2025.10.13: Monday The 13th

I'm Jared.

Could you read number 23 for the class?

No, I cannot.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gut up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is Wilking Subway!

For October 13th, 2025, my name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

She's scared because it's Monday the 13th.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

It just doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?

Yeah, but why why Friday?

Friday is like, was Friday an ominous day?

Monday's way worse than Friday.

I guess so.

Maybe it's because the Friday is the end of things.

And it'd be like, you're beginning the week on an unlucky day.

I guess you're right.

That does seem like you would have a bigger knock-on effect, except the Friday the 13th could ruin your weekend.

And is that not the worst thing that could happen to anyone?

How would it ruin your weekend?

Like a serial killer comes and gets you at your sleepway camp or whatever?

Let me ask you this.

Don't think about it.

Just answer.

Which is worse?

Monday morning or Sunday night?

Sunday night.

Sunday night's worse, right?

That is the worst part of the week is Sunday night.

And I think we acknowledge that this is because of the dread, right?

It's because like you, there's a pressure to be enjoying like the last few drips and drabs of the weekend, but you're looking, you, you're looking ahead.

You know, tomorrow you're going to have to get up at a reasonable hour, which means you're going to have to go to bed at a reasonable hour and you're going to have to get these things done that you maybe didn't get done to get ready for your week, but you just want to be enjoying the last of your weekend and you're not going to get to do it.

And even if you did get to do it, you wouldn't because you'd be looking forward to the Monday.

It's like the dread part.

It's one of those things that I put in a category of things that I call mini mortalities.

They're like little things that you face on a regular basis that are kind of a metaphor for mortality as a whole.

Where did my weekend go?

How did all this time go by so fast?

It's Sunday night.

I got to go back to work on Monday.

Or like to me, the end of the summer as a kid, when you're at the beginning of the summer, the first day of summer, it seems impossibly long.

This is American summer I'm talking about, where they get three months.

Three months, yeah.

And it's like it's stretching out before you in this just impossibly wide expanse.

And you get to the last week of holiday.

Like the last week of the school vacation.

And you're like, oh, but that wasn't long enough.

It's so short.

There's all these things that I wanted to do that I didn't do because I'm a lazy fuck and I didn't do them.

And so now, how am I going to squeeze all the fun into the last week of vacation?

I've got to get ready for school.

I've got to get rid of my books and get my book bag and all this stuff.

And yeah, it's the same sort of thing.

You got to buy a sports car.

All those, you got to go through your late life, your late summer crisis.

Right.

It's like, it's the bucket list, right?

You look at the bucket list and you look at all of the things you didn't tick off.

Yep.

Yeah, there you go.

That's it.

That's it.

Yeah.

Made mortality.

Like at whatever scale that is.

It's funny I told you to like just answer with your gut instinct.

I had to teach Finn this week what your gut is and your instinct because we were playing this uh choose your own adventure book that i used to play uh when i was a kid i think we talked about it before though we did it's the steve jackson games but not i gotta be clear but not the steve jackson games of steve jackson games the game in book format um and it's it's like a choose your own adventure but that's it's that's not quite accurate either because there's a lot of points at which it is a game you're supposed to roll dice uh and then you play ahead based on the outcome of the roll of the dice.

So there's a little bit more of a almost like a role-playing D and D element to it.

You're just, it's a D and D campaign on Rails.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like a choose your own adventure with dice, basically.

You got it.

And we're skipping the dice part.

They do a cool thing, though, that I had, guess I had forgotten about, which is.

Who the hell is bringing dice around with them all day when they're reading a book?

You can just flip through the book and they have dice rolls at the bottom of the book.

So you can randomize, you know.

Here's the question.

Here's the thing, though, right?

You're like, if if you're an enterprising kid, right?

Do you like go through and figure out like what you want the result to be?

And then like you have an idea because you've either read the book enough or you like cheated and you like

flipped through slowly enough that you could read the results and be like, oh no, I randomly stopped here.

You're right.

Yeah.

But I mean, can you flip through a book, a 200-page book, and just randomly land on the page you want?

Never underestimate the ingenuity of a child.

Well, also, it's just like, it's any like self-paced thing.

After a while, it's up to you how to do it, right?

