the kind of recognizable autonomy of a human body, then how do you convey these things? What I'm talking about of him not wanting to do the cheats of giving them normal human movements and whatever.

[01:38:11] And then he's also like, by doing that, you also test every other department more. If you're not going to have words, even though we wrote those words into the script, then I'm asking the music to convey those things. I'm asking the camera to convey those things. I'm asking color to convey those things. Ralph Eggleston, who was one of like the early, early Pixar guys and is the production designer of most of their movies and was part of that CalArts group. He passed away 2022, I believe, very tragically. Okay.

[01:38:40] What was a genius? Ralph Eggleston. Ralph Eggleston. And the Criterion release has a really nice feature that's basically like a eulogy for him, but also explaining how important he was. I brought this up a little bit in the Finding Nemo episode, but the thing of the color scripts where they do a kind of visual script of the movie based on the color palette of every sequence so that you can chart the tonality of like what you want to convey through mood and color. You didn't need to do one of those for John Carter. The red. It's a lot of red.

[01:39:11] But Stanton said, and I'd never heard it put this cleanly before. He's like, it seems a little indulgent to people on the outside, but in animation, it is not a standard thing. Eggleston basically made it a new thing because he was such a student of production design that he found out that William Cameron Menzies did these on his sci-fi movies of like the 40s and the 50s. The crazy 40s British, you know, like things to come. Which are super kind of like expressionistic. I can't believe he's got made.

[01:39:41] Yeah. Right. And would think about like, what are you conveying in color from setup to setup? And Eggleston was like, this was a cool thing. And those movies look really cool. We should try to bring this back. And everyone thought it seemed a little indulgent. And when he did it, he was like, right. Animation is so piecemeal that you don't actually see the final version of everything until the last moment. You're not getting like location scouting. You're not shooting things and being able to recognize like the color temperature in front of the lens at the time.

[01:40:09] It takes so long to add color and lighting and all of that to have that as like a guiding force at the beginning to know you're working towards really helps. One thing I want to note in here that we haven't mentioned yet, but it's not something I ever thought about because I don't like, I've never seen this movie. A lot of people noted that like possibly accidentally Wally does look like Johnny Five from Short Circuit. One of Ben's best friends. He is one of my best friends. Let me look at him again.

[01:40:37] Though Short Circuit 2 having revisited it on... There's some issues? ...an episode of Flophouse. It solves racism. Oh, no. It was something that I didn't pick up on as a young kid. I think that's one of those movie series where you're like, what's this here? Fisher Stevens lives in my neighborhood and every time I see him at a coffee shop, I'm just like immediately Short Circuit 2. The human Bobblehead. I feel so bad for him. He's done so much work. You're right though. I've never thought about that. They're very similar. It's the eyes. It's the eyes.

[01:41:06] And sort of on the long neck. Right. I found that infuriating as a talking point at the time. It was a little mini version of the Avatar is literally just Ferngully thing where I'm like, the fucking... Come on. Like, there's a thousand other things going on in this movie. I agree. So, Wally... But Johnny Five in his set. Sure. He never did anything wrong. Oh, wait. I'm seeing that Johnny Five here was at a J6. No? You basically get... Wait, where was he on January 6th?

[01:41:36] He's trying to get up the stairs at the Capitol. He keeps like falling over. I don't know. It's a funny mistake. Yeah. He was just sightseeing. He's next to Jay Johnston. He's next to Jay Johnston. Uh, all right. Um, you basically see one day of his, right? Yeah. And the little... You see a normal day and then you see the weird day. It's a perfect way to do it, I feel like. Yeah. Eve comes in at like minute 13. I mean, it's like so efficient. While you... You feel like you've spent a lot of fucking time with him.

[01:42:04] I think a lot of that is the silence makes all those moments really... You lean in and they matter more. But yes, him going back home, the organization of where do I put the spork and all this sort of stuff. The understanding of the level of feeling and thought he's putting into everything. And then his nightly ritual of like the iPod video playing the Hello Dolly sequence that he obsessively watches over and over again. I think it is such a beautiful, simplistic boiling down of like, if they're robots and

[01:42:34] they like don't have any biological drive to procreate. Sure. And it doesn't make sense that they would like need romance. Yeah. That he's recognizing something of like what is being expressed in the statement of holding someone's hand as a show of intimacy or having companionship. It's such a nice like... Well, you know, God gave him hands for a reason. It's so good. I mean, are they hands? I guess they're kind of like loaders or whatever.

[01:43:01] They're part of his sort of, you know, his cubing power. He also said that basically in the time that they were developing this movie, the iPod video got introduced and he asked Jobs for permission. Can I put this in the movie when it was a brand new thing? Who among us did not watch the first episode of Battlestar Galactica on an iPad classic? An iPod classic on a flight screen that is like one inch. I was watching Lost on those on the fucking poses. I remember Lost was kind of like the first show where they were like... Like... Yeah.

[01:43:31] iTunes video. Like, you know, like... Nine-nine cents an episode. Yeah, right. I was... I mean, I watched it on broadcast and then when an episode was good, I'd be like, purchase, rewatch at school. Wow. But he asked Jobs permission because it was such a new device. And he was like, I bet by the time this movie comes out, it's already antiquated technology. And he was like, sure enough, like iPhone comes out a year before this movie comes out, replaces the iPod video. It already was while he has an antique. Yeah. But here's the thing about Eve.

[01:44:01] And Griffin, I feel like you can relate to this along with me, which is that I don't know if there is a better evocation in film, animated or otherwise, of what it feels like to be a neurotic teenage boy and have an intense crush on somebody. This is where I'm saying... I'm not going to say for better or for worse. This was the primary concern of my life when I was 20 years old. Like, you're awed by the girls you're like terrified of them.

[01:44:29] I just don't know how to talk to them. They are involved in things that are so far above your station. Until I have a crush on someone and then I just... You show them green plants and they go catatonic. I mean, Sims, you had to like deal with even a little later in my life, the versions of this where we'd be at a bar and I'd be like, I don't even know what... How would I start a sentence? You once, instead of talking to a woman who I think may have been interested in you, can't remember the specific... I mean, of course the tragic irony was they often were. Yeah, of course. And I would fuck it up. That's bullshit. Drew a picture.

[01:44:59] I wish I could find it. Let me see if I could find it. Of just a sad little guy. Oh, I remember that. With a girl you met at Videology drew a picture. No, no. Griff was just instead of like, you know, being a person who talks to another person, he was just instead drew a weird little picture. You cast a note? No, no, no. He just gave it to me. Let's clarify this story. Just gave it to me. People keep talking over me. This is Videology trivia. And for like 10 consecutive weeks, I turned to Dave and I'd be like, I have such a crush

[01:45:28] on that girl I cannot speak to. Yeah. And Dave would be like, go talk to her. I'd be like, I don't know how to do that. And it was one night where David was trying to like hype me up to be like, just like walk over and say something about trivia. And instead I drew a sad face. You're missing out because you know what's great? Then when they're mean to you, you're like, oh, I love it. Sometimes they have fully loaded cannons for arms and they blow up giant ships.

[01:45:55] No, I do think this movie is one of the greatest depictions of that. And I love the Buster Keaton movies that lean romantic because they weaponize a similar dynamic, except the difference is that Buster Keaton often seems kind of oblivious, right? That he's lovestruck and then it's just sort of like him chasing after and he doesn't realize how much the world is trying to stop him. Whereas Wally is like smitten and also terrified.

[01:46:21] Yeah, it's the combination of being smitten, being terrified and being, there was the third thing and then you sort of just took the words out of my mouth. But anyway, odd, odd is the other thing that I think completes the picture for me. It is maybe my single favorite moment in the movie and speaks to what I was saying earlier. He sees the red dot. He's chasing it. You realize the ship is landing, right? He's hiding behind the rock. He sees her come out. Everything is very kind of routine, right? The arm comes out. It unleashes her. She activates.

[01:46:50] Her design is still so fucking cool where it's like seamless unibody thing. And then the head and arms can float off to the sides and the hands, the arms can turn into fingers if need be and all that sort of shit. Wow, I found a picture of Wilder. I'm so far back in my photos right now. That's Wilder. Alan Smith. Yeah. What happened? Wild. I know. Ben's arch nemesis. This is 2015. So he's probably like, I think it was like one or two. He was like two, maybe two. Yeah.

[01:47:20] He came to my friend's wedding. If you're trying to find the trivia drawing, that would be like 2012. I know, I know. I went too far. Yes. I went too far. I think my favorite moment in the entire film is like Eve is there. She's like locked in on her mission. The ship starts to leave and you see her kind of clocking once she's out of the view. And then it's like she takes a breath and has just the joy flight. Yeah. And it's that moment of, oh shit, she's like him. For some reason. She's a little different.

[01:47:48] She finds joy in doing things. She is doing things for her own satisfaction. And if he wasn't already going to be smitten just by like, I've never seen a fucking robot like that. There's a personality there. And as much as she then tries to immediately cover it and be like, I am all business. It is every robot we meet who is a primary character. It's the same thing with Moe. When we get to Moe and he makes the decision to jump off the line because he loves cleaning so much. He does love. He do. That's his art. That's how he, you know. Right. Whatever.

[01:48:18] Finds joy. Every one of those activation moments is so satisfying to me. Is Moe driven by joy? Here it is. Or is Moe driven by intense compulsion? I found it. This is the drawing Griffin made rather than flirt with a girl. Let me see. Huh. Okay. We'll make sure to post that. I don't know what to say. What does it say on this? Number three? I have no idea what the fuck was going on. The joke might be like, you're not even number two, you're number three. I don't quite know. It could be a Kid Cudi reference. I don't think it was. We can pull that. Yes!

[01:48:48] Chance the Rappers. Chance the Rappers. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, but it would have predated that. I think it predates. Yeah. We'll post it on the Instagram. But yes, Wally's just like chasing after her. And then there's the moment where she hears him exhale. And then just immediately fucking like turbo cannons him. Love it when she turbo cannons him. Hottest part. It's their meet cute. I know. Is she thinks she's murdered him. Gosh. Just imagine dating an egg robot with an arm cannon.

