Ep.#443 - Harold and the Purple Crayon

Hi, floppers.

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This time, it's personal.

On this episode, we discuss Harold and the Purple Cron.

Now, I haven't watched Harold and the Yellow Crayon.

Am I going to be able to understand the sequel?

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm Elliot Kalen.

I feel like we should leave into the whole YouTube crazy face algorithm booster thing and just be as silly as possible.

I do like, I don't know, I got to point out for all the listeners watching at home, Dan McCoy's wearing a purple shirt.

Oh, that's true.

I didn't even know.

No, I judged the theme.

Hell yeah.

I love it.

That's like when I don't watch the fucking endings.

You just love this movie so much.

Well, you missed something this time around.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Spoiler alert, probably.

Zachary Levy was here is what the back of his shirt says.

Did I pronounce his last name right?

I'm going to talk mad shit about this dude.

I should learn his last name pronunciation.

Yeah,

I think it's...

actually, I don't know if it's Levi or Levi.

It's in some ways.

It's his middle name,

not his original last name, but his middle name.

Well, this is a lot of great trivia, right?

Yeah, we're just goofing out of the cast.

We watched a movie called Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Let me say, let me, let me back up a little bit.

In this podcast, first principles, we watch a bad movie and we talk about it.

How do we say what's a bad movie?

It's generally we get like a critical or, you know, what the commercial critical consensus people saying check people talking word on the street you know a flop there's a shoe shiny boy

hey uh hey some tips yeah yeah hey yeah hey uh uh reggie shiny uh did you hear about any uh bad movies lately yeah i don't know uh perhaps i did perhaps i didn't uh how about this how about ten dollars yeah yeah i did hear about a bad movie uh there's something on netflix something with harold on netflix harold and maud harold and something but uh i'm gonna need another five.

How much is it worthy to find out the rest of the title?

Here's $5.

Harold and the Poi Bull.

Poiple, what?

Oh, see, you know, my pockets, they say, I don't know.

I think I've got enough of that.

I think I've got enough of the search function to complete it for me.

I think Google will auto-fill this.

Oh, rats.

Well, thanks for supporting me a little bit anyway.

You know, with AI search functions, who and few people go to their local shoeshine boy to find information?

Yeah, so, you know, but most of the time.

Harold and the purple tumescent.

Uh-oh.

Oh, no.

Should have listened.

Tumescent.

Yeah.

Even Elliot's Google is annoying.

Yeah.

Is tumescent ever used outside of erotic?

No, I don't think so.

I don't think so.

But if you're like, I'll just check it.

Harold in the purple, feet, Harold in the purple, married, Harold in the purple, net worth.

Net worth, yeah, hype.

Yeah, but 90% of the time we go in blind.

So sometimes we're surprised by like 99% it's invisible.

Yeah, Yeah.

But this was one that got a lot, a lot of bad word around it.

It's based, of course, on the book of the same name.

64-page book, huh?

Stretching it out.

What is this?

Did Peter Jackson make this?

Just kidding.

I would never make fun of Peter Jackson.

You never would, never.

Or his brother, Michael Jackson.

Now,

let me just talk about, let me just talk, or their father, Andrew Jackson.

You love them all.

Let me just talk about uh my history with harold and the purple crane i'm curious about your history with it i am my i'm married to a children's librarian i have two children we read a lot of books this is a particularly special book there's a few books this extra yarn where the wild things are a few children's books that are particularly ulysses the james joyce one and also the odyssey uh some children's books that are that are particularly special to us and i so when i heard they were making a movie of this i was like oh it's such a simple straightforward story there's not a lot of plot There's not a lot of characters.

It's literally just about what you can do with visually, imaginatively, with drawing on a two-dimensional surface.

Like, they better not make a movie where, like, it's like, we've got to get the purple crayon out of the bad guy's clutches.

And then that's exactly what they did.

So I'm so even going into this, I was not going to give this movie the benefit of the doubt.

So that's on me.

That's on me as the critical eye.

You know, I can advantage.

Worse with it than like just that.

Like, if it was like, I don't like that idea, but if it was just that and sort of still stayed within the world of Harold, but it was like the

even more cookie-cutter, like, we got to just turn this into every sort of other movie where it's like, yeah, yeah, let's make him a real human in the real world, but with his crayon things.

And he grew up.

That's what you want to see, right?

In this book about a child's imagination and discovering the power of imagination and art.

And like, what?

What if he's old enough that he could conceivably have a romantic subplot with a single mom?

You know what?

That's too much.

Let's pull back on that but yeah it's a uh yeah that they um

that they decided to bake it you know that's what there is like a scene where like she has to teach him how to use his wiener

you can draw things with this too

you know forthcoming when you know this is like the male version of born sexy yesterday born unsexy yesterday like just kind of a man-child goofball uh it's kind of like the jason bourne stories right

yeah yeah exactly like that.

So I will apologize going in.

I was going in ready to dislike this movie.

High bar for the movie to clear.

But you know what, guys?

They did it.

What a wonderful masterpiece.

Tagical worker cinema.

Yeah, I mean,

I got to say, I also had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder

because the lead is

an actor I don't particularly care for, nor do I care for his personal views on the world.

But he does a great job in this.

It's not at all like it's a one-note performance of annoying forced positivity, right?

Yes.

Like somebody who is in

a theater camp performance of Elf, the musical.

Well, that's the thing.

People have pointed out,

they are both playing into their previous strengths.

Like Shazam, you know,

boy man

for Zachary and like for Zoe.

The double Zs, they call them.

Z-Z tops on set.

Top of the call sheet.

She was the ELF love interest.

So she's had to deal with this shit before.

So

she's in the movie elf.

I feel like I've only seen it once.

She's on the shelf.

The romantic interest of the family.

He keeps her on the shelf just to keep his options open.

Yeah, and I will pretend to be in the middle.

Something I don't want to harp on too much because I feel like it's unfair.

I don't know what the budget

was apparently, according to Wikipedia, is $40 million, which seems like a lot for this movie, but there are special effects in it.

But I will say that overall,

it looks and sounds very cheap i don't there's like a feeling you get sometimes when you're watching a low-budget movie where the camera moves look like real movie camera moves there's real movie actors in it but everything feels kind of like tv movie and i don't know if you guys felt that way while you were watching it

uh i i could see

where the cheapness came out for me was that he's got this magical purple crayon but mostly he you know until the end he just makes like kind of like oh

a skateboard or a bicycle bicycle or, you know, like stuff, like very basic stuff.

I'm like, we ain't seen all that shit before.

You get a 3D printer, it's basically the same thing.

I just, I like, that was the stuff where it's like, you can make anything, but you're not.

And that feels like the actual look of the movie, like, it just seemed like bright family movie style to me.

And this guy came out of animation.

The director, I looked him up, did like Ice Age and stuff.

So I think there are occasional places where he has a way with a sight gap.

He's got some bona fides.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah,

He really, somebody should really

market a 3D printer called the Purple Crayon.

They should, but everything that comes out is purple.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's fine.

I mean, that's the 3D printer.

That's the color of resin they use or whatever.

It's the 3D printer that Prince would have used.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did get the feeling, like you're saying, Dan, it's like

this thing can draw anything.

They do draw a couple creatures, but it is mostly like, here's a car.

Here's a hot air balloon.

Here's a plane.

I did get the feeling kind of like with way years ago when we watched Mr.

Magorium's Wonder Emporium, where they were like, enter my magical world of whimsy.

We're going to jump on the mattresses at the mattress store.

And it was like, really?

This is the biggest joy and delight gets

jumping on mattresses.

Whimsical thing.

Just to ruin the mattress.

So I'm going to do the summary for today.

So let me talk you through what happens in Herald and the Purple Crayon.

We start with an animated opening.

It really feels like they're adapting the book, kind of.

I'm going to stop you right there.

Is this what the art in the because I'm not exactly

a little kid?

It's like a slicker, more movie animation version of the art in the book.

It evokes it, but it's 20% less charming than the actual book.

Gotcha.

But I also wanted to stop you here, though, Ellie, to ask you,

did you treasure these early moments with Child Herald animated, knowing that it was the closest to actual magic this movie was going to provide you?

You would think so.

No, because it just reminded me, like, oh, this book is genuinely magical.

And they've already kind of slicked it up.

The moment when they, they, my notes is they really depoeticize it.

Like, the book is very spare.

It's very straightforward.

But it's like, he made some friends, a moose and a porcupine.

And they went everywhere together.

And it's like in the book, the moose and the porcupine appear on one page.

He made a bunch of pie.

He didn't want to feed it.

He couldn't eat it all.

So he makes a he makes a hungry moose and a deserving porcupine, which I always thought was such a funny like, and those, and just in doing that, the characters have more personality than they really get written in this, in this movie.

But

I started thinking about like, yeah, you're adapting a book that's really thin when it comes to story and characters.

So

everything that happens in it, they've got to make into a bigger deal.

Like this moose and porcupine that appear on one page, they're now his best friends.

They do everything with him.

And they have their, and they have their wires cracking personalities.

The movie kind of pretends to end,

where like he goes to bed, the movie prints in.

