2025.12.04: Serial Storyline

Hey, we're recording the podcast. Gun up.

Good

morning to you, wherever you are, because it is morning somewhere for December 4th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns sitting right over there. She's ready for She-Ra.

It's Ashley Burns hat, Ashley, everybody.

Always ready for She-Ra. That was the intro.
That was the old filmmation

intro for the old She-Ra and that was like the 80s She-Ra. Yeah, like not to be confused with the Netflix She-Ra.
Not to be confused with the Netflix She-Ra, which is made by Kevin Smith, right?

No, no, no. Kevin Smith did the

Netflix He-Man, but there was a separate She-Ra series. Oh, it's not associated.
No. It's interesting.
I wonder how many times those things changed hands.

Like, the people that made Scooby-Doo, Zahana barbera made scooby-doo sounds right did they make the scrappy ones as well or did they sell it to somebody else who said hey we're gonna add scrappy let's add scrappy doo everyone's gonna love scrappy but i was watching this she-ra was watching it recently believe it or not because i was attempting to show the miniature version of you our daughter evie i was trying to show her your most beloved cartoon right you love she-ra loved she-ra so i thought okay this is great for saturday morning cartoons we're gonna sit down your mom loved this i'm gonna show you she-ra and i thought boy if she gets into she-rawesome would that be didn't work by the way.

Not for modern attention spans. Well, she might also be a little bit under the age for that one.
I think I was watching that one like more four or five-ish. Right, right.
So that plays into this.

So this is the thought I had when we were watching it because I couldn't get the first episode because it just wasn't available.

So then I had to watch the second episode, which was part two of the origin story of She-Ra, which, by the way, I don't know why you followed this lady.

She starts off as a villain, but she's like trapped in this thing where she doesn't know she's duped being part of this evil organization.

but yet she trains in something called the fiendish zone or something like that. And she works for the horde and her boss is a robotic skeleton.
Like, it's like, girl, how many more clues do you need?

This is the dominatrix of the shadowland. She's the good guy and my mentor.
I know.

Yeah.

The 80s cartoons. We have a torture party every Friday.
Such a nice organization. Did a really like, they were very clear about this is the good versus the evil.

And there was no question about who was the good guy and who is the evil guy right no

they they made it really clear for young audiences in the 80s you're either buff with a sword or you're like a gray skeleton right or you're really super ugly right basically what it was but uh it also made me wonder watching this like i was concerned about starting her with the second episode when was the first time that an animated series had a serial storyline because I was thinking like if I was showing her the Roadrunner I don't even know what the first episode of Roadrunner is.

You don't need to make sure you get that in order. Right.
Like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd's relationship did not really progress over time. There's not a huge arc there.

Tom and Jerry, I was thinking about that. There's no episode of the Flintstones where like they invent fire and things totally change for them.

Yeah, no, I guess even like Scooby-Doo's Monster of the Week.

Yeah, Scooby-Doo's another good one because it's like that one almost feels like it could be a continuing storyline, but there's really no through line of it at all. Right.

You can pick up any episode and you pretty much get it. Like at some point, they would have bought Thelma a lanyard for her glasses, right?

If they learned lessons from one episode to another, they would have done something. But or they would have just gone immediately to the guy who runs the abandoned amusement park.

Oh, he's the bad guy.

It's him. It's definitely not a ghost.
It's whoever's making money from this, that guy right here. All right, pull off his head.
Let's see what we got.

I wonder, it's like, it must have come. Can you remember? Like, what was the first one you remember? Because you grew up watching She-Ra.

Yeah, but I also, like, I didn't remember that she started off as a villain. So let's not necessarily count on my four-year-old memory for what,

for where the serial viewing started. Take things at face value.
Be like, oh, no, what happened from this episode of Pound Puppies to the next? Yeah,

who knows, man?

What do you think is the most obscure animated show that you watched? Oh, man. Okay.
So I guess I would have to say one of the ones that hasn't had some sort of reboot in the modern era.

So Strawberry Shortcake got a reboot. I think Rainbow Bright got a reboot.
Obviously, She-Ra got her reboot. Care Bears.
We don't even need to talk about My Little Pony.