[01:49:18] Pretty cool. Obviously, she's... Gotta build a cold shower into the back of Blank Chik Tzu. Indirectly inspired by Apple products. But obviously, she's also kind of like a nesting doll design. Like she's got this sort of Matryoshka shape. The egg. Um, uh, this is from Angus McLean. Who, that, is that the guy who, the Presto guy? No, that's... Which one is he? Uh, am I wrong in thinking? No, Presto wasn't Teddy Newton. Is it? Is Presto Teddy Newton? Let's find out. Presto film.

[01:49:47] Because I remember like that, that director. Doug Sweetland. Oh, Doug Sweetland. Me always being like, when's he making a movie? And then he ended up making Storks. Uh, you know, he left. I never saw Storks. I thought Storks was a Nicholas Stoller joint. He wrote it. He wrote it... Did he co-direct it with Sweetland? Or is Sweetland the only director? He might have... That was that era where they kept... Snuck a co-director. They were like, we only let an animation guy co-direct a movie with a live action guy or a comedy guy. Correct. It's to both of them.

[01:50:15] Angus McLean is the guy who co-directed Finding Dory and then directed Lightyear. Uh, aka... What year was Storks? 2016. Because Storks was in the, like, in my... Come to Jesus, after my Come to Jesus moment of recognizing that Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the greatest of all works of art and culture of the last 100 years. And being like, I will see literally anything Nicholas Stoller makes next. And he's like, I'm directing a movie about Storks playing babies. And I was like, well, I guess there's a line somewhere. That movie... Never saw it. I found it to be a bit of a rough hand.

[01:50:45] Doug Sweetland is, like, an incredible character animator and especially incredible at, like, animated comedy, physical comedy. And has... Is responsible for... That's why Presto's so funny. All the hijinks. But, like, a lot of the best Pixar physical comedy moments... I feel like the one that's always pointed at is, um... Woody acting out, uh... In Toy Story 2. When they're, like, playing Woody's Roundup and he comes out of the box and is, like, being all hot shit.

[01:51:13] Angus McLean and Doug Sweetland felt like the two guys were... It was like, when are they gonna let them make a movie? And they let Doug Sweetland get away. Right. And then Angus makes Lightyear, which is worse than making a movie. It's so bizarre. It's like making a negative movie. But he did Bernie, which was the short that accompanied this. Oh, yeah. That's really good. Yeah, that's fun. And he did, uh... Toy Story of Terror. Jesse finds a way. I feel like you should watch some of those early Pixar movies. You might like them. Yeah, it's a total blind spot for me. I'm just reading off the dossier. Anyway... Jesse does find a way.

[01:51:42] To quote Angus McLean, she looks dangly, Eve, she looks dangly and wind chimey when she's in automaton mode. When she gets emotional, she does more arcs, like a porpoise flying around. Yeah. Well, that's when... This moment of joy where she just kind of, like, flies around like a fucking flower. Uh, they loved the cockroach idea. Also, just, like, that's a fun challenge, like, making a cockroach cute. Yeah, it doesn't have a face. Doesn't have a face. Um, so... Uh... One other note on production design.

[01:52:12] Act one is all romantic and emotional. And then act two. They say act one and act two. You're right that the movie is really in thirds. But I guess they basically mean, like, planet, then spaceship. Act two is, like, get to know the axiom. Act three is, like, the uprising. Yes. Uh, but then, you know, act two is essentially the axiom is sterility, order, cleanliness. It's when it goes from being Buster Keaton to Jacques Tati. Right. Right. But you're also... Yes, sorry. They try to make the lighting more romantic as act two goes on. Like, you know,

[01:52:42] they try to... They sort of soften it as, as, you know, your personality enters. Well, the movie starts out really washed out. Then you start to get some warmth when Eve enters. I think the most beautiful sequence in the movie is when there's, like, the big dust storm and he brings Eve inside. and the way Eve reacts to the darkness of the room where she's, like, glowing and you see the weird ring of, like, fluorescence inside of her neck and also the reflections of the Christmas lights and everything off of her. And you get the singing fish, which is, uh,

[01:53:11] between this and The Sopranos was having a huge cultural moment. Billy Bass was one of our greatest. But yeah, she basically, uh, almost accidentally shoots him and then is just like, I... the fuck are you? And then you get your sequence, the Livian Rose of him just kind of, like, following after trying to get her attention. Who among us hasn't had a crush saying what the fuck are you? She's just like, I'm working! I do feel like it's important to point out, though, that Eve comes into contact with Hal, almost shoots Hal, the cockroach,

[01:53:41] but instead... She likes him. She likes him and they both, Wally and Eve, get tickled by the cockroach, which is really sweet. But it's showing that she's kind. Right. Right, right. But that happens before she meets Wally. It's like Wally making such an advanced overture to her, she's like, no, get away. I'm working. She wishes almost he hadn't seen her be nice to Hal because she wants to put on the face of all business. Maybe the best shot in the movie is right after she's exploded all of the oil tankers.

[01:54:10] I agree with you. Shot from behind of Wally in silhouette just sort of saddling up slowly beside her. But also that he recognizes that's the moment where it's like, oh, she's shown, like, emotion in being so frustrated that she caused this much damage that she had her fucking Adam Driver punching the wall moment. But also that he has so little game that he's like, now is my time to strike. But it's also so funny to see her and it's like, it's like they convey physical tension

[01:54:39] in her body even though that shouldn't be possible as she's watching the ships burn and she's just sort of like her eyes narrowing, like wanting the catharsis of watching something be destroyed. When she, when her eye go grumpy mode, the eyes are so good. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But he, he senses the opening of like, okay, if we can just exchange names, we're cooking here. Right, right. And she's charmed by the fact that he can't say it. Uh, wow. It's a little funny.

[01:55:09] He brings her into his home. She loves his collection. Yep. It's possible. And then the ultimate fantasy of showing, showing her one object that is going to so blow her mind. Right, that she falls asleep. Well, that's, that's maybe not part of the thing. You show her a boot with plants in it and she goes unconscious. But all of those gags of, of handing her the light bulb and then getting so kind of like frustrated that he can't turn it on. I like when. Her fixing the Rubik's Cube. Yes, I like when she laughs, when she goes like, like or whatever. Yeah. Mm. Uh,

[01:55:39] the pop in the bubble wrap. Like, she's finally just totally let her guard down and is as fascinated by every object he shows her, but also able to solve them so much faster. We also see him turn into a cube. Oh, you mean when he goes into like sleep mode? Yeah. Yeah. And we know that he's charged by the sun. I think it's just awesome design. Yeah. That he not only makes cubes, but is a cube. Yeah. Which, like, this is a classic Pixar logic thing. Stan is always the first to point out, it makes no physical sense.

[01:56:09] If you keep seeing the way his stomach opens up to be able to compress the trash, there's no space that his body could actually suck into. Sure. And it's like, but you buy it. We make phones now that can like fold on top of themselves, man. Anything's possible. They communicate it to you in movement so much that you're like, I just understand what you're asking me to accept. But yes, he's showing her all the objects. He's trying to show her hello dolly. She doesn't give a shit. She can't even like pay attention to it. And then he makes the mistake of showing her, of course,

[01:56:39] plant in boot. Do you think that if he had shown her a scene with Walter Matthau, she would have been a lot more locked in? She'd be like, and this guy was like a major movie star? I now understand. He did like all genres. He'd be like the romantic lead in things. Matthau? More fire, more intrigue, the drachen kehring, the absolute power is to you to get your heart to be your kingdom will be

[01:57:08] unending to be Rhaenyra. Stream the new series House of the Dragon from the 22 June with WOW. Frey to also on the series of series 1 and 2 of the Erfolg series and other highlights. It will no doubt who the gods have chosen. Drachen Heist for the best price. Now at 2 ,98 in the month. Go to wow. TV. Streaming was never so wow. I'm watching a clip or I'm watching the movie here.

[01:57:38] He makes a little Eve statue and she is unimpressed and then he kicks a bunch of metal pipes and it falls on her. Come on! This is great stuff! And his little treads flip up. It's adorable. I mean it's very childlike even as he's sort of transitioning into an almost parental mode. Although we see him in a parental mode with the cockroach. But I don't know if you've ever seen your child fall off a bed or something. It's like you're so concerned for

[01:58:07] them but immediately it's a very funny visual. I don't know. Yes. It also helps that where you're just like this guy his center of gravity is so off. His build is so awkward that doing anything other than rolling on a flat surface you're just like I don't know if he's gonna make it. But there's also I mean I don't know how deep we need to go into the imagined lore of by and large but some practical application towards designing him to be cute on the company's behalf. Yeah because they don't want these things to be threatening.

[01:58:37] Right. Versus the robots on the Axiom are less cute because people aren't even really paying attention. Right. They're all in the bowels of the ship. Do we think there's a flaw in Eve's design? No offense to my perfect queen. Go on. One boot with one plant is enough to turn around like a ship with 600,000 people on it be like well Earth seems ready because like I'm looking at Earth. It ain't like ready ready. We might want to wait for like a tree or two. But that's

[01:59:07] like centuries ago. Her programming is set in. It's just funny that she's like well there's one plant baby. That's not a flaw in Eve's design. She's doing her job perfectly. That's maybe a flaw in the work she's doing. You also have to imagine that their thought is we'll put everyone on a star liner for five to ten years maximum. And if we see the first sign of vegetation that means oh it's coming back. It's ready to go back there. They didn't know that the world was going to become that fucking awful.

[01:59:37] And the idea of this one boot making it would be so against the odds. They knew what if there is a guy on the axiom they knew and they did nothing. Mark Ruffalo so yeah what else happened now she's just the opening sleep mode coma mode and Wally still tries to like you have the Thomas Newman kind of musack Wally doing date nights with coma Eve.