We say it's on Rails, but it's like, I mean, there's been a couple times when I've been playing this with him where I put my thumb in the page going, what would the other way have been?

Because he's making all the choices.

I did that with Choose Your Own Adventures all the time.

I'm like, well, that's, hold on, I'm going to back up three decisions and see where we go from there.

The thumb in the book is the equivalent of the F5 quicksave.

That's what that is.

It is.

And it's been fun watching you go through that with him because he's also doing a very similar thing where he he'll play through with a lot of the same decisions up till a certain point, which is really the point of no return, where like he, you know, he made a decision and died the last time.

And then he makes the other decision, continues on.

And it's like this extra exciting moment because now the road ahead is new.

It was, you know, teaching a young kid about this stuff, it was kind of interesting because I think a critical moment.

In this for us was the first time we went through it.

He died like at the second choice.

Like he just chose something where did the wrong thing and died.

He got greedy and he went for the second eye in the idol.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Classic problem of an adventurer.

You know, you got the one emerald eye.

Do you want to get the second one?

Are you sure you want to chance the second one?

Turn out, turn out.

That second one, booby trap, poison gas.

Yeah, that's a problem.

And yeah, so, but it was good to have that because it was like, that's it.

We'll close the book and we'll go again tomorrow and we'll see how far we get.

You know, we didn't go, well, that, sorry, that happened.

Let's go back and go the other way now.

We didn't do any of that.

Right.

You didn't like, all right, reload.

We got got our stakes.

They're in place.

We'll try again.

And but the thing is, too, he was really into it and he was excited to come back to it and make a different decision.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that's crucial.

But then he couldn't remember which eye he did to begin with and he was like, wait, he was panicking a little bit.

He locked himself.

We walked through the whole process last time because I didn't want to give it to him.

But I went through that myself, too, because I was playing Hades too.

And I said before, it's like, I was stopping at the same point.

And this time, I'm like, you know what?

I'm going to power through.

People love this game.

It is fun.

It is one of those games that's like very skill-based, which for me means it's hard

and frustrating but i power through but they got me they did something that i can't stand in a video game is i got all the way down you're trying to defeat chronos in this and i'm i'm sure there's way more to this after this but i got to kronos and i faced him once lost to him came back fought through got to him again beat him and then i did the thing where you beat the boss and get his health meat all the way down wait a minute hold on and then it's like cinematic plays you didn't beat beat the boss.

He's gonna, he's gonna hit you with a hammer or something where even if you won, you lost.

I hate that.

Or I would be okay with, okay, well, that was at this stage and maybe he retreats somewhere else, which is kind of, I don't know, really, because I once again gave up.

But it did the thing where it literally just replenished his entire health bar and then gave you, he found a new power or some shit or teleported me somewhere else and I had to re-fight him again.

I'm like, nope, I'm not doing this.

Yeah.

I don't like when narrative, like, don't make me fight the guy if narratively, you're not going to allow me to beat him.

I agree with that.

I agree with that.

I mean, I understand that there's a tradition for, especially like final bosses or something, to have three forms.

I get that that's also part of like the sort of genre of storytelling that we're dealing with with a lot of video game stuff.

But if it's one of those sort of mid-story fights where I'm not allowed to win.

That just makes me mad.

You know what the funny thing is?

What we're talking about, I totally recognize what you're saying.

That's a feeling I have all the time.

That's when the game quick saves on you, right?

That's the game.

The boss is reloading on me until he beats me.

Right.

It's like, yeah, the adventure beat me, but no, no, no, I don't like that.

That's not fair.

It's only fair when I do it.

Yeah, that'd be funny when we eventually have like all AI-driven interactive content like that.

And the AI has a stake in it as well.

The AI is like, well, I don't want to lose either.

Yeah, if you guys didn't do whatever.

I saw it was really funny short.

Because you're so lame.

I'm quitting.

YouTube short, where it was like every DM's nightmare in a Dungeons and Dragons game, where it's like the adventurer walks into the tavern, and it's like in the center of the tavern is a man who has a dark hood over his face, and he's surrounded by three flaming circles.

And extending from his cloak are two huge metal arms with claws at the end.

And the adventurer goes, Who else is in the tavern?

He goes, Um,

uh, there's a little uh goblin.

It's like, what's a goblin sam?

He's like, uh, Sam Smorkel?