You know, the weird thing about the Strawberry Shortcake reboot is that it was done by Eli Roth. What? No, it's a joke from Kevin Smith.
Okay.

It wasn't actually Eli Roth. It's like maybe he's doing it for his kids.

So it would have to, it has to be either the Popples or Pound Puppies. Popples is good.
I don't think they brought either of those back around. Popples.

What was yours? What was your most obscure

fortune as a kid? Now I'm thinking, I think I know where the serial storylines came from in the early 80s because late 70s, early 80s, there was like an early invasion of Japanese animation.

We didn't call it anime back then.

And there was stuff like I watched like Star Blazers. Okay.
Voltron would be another one, right?

And those had more through storylines. Not necessarily Voltron, but there was a lot of things where they solved all the problems the exact same way in every episode.

It's like, just make the giant robot to begin with, and then you'll be okay.

I always feel that way about like when the villains send like a wave of bad guys and they get beat up and they send a second wave of bad guys. I'm like, send all the bad guys.

Just like throw everything at them. Yeah, like if one wave doesn't work, don't send another wave.
Send all the waves. And the wave is exactly the same, basically.
Yeah. Yeah.

But I think it was that influence from Japan that maybe started to have more serial storylines in the U.S. Maybe, maybe, maybe that's what I would assume maybe something like comic book related, like

Batman or something.

Even though Batman would also probably be like villain of the week, maybe it had some serial elements running through, but not to the point where you couldn't pick up any episode and basically get it.

To your point, too, of like send the second wave, it's like, how does the Joker keep getting out of jail? It's like they keep busting it.

Even as a kid, I was like, this prison system really sucks, dude.

Well, the fact that the prison system is also like a, like a psychiatric hospital jail thing. I mean, I just, I feel like the city has issues.
Right. It has issues.

We need to work through it. It was also watching this.
I was amazed at what they got away with back then because I was watching the She-Ra and it was like 15.

20 seconds, which is a significant amount of time on screen. First of all, they don't cut.
In modern things, they would cut about five times.

Like Cocomelon, they say, what cuts every four seconds or something like that?

Yeah, that's part of the like, like overstimulation that kids get from a lot of modern cartoon viewing is there's a lot of quick cuts and a lot of colors and it's just too much.

I would say in our era of cartoons, not a lot of stimulation. It was like a drawing on screen for 15, 20 seconds straight.
And the only thing moving is someone's mouth. And that's it.

And just the lips. And like

somebody turns from left to right and there's like four frames of of animation like wow that's amazing or they just flip

or they just flip one direction

it's just crazy what they got away with and everything is so cookie cutter too like all the characters in she-ra are basically just reskins of everything from he-man well i mean that's because it's they're they are it's like they're they're from he-man they share a universe right so it would make sense that they would do that but like i watched silverhawks which would be a really obscure one that i watched as a kid that feels like just like right out of Thundercats as well.

It might have been the same production company or something like that, but it's like, I was just, I was really impressed by what they could get away with.

Although the big bad guy, I don't know his name in She-Ra. He's basically, they took Skeletor and they're like, oh, let's put some bolts on him and make him look a little robotic.

And there, you're done. But, but make sure he still lives in like an evil mountain.
The weirdest choice in that, though, is that Orko, you know, the little wizard thing from He-Man? Yeah.

They and She-Ra. Do you remember they have a sexy Orco?

No, I just, I guess I just thought of him as Orco. She's taller and thinner and no, no, so there's okay, sexy Orco.
No, I did not realize that. But it makes, look, it makes sense, Sila.

You go to the girl's show, just up the sex appeal a little bit. I guess so.
Sexy wizards. I guess so.
Today, that would just be somebody's AI version of Orco, like their AI girlfriend.

It's Orco, right? Speaking of AI, though, so yesterday we were talking about how AI is driving the RAM prices up, and there's a couple of new headlines that really underscore that. Oh, yeah.

A lot of people commented on this, by the way. Yeah, so one of them is that Samsung recently failed to put together a deal with Samsung to buy RAM.
Oh, like one division of the company? Yeah.