And then it reveals, no, no, that's not the end of the story, because Harold kept growing up, which implies an eventual future where Harold is a decrepit old man with dementia who is making horrifying things with his crayon, or like he can't draw well anymore.

And so just half-living, crippled things that are like, oh, destroy me, erase me.

Fingers are twisted from arthritis.

Yeah, exactly.

Desperately trying to draw new body parts for himself as he ages.

I think

that's a good thing.

That's a horrible movie that's going to be made once this goes to the public domain.

Horror and the purple crayon.

Yeah.

I'm more crayon than man now.

We get a little bit of gravitas because there's a narrator and that narrator, none other than Sir Alfred Molina.

I don't think he's technically Sir Alfred Molina.

Oh, he played Dr.

Octopus.

He's a sir to me, dude.

You can just say Dr.

Alfred Molina, which he's also not.

But the thing is, okay, so we see

that Harold grew up.

Now he does extreme stuff like like skydive and make roller coasters or whatever.

Different animation style, and I would say worse.

Far, far uglier.

Even before we enter the real world, you get a taste of how the whimsy of the book will be drained entirely.

The purity of Crockett Johnson's work is being, is being, you know, yeah, drained and stripped.

But there's Crockett Johnson.

What if that moose had like a little beard?

Can we get him a little beard?

You know what?

The thing is, this moose needs some more ratitude.

He doesn't have have enough ratitude, and this porcupine doesn't have enough attitude.

How long did porcupines live?

Because wouldn't that the original porcupine be long dead if he oh, he's always replacing the porcupines?

Yeah.

So there's a narrator talking about how he grew up and he drew the world around him.

And the narrator can talk to Harold.

And Harold is like, and Narrator's like, well, I'm in the real world.

I created you.

So Harold wants to see the real world.

And there's like, that's impossible.

But then there's some gravitas.

Like you said, the next morning, the narrator is silent.

What happened to him?

He's gone.

Harold searched for the narrator.

Man searched for God in a meaningless world.

This is where we are right now.

So Harold, he says, I'm going to have to draw a door to the real world.

He becomes his own God.

Yes.

He says, no gods, no masters.

I have the power.

Like Prometheus, he holds the fire of creation in his hand.

Now, the movie glosses over the actual details, but I believe Crockett Johnson died in the 70s.

So does time, I assume, move differently in

the Harold world.

Have you ever seen Inception?

It's like that.

Considering we go to like a, we go to like

the Crockett Johnson house and the only thing it's about is Harold and the Purple Crayon.

And like, he did other stuff.

Like, this is, I don't believe this is the real historic.

Barnaby, is that him too?

Who's the

Barnaby Scrivener?

Yeah, he did Barnaby the Scrivener.

He did the Carrot Seed.

He did, yeah, he did a lot.

I mean, he did Barnaby.

He did a lot of different types of artwork, you know?

But he, but anyway, but the idea that he was a one-hit wonder with Harold and the purple crayon, no way, dude.

No way.

But anyway.

Well, that museum knows what pays its bills.

Yeah.

But yes, that's true.

But yeah, perhaps, yeah, the Peanuts Museum doesn't have a lot of stuff from Charles Schultz's non-Peanuts work.

You know, that fucking gift shop is always running out of purple crayons and they have to keep buying the fucking multi-packs.

They aren't like, here's the, here's the Schultz Museum is like, here's the big spike wing.

It's all about the girl in the red truck.

So you're saying, Stuart, that they sell, they buy a full pack of crayons, throw the rest away, and then resell the purple crayons.

I mean,

they try to sell them at a deep discount, but nobody wants that shit.

They're there for the purple crayons.

Come on.

But you're right, time works differently because the narrator disappears.

Maybe he spends 50 years looking for the narrator until he finally comes to our world.

Who knows?

Anyway,

he's the limits of his universe.

He draws a door to the real world.

Now he's live action.

The moose

accidentally follows.

And when he shows up, he's a human being.

And boy are they reasons unexplained other than i assume again budget yes and they appear in a in a public park and boy are they confused by the real world instant fish out of water comedy they don't understand anything

this is what i wanted to ask this is the problem that i often have in these movies i think you've talked about it too elliot where it's like okay what do you understand and what don't you understand yes because it seems like he's a total nafe when he shows up he doesn't know anything and then like he does does seem to understand how various things in the world work later on, including using like modern slang.

And

I don't know.

It's always confusing to me where the line is drawn.

Yeah.

The line being drawn is a big aspect of this movie because his purple crayon still works in the real world.

He can still draw things and they come to life.

Also, Porcupine comes through, and she's kind of like a British punk lady for some reason.

Yeah, because she's well, because she's a porcupine who's drawn in purple, she has spiky purple hair now, which leads me to ask, is it okay that I have a crush on a porcupine, guys?

Is that funny?

You do, you, Dan.

As long as you don't act on it, that's fine.

But this, it shows, I feel like it shows the, again, the lack of imagination in the movie, that it's like, this white guy needs some sidekicks.

He's going to have a wise cracking black guy and a British lady.

Those are the two kinds of funny characters that appear in mainstream American comedies.

And that's Lil Ray Rel Howley.

Lil Rell Howry.

Who I like.

Always fun.

Always fun.

He's not someone I'm not unhappy to see him.

I mean, he gets out of this movie as unscathed as anyone can, especially considering the dumb stuff he has to work on.

I feel like Lil Royal Howry and Jermaine Clement get out of this movie pretty well.

I think they both get and everybody else with varying degrees.

The kid performer is fine.

You know,

you're not going to roast a kid.

I'm not going to roast a kid.

Not a bad.

Eat him.

Surely not.

Elliot.

Elliot, you monster.

What do you mean?

Not when my family crashed on a deserted island that we had to.

We drew straws.

My son lost.

We're eating him.

Yeah.

You can draw straws.

Why didn't you just draw some food to eat, Elliot?

That's a good point.

Why don't I use my purple crayon to just draw some straws so we could pick who we would eat?

I drew them.

I knew which one was the shortest.

I didn't take it.

So

I abandoned my boy.

I abandoned my boy.

Give me the blood.

I abandon my boy.

That's called there will be purple crayon.

So we also meet, hey guys,

what kind of character have we not seen in one of these movies before?

Perhaps a put-upon widowed single mother.

Have we ever seen one of those in a kids movie like this before?

Whose life is going to be turned upside down by this innocent?

I don't think we've seen it.

So we meet Zoe Dichanel.

She's a put-upon widow.

Her name is Terry.

She has a son named Mel, which I thought was just a funny name for them to give to a kid.

Yeah, Mel.

Short for him.

Almost his Melbert.

And

he is seated next to you.

He's actually short for Melina because he's named after Alfred Melina.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Melina, his favorite character in Mortal Kombat.

I think, wait, is she the purple one?

I think she's the purple one.

Yeah,

Wheels Within Wheels.

What a rich man.

I also have to point out that he has, this young lad has an if that stands for imaginary friend, which if is probably a movie that Zachary Levi is jealous of and wishes he was in.

Yeah, or had made.

Yeah.

He does have an imaginary friend named Carl, an if, as you say,

and they almost hit Harold and Moose with their car, and their tire pops.

And Mel, the son, sees Harold draw a spare tire into reality with his purple crayon.

The imagination to draw a tire?

Yeah, to draw a mates.

The son guilts the mom into letting Harold and Moose stay in their garage storage room.

As far as she knows, they are two madmen that they have picked up in the park, that her son is suddenly taken away.

Can stay in me, a single defenseless widow.

The idea that

you and Dan are walking down the street and a car almost hits you, and the kid goes, Hey, they should stay at our house.

But we're dressed in like fun outfits, right?

Yeah, but you're also dressed.

Dan is in a big purple jumpsuit, and Stuart, you're in a sweater with moose things on it.

You keep saying, I'm a moose.

I'm a moose.

And I'm unnervingly childlike.

Well, how is that different, Dan, from me, right?

I hope I'm nervingly childlike most of the time.

The one thing I wanted to say about this is the movie.

Just to say, my note is Harold and Moose seem either high or crazy.

But, Dan, what are you going to say?

Well, since you bring it up, like, this is the thing about this movie.

All the characters who are painted as if, like, oh, you know, like the world is too cynical.

Like, they can't, you know, handle this, the sweetness, these dreamers, you know,

they need to get their imagination back.

All through the movie, I'm like, these supposedly cynical characters are treating these characters with a level of patience and forbearance that I

could only hope to achieve.

Like they are so nice.

I'm like, these are totally reasonable reactions to these characters at all times.

Here's something I will say, considering this is a movie that the Harold and the Purple Crayon adaptation that ends in a fight between a dragon and a wizard shooting blasts of force out of his hands, is that it is a pretty gentle movie.

I feel like for a movie that like grows up the character and tries to make it more cool, they do not have a scene where like Harold is thrown in,

or they do have a scene where he's thrown in jail, but it's pretty.

But it's like not a in a, I could see a different movie where he gets thrown in jail and the other people in jail are threatening him or something like that.

