Triforce! #300: The Small Three Zero Zero

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Triforce podcast.

Oh, we were so close.

Oh, my God, we're back.

We were so close to doing like a special.

Yeah, we almost did a special, but Lewis never turned up.

So

we were super close.

We were going to do a special episode 300 special on the boat or in a theme park or something.

Oh, is this 300?

Well,

yes.

Yeah, basically.

Well, it's not really, though, is it?

This is not 300.

We've blazed past 300 episodes.

Yeah.

We had all the 99.1s and we had the point ones and point twos.

Yeah, we're way past 300 now.

It's yesterday's news.

Yeah.

I didn't prepare anything special for it either in the true trifles fashion.

It's not like I've got like a clip reel, do you know what I mean?

Or like a funniest conversations or like, you know, best bits, you know, or reminisce like seven years retrospective or whatever of doing this podcast.

I'm not none of that.

I just turned up

seven minutes late with a cup of tea.

What more do you expect from years of doing this?

Not much, honestly.

I think you are a confirmed silly Billy, and

that's that.

We know this of you.

It is known.

I've got shit else to do, you know?

Yeah.

Actually, I have got shit else to do.

No, I've got other things to do.

You know, being ill for a start, but also working on jingle jam and

keeping the torch alight for

YouTubers everywhere.

All over the globe.

For 41-year-old YouTubers.

You know, they appreciate it as well.

There's a lot of them just sitting there doing a knowing nod to you right now.

Keep up the good work, Bucko.

So for

we were supposed to be meeting up this week.

We can talk about this now because it's not going to go out for a couple of weeks.

I guess so.

Well, just don't say what we were meeting up for and then you're fine.

We went to an event

that

we had to sign an NDA.

So we can't talk about it until.

more events transpire, but we were all invited to an event and we were all supposed to meet in London.

And two of us turned up

and then Sarah turned up as well.

And it was really fun.

Holy crap.

We had so much fun.

And we texted Lewis and said, holy crap, we're having so much fun.

When are you going to be here?

And Lewis was like, Elmeo, I'm not on the train.

So that was.

Well, I had to do a brand deal that evening.

I had a terrible fucking sudden like migraine like halfway through it.

And I just like pushed through.

And then they were like, get a two-hour train to Stains.

They'll get you in at midnight and stay in a travel in.

And And I was like, do you know what?

I'm not doing that.

It's fair.

I was like, I was like, no, I'm not

doing that.

But

life happens.

You went to Thorpe Park.

You can't say that.

Oh, yeah, you can't actually say that.

You can't go to Thorpe Park.

Would you know what, Sips?

It was raining all day at Thorpe Park.

This is the first time Sarah has ever met you.

Yeah.

Because you don't make it down for Jingle Jam because you've got the three kids, you've got other obligations, you know, house is falling down, various issues, right?

Yes, yes um list of boilers on fire

sewage pipes back up back down bath plug yeah everything

there's there's so issues so many issues a lot of issues but you did come you did like as soon as someone said do you want to go to a theme park for an afternoon you were like yes yeah you just

was honestly astonished it was okay i mean it was it was it was a cheeky little trip honestly it was just one night uh it was only an hour flight there and back you know it was very doable very doable Nearer than where we get to come from, by the sounds of it.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, period in rush hour traffic from

London.

No, from Twitter's.

It was not rush hour.

It was not at all.

I went down there.

We went out for a meal on the first night and I got an Uber down there.

It took 20 minutes so that I could have a few drinkies with the chums.

And then I drove down to Thorpe Park the next morning post-rush hour.

I said to Sarah, because with all of these things, like I'm not being funny, people plan these things with the best intentions.

This is not on Sarah.

This is on the event.

They always say, we want you there at 8, whatever,

with a view to starting it whatever time.

And we're planning on this.

And I'm like,

I'm not going to be there at that time.

And Sarah was like, oh, you are going to be there, aren't you?

I was like, I will be there, but I am not in a rush to get there because I guarantee you that they will be running late.

Like, there's no doubt in my mind.

that this will not start on time because you're dealing with there were like 20 people or something and you got got to arrange them and this will go wrong and you're waiting on that.

I'm not going to rush there.

So I drove down.

They got there about 20 to 10, quarter to 10,

like an hour later than they'd wanted.

And guess what?

Nothing had started yet.

No.

So then they had this briefing thing.