[02:00:07] Oh we got to call out he dances for her. He does the little it's so sweet and he had picked up the trash lid and it pays off. He's like doffing his hat. He's a cool guy. The top hat. I also love that he's a clomper. Dude it is so funny when she Hulk Loki's him. I also love the moment of him

[02:00:36] forget how he injures the eye in the first place. I can't remember but when he gets the new guy and he's so embarrassed that she's like seeing him naked having to plug the eye back in. He's recalibrating. Oh it's when he falls. I'm watching here. It's after the dance. He slams him into the wall. He falls down and breaks one of his eyes. There's a lot of very clever some more overt seed planting there. I'm thinking particularly like the fire

[02:01:06] extinguisher things that are just in front. I mean even when they introduced the boot it's not even the focus of it's like a half second throwaway. It's part of his collection. They don't give it any special emphasis. No he puts it in the fucking igloo cooler but it doesn't get any more attention than the bra. It gets less attention than the bra. I mean the bra kills. Yeah. That's why. Because Wally's rocking double D eyes. What about the lighter? Ben. There's like two robots and on this

[02:01:37] abandoned planet and they're looking at the original source of like energy. Prometean. Yeah it's Prometean. But the other thing Ben is in the version of the movie where Wally has to save Eve and she is the one who gets crushed and he's carrying her for the last 20 minutes. There was some Chekhov's gun of the lighter being the way they reactivated her. It's why they put a lot of emphasis on it at the beginning. It's still a nice moment. Yeah. Which is why I'm sure they kept it in.

[02:02:07] But it was supposed to be in some way he replaces her battery with the lighter. It's also a machine using machine. It places him like an even more antiquated continuum where you understand him as a relic but also as a product of the future. And it's a machine with a natural force inside of it. It's like organic versus an organic It's a machine that can create an element which is so crucial just as he a metal box can feel love. It's an analog. He's got

[02:02:37] a flame inside of him. A question that I had watching the first 30 minutes of this movie again was if ever dare make a live action adaptation of a Pixar movie or if it is a tribute to the ineffable quality of Pixar's better films that they can't be conceived of in live action in the way that Moana can. Yeah. I had that thought watching this of like are they ever going to dare to do this? And it's like what would it be?

[02:03:07] You know like it's the line between this and doing a more modern it basically becomes just like a fucking PS5 rebuild of a PS2 game. Right. Like why bother? I mean right. Which what is now the disturbing thought experiment of like what is the most live actionable up it's up upper Incredibles. Yeah, I have gotten the sense and I say this with no inside track but the vibe I've always gotten is that

[02:03:37] Pixar retains the right to say no to that shit and it feels like they have to exercise every morning at 9 a.m. when they get the daily email exercising it fully and this is the other thing is Moana one of yours? No, great. It's no surprise that like Disney inherits this batch of films in acquiring Pixar and Iger's like great we're going to put our full muscle behind them we will try to make all of these movies hits the fucking Toy Story 3 is next right? Like the sequel run starts right after this.

[02:04:07] Yeah. It was like we'll treat these movies as precious gems but you got to start fucking playing ball with us well Up is right after this then Toy Story but Up is the last of the three films acquired I'm saying the first film that Disney commissions is like Toy Story 3 now. It is like the Ratatouille Wally Up Toy Story 3 is Bridge a movie I like although not as much as some and then Cars 2 Brave Monsters You like it's a crazy downshift yes like crazy yeah it's you gotta play ball now you guys weren't fans of Cars 2

[02:04:37] I've never seen I have been working on this theory and I rewatched the film recently did you know I did I truly did you know that Michael Kane's in it he plays Finn McMissile well truth is in comedy he plays Finn McMissile who's a MI6 car his sidekick of course is Holly Shiftwell which is pretty bawdy yes that makes me uncomfortable I was watching Cars 2

[02:05:07] and I was like you know this really isn't as good as Cars 1 and Cars 3 which I've never loved has at least more integrity now how do they all stack up against Planes 1 I was thinking that Planes Fire and Rescue makes planes look like Cars 2 and Cars 2 might make Cars 3 look like Cars 1 the only Pixar movies I have not seen are Cars 2 and 3

[02:05:37] you've seen Onward yeah I like Onward yeah Onward's good I've seen Onward multiple times you're the only two people I've ever met yeah I've seen multiple times on the steel book that I can't say I don't own the steel nice steel big fan of the denim jacket with all the patches on I yeah because I've seen yeah I've seen everything else yeah the ones that I've seen a lot is disturbing because of my daughter so like well it's not disturbing that I've seen Luca like 25 times because I like Luca but good dinosaur is disturbing when you told me she was going through a good dinosaur phase that was a pretty brief phase but it did

[02:06:07] exist but like the turning red phase was so great the Ratatouille phase amazing WALL-E great Luca that's a good movie like it's not my favorite simple movie it's really easy to have on yes I love it though I think I feel like you come around on Luca I've always been a fan of Luca but yeah I feel like your son had a phase where you were happy I think because it pushes against what we were talking about earlier about like the capitalistic you know fumes around Pixar stuff right it's fun it's a little bit more it feels like

[02:06:36] pointedly small it sure does although I wanted to you know we were bad mouthing with good reason the good dinosaur but a shout out to a Stockholm syndrome like experience with Elemental which was the first movie I ever took A-CNC theaters did not click at the time can I call this out yeah I mean put him on blast I believe it was in our Wind Rises episode yeah I mean I wasn't here for that weren't you the guests on Wind Rises I mean if only no I was here for

[02:07:07] Castle not the castle fucking Howl's Moving Castle oh right that's the one where I announced Matrix Resurrections yes I can't remember if it was that or it's so crazy that they let you make that announcement to the world of all people but you did it well I mean I was a big fan there's some episode that people have invoked where you say I will not let my son watch western animation this is a classic he said all kinds of shit where it's like the one

[02:07:36] the one thing I know this child will not be loved I will not be provided for but they will they will not see any sort of CGI western animation you wouldn't show your kid Ghibli movies because you were afraid he wouldn't like it it turns out it turns out that you're mentally ill is it time for me to throw the wall in a team it turns out that the reality of raising a child is very different than how you imagine it your reality is a weird reality my friend at two years old I was like son this is an Apple TV remote that is the bed where I am asleep

[02:08:06] in the morning use this to watch whatever the fuck you want as long as you're not waking back you were just so confident that you were going to hold the line of artistic purity and then your son is like obsessed with Italian brain rot and he's got good taste and watches many good things and appreciates them I have watched your son watch YouTube videos of 10 wordles being self-informed yeah so I also have this competing instinct in me which is like I cannot be that parent who foists the cool kid stuff on their child and you don't want to be the Onion article about the fucking talking head stat

[02:08:35] it means more to me that you come to my favorite movies organically and like them on your own terms and I'll show them to you you know selectively when the time is right but I'm not going to shove them down your throat I'm going to let you reach these places on your own Elemental was what was playing I wanted to take it to him he came back around in Elemental in a huge fucking way and he really my daughter did have an Elemental I just want to call out a very distant conversation I remember having with you which was

[02:09:04] I feel like I'm almost ready to take Asa to see a movie but his first movie needs to matter and I was like Elemental what matters more than Elemental and you looked at me and said my son's first movie is not going to be a Pete Soane wow and then like six weeks later you were like took Asa to Elemental and I said why and you said it was raining or something it sure was you woke up it was a Sunday afternoon it was raining and those were dark times for a parent I love seeing a movie but listen New York City's own Pete Soane respect

[02:09:34] but I also took your son you took him to Totoro because I could not be there for that you were like I couldn't sit there and watch him potentially not like it mental illness wallet it was the same screen that you took to Totoro for the first time I'm commuting with my kids stay away from me and I took Alec's son and you were like if he doesn't like it just don't tell me sure I mean my daughter but like the difference being my daughter had seen Totoro like 20 times it was one of her first movies and my daughter

[02:10:03] who is a lot more pliable and responsive to you know the studio Ghibli of it all is obsessed with and turned me on to really converted me to the power of Ponyo which she now wants to watch either that or Totoro that was my daughter's first movie but Totoro was like so good yeah dude Elemental has some charm great music I have really struggled to locate the charm of Elemental and I've seen it a lot it has some Wade is a little bit of a nuisance but it's the main character

[02:10:32] but I like I like when Ember speaks fire-ish I find all of the epic stuff in Elemental very tricky yes listen do you own that film Elemental I do not Ben it's actually a really good question I own it I was but uh cause Disney sent me a free copy okay I was maintaining I do have a blue I was maintaining not even a 4k uh no they sent me a blue and I was like

[02:11:01] I'll put it on the shelf they were like do you care about the K's on this one uh I was maintaining a own every Pixar film and even in the pandemic I like broke down and bought 3D Blu-rays of good dinosaur and maybe Cars 2 another one I like didn't like and Elemental was the one where I was like I don't need to own this in any form thank god I'm truly relieved now who knows two months from now I might hit a rough patch and start trolling eBay for the Elemental seal book but as of this moment I own Elemental in no form

[02:11:31] I don't even own a digital comic my daughter's first movie in theaters will by no means be Minions Monsters and Minions well she's wait your kid's three now uh thus guaranteeing that's exactly what it's gonna be Minions and Monsters I've seen the trailer for at every movie I've taken and I'm always like and I think it's time for me to catch up with the Minions the Minions bounce off of me I have never gotten it without any judgment you say Banana but I see that trailer and I'm like do I gotta do the fucking deep dive because it is a little galaxy brain to be like

[02:12:00] the Minions obviously love Early's like Sword and Sandal cinema and you're like well of course I think that's fine that's great is this their like Wally moment you know where Pierre Coffin's like I've made you so much fucking money right I want to make my passion project right can I use the Minions to express my interest in the birth of cinema I feel like nobody liked the second Minions right Rise of Gru that was the one I feel like really passed everyone by that's the only one I've ever seen but you could slap the word Minions

[02:12:30] on anything and it would mint a hit you could have the Minions Minions and Mosquito Coast speaking of the episode of your show that most recently aired and that thing would print money Minions and Solo well maybe Monsters and Minions will have a shout out to Solo it doesn't really fit into the vibe but why not Minions movie needs it Sing 3 could be entirely Solo dependent I feel like that would fit very organically that's another one where I'm just like I don't get this fucking thing okay so they get to the Axiom I think we need to get to the Axiom now right Axiom time

[02:13:00] he's just trying to take care of her right as she is now infirm basically and shut down until her ship returns to retrieve her but he's staying out in the elements he's getting struck by lightning he's getting rained on that's true but he's then covering her up with a garbage can yeah he's really sweet he's a sweet boy but her ship comes and he has to make a split second decision which is like I'm gonna grab onto the back of a fucking spaceship because I don't want to lose her and I don't know where she's going him telling the