He goes, I want to talk to Sam Smorkel.

Sometimes the adventurers don't take the highlighted path.

Right.

It's like, oh, come on, man.

Don't just, okay.

All right.

When I was a kid, I noticed that too.

They've kind of eliminated it now with like

computer, well, basically computer animation or just having more sophisticated animation.

But do you remember as a kid, like in a Scooby-Doo Scooby-Doo cartoon, Scooby-Coo,

a Scooby-Doo cartoon, they would walk into a room and they would have like a matte painting for the background, but you could always tell the object they were going to interact with because it was a different, like it was more highlighted than anything else.

Yeah, or like the like the matte painting in the background was like a different, slightly different texture or different level of clarity or something than this object.

So yeah, it's like, you know exactly.

That phone is going to ring.

I know that phone is going to ring.

Even as a kid noticed that stuff.

Well, it's like having, it's like the story is taking place on a stage and you have the backdrop and you have everything on the stage.

And the stuff in the backdrop, you're not, you know, that's not important.

That is, it's just the backdrop.

What matters is the stuff on the stage.

Yeah, what matters is the stuff on the stage.

What matters is what carries us forward, Ashley.

Well, quickly, turning to sports news, teams in Major League Baseball that wish they had had a quick save were the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago Cubs, who I mentioned last week.

Yeah, you were pretty excited about them last week.

You know, I was kind of secretly kind of rude for the Cubs, even though they would have been going up against the Dodgers.

They were both eliminated.

So the ALCS is Seattle, who is already up one game versus the Toronto Blue Jays.

And then the NLCS, the National League Championship Series, is the L.A.

Dodgers versus the Milwaukee Brewers, which is an awful team from an awful city.

Well, I'm very sorry to hear about that, Cubs, but you can join 128 Jr.

in the pub and you can all drink together and be sad about losing.

Be sad about losing.

And And in college football, if anybody follows college football, the Longhorns, which are one of the most underrated greatest teams in the history of college football, they started this season ranked number one and then plummeted out of the top 25.

How do you even do that?

And like, so you said it was in six games or something, right?

By like the sixth week, they're just not even in the top 25.

They lost to Ohio State in the first week, and then they lost to Florida and looked terrible doing it.

Florida's a great team.

Don't want to take

anything away from Florida.

But now they're back in the top 25.

But to ignore all that, because that's a bad story.

Indiana now has the highest ranking ever in the history of the school in the top 25.

Indiana is now ranked third.

Indiana is a basketball school traditionally, but yeah, they're not really known for their football programs.

It's weird.

It's like an aspect of my life because I've never been athletic that I would never have had to consider, which is like, what university do you want to go to?

Well, that depends.

Do they specialize in my sport?

Yeah.

Yep.

And that's a really that's a real thing for a lot of like the you know young people who can do things like run do you mean as a spectator or do you mean as no no no i mean like for you know if you're looking at where you want to go to to college and you're like well that depends do they do my sport well it's one of those things like as a kid if you grow there's a lot of allegiances to universities within households and so sometimes that might even shape what sport you go into right yeah i mean very likely right if you're if your dad's the little league coach guess what?

You're probably playing as a kid.

Yeah, like, like, if your dad is like super into Alabama football roll-tied, and you grow up in a house where you're watching that stuff all the time, it would be really strange to hear that kid, you know, just suddenly say one day, I'm really interested in lacrosse.

No,

just not the sports that he would ever be exposed to.

You know what sounds exciting?

Water polo.

Yeah, that sounds amazing.

Equestrian.

Sounds great.

No, but I was, as you were reading

the books with Finn this weekend.

I was really excited about it because

what you get into as a kid, I feel like it can be so important and so like it shapes who you are and what you enjoy as an adult, right?

Like, you know, as you said, if you don't grow up in a lacrosse household, it takes some sort of special accident to get into lacrosse.

Right.

Right.

It's like some accidental exposure.

But I was so happy because I remember when I was a kid,

I feel like all the kids were reading at this point.

Maybe it's just the ones I saw.

Maybe I just hung out with the nerds.

But everyone was reading stuff like goosebumps and all of these really like fun books that made reading kind of like exciting.

And

I'm really, I'm hoping that Finn takes up reading as an enjoyable hobby.