So Samsung Electronics was trying to sign their deal with Samsung Microchips.

I'll look up the exact division. Probably like a Galaxy manufacturer.
They got to buy the RAM from somebody. Yeah.

Yeah. And so they normally try to get them from Samsung Semiconductor Global.
That's where they normally get their RAM from. And they tried to sign their year deal.

And Samsung Semiconductor said, no, you're going to have to renegotiate the rate for these quarterly because it's just the prices are that volatile. They're going to be going up.

So you can't get a year lock-in deal on this, even though you're us. This is probably the most commented thing from yesterday's episode.
This is

You're a Squid, You're a Kid. That's a great name.
That's a great name. Great name.
Splatoon's such a good game. Splatoon, that's what it is.
Yeah.

They said yesterday in the comments, RAM prices are ridiculous right now. I bought 64 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM for $175.

That's exactly what I said RAM should cost. $175

back in 2023. Today, it's worth over $400,

even though it's not DDR5. And had a similar experience with their GPU as well, their video card.
That's crazy, man. That's in two years.
And it's not going to get better either.

There was one of the other concerning headlines was that Micron

is shuttering their consumer-facing RAM business to focus all their resources on development for the AI industry. No way.
Yeah, so they're basically just making RAM for AI.

So, yeah, see, that plays in the other things we were talking about this week with like the K-shaped economy, right? It's like you have a whole company now that's so I bought Micron RAM in the past.

I think my first, if it's the same company, my first PC I ever bought in the 90s was a Micron PC back when they were a full-fledged PC manufacturer, kind of like Dell.

Talk Talk about Dell in a second, too. There's the Dells are in the headlines these days.

But it's so crazy to me because I was looking yesterday, going back to this AI thing. You posted photos of the Chinese bicycles, the bicycle graveyards from 2018.
Yo, I posted one.

I posted one of basically a guy riding his bike in front of one of these mountains because some of them are...

They're very zoomed out to give you like a sense of the scale, but you almost lose the scale as a result where it looks like a patch of moss or something. Right.

When it's like, it's actually, it's this huge, huge, like mountainous pile of bikes, but your brain can't make sense of it because it's so much and it zoomed so far out.

And I posted that image in the comments for yesterday's episode because I couldn't believe it.

When I was looking at it, exactly what you said, it said it looks like a patch of moss or a bush or something. But then when you zoom in, you can see its bikes.

The weird thought I had when looking at it was when you zoom in far enough, you can see the bikes, but because they're all the same shape and there's so many of them, your brain almost can't make sense of the pattern.

And it would absolutely be something today that people would say is an AI-generated image because, look, that bike has four handlebars. Right.
Or like that wheel is not the right shape. Right.

Or like, you know, all these things jumble together. It just, it, it, it bleeds together into like this one blobby shape, right?

Because it was posted on the Atlantics website in 2018. It's kind of like that Facebook status where people mark themselves safe from like some disaster.
Like a calamity? Right.

Like knowing that it's from 2018 and it was posted back then, it's marked safe from AI in my head. And I keep having that thought again and again.

When I see something now and I'm judging of whether or not I can believe what I'm seeing, a lot of times I end up looking at when it was posted.

And if it's posted before 2023, 2024, I'm like, okay, that is perfectly fine. Right.
But like, but before that, good. After that, I don't believe it.

Even though like stuff like Photoshop and photo manipulation absolutely existed. Oh, sure.
They just made lying harder. It just goes to show how it's like on a completely different level, right?

It is. It is wildly different.
And I wonder, do you think that's why China is trying to sell so many of their gas cars out of the country so they don't have to pile them next to the bikes? Right.

Did you read that story too? Yeah, that they're essentially flooding the market with a lot of like low-cost

internal combustion engine, like traditional gas-powered cars,

like all like in the area, but outside of China specifically. So, it's an interesting problem that they've run into.

This is from Reuters: China floods the world with gasoline cars it can't sell at home. And we talked about this before yesterday when we were talking about the bikes.

It was because they had the manufacturing capacity to make the bikes, but there was no consumer demand for it.