Like the characters are always in a pretty low level level of danger, which I think is okay.

It's not like when he's in jail and he gets the purple crayon back to break out, he uses the purple crayon to like draw a gun or something.

He just changes the stakes and the path of their lives forever.

No, even the bad guy who, even the bad guy who gets a hold of Purple Crayon, he's kind of silly bad.

So I will say the movie gets points from me for being gentle,

not being too intense.

I don't think it's doing a great job, but it's a gentle job.

And on that specific note,

no one draws a weapon that is anything but silly.

There's a big

trebuchet thing that you can't take

seriously in the context of Jermaine Glenn and McMahon.

He does like a dwarf and axe.

Yeah.

That's probably the most menacing anything ever gets.

Yeah.

So there is a lack of...

I think at the very least.

What's the most menacing they could have done?

Like a chainsaw or a morning star?

I mean, the one thing that does disturb me, and we're about to get there, so maybe I'm jumping ahead, but when he, like, the kid creates this spider fly that is apparently poisonous and is just unloosed upon the world.

Yeah, and they just, and it doesn't matter,

yeah.

But I think the, at least this movie feels like a kid's movie, which I, which I do appreciate.

I don't think it's, I don't think it's very good, but it's not trying to like, Harold and the Purple Crayon is finally like extreme for adults.

Only for adults.

Yeah.

I would have seen Jarth Vayner chop dudes' heads off.

And there's, there's no joke about like,

this would have, I would have gotten so mad if there later on, the crayon gets broken and the good guy and the bad guy both have halves.

If there was a joke about like, my piece is bigger than yours or something like that.

There was, you know, there was a joke.

There was a joke like that.

Oh, I missed it then.

I missed it.

Forget it.

Oh, then movie, you lost me.

Forget it.

I was, I was, I, I did, I missed to miss that while I was, while I was not paying attention too closely.

So anyway, we learned that Terry, the mom, she used to be a musician, but she put those dreams aside.

She works in a store now.

That night, Harold bonds with Mel.

Mel introduces the concept of dead dads to Harold,

and Harold shows him their purple crayon, and Mel makes this poisonous spider fly creature, which is the most dangerous thing in the movie, but is considered just a comic relief joke.

Porcupine

trying to follow Harold's trail.

She walks into a house and steals a jacket.

Now, I guess the police are after her, but there's this subplot of like detectives that are on the case, and that doesn't really amount to much.

Even though one of them, I'm crazy

to boss.

So that was fun.

But I mean, the

yeah,

her plot seems to be how she slowly assembles a cute punk outfit.

I mean, that's a plot we can get behind, sure.

Yeah.

Where does this take place?

What's the town?

United States of America's.

Anytown, I think it's called Anytown, USA.

Okay, cool, cool, cool.

Let me see.

I mean, within short driving distance of wherever Crockett Johnson's house was, I guess.

So let's see.

Looking at the microphone.

Which makes sense that they would appear there.

He seems to have Westport, Connecticut seems to be where he lived with his wife Ruth Krause, who wrote the carrot seed, which he owns.

That blows my theory that any town stands for a New York town.

No, it seems to be a Connecticut town.

So it really should be Actatown.

So the next morning, Harold has made a ton of pies because he does that in the book.

He does a lot of pies.

He's repainted the house purple.

Terry does not like this.

I understand that.

And

although I will say, when I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, you guys may remember this house, there was one brownstone that was painted sloppily, a kind of peptobismal shade of pink.

And everyone was like, what an eyesore.

Can you believe they did this?

And they did such a sloppy job of it.

But eventually new owners bought that house and they just

stripped that paint and it just was brown again.

And it was like a little, it was like a little bit of magic had died that day.

You know, a little bit of the old New York was gone.

So, I, so maybe Purple House is great.

I don't know.

Who knows?

And it's well painted.

Yeah.

Uniform.

Yeah.

Harold gives Mel half his crayon, setting up the joke later that I missed that that makes me mad.

And Mel skips school to help Harold find his dad, who he just knows as the old man.

And this is...

This I thought was going to be more of a runner-through of the movie, but they just do it like once, a couple times, is him just harassing any old man he sees, assuming that that's the old man.

And he's like, old man, look at my life.

I'm a lot like you were.

And they're like, I never lived in a crayon world.

But anyway.

And I feel, and I would imagine most of these old men are, on one hand, annoyed to be bothered, but also, on the other hand, they're excited to talk to somebody.

Something's happened.

Somebody's paying attention to them.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm an old man.

Oh, you want to talk about what they want to do?

Let me tell you about the 25 years I spent as a dress salesman.

This is how Napoleon could have won.

Let me say some things to you that sound sweet, but the more you listen, the more intolerant they become.

All right.

Do I have to stay for the whole thing?

Yes.

So

they say, hey, let's go to the library.

How are we going to get there?

Harold draws up.

You guessed it.

Something really amazing.

Roller skates and skateboards.

And

they just skate on over.

At the library, yes.

Well, I wanted to ask you, now that we're hitting the library, you mentioned how you're talking about the movie.

Danielle's just a library.

It's an important public space.

Were you just talking to Danielle about this movie or did she see any of it?

Because I was curious if she had thoughts on the library content of this film.

She did not see the movie.

I only talked to her about it, so I didn't get her full take as a children's librarian about this movie.

It's hard to watch the clips of the library stuff on YouTube or something.

I mean, it's also probably the best stuff in the movies.

It's all Jermaine Clement.

It's all Jameen Clement.

I mean, Jame Clement, like...

The material is not amazing, but he's still funny.

Like, he's just such a funny performer.

And I'm sure there are jokes that are his jokes.

He adds like a little extra level.

Like, there's a moment when he sees them playing around with the purple crayon outside and he like smashes his face into the window and his glasses all get fucked up and i thought that was pretty funny

he is i mean he he's playing a in some ways a a more innocent version of his character it's him and gentleman broncos right who's the like science fiction fantasy author right I didn't ever see that one.

Me neither.

This year he is a librarian who also dreams of being a fantasy author.

He's written a fantasy novel called like, what, the legend of Gagari or something like Gagarok, which is clearly his fantasy fantasy version of himself where he's in love with a fantasy version of zoe deschanel's character i feel like i've played d and d with this guy before well this guy is like he's like the

not as frightening as he could be in real life like children's movie version of an incel like that's his yeah i guess because he's kind of like you know got this like power fantasy obsession that he's put into this world and it's all about like you know uh dreaming of zoe duchanel who you know is constantly constantly politely but firmly telling him to buzz off.

But I guess he's like a good-looking dude, and he's got an accent.

I feel like he'd clean up in any town, Connecticut.

To be honest, if he was a little less, if he was a little less intense, he probably could get a date with Zoe Deschanel.

He's not a bad-looking guy.

He's got a great accent.

He's kind of fun to talk to.

He's a little kooky.

He's got a good job, a good job that shows that he knows how to handle children, you know.

And children need to be handled.

I mean, he does have a bad habit of getting power mad as soon as he gets his hands on a purple crayon.

That's That's true, but how often are you going to find yourself in that situation, Dan?

One time out of one, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan's like, uh, I would, I would be like Fermier in the books and just turn down the purple crayon.

Whereas me, I'd be like, Give me that shit.

Oh, no, I'm in Mount Doom.

I'm dead.

Oh, no.

So, uh, Gary, I think

Gary is the gentle children's movie villain, which is fine.

Gary has a crush on Mel's mom.

He agrees to help them look for Harold's dad.

And Gary sees eventually Harold draw a plane to skywrite a message to his dad that says, old man, call me, and then has Mel's mom's phone number underneath it.

And he realizes, oh, that's Harold from the book, Harold in the Purple Crayon.

With that crayon, he can make his fictional fantasy world real, which is kind of funny.

It's like, well, why wouldn't you just draw copies of the book you want published?

Like, you don't really want to be a fantasy barbarian.

Like, you want, we see him on a Zoom call with a publisher, an editor who's rejected his book, which is crazy.

They are going to send you a letter.

Crazy that he got that far.

Yeah.

They're not going to set up a meeting with you to tell you that they don't want to read the book.

But, but the uh, but

that shit doesn't play well in a movie, though.

You want to, but it's that's true.

But it's as someone who has written a novel, which I don't think will ever get published.

I don't want to live the novel.

I just want to get it, the story to other people.

So it's just kind of funny.

If you wanted to live the novel, it would get published, Elliot.

Oh, that's a good point.

That's a good point.

Live the novel.

Yeah.

Be the novel.

Be the novel.

So I've got to slice myself into hundreds of pages.

You got it, Dan.

That's slice myself into pages.

And so he sees, he goes, oh, I can make my fantasy world real with that.

Our heroes, they fly around screaming for a while.

They skyrocket the phone number.

Go on, Dan.

Well,

one other thing that said, you know, cheap movie to me was, you know, of course, there's a payoff where Zoe Deschanel is getting like all the phone calls from old men, and there's like three of them.

Yes.

She's like,

we can't afford.

Can we get AI to mimic old man?

The old, the old man budget was very low on this movie.