But it's also, you just don't know.

You don't know.

You don't know.

You just don't know.

Like every kid is different.

And I don't want to,

I'm always really self-conscious about trying to like make him like the stuff that I like because

then everyone gets mad about that.

You know, when you're growing up, you're like, man, why did my parents get me into this instead of this other thing?

I could have been a great lacrosse player.

And there are times too, you see these families where one kid is going totally against the grain from everyone else in the family.

It's usually.

a very like sporty family and there's like one nerdy kid and then they kind of indulge the nerdy kid in like their fantasy LARPing or whatever.

But sometimes it's really weird when there's a nerdy family and then there's one super jock kid in the middle of it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And they're like, i'm so happy for you but i don't i don't understand anything about this i don't know i feel like uh it's got to be um in in a lot of ways kind of easy for the nerdy family to embrace the jock because they're like sure we'll buy your jersey we're gonna cosplay as you

right we can listen to audiobooks as we drive to the eighth tournament this year well we we get a special chant

i was thinking today too there was uh because these books that were sam smorgel sam smorgel that we're reading they were uh

these books uh they were written in the UK a long time ago so there's like meters and stuff like that and there's well and I was wondering when they brought them over to the US did they change it from meters to feet you know especially back in like the early 80s would they have done that they probably would have I don't I yeah I still find a lot of the the weird sort of uh

between

country changes to things always a little bit jarring.

One of the DVDs that you got, or was it a Blu-ray that I was surprised by, I picked it up, and it was Zootropolis.

Oh, right.

The film Zootropolis.

And I was like, well, that's weird because it's to us, it's always been Zootopia.

And it seems like, why did they need to change it?

Is utopia not a common concept outside the US?

I think we talked about this before.

I think they just decided they liked it better.

It actually is a more appropriate name.

Zootropolis.

It is, but it's like, and then I thought the difficulty of splitting branding internationally, right?

Like, how much harder could it be to build like a solid international brand or like a franchise or something if you can't call it the same name?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and that's maybe something that the Avengers had to deal with.

Obviously, Zootopia, Zeutropolis, very popular franchise.

I think the second one's coming out.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It's got people coming back.

I think it focuses more on Jason Bateman's character this time.

Which Jason Bateman's interesting.

It's coming out next month.

We've always talked about the siblings, where they have a famous sibling, and then suddenly the

newer sibling takes over, like the Olson twins, and then

Elizabeth Olson.

Yeah, and where that happens every now and then, or even like Nepo babies with like...

And the Culkins.

Yeah, and the Culkins is another good one.

Jason Bateman might be one of the first examples of that.

His sister, Justine Bateman, was very famous.

She was on that show, Family Ties.

Oh, okay.

Jason Bateman was like, not really that famous.

Although there's clips of him as a kid, and he's the same dude.

Like, he had the same personality as a kid.

It's really weird.

Is he one of those people that like immediately got to, they like were born at age like 25 and then have just like stayed in that range for, I don't know, 50 years or whatever?

Yeah, it's like he didn't get older.

He just got bigger.

Like a shrunken version of himself.

But he was, he, Jason Bateman, if I recall correctly.

He was in the teen wolf sequel that Michael J.

Fox was not in.

Oh.

Yeah.

Is Teen Wolf like, is that just because of the age I am that Teen Wolf feels like a popular movie?

Did you watch Teen Wolf growing up?

I never watched Teen Wolf growing up.

You know, I think there's actually, yeah, 1987, 18-year-old Jason Bateman talks Teen Wolf 2.

So, no, I never really got into the Teen Wolf stuff, although I think there might be, hold on, is there a Teen Wolf series?

I think there is a Teen Wolf series.

I was just over here thinking about that.

Like, they tried to buffy it.

Right?

Right.

They tried to take like the some cult thing from the 80s or early 90s and then turn it into a series that somehow transcends the original feature yeah well which is also interesting because it's a new series i i think it came out 2023-ish so it's like a fairly new series but for a fairly niche nostalgic property uh but i guess they were like i don't know girls think monsters are hot now so i guess let's do it yeah but werewolves have always been like that second fiddle right it's like there's vampires and then there's werewolves it's like there's no like unless you want to consider wolverine basically to be a werewolf you know

closest thing.