This is kind of the weird flip of that, where the reason why they're flooding the global market with these gas-powered cars is because EVs are selling so well within the country. It says,

no one wants a gas car now. Right.
While Western nations focus on the competitive threat of Chinese EVs, a different challenge is reshaping the auto industry.

Beijing's legacy automakers are saturating emerging and second-tier markets with fossil fuel vehicles, often undercutting their foreign partners.

China's electric vehicle industry captured half its domestic market in just a few years, crushing sales of gasoline-powered vehicles from once dominant global automakers.

Okay, so they've got to find somewhere to send them, basically. Yeah, because the EV adoption is so high there.
Well, it's interesting. You know, where it's not high?

Well, possibly, is in India nearby, which is a really interesting thing going on in India at the moment with Tesla EVs specifically.

So, India, the most populous country in the world, and Tesla entered the market in India in July. They have, since July, sold 100 Teslas.
Wow, 100 units. 100 units.
Wow.

And so they're having almost like the opposite problem. Like they're trying to get in the market and no one wants their thing.

Well, the good news, the ray of sunshine there, Ashley, is when I hear you say that, I think to myself, hey, I'm only 100 EV sales away from beating Tesla.

With all my efforts I've made in the EV market in India, I'm within 100 units of Tesla. Yeah, anyone can do it.
It is, it's like, it's crazy to me that. If you sold a used car, you're only 99 units.

It's amazing, right? That's insane.

100 units. How do you even report that? You know, they haven't had a lot of show floors available yet.
I think they had one. They've opened a second one.

But even so, like only selling 100 units in the market, mind you, those are very, very expensive vehicles.

And if you can look at that, or you can get this incredibly cheap fossil fuel vehicle that China's got going spare, you know, that's a choice that you would make, right? Yeah.

And comparing ourselves to, you know, our EV sales in India versus Tesla's, I had another thought like that this week, too. Did you read this,

like, Tarantino, I guess, is on a promotional tour for the new Kill Bill thing? He's talking a lot, I'll say that. Did you read the stuff he was saying about Paul Dano? Yeah, he said, was it?

There Will Be Blood might be like his favorite movie of the 21st century, except Paul Dano's in it. Right.

And it's like some kind of weird, and the comments he's making are not like, just like, not like I don't like Paul Dano. They're saying he's he's like, Didn't he say he's like the worst actor in SAG?

This feels very personal, right? And that was my takeaway too. He said he was weak, weak sauce.

He's he's not a good actor, he's nowhere near the caliber of Daniel Day-Lewis, who was the lead in There Will Be Blood.

Obviously, there's not many people who could say they're the caliber of Daniel Day-Lewis to start with. But I did have the thought too of like when he said that Paul Dano is the worst actor in SAG.

I thought, I'm in SAG.

So then I said, Oh, Quentino thinks I'm a better actor than Paul Dano. Wow.
I can put that on my resume now. I'll do that.
It'll be like my version of Tarantino's said he was in Dawn of the Dead.

I'll be like, you know, Tarantino said I'm a better actor than Paul Dano.

Anyone who's in SAG can say that now.

Famous director Quentin Tarantino thinks I'm better than Paul Dano.

He's talking a lot of shit in the lead up to this release, isn't he?

Do you think Paul Dano like woke up?

Earlier this week and it's like, why do I have 87 messages on my phone? He's just sitting there living his fucking life and it's like on on a beach somewhere doing Paul Dano things.

I don't really know. And then just suddenly, suddenly every

Tarantino just comes a stomping. Yeah, well, it's weird because obviously anyone who works in the art is well used to criticism.
People feel very comfortable criticizing all of the arts in any form.

But for people who work in the arts, there is a level of professionalism that you rarely see crossed. And this is a weird one like that.
Like, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

They didn't work together.

As far as I know, they don't have like any negative professional experience with one another. Did Paul Dano kick his dog? Randomly criticizing.

It's a lot. It's really weird to see, but it's...
While promoting another movie. Yes.
Yes. Starring Paul Dano.

Also, he was taking a, I think Tarantino was taking a little bit of heat for the Fortnite thing, the crossover. Like, that was not really well received by Tarantino fans or by Fortnite fans.