Uh, they're like,

Look, we needed to, if we were gonna, if we were gonna get these big name stars, we had to pull the money from somewhere, and it's from the old man budget.

Every movie has an old man fund to cover all the old men they'll need.

Sometimes a movie never digs into that fund, and they can use it for a big party at the end.

Like, um, singles, swingers, they never really had to dig into the old man fund.

A lot of movies with S and then NG in it somewhere, they don't have to dig into the old man fund.

But sometimes a movie like,

you know,

what's a movie set in an old folks' heart?

Grumpy Old Men, Space Cowboyboys,

Space Cowboys.

Yeah, exactly.

Those movies, they ran out of the old man fund, and they had to start pulling from other aspects.

And rap party, don't not at all.

They're not going to have fun.

Yeah, yeah, because they don't like, all those old men don't like rap.

That's true.

Once you get enough old men in there, I mean, the fact is, the OGs are getting pretty old.

The original generation of rappers.

And considering my kids think of Snoop Dogg as an old man who sells fast food on television.

Yeah, he's pretty good at it.

He's very good at it.

Oh, he's America's beloved, cute, violent rapper.

Anyway, and we learned that when Moose feels like he's in danger, he briefly turns into a moose again, but then back to a human being.

Does that get

talked about at all, or just happens like two or three times and then forgotten?

It sort of happens.

It doesn't really pay off.

It pays off at the very end.

It happens about two times, and it pays off in helping to defeat the villain at the end.

When he

blasts the villain across the he like, he like headbutts him with his antlers and

just pushed him as a human.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, but a moose is able to push someone much harder.

Yeah, they need to make it a little more exciting.

I get

extra pushing.

I mean, that's what moose stands for.

Men

only

oscillate strongly

every time this thing hits them with their antlers.

That makes sense.

E stands for a lot of stuff.

Yeah.

Whereas human stands for humans,

unlike moose, interesting that, yeah, that makes sense,

nudging

you can't push someone as hard when you're a human.

Um, yeah, but this sudden mooseification causes uh problems with the plane, like you burst through the plane and they have to parachute out, which left me wondering, did this plane crash?

Yes, people did, it crashed, it hurt somebody, yeah.

Um, and then it disappeared later when all the stuff disappeared momentarily, and there was just dead bodies, and they were like, it's a mystery

crashed into this house, killed all all these people.

And then the next year, Mark Wahlberg makes a movie about how he would have piloted that plane to safely.

Yeah, I mean, he didn't make a movie about that, right?

He's just the thing he's seen.

He's making a movie right now.

Like, he and fucking Mel Gilson made a movie about that shit.

Kind of like that.

They're making a movie where they stop 9-11 because they're on the plane.

Something like that.

Yeah.

No, it's like there's a prisoner transport and

the prisoner gets released, escapes, or whatever.

And I don't know.

It's a danger plane.

Isn't that one that Jason Bateman?

It's a danger plane.

Okay, danger plane.

So

is that kind of like the Jason Bateman movie that everyone in the world has seen 15 times according to Netflix?

Yeah, Carrie?

Kind of, probably not.

I haven't seen the other one because I'm not allowed to watch Mel Gibson movies in my house.

Someone's not getting dragged across concrete in his house.

Oh, yeah, I had to wait until I had to watch that in a dumpster

on my phone.

So anyway.

And when they were going to throw more garbage in there, I'm like, I'm in here.

Occupied.

Meanwhile, at school, a male is getting bullied, and some kind of invisible force hits one of the bullies.

We know it's his if, but, you know, and uh, but he gets in trouble for it.

I gotta say, someone being bullied and then getting in trouble for being bullied, I relate to this.

This movie saw my experience as a kid for sure.

I thought it was funny that the bully's strategy was to bully him for being tardy, which is apparently I don't think bullies character.

What do you do?

What do you do for class?

Well, as we're seeing in politics today, the way to harness the aggression of toxic men is to give them authority and to put them in places of enforcement, you know, rather than to teach them or redeem them in some way.

Yeah, so Harold and the Purple Crane really captures this concept.

Oh, yeah.

They might as well call it Harold and the MAGA crane.

Yeah, for sure.

So Harold and Moose, they show up at the store Terry works at.

She's like, I have to get mail from school.

You know what?

I have to move all the stuff in the stockroom.

You do it for me, and I'll go get my son, which is a bonker's plan.

You don't know these guys.

They don't work there.

Uh, they, you, all you know about them is they seem strange.

Of course, they cause havoc in the store.

Uh, someone goes up to Harold and is like, Hey, do you sell pumas here?

And he's like, I think so.

So, he draws a live puma, which is not purple.

They didn't go all the way and dye a real-life puma purple for this movie.

Yeah, I'm sure that was a possibility, and they had to ask.

But again, but the old man budget, they're like, there's nothing in the purple puma budget.

You know, again, most movies never dip into the purple puma budget, so they can use it for other things.

A Pink Panther budget, sometimes movies dip into that, but very rarely into a purple puma budget yeah

so anyway there's nothing more to say about it no it's just a true thing you said yeah so there's true facts about

they cause havoc and she loses her job which it seems funny to me that the the manager was like yeah a puma got loose in the store because of these two people i've never seen before you're fired zoe d'hanel like they don't have to say we know this you know i don't know why they have to connect to her I think, I mean, this is one of many situations where their hijinks negatively affect the lives of other people.

Yes.

I'm assuming that's a lot of people.

Like in the movie The Lives of Others, which is about a purple crayon that causes trouble in East Berlin, yeah.

Because the store like burns down or something, right?

Like the level of havoc is on pretty intense.

It's fire.

It doesn't burn.

The lights fall down and yeah.

And then later on, there's a moment where the porcupine goes into a diner and then despite the staff being firm but patient with her,

she causes all kinds of havoc and

like destruction.

And I'm like,

these employees didn't deserve this shit.

No, we're definitely, it definitely feels like the movie in these moments is punching down

in the same way that, and, and I don't, again, we don't have to get into this.

We don't need to be the kind of woke podcast that is no longer popular and will only get us in trouble.

But the people working in service positions on these.

That's not the reason we're not to.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's now.

Damn, we got to follow the money.

It's all about being mean.

I think there was an executive order dissolving the

rule that we have to allow wokeness in our podcast.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, the Biden era rule.

Oh,

it was very sweet.

This morning, we finally got near the end of Biden's term, my younger son, who loves Joe Biden,

he sent him a letter.

And we were like, oh, okay.

They never wrote back.

And this morning we received finally his return letter, which they must have like.

sent out a ton of letter responses at the very end January.

I'm not answering this anymore.

Peace and love.

Peace and love.

Yeah, yeah.

Just like Ringo.

But he was so excited about it.

It was really sweet.

Did it have like ice cream stains or something just to know for sure it was Joe?

Oh, I wish, I wish, yeah.

Um, no, it was pretty, pretty much a form letter for kids, but then signed at the bottom.

So, uh, the uh, but anyway, uh,

was it?

Oh, yeah, so anyway, I was just gonna say that the people working in service positions at these stores and restaurants are all people of color, and it reminded me of an episode of Seinfeld, where the job of a person of color is to be a security guard or a manager or a desk clerk who rolls their eyes at these crazy white people who are causing them trouble.

Well, there's, I was, I was watching, uh, I was watching a show where a character gets rejected from going into a country club and they're like giving the matrix so much shit.

And I'm like, the major D's not rich.

Like, you're treating them like they're like a rich person, but they just work there.

That's their job or else

their job.

Are you Michael Moore going in and bothering security guards for doing what they're paid to do?

I'm like, like,

it's charming when Axel Foley does it.

He's allowed to.

Everybody else, no way.

And I think, and I also don't want to say, I'm not saying don't aim for diversity in your movies because characters are going to get annoyed or anything like that.

I'm just saying that I am agreeing with Stuart's case that the people who live in this world are being very patient with these crazy, with these, with these, I shouldn't say crazy, they're being very patient with these difficult characters.

And the difficult characters only escalate the situation.

It's not a matter of they're doing something innocent and someone misunderstands.

There's a swath of chaos in the city behind them,

which can be fun, which is not a bad thing.

But when you're presenting them as like, oh, these are the innocents of the world and all, it's just chaos behind them.

Anyway, but Zoe takes losing her job pretty well.

They're walking around the city.

They want her to play piano, like she always dreamed of doing, so they draw a piano for him.

She plays some classical music in public.

Meanwhile, these two cops are looking for Porcupine and the other heroes.

And

this will kind of pay off later, but they're not big characters.

I just wanted to say that there was someone on Letterbox who pointed out that Zoe Deshanel can play piano, but the movie shoots it as if she can't.

That's true.

They're playing a different song than she's playing, I think.

Will she play like the intro to that Lincoln Park song?

Well, eventually, I know, I don't remember the first song that she plays, but then eventually she's playing Hungarian Rhapsody number two, the friends list song that's in a lot of the stuff.

Get someone in for there for that.

Which is a hard song, but like it was very funny because I was like, oh, yeah, I don't know what song she's playing.

Like, the hand motions don't really seem to match.

And as you said, Porcupine, for no reason at all, terrorizes a restaurant.