Yeah, but it's like, there's no big werewolf movies, you know?

Maybe they're just waiting for their season to come.

I think a lot of those things are cyclical.

For a while, it's ninjas and then it's pirates and then it's vampires.

And then one day, those werewolves are just waiting for their chance in the sun, right?

Someone's got to make like the first super hot werewolf thing.

I mean, think of the doomed romance.

That's going to get everyone going.

Right?

You just, you got to get that first really like super like hot werewolf story and then everyone's gonna jump all over it yeah but even neither one of those is as lame as the mummy the mummy's like mom said i had to play with you guys

she said i could come along

but then they made those huge brendan frasier mummy movies but i feel like they were not at all wait wait wait the mummy movies are based on like

the mummy you just mean like mummies as like a monster in general well like there was the mummy right i guess i i think of those universal classic monsters of like frankenstein the werewolf, Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I'm just going to throw Dracula in there as well.

And I feel like, yeah, the mummy was like a character, but it's also a kind of, like, like, for instance, Frankenstein.

Like a character, but also a genre of character.

Is Frankenstein a zombie?

Is he the first ever zombie?

Can you be classified as a zombie if you're not one human?

Yeah, I don't know, right?

It is like, it checks a lot of the boxes for zombie, but it's not.

Right.

Also, he's smart.

Yeah.

So

he takes all of the boxes for zombie except the important ones.

Right.

Like the ones that are all one person and what, like,

you know, sort of like a mindless feeding frenzy.

He doesn't have any of those.

His, his eating is just perfectly controlled.

He has great habits.

While we're talking about this, I know people are screaming at their speaker right now.

We know it's Dr.

Zombie's ghouls.

It's not a zombie.

We know that.

We know that.

Yeah, but the mummy always felt like Dr.

Zombie was the real monster all along.

The mummy just felt kind of goofy to me.

Even Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is really goofy, it felt like it was kind of its own thing, doing its own thing out there in the swamp.

Yeah, I don't know.

I feel like maybe like the mummy and the creature from the Black Lagoon, maybe they like get together on a weekly basis to bitch about the other guys who all like got successful and went on to like their you know pop star careers or whatever and left these guys behind in their garage band of monsters.

I'd be curious to know too, which came first, this like menagerie of monsters or the Justice League?

Because I feel like they check a lot of those boxes as well.

Well, do you remember?

Batman's a vampire.

The creature from the Black Lagoon is Aquaman.

Somebody's ripping somebody off somewhere.

Do you remember they were actually going to try to make the, was it the Dark Universe

movie franchise?

And they came out with like the marketing of like all the like hot actors that were going to be in all the different monster franchises.

And then that just went absolutely nowhere did it go nowhere because the was it the tom cruise mummy reboot had a trailer that didn't have the sound effects in it and that he didn't have just the sound effects

right or just his audio track i think it was like just his but it was like missing like the music and all that stuff and did that one like trailer mess up an entire film franchise.

I think the Tom Cruise Mummy reboot was one of the most forgettable things of all time.

Look, it's when you go back and you look at the mummy, though, and you look at like the cast of the mummy, there's that cast is so like unfairly hot.

Right.

Yeah.

There's that, you just, you know what you do?

You leave that one alone.

I know you're Tom Cruise.

I know you can do anything and I know you're really, really good at running, but leave the mummy alone.

Sure.

Fair play.

That's when you, that's when what you do to build this dark universe or whatever is you just, you look at it like it's the Incredible Hulk and go, no, you're already in.

But you can come too.

That moment is so weird because they released publicly a trailer of Tom Cruise.

He's in an airplane, like right in the airplane.

He's flopping around inside the airplane that's crashing or something.

And they released an entire trailer to the public online

trailer that no one checked.

And

nobody must have quality controlled this thing at all because it had no other audio tracks in it, except for Tom Cruise's dialogue.

I want to say

effort noises.

His effort noises.

Like you, you heard grunts, and that was like the

and that's like the entire trailer.

It's surreal to watch.

The process of how that trailer got to the world will never cease to be fascinating.

When you're doing voice acting for Coco, did you ever have to do an efforts track?

I did.

I did.

Those are always the weirdest sessions.

They're really weird, especially because we had

where the recording was set up at the time,

or at one point in time, there was the whisper room, and it was right behind the

curtain that separated broadcast from a lot of the production offices.