Which is not exactly... You don't want to see the Venn diagram where the two circles are completely separate and no one went in the middle.
What is the rating for Fortnite? Because I watched it.

Yuki's Revenge. I watched it.
And I thought it was perfectly fine. I thought it was cool to have something like that.

The only thing in it that really bugged me is all the stuff that they inserted that was like Fortnite placements. I thought I was just, I thought I was just going to watch a Tarantino animated film.

And it's not. Did that happen to show in Fortnite? No, it's like in the world of Fortnite.
Like there are Fortnite characters that are like starring in this.

Like there's a guy on a porch who's one of the Fortnite. I don't understand the Fortnite lore, but like for instance, the bride, Uma Thurman's character.

At one point, she's riding on the blue bus that everyone skydives out of. Like she's actually on the Fortnite bus.
Okay. And when a character dies,

this is why I'm asking the question about the rating. In order to maintain the rating, they probably can't show a lot of blood.
So

when people get shot or cut it's like pixelated like it is in fortnite yeah and when someone dies that weird teleporter thing that that takes you away as soon as you die that indicates oh you're not actually dying you're just a digital representation of something like i said i don't understand the world of fortnite uh but characters like big characters in this short when they die it goes

and it zaps them away you know what i mean and like it was when that seems very un-tarantino when it very and when it intruded into the narrative i didn't like that stuff So I rejected, as a Tarantino fan, I rejected the Fortnite stuff.

So Fortnite is rated T for T. It's probably 13 and up.
Yeah, that's probably it. Yeah.
So it's, yeah, that's a, that's a weird one. I'm crossover.

That's a weird choice to make for someone like Tarantino who, like, the, the blood, especially for something like Kill Bill, right? Is like really intrinsic to what it is.

Like if they did one of those giant blood sprays, they can't put that in Fortnite. They can't.
It would kill their rating. And you think, well, it's not in the game.
It doesn't matter.

If it's presented within their title, within Xbox or PlayStation or whatever, then it's the ASRB does not around with that stuff. No, they do not.

No, yeah, they will give you immediately give you a mature rating, which Fortnite does not want.

No, uh, but before we go, um, you mentioned the Dells earlier, I just want to make sure that we touch on that. So, this is really interesting.

Uh, this is this is something that made me wonder, like, you know, kind of go down a rabbit hole of looking up other donations. So, Michael and Susan Dell have donated $6.25 billion.

They did this on Tuesday to provide, this is from AP News, to provide 25 million American children 10 and under an incentive to claim the new investment accounts for children created as part of Donald Trump's tax and spending legislation.

These are what are called the Trump savings accounts. We had talked about these before.
Yeah, where basically

this era of kids, this kids, what's 10 and under, born before January 1st, 2026, are all supposed to have these funded savings accounts of $1,000. The under 10 thing is the Dells, right?

The actual legislation is for anyone who's basically born in the era of Trump, the second coming of Trump. Got it.

Any kid born there gets a savings account of, I believe, $1,000 that they can invest, and the contribution is made on behalf of the government in their savings account.

And there's all these rules of when they can access it and everything else.

The Dells have done this because they want to contribute to that, but they want to try to cover the gap for some of of the kids that were not covered. So, this is people that are up to 10 years old.

And they went with an interesting thing.

The Dells will put money into the accounts of children 10 and younger who live in zip codes with a median family income of $150,000 or less and who won't get the $1,000 seed money from the treasury.

Because federal law allows outside donors to target gifts by geography, the Dells said that using zip codes was, quote, the clearest way to ensure the contribution reaches the greatest number of children who would benefit the most.

Okay, so they're basically expanding that program on their own. Yeah, but I've read breakdowns of this too, of people analyzing like,

where is it being donated? So basically the money is $6.25 billion is

huge, by the way. Is that the biggest donation you've ever heard of? Because I don't think I've heard of one at that scale.

I mean, there's a lot of billionaires making really big donations at the moment.

The former Mrs. Gates makes a lot of big donations to charity, and the former Mrs.
Bezos makes a lot of really significant donations to

charity, Mackenzie Scott.