And then we rode a roller coaster and I rode Hyperia and Hyperia was also not ready to the point where, and Sips and Sarah will attest to this, we went out there and waited for an hour in the rain in the queue.

And they stopped everyone else going in.

It was just me and the other people there and some of the staff and everything waiting in the queue.

It was an hour.

It was an hour.

And then we rode Hyperia twice.

I got a blinding headache because it was very violent.

And I'm not the tallest and fastest roller coaster of the UK.

I was not ready for it.

Like I've ridden roller coasters.

The picture that it I got a photo.

You know the photo that takes a picture of you on the way around the roller coaster?

As we're coming out, one of the guys says to me, Oh, we'll cover that.

You can, we'll get you the picture.

And I was like, Cool, maybe we'll use it for a thumbnail.

I showed this to my kids.

My kids thought this was the funniest thing ever.

It's me.

Oh my god, man.

He looks like he is doing the most powerful cum in the entire universe.

Like, it is

he's braced like it's insane.

To me, it looked like the hardest sneeze ever.

Like, on the real chew part of the ah, chew.

It's like right on the tail end of the chew.

That was my face.

Was like

just clenched up, horrified.

Or someone with an explosion going off behind them.

That's also what it looked like.

It was the kind of climax where

your genitals explode like the Death Star.

Oh, 100%.

Right, that's your, it's your one-time.

It's like if we were some sort of like spider that only came once or whatever and it died doing so.

Yeah, that would be it.

That's, that's the, the moments before death picture.

Yeah.

Fuck me.

Do you, do you, was that, what was your thought going on it for the second time?

After you got off the first time,

you got to get on it again.

Didn't get off.

Didn't get on.

No, they said,

if you want to ride it a second time, just stay seated.

Right.

I didn't want to, but they said, who wants to go again?

And everyone ahead of me, all much younger, went, yay.

And I went, yay.

Yay.

I'm not going to be the one guy getting off.

So I rode it again.

I love it.

Our dad's getting off, guys.

Yeah.

So, so how were the other 20 people?

Were they like YouTubers or roller coaster enthusiasts?

Combination of the two.

Right.

And I would say mainly content creators, but there were a couple of expert roller coasters in there and they knew their shit.

But it was like, it's a very scary ride.

Like it's not that long, but I can just remember that the G-Force was intense.

Coming around, you go up, it's the highest roller coaster in the world, or in Europe, sorry.

You go up very high, and then it drops you into this plunge with a slight twist into loop de loops and you're just when you're hammering down the loop de loop at speed in slightly increasing or decreasing spirals the g-force is like really messing with your head and I could just feel my head aching instantly as soon as we hit the first corner I was like oh this is a mistake it was bad I had a headache for the rest of the day oh no I mean I've been on roller coasters before but I'm just at that age where it's just a bit much it's just a bit much but Sarah and Sip to their credit also rode a roller coaster so they didn't didn't ride Hyperion.

Neither of them were up for it.

No,

we went on the

kids.

Yeah, we went on a kid's ride, the flying fish.

It's a pretty slow day at Thorpe Park.

So the guy thought it would be funny to send us round on this thing six times.

Yeah, they just kept going around.

After the first time, I was like, you know what?

That's fine for me.

But after six times, I was pretty close to puking.

I didn't, you know, it's just too much.

Like, I'm not a roller coaster guy.

I'm more of like a dark ride at a Disney guy, you know?

i like the the slow scenic i like the story unfolding so you know maybe a drop or two but you know i don't like being uh

i don't i don't like being sped up and uh and like jerked around and stuff you know it's it's too much acoustic i i feel like when you're designing a roller coaster and a and a length of it and the whole the whole experience It's a little bit like you're trying to put through as many people as possible, but also you want to make it long enough that they're not like disappointed, right?

And so, six times is quite a lot to go consecutively, I think.

Yeah, on a game.

He seemed to be having fun, you know, he's in the little booth, and we would go around, and I would be waving my arms, like, come on, not another one.

And he was like, he would like look down and kind of squirt.

You're like signaling.

You're like waving, like, you're like waving no.

And he's like,

he must be loving this.

Yeah, no, let's go round again.

Yeah, it was like a little bit of a bad thing.

I mean, it was a very tame roller coaster, in all honesty.

Like, it wasn't, it wasn't crazy, but it was just once you've done it a couple of times, it would just be boring.