And the whisper room is really great at keeping other sound out so that sound doesn't come in and interfere with the microphone recording.

What it does not necessarily do is keep the sound in.

Right.

So it was not uncommon to hear a lot of like

like from a like from a distance just as you're working you're typing along and you just hear ah

and it's weird too the stuff and go about your day you'll do vocal it's called efforts because you're just making the sounds that they can layer in with like a punch or a smash yeah because you don't know exactly what you're not watching the video and going this is what sound I would make and but it's fun though because it's kind of like weird like onomanopoeia improv because they're like you get hit in the face

now you're hitting not hit in the face, now you're hitting the stomach.

And even like weird stuff, like you pick up something heavy,

or like you pick up something light.

You're like, you're like,

like it might

mean nothing, but when you layer it in with everything else, it sounds really cool.

What doesn't sound cool is when you layer it in with nothing else and you release it to the public.

Dude, that's like, that's probably five or six people that are not doing their job for that to make its way out.

Oh, yeah.

At least.

At least.

Which also though, I get it.

I get how that can happen because if you're working on like, let's say a two and a half, three minute trailer, by the time that thing comes out, you have probably seen it 8,000 times.

And you got to sit down and there's nothing longer than three minutes that you've watched for the 8,000th time.

You're just like, and it's just like, oh, we got to change this one frame.

They want to back this off because they want to tighten this up a little little bit.

So you make that change and they're like, it was fine the last time we watched it.

This is fine as well.

And then you never know.

Also, you expect maybe something to come back with notes, but they're like, no, it's fine.

We're locked.

We're good.

And then nobody looks at it again.

Then out it goes.

Right.

Well, and also, like, which one was this titled?

Was this final two underscore final final?

Right.

Or was it final underscore final three

underscore X cut?

Underscore, embarrass our lead actor.

One of the most dedicated film stars in the world.

Speaking of how the sausage made.

I'm sure he took that in stride.

Oh, hopefully.

Speaking of how the sausage gets made, there is an interesting trailer out for a new Marvel movie.

It's the Wonder Man trailer.

It's like the new Marvel show.

But it's interesting because it seems like it's a how the sausage gets made, but about making a superhero movie.

Yeah, even like recasting classic role is part of the story, apparently.

Yeah, and

I was thrown because it's got Ben Kingsley in it, who's in the MCU as the actor who then, spoilers, played The Mandarin.

Yeah.

And

they reference that.

They're like, he looks familiar.

He's like, yeah, I think he used to be a terrorist.

You know, in this trailer for Wonder Band.

So it's a very meta, seems like it's fourth wall breaking without actually looking at the audience.

And it's about making a superhero movie, but it's also takes place in the MCU.

So I'm really confused by it, although it does look fun.

I think everybody who grew up reading comics has a character they think was done dirty by the MCU.

For me, that would probably be the Mandarin.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of things with that, that whole what storyline, I guess, right?

Because I would, maybe it would go better, maybe it would have gone down better, except we don't know what's happening with that entire arm of the universe because they never made a Shang-Chi 2.

Right, right, because they kind of morphed that character

with 10 rings.

It was in that as well.

Oh, I forgot that.

And now he's just auditioning for films.

What happened?

Where did everyone go?

Yeah, that's,

I, I read somebody who made a comment that people who watched it really liked it, but it wasn't enough to get it to get a sequel.

Maybe.

I, I mean, it seems like there was intention to do a sequel, but I also heard, and I don't know how much of it is speculative and how much of it is, you know, confirmed or anything,

but that the Marvel movies in general do very well in China, which is a huge movie market historically,

or, you know, especially for a lot of these films.

And Shang Chi didn't do great in China because Simuliu doesn't match the traditional Chinese standards of what their hot male actors are.

Oh, really?

I think he's very attractive, but I guess it's a very just sort of like different expectations of like what features you find attractive.

And they're like, he doesn't match that.

So they're like, why is this?

Why is this guy the lead in this film?

And they didn't go see it, and it didn't make nearly as much in China, which then hurts the overall box office numbers.

I see.

So it would be like in the U.S.

if we had to cast Tony Stark as Steve Buscemi, would yes, right?

Yeah.

Like we all love him as an actor, but he doesn't fit.