Gary finds Harold and Moose and he goes, hey, I found your old man.

And he explains to them about the book they came out of and that the crayon is made of pure imagination.

They're reunited with porcupine and the police arrest them, throw them in jail, but they escape using the magic crayon

pretty easily.

It's fine.

It would have been pretty crazy if he made a gun and they accidentally shot someone and they're like, I can't believe we did this.

Oh my God.

But we've raised the stakes.

If we give someone else the gun, they'll use it on us.

Just draw a dead perpetrator.

Yeah.

Draw a gun in his hand.

Draw a dead bad guy with a gun.

Then the cops are like, we know all about this.

We'll help you with it.

They know you're on our side.

So the next day, Mel is at school and he scares his bullies by drawing his imaginary friend who is a dragon.

This dragon is pretty cool.

Look, dragons are cool.

There's nothing wrong with it.

He's got his own little Lockheed

that is his best friend.

Later on, the dragon bursts.

Does he learn a valuable lesson

not to deal with his bullies by creating something that's dangerous and deadly?

No.

No, he meets force with force.

No, he's that

if with met with violence, he responds with violence.

Or at least with fear.

When met with fear, he responds with fear.

He believes in fight, fire, with fire, and then he starts singing the song Fight, Fire, with Fire by Metallica.

It's pretty rocking.

It's pretty awesome.

It's pretty cool.

That moment when he goes, We all shall die, is such a

scary moment in a song.

I'm not used to being scared by a song.

Yeah.

Porcupine very unsafely drives them in a four-person motorcycle to Crockett Johnson's house.

And

Gary sees them

along the way and follows, I guess.

And Terry is tracking them on her phone.

They end up at the Crockett Johnson house.

It's a little museum now where Harold, they open the door.

This lady docent is like, oh, are you here for the tour?

He's like, well, we're here to see.

Crockett Johnson goes, oh, he died.

And Harold immediately turns around and walks away.

Yes.

They do remedy this at the end of the movie, but I had the same reaction where I'm like, well, I mean, if you think of this man as your dad, you don't want to see anything about him.

He's not here.

I'm out.

Harold.

No, thanks.

I didn't know I was going to have to read information plaques.

Too bad.

Send it to me as a reel, please.

Terry shows up.

She gets mad.

She thinks Harold is just making their lives more difficult.

Objectively, he is.

And he goes, she goes, stay away from my son.

Harold is shattered, and he loses his faith in his ability to create things.

All of his creations disappear in a puff of purple smoke, including porcupine and moose.

He is now

on the wreckage of that plane.

Yeah, now he's all on his own, leaving a mystery that will never be solved.

And now he is distraught.

Even the purple tire on the car disappears.

I have two things about...

Well, number one is my questions about the metaphysics of this where he loses the...

They disappear.

Well, I think that can be answered with the fact that it's a magic crayon.

Okay.

Well, they disappear once he loses faith, but then like he still uses the crayon later on to make stuff and it works.

There's no like moment where he like gets faith back, but then they come back only when needed at the very end of the climax.

And also, like, what matter of faith are we talking about here?

Because if it's just faith in the fact that the magic crayon works, he knows it does.

There's proof of that.

I don't know.

He's mad

anymore, right?

I think he's more losing faith in his own imagination to solve problems.

Yeah.

But again, that doesn't destroy everything.

So, Dane, have you ever seen?

We've been talking about Alfred Molina a lot today.

Have you ever seen the movie Spider-Man 2?

Now, there's a sequence in Spider-Man 2 where Spidey loses powers and he could not be happy.

He's wandered around.

He doesn't break up a mugging that is possibly my favorite thing I've ever seen in the movie.

He's just bopping to Ranger.

Kevin's dead.

This movie takes one of those moments.

What's that?

I'm not a professional screenwriter, guys.

What's the name of that kind of a bit?

Is that a Spider-Man bit?

Yeah, Spider-Man.

A hero just loses his powers for a little while.

What would you call it in Joseph Campbell or Stories World?

Yeah, Crisis of Faith, Rock Bottom.

This is your end of Act Two.

Oh, no, actually, it's not your end of Act 2, Rock Bottom.

It's your middle of Act Two, Crisis of Faith, that leads to the end of Act Two.

Oh, no, the hero is trapped and can't get out of it.

That's the rock bottom.

But yeah, it's a fairly fair treatment.

I mean, he's trapped in this fleshy prison that we we call the real world.

We all are, that we call our bodies.

Someday we'll be free of them and one with that electron field that makes up the universe.

I was trying to explain this to my kids.

My younger one, he said, he said, I think heaven is you get to play video games all the time.

You only eat ice cream.

And I was like, that's a pretty limited idea of what a

transcendent heaven would be.

Dante's depiction of paradise involves more of a oneness of the soul with God, a closeness to God, a proximity that fills your soul and fills you with the joy of being just one with creation.

And this did not mean mean much to him a six-year-old.

So I guess he's not ready for

him he'd be one with ice cream.

Then he would love it.

Yeah.

Imagine having all possible information immediately shoved into your head and having your consciousness shattered immediately.

Well, that doesn't sound great.

Oh, the other thing I wanted to say about this moment, though, very quickly was I just, while watching it, I suddenly found it very funny.

If the movie just became about, yeah, real life will crush you.

Like, you know,

he never regains his faith.

He never regains his his faith.

He gets a job.

He becomes a man in a gray flannel suit.

He starts a family.

He's never happy.

He does not talk about his past.

He's Don Draper, essentially.

Yeah.

Don Draper.

The road not taken for Harold.

Oh, well, maybe next time.

So, because instead, what happens is Gary picks up Harold.

Man, if Don Draper had that fucking purple crayon, he would have destroyed.

Oh, Mel.

Oh, wow.

The queens he would have made.

Yeah.

What an imagination.

And then eventually he'd steal the idea of another guy.

You'd have to hire him to make up for the fact that he stole that idea.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Harold,

Mel sees Harold and Gary drive by and he goes, Harold's in trouble.

And mom is like, that's it.

Give me your whistle that you used to summon your imaginary friend, Carl.

Like, we're not dealing with this anymore.

She also says, I should have believed you earlier.

And I'm like, no,

no, you shouldn't have believed your kid when he said all this magic crayon.

I thought she said that later.

No, when she hands him the whistle, I'm pretty sure.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

She says, I should have.

Well, she should have believed him because it was true, but you're right.

If your kid comes up and goes, my imaginary whistle calls a dragon and my friend has a magic crayon that can make things real.

The thing about imaginary friends is I'm fucking sick of this shit.

Like, as soon as this kid tells you he has an imaginary friend, you're like, oh, yeah, let me give him a little pet.

And he's like, you're touching his butt.

I'm like, come on, kid.

I'm fucking halfway.

It feels like a trap.

I'm thinking more about eventually he's going to go to college.

He's not going to bring a dragon with him.

Now she's stuck taking care of a dragon.

It's not his imaginary friend anymore.

It's hers.

She didn't want that responsibility.

When he's in college, she wants to be out and about, living and loving.

you can't take a man home for a one-night stand and have a dragon in your house i'm sorry if movie trends have taught me anything mommy horny right guys

that's what i've heard yep hashtag yeah hashtag it so uh harold gives gary the crayon because gary's like i can use this power for real gary seemingly needlessly traps harold in a dungeon from his fantasy novels and declares revenge on the world uh mel shows up and gary shackles him too and again this all seems unnecessary really all he really wants is to be a novelist um after trapping him Gary, and he traps him at the edge of a pan.

He's too big.

Yeah.

Gary, he flew too close to the imaginary sun.

Gary draws a chariot and rides off, and Mel tells Harold.

Man, Daedalus would have drawn some fucking badass wings if he had that purple crayon, right?

You better believe it.

Icarus would have been fine.

Probably still would have gotten all roasted up, but that's okay.

Oh, Icarus would have found some dumb thing to get back doing.

That can't be moral.

He's an idiot.

He was an idiot, you know.

Looks bad.

I can fly a million miles up.

Like, calm down, kid.

Although, to be fair, you're a teen or a young adult your dad tells you don't do that you're gonna do it you know daedalus should have said hey be sure to fly super close to the sun icarus would have been like oh i'm hovering just over the water dude

You can't tell me what to do.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, he's a great inventor.

Probably a bad dad, right?

Is that the long and short of the dad?

I can't imagine he's got the time to give his son a real moral upbringing when he's busy building a labyrinth to trap a bull man who eats virgins.

He was also starting with like, hey, why not try these untested wings with me?

Dan, it was a prison break scenario.

It wasn't like they were just at his lab, they're trying to get out of the labyrinth, you know.

And he's like, not everybody has a Jennifer Garner to help them out of a labyrinth, you know?

I think he also built a bunch of shit that Kratos used in the God of War games.

I got to double-check.

Or is that Jennifer Connolly in labyrinth?

Am I getting my Jennifer Carny?

Jennifer Connolly.

Jennifer Connolly.

Not everyone has a Jennifer Connolly to get them out of a labyrinth.

Sometimes you got to just slap a bunch of wings together.