[02:13:29] cockroach to stay put where it is is as anthropomorphized as I think Wally ever gets yes and now two hours into the episode we've hit the 30 minute mark which is when he blasts off into space yes and you have the beautiful sort of five minute sequence of him seeing the solar system touching the rings of Saturn just beautiful shit we argued in the Finding Nemo episode that that's Thomas Newman's best score

[02:13:58] and I think it's the best like use of the Thomas Noonan thing Thomas Noonan the great Tom Noonan who recently died I think Finding Nemo is the best version of what Thomas Newman does really well I was surprised re-watching this how different it is from most of his work it has the strains of the motifs but I think partially because the movie is putting so much more weight on the score to convey story it has like five different tonalities that

[02:14:28] switches in between and it feels like this sequence where it's you know the kind of like magical beauty of the stars is when Newman goes into Newman mode for the first time and they're flying too close to all these planets they are but he lands at the Axiom which is a luxury star liner where babies just do baby shit and he meets the main character of the film Moe Moe Moe is incredible and I feel like Moe had largely kind of been hidden from the marketing

[02:14:58] I think they hit a lot of the Axiom stuff they really front loaded yeah they did because I remember everyone being so focused on this movie and being like and if you watch the trailer it does look like it's not all on the plan but no one was really prepared for any of that which I think might have been also part of why it did bounce off some people like some people did bounce off it a little bit I also think I mean I compare it to like shit like Full Metal Jacket right where it's like often Wally is

[02:15:27] compared to Full Metal Jacket yeah it doesn't feel like you had a lot of people being like Wally sucks after the first act but you had a lot of people who were like the first act is so transcendent that was the normie take amongst my friends right first act incredible second act is fine it goes from being like right perfect yes to being really good I have always liked all of it but the purity of it is it's just astonishing where you're like I can't believe they're getting away with this and it's working and I think it's all good I love the first act and I think it's so special but I think the movie

[02:15:57] needs everything that happens I the sci-fi kind of dork that I am just love the axiom and I love all of the kind of like kids version of rebelling against you know the ship computer like it's just like it's a it's classic sci-fi storytelling that I respond to I think it's so well done I also I and I like that it's goofy farce like yes like that it is like a mad that's where you feel the reared in too of like bringing in a Simpsons guy obviously the just the Pixar you know like yeah there's Inc has a bit of

[02:16:27] that and of course I also I really like the captain there are so many bad versions of this where you're like this is the cop out that we finally introduce a character who can speak all the subtext and explain everything directly to camera but I think the arc of the captain is really well rendered and I completely agree the captain could have used a wife who kept telling Wally to get the fuck out of her house that really would have added bossy face well that auto's kind of his work life I suppose yeah auto the true villain of the right there's captain Mcrae

[02:16:57] Jeff Garland's character who uh does not he's only called the voice by and credited in the uncredited Macintock Macintock it's called Macintock right which was that that era's talk to when is deliberate that the antagonist of the film is the only one not to have any sort of trace of human right like Ben Burt didn't do that they just typed words into a computer and that's the Mac voice portal is the year

[02:17:26] before right the portal connection is strong but I think it's an parallel thing it's parallel right like because it's not like but I remember at the time portal obviously the greatest video game ever made equaled only by portal two uh like not not being able to shake that uh that comparison yeah yeah I mean obviously uh GLaDOS uh obviously auto is a lot more how visually coded I mean with the the red eye at the center is it's kind of dominant but yeah I mean I think it was like the Mac aesthetic

[02:17:56] uh combined with evil super intelligence gives you GLaDOS slash auto uh but I just want to talk about Moe I just I I married Moe as I alluded to earlier in this episode um and uh well can you speak on that yeah I mean I'm trying to I was trying to in that that sort of pause figure out how best to do that your wife a lovely human being one of my favorite people and I don't project what you're saying you're like as derogatory but I need you to unpack

[02:18:26] it so the audience understands anytime your wife texts me like you know are you going to this screening tonight like you know David's out and I'm like no divorce him I'm just like divorce divorce anytime you like go to can I'm like divorce what's he doing going to can uh if she could carry our children up to our fourth floor walk up maybe she would have a good reason yeah but I am definitely the every relationship needs a Wally and a Moe uh and Eve is sort of off in her own lane she's the

[02:18:55] other woman as far as I'm concerned but uh yeah my I on one of our first dates I drew similar to how Griffin drew a sad version of himself at a bar uh I drew a crude maybe the best thing I've ever drawn as someone to no artistic talent whatsoever um a a little caricature of Moe on her legs uh wow and on both across both legs yeah that's bold and um the ballpoint pen it turned out pretty well uh a lot of just boxes um

[02:19:24] what you identified this movie as a shared point yes uh we've been dating fuck we've been dating started dating 16 years ago so a year or two after Wally yeah I mean we we knew each other since college but we didn't start dating until got drunk one night as happens um but the um yeah she is very compulsive towards cleaning and I am more of a Wally type in that I like arranging and collecting things that uh other people might

[02:19:53] think of as trash I I did appreciate there's a thing on the criterion disc where Stanton calls out that he is an obsessive physical media collector character and it's like the balance between being like I buy these things they give me comfort they make me happy I want to be in a room surrounded by all the things I care about it doesn't actually solve anything I'm not critical of Wally's compulsion right of course and but I wonder about Mo you know it's sort of the classic one must imagine Sisyphus happy sort of thing like is he delighted or she delighted they I mean the robots are

[02:20:23] aggressively coded in this movie Mo not so much but aggressively gendered I would say um but uh is Mo happy to have the excuse to pop out of letting clean something or is Mo more irritated this is a question I am often asking in couples therapy with my beautiful partner but uh but you know Mo is when Mo sees the dirt trail goes whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa that moment I mean Mo lives on a shakes his arms out like I got my work cut out

[02:20:59] daring to jump the line and one assumes tempt death like I feel like he's thinking like if I jump the line will I just explode or shut down or something but like his job is to obsessively clean everything in what is a very sterile environment and Wally enters the ecosystem covered in dirt and creates a new but does this give Mo a purpose that Mo has never had before justifying most life and therefore should Mo not be pleased to have the opportunity to clean up after someone's messiness I think that's a

[02:21:28] great question I would argue I think similar when I was saying like what defines Mo and makes him similar to Wally and Eve is that he takes pleasure in what he does and you said is it pleasure or is it like obsessive compulsive there is an argument that Mo is like mentally ill rather than like driven by joy but it still is an aberration that gives him a personality I feel like we're broaching territory that it's no longer fair to discuss without my wife present sure I'm speaking fully of Mo I speak not of your your lovely

[02:21:57] yes anyway I will say that the dynamic between Wally and Mo is I think a very complicated and familiar one to me yes and I love Mo very much Mo is so funny everything about him his like his intensity yeah yes very intense mindedness I mean he's earlier on a journey that Wally is far along on and even Eva is a little further along on right like we're watching just the beginning spark of

[02:22:27] rebellion or consciousness or whatever maybe that's the question is like Wally and Eva when they start sort of deviating is it at first out of an obsession that then they let turn into a joy you know is very Marie Kondo yes but Wally has for hundreds of years we assume been iterating and thus getting weirder and weirder this is most first moment of activation right and then the other droids we end up seeing the kind of like I forget what they call

[02:22:56] foreign contaminant yes but the sort of like reject bots yeah are all like they've had their first kind of in the diagnostic bay right right aberrant behavior that is maybe the activation of something I'm just watching a Mo video now it's just so funny he's so disgusted by Wally Wally's so filthy I think Mo's a little forgotten like even just within the Pixar canon and the characters that are like often invoked Mo was in line to replace Tim Cook at Apple yes I think he was one

[02:23:26] of the three I think he should have there's a lot of politics you know Mo doesn't always you know he's tough to be a big personality I like that the way he says his name has all this wind up to it like Wally it's effort of like Wally and like Eve can get out quickly and Mo it's Mo he's efficient just want to clean so bad that's all he want to do he just want to clean okay so Wally is chasing after Eve we get to

[02:23:56] the roadway yes and we see another aberration which is that we're seeing the humans they're you know laying on these little beds right and yeah they're in these like chairs chair bed which I'm assuming there's a toilet built into it I think no assumption necessary that's going on yeah Wally runs into the first human this is where we start to get right the Keaton-y thing of can Wally just start to throw things a little bit off out of whack right

[02:24:26] he the amount of dirt he introduces in the ecosystem makes Mo jump the line him chasing after Eve knocks John off of his axis he's looking away from the screen for a second he makes the introduction and I think it's a beautiful moment of Wally introducing himself and John being like uh John like he's out of habit of needing to but he probably hasn't done it he knows what his name is but he's sort of like what am I what do I do here

[02:24:55] when was the last time he secretary yes with the little finger and I love that we don't really go back to that guy but it's I say guy but the same thing of like Wally waving makes them sort of look at their own articulation point and be like can I express an emotion there's um go for the

[02:25:25] go for well those that's they're like they are legion but but there's the first mate one that's the one that like tries to yeah in the plant I mean they suck they're cops they're fuck them they're little fucking dwee trying to think of other Wally robots um the painting one is named Van Gogh alright that's a little too cute it's really good um but then you have the beautician bot you have the boxing robot that's supposed to be the workout I don't know what his job would be no the idea is that he's for

[02:25:55] like physical training he probably has not been used in a while he's supposed to be the exercise bot that like he's like the vision you have the vacuum cleaner bot that also has allergies yeah I'm just like there is an incredible amount of entries on the Pixar wiki there's a golf bot called Birdie oh sure you see yes you see the guys on the screen yes

[02:26:24] yes there's also Bird comma Brad who made a lot of movies of Pixar he did thank you yeah thank you for acknowledging that yes what is Bernie Bernie's like a welder right he's a welder outside of the ship who gets locked outside and it's sort of a blackout gag of like what's this guy gonna do and Angus McClain pitched like what if there's a subplot of him trying to get back into the building and Stan

[02:27:05] Bernie Bernie Bernie really fucking good they're often good I always worried I always thought with those like wondered with those like yeah is it annoying at Pixar where it's like hey