But like, but like, why is he the leading man?

Yeah,

yeah.

That's one of the things Marvel movies get away with too: is all the heroes are really buff and good-looking, and then the villains and the henchmen tend to be character actors, you know?

Yeah.

They get get away with that a little bit do you think that's reinforcing the the negative stereotype or

with fiction that like good people are virtuous or sorry hot people are virtuous yeah yeah i think that's something we all kind of lean into a lot right and you're like you look at someone and you're like you clearly you're suspicious they had the mandarin set up so well i felt like in iron man the first one because the organization that captures Tony Stark is the 10 rings.

And the leader of it is there the whole time and survives, as far as i recall and they don't really tell you anything about the guy either right right and they set him up to be the mandarin like they had all the pieces layered in there in that weird kind of like adaptive way that marvel does especially with villains They had it all set up and then they just went this weird route with Ben Kingsley.

Right.

Like someone got their hands on and went, actually, what if we made it kooky?

You know what I read, though, is that in the comic, the Mandarin has 10 rings on his fingers, and each one of the rings controls a different aspect of like human existence.

Well, that sounds familiar.

Well, that was it, is that even Kevin Feige said we can't do the Mandarin the way he is in the comics because it would be too confusing with the Infinity Stones.

They're too close together.

It's like we just can't do these two things.

Right.

People would be like, oh, I'm getting a little deja vu here.

Right.

He's got 10 of these things and Thanos only has six of them?

What the hell?

Yeah.

No, I get it.

I get why they made that choice.

Well, that's because of one of his rings is the existential terror of Sunday night.

Right?

He just hits you with that and you get all depressed all of a sudden.

Some of them are really weird.

I don't remember what they all are.

They're all

mixed with different

aspects of human psyche, but then also with elements and stuff like that.

They're not quite as succinct as the Infinity Stones, which get a little weird when they get into mind and soul.

I guess so.

He punches you with this ring and you have an insatiable urge to go to the bathroom.

I don't feel like...

Honestly, if you get the Infinity Stone that controls reality, aren't you kind of done at that point?

Right, because then you determine what works and what doesn't, right?

Right.

Like this one controls all of reality this one except time you can move fast different places and also souls like i'll take the reality bending one

i'll just make los angeles next to new york and we'll just call it even i'm gonna i'm gonna really shorten my commute i had a really weird casting thing to wrap up on this i had a really weird casting thing i was working uh you know getting all our movies set up by the way there you were talking about choose your own adventure books i didn't show you to the this uh thing this poster set that somebody had set up i didn't show it to you on purpose because somebody went through, and not for every movie, because that would be impossible, but literally every movie that I looked at, somebody had made posters for every single movie that's out there that look like the old choose your own adventure book cover.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, but I'd see I knew you'd like that, and then I'd be stuck with an entire library of ones that look like this.

Well, maybe we can set it up so I see the library differently than you see the library.

And then it's like we have our own reality stone.

So you haven't seen the movie, but you know, the

movie uh no country for old men you know that movie right yes i i i may have seen it i have at least seen pieces of it there is an actress in that she plays louwellen moss's wife and she's a really interesting character she's like a like a rural trailer park lady she's like you know not like you say and all that and she's a really memorable character she has a really cool moment towards the end of the film uh

I was shocked to learn that the actress that plays that role is the voice of Merida in brave

i i that was i had no idea that there was a connection between those two movies and it's the lead actress who plays merida brave basically i i'm still reeling from that how can she play those two roles when you like find something like that where your worlds collide you go wait what it's crazy that was crazy to me no i i i loved that in disney mover was that the pixar one was that the one where like disney and pixar like swapped styles for a movie not that it matters now because they're all

one family.

Yeah, but I mean, you'd be like, Yeah, I loved that movie.

Brave was a great character.

Let's definitely cast her in this.

Yeah, she makes perfect sense.

Let's bring her in for a read.

Lou Ellen Moss's wife will be perfect.

All right, she's good with acting.

Who will be casting in our upcoming adaptation of No Country for Old Men?

I want to say congratulations to Aiden Jones and Alexander Pollock.

You are starring in our next film.

And thank you for sponsoring.

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All right, that does it for us today.

Monday, the 13th of October, 2025.

We will be back to talking tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.