Maybe Jennifer Connolly is Jennifer Garner's alias.

Oh.

The listeners at home, Stuart just tipped his glasses down as looking over them.

Give this man a Pulitzer.

Anyway, Mel tells Harold, he's like, No, you made my life better.

You need to believe in yourself.

And Harold's like, I don't even have my crayon anymore.

But Mel has his half of the crayon, and they escape in a hot air balloon, just as they do in the much better Paddington 2.

Terry sees Harold's magic is returning all over, and Harold and Gary they meet up in the public park.

They have a crayon object battle.

They're drawing stuff that they fight with.

Gary's like dressed up like a wizard with long hair.

Yeah,

I was wondering if you liked this part, Stuart, because it's basically a wizard's battle i do like a wizard's duel but i feel like uh i mean the the bar is sword and the stone wizard yes that's the best wizard's battle unfortunately this doesn't measure up no no that's too bad that is a that is a great wizard's battle though that's the best but mad madam mim is also purple That's that's true.

Maybe that's where her power comes from, Dan, from the magic crayon.

That's Dan's unified theory of sword and the stone and Harold and the purple crayon.

It's the same universe, everybody.

Dan loves that shit.

He loves it when you combine a bunch of movies together.

It's probably referring to my San Francisco presentation where I made fun of fan theories, possibly too angrily for the audience.

I don't know.

It was a little aggressive.

I think the audience was a little.

My presentation was also not my best.

And so I feel like I didn't set you up super properly.

But your presentation was a little awesome.

You know, Stuart cleaned up.

It was like when

the opening comic at the Daily Show was mean to everyone.

So when John came out, everyone loved him.

Yeah,

yeah, that worked.

Terry got everybody riled up, and then I calmed them down.

Talking about the greatest city in the world.

But let's go on.

Let's move on.

At some point during the battle, Gary swallows the crayon, and I couldn't remember if that was accidental or on purpose.

On purpose, yeah.

It was on purpose.

And he gains the power to become his fantasy character, a good guy, Roar.

So now he's like a full long-haired wizard.

Terry shows up and she rejects Gary.

He gets mad and turns the park into a lava field.

And Terry, that's when Terry says to Mel, I should have believed you back when you told me that your friend had a magic crayon that makes

objects out of nothing.

She gives him back the whistle.

He calls back his dragon friend Carl, who fights Gary.

This is the moment where I turned to my wife because she walked in the room and I said, Did you think that Harold the Purple Crayon movie was going to end in a battle between a dragon and a man shooting

power bolts out of his hands?

And she said, No.

Gary wins the battle against the dragon.

Harry says, Harold says, I believe in myself and I believe in my friends.

And Moose and Porcupine show up to help him.

Porcupine finds Harold's crayon half, which is in a crag of a rock that is thrust up through the earth.

Harold draws the spiderfly from earlier, which flies into Gary's throat, and then Moose turns into a moose and headbuts him, and the crayon comes flying out, the spiderfly, and all the damage that Gary caused goes away.

All the stuff he created leaves, and Gary is sad, and Harold draws a door to Gary's fantasy world so he can live there forever.

And Gary steps through, and then the dragon just destroys the door so he can never come back.

He can never return.

Yeah, and it's like, I mean, I'm assuming the rest of it is like that, the Steve Kostansky short, W is for Wish from, what is that?

ABC's death.

ABC's death.

Yeah, it's great.

And we'll see.

There's a mid-credits scene, Stuart, that I think you didn't watch.

Our heroes, they go back to the Crockett Johnson house.

Elliot, you say that as a joke, but you know, there's no...

Fucking way I watched anything as soon as the credits started.

But also now I think that you just are just like, well,

this is my thing.

It's my thing.

Roulette.

I don't have to do it because it's funnier if I don't.

Pick up my fucking heels.

Start scrolling.

So

the heroes go back to the Crockett Johnson house.

They now deign to take the tour and look around inside.

And Terry tells Harold that the old man would have been proud of him.

And it's so weird.

He says to the lady, he's like, he's like, oh, yeah, I'm Harold.

And she just hands him an envelope with a letter to Harold.

Like that Crockett Johnson is like,

Joe Hilarity in Back to the Future part two of his life.

Well, we've been holding on to this letter for 50 years, but like, or 30 years or whatever.

But the idea that the character, Crockett Johnson's, like, someday the character I invented may come to this world and try to find me, so I better leave him a letter.

And the letter, we hear it in voiceover, it's explains that Harold is meant to inspire others to live with more imagination or something.

It's such empty kind of boilerplate, you know, nothingness.

And Harold and Moose and Porcupine, they draw a new door.

They go back to his crayon world and they start drawing again.

And meanwhile, in the real world, Mel still has a pet dragon that lives in their house.

Dan, you say something before the postcreds?

Yeah, before the postcreds,

you mentioned in passing, I wrote it down the actual line, because

you mentioned the response, but not the line.

There's a point where Harold says, I wonder what the old man would say if he could see me now.

And I'm like, you don't want to ask this question movie version of Harold and the Purple Frank.

Because he would say, what did you do to my book?

Exactly.

Why?

Why?

What?

What is this bullshit that you added?

Well, that's the reason.

The reason why the original book sucks is because he didn't have the imagination to create a world like we see in the movies.

With dragons and stuff, yeah.

He does say, he does say, if he could see me now, that old man of mine, I'm eating fancy food and drinking fancy wine.

And then he just bursts into the whole song.

And then it's the best.

You got to guys go to Vegas.

It's one of the best renditions of that song from Sweet Charity that I've ever seen on film.

And so he goes back to his world.

And Mel has given him a box of crayons.

So now he can draw with many colors.

Oh, boy.

Finally.

That's another reason why the original book sucks is because it only has one colour.

Only one crayon.

Yeah.

And so the post-credit sequence we then see.

Gary is in the fantasy world, and he finds the fantasy version of Terry, and she reveals that she is in a relationship already.

And the wizard she's in a relationship with takes her away.

And Gary goes, Oh, yeah, well, I was, I was pretty busy already, too.

So even the, even the, even the, the bonkers reward that this character has been given of he can finally live out his fantasy and fantasy world is undercut and this character is is punished.

It felt like he's like,

there's time now, and

his classes are all broken up.

It just felt unnecessary, you know.

I think the movie didn't want to give him the win of like,

yeah, like this, this, he gets the girl in a way of, you know, like that, I don't know, that, that, that, that, the realization of that power fantasy was a little too much for the, the movie, I think, without that

happening.

I guess the movie fainted towards the idea of the redemptive power of love and happiness and then said, nope.

And then there's a second, there's a, there's a second, uh, you guys missed this.

There's a second post-credit scene where he is in his therapist's office.

His therapist is like an orc or some shit.

And he's talking about how, oh, he like needs to learn that like

just because he's projected this fantasy on someone doesn't mean that he is owed anything.

He really needs to just work on himself.

Yeah.

And then, wait, and you missed the post, post, post-crib sequence.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Where he is then, he's come to peace with himself and he's realized, I'll just, my fantasies have to stay fantasies.

They can't be real.

He's masturbating.

And even in his erotic fantasy, in his masturbating, she dumps him and walks away.

And he looks towards the camera and he goes, I just can't win.

Well, but I really like that.

Then there's another scene after that where he learns to eroticize the rejection.

And so that's what actually gets him off is being rejected by leading to the sequel, Harold and the Purple Cuck.

Yeah, of course.

I got to admit, the thing that confused me about this

post-credit scene is like, she's like, I'm dating this guy.

And I'm like, is this guy someone that we saw in a non-fantasy version earlier in the movie?

It just seemed to be like a conversation.

That's true.

It just comes out of nowhere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they don't even list who the actor is in the credits because I looked at it because I was trying to figure out whether it was a callback of some kind.

Yeah, you're not sure.

Maybe it's a friend of Jermaine Clements or a friend of the directors or I don't know.

I don't think it is like a version of someone we've seen.

It's just Mr.

Egg or something.

It's just a character from his book, I guess.

So that's the story of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

It taught us all to embrace our imagination and our inner crayon.

Now it's time for a little thing we call Final Archives.

Jar Andrew Crane.

Are we going to use the crayon to say this is a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie we kind of like?

So the crayon segment, it isn't really that different.

It's just the baresty.

It's the same

segment, but with like a crayon skin on it, I would say.

Crayon.

Skin to crayon.

Did I ever tell you about when I was a little kid?

No.

My.

Well, you have told us about when you're looking good, but I don't know if it's this story.

So when I was a little kid, my little brother and I would stay with my grandma and my grandma, or Boucha, as we called her, because she's an old Polish lady.

She would, when our crayons would get small or run low, she would take the shavings of it, like the wrapper, and

she would have us bury them in the garden.

And then when we would wake up the next day, there would be new crayons sticking up out of the barracks.

That's cool.

That's really fun.

That's cool.

That's a sweet memory.

Sweeter than anything in this movie.

Before we go to Final Judgments, I was affected.

How long do you think this movie was in development for?

How long?

Since the 70s.

Not that far back.

Only since 1994.