[02:27:35] whose kids are obsessed with these movies and instead of watching Frozen 2 for the 97th time you can watch Frozen Fever or Olaf's Snow Invent whatever the fuck it's called that one that started a mutiny it's like 40 minutes long it was insane but the one on Olaf they don't even fully animate yeah it's like on the disc as like story reels where they were like we ran out of time money on this but I find shorts before now like bringing kids to a movie a short before a movie

[02:28:05] is very anxiety inducing for me because there's a narrow window where the kids attention will be locked in enough and rock steady

[02:28:34] I gave you a little study guide that has a photo on one side and the name on the back my bebop as I think I've told you the toys are still in separate crips bebop has bebop rock steady has rock steady but at the start of every morning bebop demands both right like he points you know like I give him both and then he plops in my lap and holds them feels great and what does rock steady do doing that he's still drinking his bottle my bebop drinks his bottle like done you know

[02:29:04] which is his energy generally whereas rock steady is a little bit more like I shall pause you know I don't want to drink six ounces of milk bebop is the one I have my eye on re attention he's got some bruiser energy too yeah yeah uh you posted a very funny picture of rock steady reading a book the other so far he looks like a little intellectual I mean that's just what is rock steady likes to find a corner

[02:29:34] he likes to find like an egress you know what other other robots there's the flashlight there's the umbrella there's so many of them there's the makeup

[02:30:04] robot yes but what I like is that it feels like one of the things that's activating all these robots is that they're barely kind of engaged with anymore there's something about much like WALL-E they're forced to do a itself right yeah um yeah everyone's it's not

[02:30:34] like they're depressed they're just in a daze yeah and Captain McCray is the one who's sort of like half in yes he is the one whose brain has to be the most awake even though it's only a little awake he doesn't talk to other people but he needs to bit active and he thinks of himself as more engaged than the rat he's the only thing only person who has

[02:31:03] even an illusion of responsibility yes even though at this point it's like to what end Otto doesn't even wake him up no no I mean he does the morning announcements it's his only joy right and the idea of switching from day to night which no one even notices like he oversleeps and then sets the time back to morning so that he can do the morning it's his only thing he gets to do obviously his big triumph is walking

[02:31:33] and to me it's another just triumph of physical animation as good as the robot stuff yeah he's like making his walking like compelling you know he's like okay I gotta actually get on my feet and walk it's so funny that the uniform they made it's just like one size right and so it's just become yeah exactly yeah do you think like children immediately understand the spoke Zarathustra as like yes this is of course the music you play

[02:32:03] when someone is evolving that it's like so hardwired into our DNA at this point so it's like you know it's like the fucking oh this is what you play when someone's graduating this is what you play when someone's getting dramatic music yes they should play to graduation yeah um yeah but I like that it is this sort of reactivation of curiosity that that drives him well it's the yeah the machines becoming more like humans the humans have already become more machines but then the humans then have to

[02:32:33] reactivate into their humanity by their machines right the two-pronged thing of all these qualities Eva showing up with a specimen he's like wait specimen right that's what I'm supposed to be waiting for yeah but it's been so long that it's felt like it could even happen I don't even know how to react to this his moment when Otto hands him the like guidebook and he lifts up the one page and it's like wow what do you look at that right I think he speaks to it at first yeah yeah that's pretty right he talks into it like a tablet but I do think it's always a

[02:33:03] morbid line for me when Fred Willard says that like oh just a few laps around the jogging track and your bodies will be right as rain again it's like I think in reality when they go back down to earth's gravity they are going to be plops they're not going to be able to again it is hard right it's hard to imagine quite what their life will be you know this is why they put in the end credit sequence because when they did the test screening of the almost finished movie the first note everyone got back is like well I don't think they survive right

[02:33:32] don't they just die right and they were like we have to like put something on that tells them like they're gonna do the work we'll figure it out we'll see how far it goes yeah and that's basically the credit yeah the cute like over the is it Peter Gabriel it's Peter Gabriel I'm going now because this is the year this is this is slumdog I'm going slumdog giant hole beats this for best original song I have a logic question we see babies now

[02:34:02] I think there's this is a crass question there's some harvesting going on I think this is an artificial situation okay because I was gonna say how do they fuck how are they they're on zoom all the time they might actually have to tube what's the last time someone didn't tube in because we see the relationship with the two humans yeah I don't

[02:34:31] remember the character's name it's John and Mary I think but it's clearly like voiced by Kathy and Imogen people haven't touched one another yes the act of them just making skin they're like okay let's nominate two songs from Slung Dog one song from Wally I think we're done that's the era where they couldn't even care to nominate five right they're like yeah

[02:35:01] you know what I think that covers the songs of 28 Diane Warren didn't have something Diane Warren should have written a Frostnickson song was 06 the year where Dream Girls has three out of the five song nominations and then they're like what are we doing here and then I think they sort of went I think they went to a sort of like it can be up to five but it can be smaller it can be lower and no movie can get more than two Dream Girls did get three I wrote an article at some point about Diane Warren the scourge

[02:35:32] of Oscar season and I saw I don't use Facebook anymore but I got an email that said Diane Warren has sent you a message and I was too afraid to look at it for an entire calendar year and then finally after she lost another Oscar I was like I'll just check what it was and it was just a smiley face it just is so funny we need to rip off that fucking band and give her an award but she has to stop writing songs for movies that are like Diane Warren the Diane Warren story

[02:36:00] where she wrote a song for a documentary about how she always loses the fucking Oscar in this category sometimes you lose and people are just like we're not giving this to you I'm sorry like fucking famous people write songs sometimes you lose David mimes holding a microphone while he was singing that even though he is sitting in front of a microphone the documentary about her I mean she does she has written a lot of great songs sometimes you lose

[02:36:30] I don't want to be overly harsh but like she is so embittered even when she lost to like fucking like Billie Eilish like Lady Gaga for Stars Born which was like she was never going to lose harder than that she also wrote a Star Wars shit and walks home right the problem is that there were so many years where it felt like this category was so irrelevant where people were like do you just fucking eliminate it from the telecast entirely and we should have given it to her one of those years now I want to find it when do we give it to her the last 10 years

[02:37:00] has been like songs that people actually know written by giant pop stars she's not going to beat her I'm just going to give you some of her losses her first nomination was for nothing's going to stop us now from mannequin an incredible song what beats her time of my life from dirty dancing you're not beating that no but you're like in any other year maybe but I think that's like okay here's when she should have won it's her second although I wouldn't give it to her but her second nomination is for because you loved me beautifully sung by Celine Dion from the

[02:37:30] forgotten film of close and personal it loses to you must love me from Evita which is ass yeah might as well be called ass song that should have been her win and we could have avoided a lot of the correct winner there is that thing you do yeah which is better and was nominated and was nominated yeah but if they've given it to Warren that's still better than the stupid of that's nomination two a banger hilarious that it's from Con Air but a banger what beats it my heart will go on yeah you're not

[02:38:00] winning break you're not gonna win okay so then the year after that is don't want to miss a thing so the next year she has I don't want to miss a thing from Armageddon beautifully sung by Aerosmith there she loses to When You Believe by The Prince of Egypt I think we could have given it to her I think that's also her best song I don't really like right I got pretty sick of it but like I don't think there's a huge problem skipping fucking when you believe there's definitely an element of continued injustice that has fueled her the next year she has

[02:38:30] what's it called music of my heart from music of the heart well that's she's starting to get that that loses to you'll be in my heart from Tarzan and that's obviously blame Canada right but that's an NSYNC Gloria Estefan song I remember NSYNC performing at the Oscars I definitely remember Gloria Estefan Blame Canada is my winner but Toy Story two year that's what should have won McLaughlin and Newman now I'm gonna shoot you in the head don't do that now her next

[02:39:00] nom is for There You'll Be from Pearl Harbor a terrible movie with it's regular Diane Warren it's diet what's the fucking Con Air song I'm already forgetting it's very similar yeah it is it loses to another situation much delayed award Randy Newman for if I have you right so they had to give it to Newman then 13 year

[02:39:30] drought that's Warren vanishes because I feel like the kind of work she did was no longer needed right those are the years where she could have eked out a win Hollywood turns away was the hero we wanted not the one we deserved is it the sexual assault on that the hunting ground and Pearl Harbor is her song from beyond the lights grateful which is pretty good and that

[02:39:59] loses to glory from Selma so she could have won there too glory is strong it's fine glory strong it did make Chris Pine cry let's also remember that year was the whole thing where Selma only got two Oscar nominations and it suddenly was the only Selma and it was like if we don't give Selma the Oscar win we look like assholes she definitely could have won for the documentary about sexual assault with Lady Gaga song until it happens to you because writing on the wall from Spectre won a song that sucks

[02:40:29] and is for losers terrible that's the Sam Smith one especially given the one that we eventually heard the song that Radiohead wrote it's incredible going into that night everyone thought she was finally going to win and the fact that Joe Biden was on stage presenting the song with Lady Gaga it was like this feels like a moment and then they were like you know whatever since then it's been like stop it because like the nomination has been for Marshall RBG

[02:40:59] Breakthrough The Life Ahead which was like an Italian movie Breakthrough Breakthrough was a Chrissy Metz yes she's like stuck under the ice sometimes you're under the ice they pray a kid back to warmth that's truly what that movie is listen to these movies you've never heard of The Life Ahead Four Good Days which is the like Mila Kunis heroin addict David why are you reading off my Spotify rap then in 2022 the Oscars are like

[02:41:29] here's an honorary award stop it four more nominations after that tell it like a woman flaming hot she got nominated for the Cheeto movie what's the song it's called The Fire Inside is that the year that Billie Eilish beats her for the second time I mean I don't think she was ever going to win but it does yes Eilish wins for Barbie that's the year that I'm just Ken should win and instead they give it to the Eilish song she's too

[02:41:59] hot for the Oscars they famously never give Oscars to hot people the six triple eight and then yes last year she was nominated for the movie Diane Warren Relentless and relentless she is we cannot deny this and I just like that it wasn't even considered to give it to her you felt like everyone who wrote her in on the nomination ballot put parathetical but I'm not giving her the way in the golden year yes Wally Wally I would just to

[02:42:29] end this tangent to close this loop what do you think she would need write a well regarded song from a movie that is in theater Diane you're not going to rope a dope us into giving you a competitive win we're not going to be shamed by you we stopped being embarrassed at nom 10 and you're at nom 24 as you were alluding to earlier now it is also not just for the end credits but baked into the meat of movies nowadays like very strong original