And so they're both donating loads of money, but $6.25 billion

is another level, right?

I do love that Mackenzie Scott went to the story that's being circulated right now is that she got a loan from a roommate or something like that when she was in college when she really needed it.

Now she's paying that forward. I'm sure the roommate's like, hey, what's up? You could pay forward.

You know, I'm glad you're paying it forward. You could pay it back, too.
You know, you could slide a cool hundred million my way

interest or whatever.

But yeah, so I fell down that same rabbit hole that you just mentally went down, which is I was trying to figure out what was the biggest ever single donation because I had never heard of anything that was $6.25 billion in one go, like fully donated at one time.

And from what I could find, the largest ever single donation was $2 billion

by Nike co-founder,

by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny. They donated that to the Oregon Health and Science University's Knight Cancer Institute.
That was in August of this year. I didn't hear about that.

I didn't hear about it. And then previous to that, Michael Bloomberg had donated to Johns Hopkins University $1.8 billion in 2018.
The other one that showed up on the radar

was an over $1 billion donation

by the founder, quote-unquote founder of McDonald's, his widow, she donated to the salvation army of all places. So, six and a quarter handily

seems like the biggest donation of all time, which Ray of Sunshine here, if we're going to read about records set by billionaires, this is kind of the nice thing to read about.

You know, there'll be a lot of breakdowns as to where the money's actually going and things like that.

But at the very least, it's like, you know, we're not reading Michael Dell is starting an aeronautics division to go into space or something like that.

Or is spending $6.25 billion on an underground bunker to ride out the Ram crisis. Right, right, right.

For all the problems the billionaires have caused in the world, now we're just, they're setting up a life for themselves underground to watch like Blu-ray movies.

They're going to watch Space Balls 2. As opposed to actually solving those problems.
Yeah, Space Balls 2 just finished filming. Yeah,

I'm so, so excited about it.

I want to put out real quick before we move away from this, though. AP News estimates the Dells are worth about $148 billion, to put it in perspective.
Okay, so they still have some to share.

They got some money stocked away. But yeah, I'm really excited that Space Balls 2.
Josh Gadd, who's part of the cast, basically said that filming is complete on it.

So now I guess we just wait for all of the shiny VFX. You must be really excited.
You love Spaceballs. I am.
Spaceball for me was one of the movies when I was a kid that I could put on repeat.

I could watch that movie every single day. So I loved Space Balls so much.
So I was really excited that they were going to make this sequel. I really, really, I really hope that it's good.

I mean, not that it makes the first one bad in retrospect if the second one isn't good, but I just, I want to recapture that feeling. I loved that movie so much that I want it again.

I don't want to yuck anybody else's yum, but Space Balls was never important to me. You know, I don't know how you would tell a good Space Balls movie from a bad one.

How dare you, sir? What I would love to see, though, is if Space Balls as a franchise has more good movies than Star Wars does.

We've got...

We've got two good movies and so does Star Wars.

What are the chances? All right, Ashley, who's going to the premiere of Space Balls 2 with us? All right.

Big congratulations to Graham and Ben Bremer, who are both going to the Space Balls 2 premiere. That is not a binding agreement.

But thank you for sponsoring this episode of our show, patreon.com/slash morningsomeware and roostyourteeth.com. Also, in movie news, this is another thing, too.

We talked about Zootopia 2 breaking the global record for opening last weekend and how other markets might still be coming.

They must be because Hideo Kojima was just announced as the cast of a police officer in Zootopia 2 for the Japan version of it.

I love the idea that they're like, oh no, we need to voice this one quick. It's going to theaters this week.
Who have you got? And they're like, get Kojima in here. Yeah, why not? Get him in there.

It'll get gamers into the theaters, right? Sure, that'll happen, right? Look, I can tell you that when it comes out on Blu-ray or whatever, I'm absolutely going to listen to the Japanese trackers.

I will do Kajima.

He plays a mole in the

literal mole in the police department. But yeah, but at least it does show there's other markets markets yet to add to that tally for Zootopia, too.
So we'll see where it lands eventually.

All right, that does it for us today, December 4th, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.