So what we saw was only the product of 30 years of multiple people trying to make this movie.

Who would have been,

who would have been, what is it, Larry in the purple?

What's the name of the movie?

Harold.

Larry Fine.

Who would have played?

So it's the 90s.

Who?

Seinfeld?

Who was going to play?

That's a good question.

So they didn't have casting so looking at Wikipedia when I mean in 1994 Michael Tolkien the writer of the player was supposed to write it and Henry Selleck was going to direct it maybe it would have been a stop motion movie I don't know maybe live action but then eventually that changed and Spike Jones was brought in at a at a certain certain point that makes sense yeah then eventually David O'Russell was brought in to help rewrite it

that seems like a mistake eventually spike jones abandons the project 2010 uh it was the project was picked up again and uh that was going to be written by josh clausner who wrote date night and shrek forever after um

And eventually another writer was brought in.

Then in the 2020s,

the current version of it, as the new screenwriters were brought on, and Carlos Seldanha, Seldon Seldanha was, I don't know how to pronounce his name.

It doesn't have a tilde.

No, but

he's from Brazil, so I think it's a Portuguese name as opposed to a Spanish name.

And eventually it was that.

But

it seems like such a to spend for this movie to have been in development in many ways for 30 years and to have ended up with probably the most straightforward

version that any of those people would have made, I think, at least a more interesting version.

Maybe not the best.

I mean, I didn't love Spike Jones's Where the Wild Things Are movie, but uh, but uh, but it would, but it's more interesting, certainly, yeah.

Yeah, okay, well, which returning

here's the thing: I didn't like this movie.

I'm not going to say that, I think it's a bad, bad movie.

You loved it, you didn't like it, you loved it.

Oh, wow, he's a reality movie.

I think it's a bad, bad movie, but I do think that had this not been a Herald and the Purple Crayon movie, had it been the same movie based on nothing like

Herald and the Red Marker.

Yeah, on the scale of things we watch for the show.

Yeah, the Spirit Halloween version.

On the scale of things we watch for the show, as Elliot says, it's kind of gentle and sweet, essentially.

It's 90 minutes.

I hated it less than I thought I would.

The hatred mostly comes from that this was a much more beautiful thing that has turned into a dumb generic thing.

What do you have to say?

Yeah, I mean, I think

the movie has chosen an uphill battle, and it does not make up enough for the ill will that it causes by taking something that is clearly

a nice small little story.

and extrapolate it into something completely unnecessary.

Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way.

I think you guys have described it well that I think if I wasn't bringing my emotional baggage of loving this book and finding it to be so special, it wouldn't bother me as much, but it is still a,

it's just a forgettable kind of movie.

And that would be okay.

Like if my kids, of all the kids' movies that we've watched for this podcast, if my kids were like, we want to watch Harlan Brokran, I'd be like, fine, all right, I guess.

But it's, yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like it really needs to exist.

They're like, daddy, daddy, I want to start following the lead actor's X account to see what his political views are.

And I'd be like, oh, hold on a second.

Maybe not.

We still call it Twitter in this house, young man.

And what were you doing looking at it?

Hey, everybody, I'm Jeremy.

I'm Oscar.

I'm Dimitri.

And we are the Euro Evangelists.

We're a weekly podcast spreading the word of the Eurovision Song Contest, the most important music competition in the world.

Maybe you already heard Glenn Weldon of NPR's pop culture happy hour talk up our coverage of this year's contest.

But what do we talk about in the offseason?

The rest of Eurovision, duh.

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And let me tell you, the drama is juicy.

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Check out Euroevangelists, available everywhere you get podcasts.

And you could be a Euroevangelist too.

Ooh, I want to be one.

You already are.

It's that easy.

Oh, okay, cool.

The Greatest Generation has been going on for more than eight years.

And if you've been Greatest Gen Curious but have never taken the leap, we recommend exploring your Greatest Gen Curiosity in a safe, fun environment with partners you can trust.

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Every Monday on maximumfund.org or in your podcast app.

Hey,

let's take a moment to thank our sponsors.

This week,

Herald Week, we call it.

It's a flop house.

I don't know what we're doing.

I just decided we're sponsored in part by Squarespace, the all-in-one, all-in-one, I'll tell you, all-in-one

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And when you are ready to launch, you go to squarespace.com slash flop to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Well, Dan, we've also got some of our own stuff to promote

to promote.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Look, there's one more episode of Flop TV.

That's right.

Flop TV, our live online video broadcast version of the Flop House.

It's like the Flop House, but you can see it and it's shorter and there's more in it.

So really, Flop TV is the steak and Flop House, the podcast, is kind of the ground chuck.

Anyway, the

live flap TV.

I believe, Dan, this episode, I believe, is going out on the day of our final episode, right?

Yes.

If you want to watch live, tonight is your chance.

Pretty much you've downloaded this in time.

You get to hear Dan's reaction to watching hit movie Teenage Me and Ninja Turtles 2 Secret of the Ooze, a movie Dan has never seen at this point.

Yes.

I want to know what's up with that ooze.

If you're listening to this on February 1st, the first Saturday in February, then yes, tonight at 9 p.m.

Eastern,

6 p.m.

Pacific, you can listen and watch as we talk about Ninja Turtles 2, The Secret of the Ooze, big movie for me when I was a kid, did not factor into Dan's life at all.

And it's time we're introducing it to him.

These flop TV shows?

I think that explains a lot, actually.

Yeah, I think so.

Flop, that's why I have a family, and he doesn't, and so forth.

Flop TV is how.

No, there's all different types of families.

Dan, married with two cats is a family.

So Flop TV, for those who haven't joined us yet, and I don't know why you haven't, it's really fun.

One of us does a visual presentation.

We talk about the movie.

There's a video segment in the middle that one of us puts together.

And the fun thing about it for us is that we do not see each other's segments until the show.

So you get to experience them live as we do.

It's super fun.

We have a great time.

And I think the audience loves it too.

If you can't be there tonight, February 1st at 9 p.m.

Eastern, 6 p.m.

Pacific, then you can still watch the show afterwards because the recording will stay up online until the end of February.

If you go to theflophouse.simpletics.com, you will be able to buy tickets for each episode or a season pass.

That's six shows for the price of five, and it gets you access to the recorded video of those shows.

So if you missed all of Flop TV the whole season, until the end of February, you can buy a season pass, watch it all at your leisure, and just enjoy it.

Just binge it.

Binge the whole thing, all six episodes.

Why not?

That's the new streaming model, right?

Just yourself.

Sick on

the flop house.

Oh, you like the flop house?

Well, why don't you watch a fuckload of it?

Yeah, oh, I caught you watching the flop TV.

Well, you have to watch the whole season, young man.

That will teach you.

And so at the end of February, though, those videos will go away for quite some time.

So your last chance is February 28th, right?

This isn't a leap year that we're in.

February 28th.

But until then, go to theflophouse.simpletics.com and you can get a season pass to watch those episodes.

I'm so excited to talk Ninja Trolls too with you guys because,

again, I haven't seen it in years, but when it was a new movie, I saw it many times.

Really?

Okay.

Every time with his grandma.

Just one time with my grandma.

Just one time.

She was along with me.

Elliot, Elliot, take me to see these ninja turtles.

I hear the ninjas and turtles.

I also wanted to mention, before we go on to the next section, I want to just do a private plug, a personal private plug.

I'm still writing the Harley Quinn comic book for DC Comics.

It's in comic stores now.

I've been having a lot of fun writing it.

It's a real fun series.

If you are looking for a Harley Quinn book that has

an intricate, overarching story that will test who Harley Quinn is and bring her to the limits, bring her to the limits of her powers, her personality, and her patience.

This is not the series for you.

It is a lot of fun stories.

I'm trying to do one-off issues as much as possible.

There's a theme to it, and there's recurring characters.

There's at least one two-parter in there, but the emphasis is on fun stories and just having a good time.

So if you were looking for a book that was going to like, really make, really change the way you think about Harley Quinn, make you question everything you thought you knew, this is not your book.

But if you want to find the Harley Quinn that you know, then read it.

Yeah.

That Harley Quinn isn't a Harley Quinn that thinks it's a plant, but rather a plant and thinks it's a Harley Quinn.

No, it's that she died and her mind went into a Harlequin doll and now she thinks she's Harley Quinn.

Yeah, we're not doing that.

Yeah.

Where's the TikTok man figure in?

Yeah.

Where's the TikTok man?

That's a great question, Dan.

That's a great question.

When the Harlem Ellison verse merges with the DC universe, and I think we'll finally get to see them, see each other.

Actually, it would be very funny if I did a story where she fights the TikTok man, and then

Harlan Ellison runs in and threatens to sue the whole company.

That'd be very funny.

He's passed, right?

Yes, he's no longer alive.

No.

All right.

Well, now that that's cleared up, it's the perfect time to move on to letters.

Now that we have the happiness of knowing Harlan Ellison is not with us anymore.

Yeah.

Wow.

Just kidding.

This is a letter from Justin Last Name withheld, who writes, Mac originally addresses,

or they address to me.