[02:42:59] songs by major artists and I think that has never been so difficult stuff like golden you're like right like you're not this is not a kiddie category I mean like these are right big pop songs make it and the days when she was writing songs that could compete with golden they existed but they are so funny that they were like con air okay it's like a really violent R-rated movie about like cons on an airplane like do you think we need a fucking just ballad this is the era I miss which is what I refer to even though often this was

[02:43:29] not the proper title blank blank blank parenthetical love theme from any like action movie or disaster movie Blade Runner I think is famously the one I always show people because it feels like this was too late for this to be happening it feels like an aberration that snuck through and I'm constantly pointing at and saying can we bring this back is Adam Lambert's Time from Miracles love theme from Roland Emmerich's 2012 which has a music video of him like all decked out in leather

[02:43:59] and spikes walking through the wreckage over like shots of John Cusack driving a limo over like the fucking Pacific Rim my friend I watched this video once a month my friend Carolyn never seen Independence Day I watched it recently rewatched Independence Day it's kind of crazy how in that movie the first lady dies like right like she dies she's returned to Area 51 and she's like goodbye wife and I'm sorry husband and daughter and they're like five minutes later

[02:44:28] never mentioned again everyone's like high-fiving America she says happy Independence Day daddy's like happy Independence Day to you like they're just like I mean it's already a movie where like no one sits down and it's like I think a billion people are dead sure like they are just booming cities one by one the question is like should Diane Warren have hitched her wagon to Feige and gone like every Marvel movie needs a love song sung by like a Groban

[02:45:00] Groban sounds like a robot in the original piece of music I am the Groban the MCU other than just the theme song itself there are the Mencken songs in Captain America the first Avenger that are fun that I actually think should have been nominated but get cut down a little bit in the film did they not nominate one of them the star spangled man I that's the one time where they wrote and then I guess the Hawkeye TV show has the fake don't know what that is in America okay Wally Wally Wally Wally okay

[02:45:29] so the plant get taken the plant get taken Eve is deemed defective well you have she's brought up he's like oh my God plant life chest opens up the audience see auto clock that Eve had the plant and organize hiding it it's another deleted scene that you can see in storyboard form and he was

[02:45:59] like a I think we need to stay with Wally's perspective until basically he starts to get crushed and be the audience is going to follow you and be they're going to lean on the intrigue of genuinely where did the plant go it it helps us to it's good it's

[02:46:30] we've been watching Eve this whole time her chest has been closed where the fucking plant go and that's of course what Captain McCray says verbatim where the fucking plant go every magic trick has three parts and the second one is Wally correct they throw the play it's a great shot of Wally poking his head out of the tube Eve's defective they put they put the red kind of like cable fucking lock thing on her they put yeah it's like the boot and send her down and Wally's chasing after we meet the other

[02:47:00] reject bots and you know what do they call it a rogue robots also fun you know Island of Misfit toy boys Cuckoo's Nest kind of mental hospital vibes while he yeah exactly right the weirdos blaster behind him in slow motion and they all run rampant through the hallways of the axioms fun and then eventually at some point they wind up oh he winds up in the escape pod well they're wanted and all of those

[02:47:29] those aren't the gophers but those sort of like big screen guard bots have taken the photo that now everyone's waking up a little bit by the danger of our robots turning on us which is another example of Wally starting to create the ripples that affect everyone right the whole system runs on everyone behaving like it does not run if the robots have their own idea and something's that's just alarming enough to break everyone out of the trance but I guess basically in running away and hiding out from the guards they see the

[02:47:59] gopher trying to eject the plant the gopher's got the plant in his tummy and he puts it in the escape pod and and Wally wants to go after what were you going to say I just that's the idea that I love of like this he he's been infected with consciousness right and like he brings consciousness back to all these people who've lost it like it's not just the robots coming to life it's everyone coming to life that's why I love this movie yes I agree with you good and that's why yes everything on the axiom is important I think

[02:48:28] when I was 22 and I saw this movie in theaters and was so hyped for it and was then like probably mad that it was not like a Philip K Dick style gonzo depressing fable of you know like I was like oh I don't like all the kind of farsi kid shit at the end like boring and now I just watch that I'm like that's the point of the movie as much as anything else and it's so funny like and it's so fun to watch with a kid who loves all the antics of course sorry I was just pulling up on my iPad but that's the other part of it is she's leading him to the escape pod because she wants

[02:48:58] Wally to leave right that she's actually fully angry at him right is like the fuck are you doing here the plant's gone being plugged into my head now I'm on like all the wanted screens and in trying to get him to go into the escape pod they then see the gopher show up hide in the shadows put the plant in there and Wally gets stuck in the escape pod trying to save the plant which she then thinks explodes you see a moment

[02:49:28] great little bit of Wally being all manic in the porthole but he's like about to explode he's like and the fucking parachute coming out like all the crazy gag shit and then the no no no no no no no of Eve actually she does care she doesn't want him to die and then like one of ten Chekhov gun moves this movie has is like oh right we saw him learn how to use the fire extinguisher on earth he knows how to use this he can propel himself they start dancing define dancing

[02:49:59] right because Captain McRae has also already now watched Eve's camera and he's like the fuck is this place earth it's not the cute paradise of my storybook trees water it's basically the same plot as under the skin I guess of like a creature becoming increasingly humanized you know in this case not to their detriment and Captain McRae getting obsessively falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole basically right I guess

[02:50:29] it's important to remember re them restoring the planet they do have the robots and the robots will be helpful now where are they going to put all the cube garbage and stuff I don't know it does feel like that's got to go somewhere well my thing is send it into space put it on the axiom that was probably the way they could have resolved the problem in the first place instead of building a ship to get humans to leave the planet fill the fucking ship with garbage and send it out to space like the low orbit anyway is so cluttered with satellites thanks to Elon Musk

[02:50:58] thanks to Elon you know that it's robots like the character robots are not going to want to do their functions because they have now discovered love and the joys of life and whatnot and they're going to have to rely on the wall a's and sure but you see in the end credits the way that like the robots are helping with the efforts the way their programming can be reapplied to making the farming and such yeah yeah they're gonna make a pizza like I would

[02:51:28] feel bad asking Wally to like go mix take out my trash for me or something like he's got stuff to do yeah he's got dates he's really got to put the work in on this relationship if it's ever gonna survive you have the divine dancing thing which I just think is so beautiful beautiful them creating their own like color trails that is between Newman fucking unleashed yeah that that is a really this is what it's it's the argument that like it's the other one I think you could say

[02:51:57] is his best score only because it forces him to do a lot of stuff outside of his usual yeah you found it quite challenging I think and then you have moments where it's like and Tommy I'm gonna let you do your shit on this one he actually the whole score was written by AI sorry the movie but he just said like write me a pretty score what was written on David written by David when he was sad about missing his mommy which David are we talking about the one from AI yeah his love is real but he is not there's just too many Davids in the room right now I'm sorry too many Davids

[02:52:31] Thomas Noonan's in this film Thomas Newman is another one who I think is at 20 nominations he might only be behind Diane Warren Tom Noonan also had 29 it really fits Newman's like he's 15 noms his thing of like he's workman like you know like he's pretty reliable he's distinctive but I do think he's also taken for granted of late he's been but he's not taken for granted in that they like will nominate him for passengers that's the crazy where you're like

[02:53:01] they clearly know him and recognize him you're noticing the passenger score and you also refuse to give him a trophy I mean the connection between passengers and Wally is pronounced I mean I think that is the live action remake of Wally his 1917 score which was his last nom I listen to all the time the film that was playing that I was supposed to go see the night that you carried the snoo up the stairs to my apartment when Lord he was coming I didn't get to see I was spared having to see 1917

[02:53:30] then I ended up fucking I had twins and I was like well I'm not gonna get two snooze like and then like Spongebob meme one months later like the second snoo is being brought into my house he should have won that year because he lost a fucking joker yeah Jesus but that was I mean it's like the Slumdog win like even giving Jai Ho best song wasn't enough Slumdog was such a fucking juggernaut he should have won for this yeah yeah yeah he should have won for this over but

[02:54:01] this Slumdog moment yeah obviously that is not my favorite film of 20 no it was it was rewarding a Bollywood luminary and like his music it does make sense it does it makes sense in the moment part of the kind of energy of that movie is the music and all that yeah and then we had the Nemo conversation which was like he would have won even if Howard Shore had been disqualified which is kind of aberrant that they didn't do that when they're usually so difficult but the score that's why the score branch is so hated no but I mean

[02:54:31] oh yeah yes yes I made the case of course the Return of the King score bangs hard but also it is just yeah sometimes they're like well you can't have we're not nominating Dune 2 because it's too similar to Dune 1 and I'm like the Dune 2 score is completely different and you have allowed other sequel scores fucking Rise of Skywalker got a nom that same year they shortlisted Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and I'm like guys what's the line here Elfman let me show you what instrument he used for that one a phone okay

[02:55:00] he phoned it in excuse me okay sorry he used a keyboard and he copy pasted control V control V or it's control C control V see this is why you could never write an Oscar nominated score because control P is print that's the problem that's why it had to be V Wally and Eve come back Wally gets back on from being out in outer space I know it's another three hour wrap what are we yeah I know I know I know it's Wally I know Eve has the plant there's a point at which she gets the plant back to she's gonna bring it back to the captain

[02:55:30] tells Wally to stay behind they've also seen gopher so they're just like something weird's going on here we should be suspicious and cagey beyond the fact that everyone's looking for us now but she gets through she brings the plant to Captain McCray McCray and also sees the video footage he's been watching of her on earth which now has gone into her hibernation period as it's like continues autoplaying so she gets to watch Wally taking care of her when she wasn't conscious they don't really

[02:56:00] milk that moment as much as they could and I'm not saying that's as a negative but like there is a real opportunity there to sort of squeeze you by the heart they use some restraint yeah it is restrained but within that footage is Wally showing her hello dolly her like standby mode body directed at the screen when she wasn't paying attention before so now she sees it for the first time and you see her have the same hand realization activate fingers