They say, hi, Dan.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Well, just

I blame you.

I was critiquing a friend's work, a nonfiction piece on the movie The Women, and was trying to remember the name of one of the actresses.

I came up with Rhonda Shearer.

My friend's face scrushed up a bit.

He reminded me it was Norma Shearer.

If you were off the chance,

very similar.

If you were offered the chance to produce the 21st century version of USA's Up All Night, what would it be?

Who would be the host and what types of movies would you screen?

Dan isn't super vocal about celebrities he hates, so I can't really make a joke yet.

Yeah, I would have to think about

my host a little bit.

Maybe you can come back to that part of it.

But I was trying to think of like, what's a sort of subtype of dumb movie that i have a real fondness for and i maybe i would just it would have to be you know like a

one or two season thing you you would run out of stuff a lot faster than i think the up all night purview uh but uh move you

well

the question it's a hard question to think about in some or to answer partly because yeah what usa up all night was doing is something that you don't necessarily need done anymore and also is not as acceptable in some ways you could just dial up Tubi for it.

But I was going to say, the genre

would be like dumb techno thrillers or horror movies.

Oh, yeah, that's

just have such a fondness for anything that's

with like you should have like a Garth Merengi-style opening where you're like logging on to a scary computer.

Oh, that's good.

And I wonder who would be good for that kind of role.

That's like Matt Berry always.

I mean, Jermaine Clement, you know, or Matt Berry.

Oh, Oh, yeah, I think you guys cast it for me.

Yeah.

But

I feel like I was starting to put an answer to this in my head, and then I realized it was just monster vision with Joe Bob Briggs, which is a thing that exists already.

Already exists.

Yeah.

Do you have any ideas, Stuart, or should we move on?

Let's move on.

Let's move on to

letter number two from Zach Withheld.

Zachary Levy.

Did you guys see my Herald and Burple Cran movie?

Did you like it?

Maybe a recommendation.

Dear Peaches, what was the Knight in the Last Crusade up to for all those years in that cave?

Clearly not dusting.

Much love, sack withheld.

So was that a real question?

I mean, it's a real question.

Yeah, it has a question mark at the end of it.

To defend the Knight in the Last Crusade, what was he supposed to dust with?

He was not equipped with cleaning supplies.

Yeah, you know, he doesn't dust super well.

No, not at all.

He's not going to scratch those artifacts.

Come on.

His fucking tuna could turn to dust as soon as he started moving on.

It's a cave.

You know, it's nothing but dust.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if dust is the definition of a cave,

let me just look it up on Webster's.

Hold on, Webster's Dan Shenery.

Oh, yeah, cave, noun, nothing but dust.

Yeah,

dust in the wind.

See, see nothing but trouble.

Okay, let me flip to nothing but trouble says noun, not a cave.

Okay, well, I'm glad that

he's a religious man.

I mean, clearly,

you know,

a Christian from the Christian

tradition, if he's guarding the holy grail.

So maybe not meditation in the traditional sense, but I would assume sort of quiet religious reflection is what he's spent most of his time in.

And you know, that dude has got to be so annoying because he hasn't talked to anybody and he's like, he just needs, he's craving that human contact at this point.

So he's like, anybody who walks in there is like, okay, man, just take it down a little bit.

I know you're thirsty for this shit, but like, here, let me give you my phone and you can just play around on that for a bit.

Yeah.

Let's move on to recommendations, movies that we've seen that we would say maybe you should spend your time on something like this rather than Harold and the purple cran.

I want to very quickly do a dual recommendation because they're linked.

The Nighthawk cinema here in Brooklyn has been doing a Robert Altman retrospective, and I got to see two of his films on the big screen that I'd never seen before, despite Altman being one of my go-to, like, if someone asks, you know, favorite American director.

But I saw Brewster McLeod, and I saw come back to the five and dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

The play turned into a movie where they're like, this title's not long enough already.

Let's repeat that Jimmy Dean at the end.

But very different types of movies.

Brewster McLeod

gets kind of serious at the end, but mostly is just kind of Altman's gag-a-minute movie.

It feels, it gave me this feeling like I was watching sort of the doodles in the corner of Mad Magazine, but in movie form, and I found a lot of it extremely funny.

And it's a very strange movie

about, you know, a boy who is building some wings, and maybe they'll fly.

But mostly it's just about a bunch of weird stuff happening.

And come back to the Five and Dine, Jimmy Dean.

Jimmy Dean, it was a

a Broadway play that I believe was also directed by Robert Altman.

He filmed this version of it, but it's still very cinematic.

This is a big plot spoiler.

So skip ahead a little bit if you don't care.

It involves a character who we learn is

trans.

And,

you know, while I think probably from today's eyes, I'm not the best person to speak on this, but probably from today's eyes, there are certain things that maybe ways of talking about this that

would be frowned upon.

But certainly for the time, it is one of the most like empathetic portrayals.

Obviously, the movie's heart is with this character.

And

that was kind of neat to see in a movie

of that period, but also sad to see

the backsliding.

But it was a very moving picture.

And it's got your, it's got share in it, Stuart.

So, you know, share.

You like that?

Both really good.

Stuart?

Oh, cool.

Okay.

I'm going to recommend a movie.

I'm going to recommend a movie that is, I think, nominated for at least two Academy Awards, including Best International Feature and I'm guessing Animated Feature.

And that is a movie called Flow.

Flow is a movie.

It's like an adventure movie about mainly following a cat character and a series of other animals who are inhabiting a kind of abandoned human civilization.

and then they have to contend with a sudden

like disaster level flood and they have to kind of rely on their own abilities as well as a slowly developing kind of friendship between them.

Now, these animals are not particularly anthropomorphized and they don't, there's no dialogue in the movie.

I will say the amount of like scared cat sounds was pretty distressing and I guess those are all cat sounds recorded.

The director's own cat made all those sounds.

But I found it to be a really touching and just a really well-told story.

It's like it's directed very beautifully, and the action is very like, the action moves really well, and it's just a really exciting movie to watch.

I'm going to recommend another kind of fun, action-y, exciting movie, one that I had been mean to watch for a long time, and I had not gotten around to it.

And I have not seen the second movie, which comes after it yet, which is the continuation of the story.

But I finally got around to seeing the Richard Lester version of The Three Musketeers from 1973.

And it is a,

you know, it's just telling the story of the Three Musketeers and adaptation of the book.

But it's, but it's, I think it's really funny, and the action in it is really fun.

There's really good sword fighting in it.

And it's funny that I was looking at some of the contemporary reviews, and they were like, ugh, the sword fighting is too precise and choreographed.

And you watch it and you're like, I guess a little bit.

Like, compared to the stuff that we see now, where everything is so intensely choreographed, uh, it looks more natural than that.

But, um, it's, you know, it's your classic Three Musketeers story.

Guy shows up, wants to be a Musketeer, falls in with these Musketeers.

They gotta help the, they gotta help the Queen of France not get caught by her husband because somehow that's gonna help Cardinal Richelieu when she's having an affair with a British guy.

And there's a lot of just jokes and stunts, and there's a very light tone to it.

We just talked about Cuthroat Island

in San Francisco, and I think the light kind of breezy tone that they were going for in Cuthroat Island but didn't quite get, Richard Lester does a really much better job of capturing in the Three Musketeers.

So I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the second movie, The Four Musketeers, which I haven't seen yet.

Yeah, those Musketeers movies from Lester.

Yeah, I really love them too.

Great pick.

Before we move on and say goodbye, I just want to do a quick shout out.

This story ends happily, spoiler alert, so no one stresses out over it.

But I wanted to shout out to Vince, the guy who runs the flophouse discord he had uh mentioned um

you know an injury a while back and then disappeared for the discord for quite some time and no one had heard from him and a lot of people were worried and uh i'm i'm not telling tales out of out of school because he posted this on reddit himself to like update everyone he resurfaced recently confirming like yes he had been in the hospital and it had come close to being really bad but he is uh alive and well and he's just like, you know, a really enthusiastic listener who set up the Discord.

And I was personally, genuinely very scared that something had happened to him because no one knew.

And so at a time when I feel like there's a lot of bad news, I was really happy to hear that he's well.

So I send wishes for continued health to Vince.

That's really good to hear.

And I would like to take this moment to thank our network, the Maximum Fun Network.

Go to maximumfun.org, check out all the other great shows on the network.

They keep

adding new ones.

There's a lot of funny stuff, a lot of informative stuff.

I'd like to thank Alex Smith, our producer.

He goes by the name Howl Dotty all over the internet.

You can listen to his music, watch his Twitch streams.

Check out his stuff as well.

But for the flop house, I've been Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

And I'm Elliot Kalen.

Bye.

Bye.

Goodbye.

I think some people, they don't have a lot of control over things in their life, so they decide to get mad at about the things they feel like they can't control, such as the opinions of others about movies.

Other times, someone has tons of control in their life, and yet they feel like they get mad about stuff.

And they get into politics and they ruin the country.

What are you going to do?

People get mad about stuff.

It's weird.

Yeah.

It's a silly time.

It is weird, baby Stewart.

It is weird, yep.

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