[02:56:30] does the interlocking activate fingers right so now Eve kind of gets it but she's already shunned him off and Otto is going turbo trying to block Captain McRae's efforts keep your Wreck-It Ralph terminology out of this conversation I'm sorry well he's a good guy though let's not be saying me and then Otto reveals the second video from Fred Willard right looking like they just busted him at the Tiki Theater very disheveled was he wearing a life jacket

[02:57:00] yeah he didn't want to drown Jesus a lot of fluids in that place this is our episode on a children's film but the idea that it's like five years later and things have gotten so bad and he's just like never mind abandon right and the secret protocol you're actually just gonna stay out here forever and there's an argument that Otto is showcasing the same thing we're talking about with our other like hero robots which is like Otto has clearly

[02:57:30] made a decision to hide this information from the humans Otto has been serving all of these captains and at some point Otto's following protocol I mean that's that's Otto's design but like was protocol not giving the captain the complete information I think it was by any means necessary making sure that humans do not get back to he was following his prime direction yeah you just could argue that Otto is starting to make like creative decisions of how to execute that maybe in the way that like a learning

[02:57:59] language model large language whatever the fuck they are would would make what appear to be creative decisions to gas somebody up when they're asking chat GPT for advice I mean I don't think it is actually thinking for itself in that it's irrational feeling is defeating its programming in the way as all the other robots in the film I think that's what distinguishes Otto from all of them is that it is bound to its order and can't really think novelistically they both get knocked down the garbage chute zapped by Otto

[02:58:28] Wally gets crushed and smushed but Eve sees that he has saved the plant and all is not lost yeah it's also a fun moment with Mo right Wally makes the introduction to Mo who just uses it as an opportunity to clean his hand off but like that Mo blocks the doors when the garbage is being Mo takes a big risk yes

[02:58:58] Mo says life can be messy I love the moment of Wally's sort of like back hinge flipping out his hook that he had previously been using for the igloo and you're like that's a pretty perfect place to put Mo we got our fucking core three now you know like the three of them like Eve can carry Wally Mo can be on Wally's back and we're just fucking all business now what I'm taking from this is that maybe my marriage needs a third right achieve harmony we need an Eve

[02:59:28] you need an Eve maybe the Eve is your couples therapist I'll bring that up there this afternoon I think the last time I was here I also had couples therapy in the afternoon which is not a daily occurrence but more of a coincidence but did we cancel it once because a blank check I think I did actually have to cancel because of Schindler's glad that didn't end your marriage I remember being quite abashed about that not about pouring a wallet at you I will say it is a point of pride that blank check has not yet knowingly ruined a marriage I'm sure it's happened

[02:59:57] because you don't know about it right like maybe someone just listened to us so much that the other person was like you know what on all the time in the home and I just go like I'm so sorry if this is not a thing you're opting into could be worse they could be really into ice age the meltdown this is true Wally yeah they're

[03:00:27] they're just in fucking mission mode now because Eve is just like a it's like her protective instinct is kicking in Wally is close to death his circuit board is fried there's no time to waste he has you know in a slightly christlike way potentially sacrificed himself for the sins of humanity to try to save them but that always I was watching the movie and I was like he'll be okay like that would be too I had half a moment of is Pixar gonna do it I think future generations of people once they repopulate the earth

[03:00:57] should worship Wally they should yeah as a god or at least the child just as a good movie but they've locked Captain McCray up Wally even Moe are trying to find a way to get to the Lido deck because if they can put the plant in the whatever it is the hollow deck the ship will autopilot itself it will override autopilot himself even and just go straight to it and I just yeah McCray just need to give a shit he's still trying to stay in the

[03:01:27] hover chair and do everything he can but then you finally get to the breaking point as you said this excellent piece of animation of I got a lock none of this is going to happen if I don't make the effort to take the first step yeah and it's such beautiful walking little bobby boy I mean this is really when Wally sacrifices himself though he gets not gets crushed in the trash compactor it's that Otto is trying to drop down the chamber where they're supposed to put the plant into yes well right the first thing that happens is that

[03:01:57] Otto shocks him which fries the circuit board and then now he's additionally physically crushed I like that they fool Otto with a drawing of a plant yes the projection and yeah and it's just like the ripple effects of everyone that Wally has affected in some way are woken up now everyone is suddenly joined in the very Paddington esque right this

[03:02:27] civilization where people have no social interactions Wally is like their favorite thing they've ever met because it's the last time they had a feeling about anything it's a smart choice that it's just hyper speed and it's like once you get the boot in there we're just gonna go straight right yep that's how it's all designed but then you have what I find so emotionally affecting is Eve in that panic mode of like I don't have a second to waste how do I keep him alive how do I

[03:03:17] in a Pixar movie that way I'm just picturing like Moe breaking out of the window and running away into space this movie felt so audacious that I was like are all rules out the

[03:03:47] I just I'm like right I'm like you know just don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining I think it's a credible moment I think what's credible about is it's more about the acceptance of death and the fact

[03:04:19] don't like Lotso he smells bad I'm not into it he smells like strawberries anyway we see a bunch of greenery and it's nice to think that Wally played a big part in clearing all of the debris that enabled the plants to

[03:04:49] and society rebuilds itself as depicted in the evolution of artistic styles and movements and it's a great movie Wally's my boy man when you get to like point a list Wally and Eva under the tree it's a great movie I love this fucking movie it hits the ending quickly it's not abrupt but it's very efficient yeah and the greatest tension at this point is can she save him and

[03:05:19] don't believe there's any way to save him yes it is my only reservation is that I I think that the bit with the ship tipping over and all the babies sliding is thematically on point but I always wished it were a little bit more viscerally satisfying after the 30 minutes of this great tati scramble through the ship which feels so balletic and fun this feels a little clumsy but maybe it's I don't know I always wanted something that pulled me in a little bit more at the end yeah

[03:05:50] this is one of the movies that broke the academy awards it fuck is there like there's no merch it's this movie pretentious and ratatouille did well but it was down right it was a hit but

[03:06:20] it it was leggier it was less front loaded and it still ended up way below wally doesn't even have legs this is true he's got treads wally was an uptick but they definitely were worried about it and the marketing I mean we mentioned the hidden city cafe teaser but I remember the super bowl ad for this movie was buzz lightyear and woody watching the game and woody turns to buzz and go you hear about this wally guy and they were so freaked out by this movie that they were like can we just remind

[03:06:50] you of our legacy and our track record and use that to buffer please trust us movie also very expensive it is 180 million dollar budget yes very high it opened to 63 domestic it grossed 223 million 521 so was below ratatouille which had been below the incredible it was below ratatouille worldwide because ratatouille was 200 domestic it went above ratatouille wally feels like a universal ratatouille made

[03:07:20] 623 worldwide yeah cars also obviously had been a disappointment to some extent on release although it had a long tail you know merch wise it won best film at LAFCA which is a big deal big deal there was a real feeling of like is is it time to let

[03:07:55] a lot but at the same time it is you know they're kind of in their categories arguably the only two other nominations it could have realistically gotten were picture and directors and it felt like they were on the bubble and it was

[03:08:25] Dark Knight and WALL-E are a much bigger deal but it's like if we're getting more elevated serious blockbusters do we need a space to recognize these if these animated movies are becoming this artistic do we need a space to recognize these yeah it drives them insane despite as we said in our Slumdog Millionaire episode Slumdog Millionaire was the highest grossing best picture nominee until Oppenheimer they had a movie that was a genuine

[03:08:55] blockbuster crossover success and they were so freaked out by the fact that they didn't show enough respect to WALL-E and Dark Knight that they go to 10 the next year and up becomes only the second animated film to ever be nominated for best picture in a 10 Toy Story 3 is the third has not been another one in 16 years I have it where do I have it on my 2008 list it's my number two what's your number one Synecdoche I have a 12 maybe I should get it higher

[03:09:25] I'm gonna throw my wallet at you what do you happy-go-lucky speed racer milk Wendy and Lucy these are big movies for me milk is the best I love these movies they are lower and then

[03:09:55] like it's sort of are kind of wet blankets yeah of course I mean I think like Frost Nixon is obviously that

[03:10:25] is that Frost Nixon contributes to the 10 best picture nominees as much as Dark Night and Wallet readers like one that's egregious but Frost Nixon is a little bit of like are we just like auto nominating anything that feels like an Oscar movie you were like I could find a few people who thought that was good right there was not one person on earth who was like one of the best five movies of the year is Ron Howard it was

[03:11:12] so so much better than those and what's the fifth one I'm forgetting Benjamin Button and I like that movie a lot but even that one is at the time everyone's like a little underwhelmed it's a little treacly you know like just and like we're nominating that over Dark Night and WALL-E which actually kind of really hit the zeitgeist my son who's never seen a minute of Benjamin Button is fascinated by the premise he's always like what's that movie about the guy who's born to being 100 years old and ages

[03:11:41] backwards you maybe should show Asa Benjamin Button supercuts like best of blobby like I don't think he'd like the whole movie he would like like Benjamin Button and the revival tent yeah so box office game right yeah uh sorry I'm just coordinating a little photoshoot maybe okay coordinating a little photoshoot I interviewed

[03:12:11] somebody and uh they won't they're they're gonna take pictures of you of I should do that for any time I interview someone just like me going like and who interviewed him but David Sims here scene can I paint you I interviewed uh what's his name Kane Parsons yeah how's that movie we'll all know by the time this comes out I'm quite fond of it especially all the parts where they are in the back rooms but there was a yeah sure but there was a moment during our interview when he said

[03:12:41] yeah no I started to get into this stuff liminal horror and all that stuff my first year of high school which was the first year of COVID 2020 and I each you can hear it on the audio of our interview right the loud shotgun I do to my you ate a bowl of bullet soup where I was like oh pardon me drink poison okay so it's number one of the box office Griffin what's it opening against opening to a very surprising 50 million

[03:13:10] dollars wanted I feel like wanted like massively over indexed because it was sort of the Angelina Jolie moment of like this is serious like she is a magnet the only thing I wanted was to never see that movie again am I right that movie is a little terrible she is really good in it though I because this is the Changeling year which is a movie you know I don't like and I always contended her for best supporting actress would have been a more deserving nomination and wanted over Changeling for

[03:13:40] lead actress I I think that's a bad take I don't like that movie and I think Jolie is really good I think she she definitely like gives wanted some pep and she's doing her assignment but I I'm a Changeling it's a strange specific performance but maybe I need to rewatch Changeling I like never needs to be thought of again wanted I mean that guy I mean more Batman bent off he's a product of Harry Knowles it's just them gassing up the night shift yeah

[03:14:10] whatever the fuck it was night watch yeah I every time it made a choice it made the loudest most annoying choice well they have lumers who weave tapestries that tell them where to bend bullets when McAvoy creams Chris Pratt in the face with a right with a keyboard and then the words fuck you but the teeth are filling in like the

[03:14:40] O's or like the you know like come at your screen the most inspired visual choice in that right and Chris Pratt was in that movie Chris Pratt plays his co-worker who cucks him it's Chris Pratt in like sweaty chubby mode right back when he was in playing office workers yeah but that movie yes you're right massively overperformed it massively overperformed number three at the box office right these are all films I like saw alone in cinemas in my first year living in New York comedy TV adaptation it's the it's the first sex in the city movie is it not

[03:15:10] you are correct that movie is at number nine though okay it's a older TV it's an older it's not the honeymooners movie it's an older what's it opening to well it opened last week uh-huh to 38 million it's going to end up at 130 domestic oh it's get smart get smart it was a hit forgotten forgotten forgotten they kept threatening to make a sequel and they were like didn't you guys like this and people were like what there is not

[03:15:40] an inch of pop culture that is not somewhat connected to Anne Hathaway over the last 30 years she rocks she's gonna have a very defining year this year and we all recognize by defining you mean every single movie features exactly or having an arm wrestling match it could work against her yeah I mean in some senses maybe does Zendaya have four or three Zendaya's got Dune Drama Spider-Man Odyssey Euphoria season three luckily it seems like Euphoria season three

[03:16:10] is going to pass without anyone talking about it I do think that this year will sort of cement in the public consciousness to an even greater degree than it had before that Anne Hathaway is an institution Hathaway fucking rules I mean Hathaway we're very pro Hathaway in this house yeah in this house we respect Anne Hathaway I worry this year will be too much Hathaway so it's Mother Mary Devil Wears Prada Odyssey Verity House at the end of Oak Street is there a sixth one I'm forgetting but with the exception of Verity and Devil Wears Prada I think those movies

[03:16:39] have such different core audiences that I don't think it's going to feel like it is a widespread sure is it just five or is there six I'm just seeing five although I could have sworn there was there's a movie called Alone at Dawn the Ron Howard movie right that's coming up next year I think that right doesn't have a date yet but that's the other one on her I mean my main concern is that Prada 2 might like suck really bad I've heard that it is basically the same as the first one the first

[03:17:09] one's a masterpiece that's fine I'm fine with it right if it's like a kind of like base hit like that's okay I was worried it was gonna be like me too Super Mario Galaxy of Devil War's Prada where just shit happens it just starts and they point at the screen and then she goes like corals and you're like yay I really have been worried of like jangling keys shit with that I'm troubled by the implication of the trailer that she does not remember Anne Hathaway how advanced is her dimension she worked for a long

[03:17:39] time no she didn't she worked for her six months it was a memorable six months come on the joke for her is it was not remotely memorable I do think that trailer did make it seem like it was like a Men in Black 2 style that might be too difficult a bit to sell in the trailer exactly I get the idea that she's aloof and they're doing that joke but to the point where you're like hey Joe Biden anyone yes is Kung Fu Panda still in the top five Kung Fu Panda

[03:18:09] you have guessed correctly is number four at the box office that's another one that over performed and there was a real arms race of they ended up very close in terms of the final totals sure Kung Fu Panda's fun it's got a Kung Fu Panda in it yes there you go but I think there was a little bit did Pixar go too esoteric sure versus Kung Fu Panda is right Pixar's ah yes the existential Christ Kung Fu Panda's like the panda's large yet does Kung Fu the title explains the plot

[03:18:38] so many times but the urban legend I have heard that when Jeffrey Katzenberg was pitched Kung Fu Panda his first response was I like all three of those words and that movie is the best executed version of Kung Fu Panda I think when it came out everyone's like oh it's actually like good but you know Wally was trying something very ambitious and they ended up at the exact same number and Wally Cosby you don't hear a lot of podcasts about Kung Fu Panda these days no and there's four of them they're four

[03:19:08] but right Kung Fu Panda did endure I guess as right sequel fodder and all that as well number five of the box office is a film in a cinematic universe that's getting its start this is here in 2008 is this Hulk the incredible Hulk yeah yeah yeah bad movie really bad but did introduce me to my favorite MCU character Liv Tyler's Betty Ross and I finally got to see her one more time recently I love when we're yes can we quickly if you want to salute

[03:19:38] our president there he is bright and red I thought you were going to say Tim Roth's abomination which is most Americans favorite MCU character also actor was clearly the most delighted to be having a great time charming to everyone around you know what my favorite Betty Ross scene is tell me it's tough to pick because she's got so many good moments in the MCU I can't guess because there's too many my personal favorite Betty Ross scene is when her human body walks into the raft to visit her incarcerated red

[03:20:08] hulk former president father and her head is definitely the same as her human body both things were shot at the same time in front of a camera on a real set next to Harrison Ford god what if it turned out Joe Biden wasn't insane yeah wasn't sorry you know losing his mental faculties when said it was just suffering from red hulk disease and that would answer some questions and raise others yes number six

[03:20:37] was oh a good film here the love guru wow we covered a lot of these number seven we've covered this one too with this very person Indiana Jones the kingdom of the crystal skull number eight another film we've covered M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening number nine a film we've yet to cover sex in the city number ten a film we've yet got to cover I wonder if we will the opportunity has kind of passed us by you don't mess with the Zohan yeah that's that's maybe

[03:21:07] top of the list of movies I used to argue are masterpieces that I am terrified to ever rewatch in my memory it is a movie that you know has a good heart like it wants everyone to be friends maybe it doesn't have the most textured view in 2008 it felt like the politics were surprisingly good for the time for a movie that was that overly stupid when the democratic leadership stopped aging it's been frozen

[03:21:36] in time today that movie might feel like a weapon of mass destruction Zohan maybe truly don't mess with the Zohan not me that's happened like three times I'll never learn we're done we've been talking for so long Wally is a very good movie and I think it's nice and he's my good friend he's really the best of us yes now next week on the show we're going to meet another good friend

[03:22:06] John Carter a slightly less successful movie you have a Pulitzer Prize winning writer Tony Kushner is the guest on that one but Michael Shabon is the co-writer of well he was the co-writer of some shit I mean god bless yeah but that was this was a passion project I mean we'll get into all of it it is it is a fascinating movie it arguably has become the shorthand I think we were saying this we were talking about this in Madison Ben that we were like John Carter

[03:22:35] kind of took over the like you know Waterworld replaced Ishtar Ishtar replaced Heaven's Gate John Carter just is the thing that people made a bid for it but couldn't compete no and I think some of it just boils down to this movie costs this much and it's just called John Carter and I'm supposed to know what that is we will talk about it next week I'm very excited it's a fascinating movie to look at now and pull apart 10 years

[03:23:04] I'm excited to rewatch I've only seen the one time Erlich thank you for being here do you have anything you want to plug done we are done do I have anything I want to plug writing a book that's going to come out in like three years so start getting hyped this recording not written a single word yeah but working on it I was going to joke you're finished but you just want to leave the manuscript out in the sun for three years yes yeah

[03:23:34] I want to say I got an idea from Wally there's a Twinkie that Wally feeds cockroach hell hangs out inside I think I might start burying Twinkies with the jeans continue how can you say anything after that it's a brilliant idea I'm also going to force you to plug fighting in the war room because your co-hosts always get mad when you don't do that yeah I guess if you want to listen to it you can I think its entire audience that listens to your show is already well 100 best

[03:24:04] podcasts ever yeah sure yeah you can find me on the internet and my name and the IndieWire reviewing movies by the time this comes out I'll already have been to canon back and life will go on excited for can am I excited for can yeah I mean if you're not excited for can what are you doing silence from David Sims was

[03:24:34] rejection or just omission we'll find out I just want to remind you that the episode you threw your hat in the ring for is basically a calendar year away because Scorsese is so long that's what I figured I didn't feel like it was going to be stepping underneath toes we're just not making decisions about those we're trying to keep we're not please remember to rate review and

[03:25:04] subscribe tune in next week for John Carter over on our Patreon we're finishing up Robocop who you guys got for John Carter the great Matt singer I'm looking now we're still in Robocop mode I say

[03:25:38] your name Asa good name Asa who is your favorite character on Big City Greens Cricket what do you like about cricket well he's a rock-crossed boy like me and he's about the same year as old as me and I'm the big brother but he's a little brother it's kind of weird he's kind of six what would you say if somebody asked you what Big City Greens is about well it's about 22 minutes long

[03:26:10] what's the show about what happens the family moves from the country from the country to Big City and they get all crying when they don't want to go but before they think that they don't want to they think that's going to be like a creepy mansion like across the door but then they'll say that we're leaving the country and moving to Big City and and they cry and they like

[03:26:40] cry and why is Chip Whistler so mean to them well when they first went to Big City Cricket like um the Chip told um Cricket something and then and then Cricket kicked him in the lens and then it all began and last question what do you think of the movie WALL-E what does that have to do it's unrelated what do you think about WALL-E

[03:27:10] you used to love WALL-E we watch it every day for like six months nope morning okay say goodbye blank check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims our executive producer is me Ben Hosley our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas and our associate producer is AJ McKeon this show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy research by JJ Birch our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the great

[03:27:40] American novel with additional music by Alex Mitchell artwork by Joe Bowen Ollie Moss and Pat Reynolds our production assistant is Minnick special thanks to David Cho Jordan Fish and Nate Patterson for their production help head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit join our Patreon blankcheck special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes follow us on social at blankcheckpod subscribe to our weekly newsletter checkbook on

[03:28:09] Substack this podcast is created and produced by blankcheck productions and Wally is kind of a vehicle yeah what do you think about that Wally's kind of got some main character syndrome with regards to Finding Nemo already we did we did that one

[03:28:38] good movie very good fish okay David yeah well I assume you don't mean me yeah sorry Ben we ready we are