And there'll be a corner or something where you just get banged around a bit.

You think, geez, I don't want to do that again.

You have to do it six times.

Yeah, it's a lot.

Yeah.

You'd be like, this is a lot.

Fucking hell.

But there was no cue.

It was a Tuesday.

It was a Tuesday in the middle of at the start of October.

There's no half term.

There's no, nobody's taking any vacation or whatever.

It was pretty dead.

And yet, there were definitely school-aged children there just skipping school.

Yeah, there did seem to be quite a few kids there, somehow.

Maybe they were on school excursions.

Who knows?

There was a school excursion for a private school that were there, but I don't think the rest, I think the rest of them were just people skipping school, the miserable buggers.

Wow.

So space, so the one you rode, The Flying Fish, it used to be called Space Station Zero.

It was the first roller coaster in Thor Park.

Right.

And it was themed as a flight through space.

Right.

However, it was removed.

It's more of a flight through

unkempt

areas of grass in Thorpe Park.

There's just lots of long grass that's never been mowed.

Well, what happened was it was removed to make room for the stealth roller coaster, which is

very much fancy.

But then it sat in a shed for two years before they reinstalled it in 2007.

Oh,

So I guess like they just gave it, they were like, oh, you know, this is, this one's, we could just put this one back.

Yeah.

You know, it wasn't even that bad.

Thorn Park is

quite,

it's very British, you know?

It's a bit little bit shitty.

It's a bit shitty.

Yeah.

It's a bit run down.

It's a little, you know, it's rough and ready.

I'm, you know, if you love thrill rides, I'm sure it's, it's great.

Not a huge fan of thrill rides.

Been to Disney a lot.

I think, I feel like Disney's just kind of ruined theme parks for me because

everything's very sort of clean and detailed and precise and stuff.

And

you build a bit of a standard around it, you know?

Everything, everything else you go to, you think like, oh, this is not Disney.

Yeah.

You know, like when there was a bit that we went to,

quite a few of the rides were closed because of the weather, I think.

The weather didn't help.

Let me place some context on everything I just said.

Yeah.

It was raining all day.

so it wasn't.

You've got to understand that everything in the UK is out in that weather nine months of the year, right?

And so, whereas in Florida, it's kind of warm-ish throughout the year.

And that kind of like, I don't know, it's like LA, you know, where you have all these sets.

They have like the

Hollywood backlot where they've got all these fake buildings.

They've been there for...

30 or 40 years.

They're just made of fucking plywood and polystyrene.

But bring it.

But even in the UK, they would be all moldy like fucking instantly.

Do you know what I mean?

But because it's LA, it's always like

bringing that back to what I was just saying.

I mean, I've been to Disneyland in Paris a few times, and I think one time I went during the summer, the weather was glorious.

Every other time I've been, it's rained like the whole time.

So it's, you know, as good as Disney is, the one

that's not that much difficult to do.

The weather's pretty inclement at the best of times, sort of thing.

So So it's like, yeah, you do get the shitty weather experience there, too.

Well, I mean,

that's to be expected.

I mean, the first Disney, what was the first Disney you went to, Tips?

Remember?

The one in Orlando, I went as a kid.

We went on a family vacation one year.

And we was it a truck?

Was it a road trip?

Like the one in the road.

It was.

It very much was a lot like the Grizzly.

We drove down the whole

dog.

Well, not that I'm aware of of on the way.

We didn't visit any family or anything on the way.

We don't have any family in America, but we did do a full two-day drive from Ottawa to Orlando, and

it was pretty rough.

Did you, what was the kill a dog thing?

Sorry, I don't know that reference.

Is that a big part of your road trip across Canada?

No, it was in National Lampoon's

vacation, the first one where they go to Wally World.

Remember these stocks?

Oh, come on, Lewis.

Remember why he ties the dog up to the back of the car and doesn't realize it.

And then they stop somewhere for a rest and they find the leash and the collar

on the back of the car.

And they get pulled over.

And the cop pulls them over and says, you are a fucking monster.

What are you?

Because they accidentally killed the old lady's dog.

Oh, shit.

That's how you know that they're a bad guy.

That's right.

Yeah.

The branding at Thorpe Park

is kind of shit because, and we were talking about this on the day.

Disney obviously has all of these big names and IP to call on and all that shit.

Yeah.

Thorpe Park does not.

No.

So a lot of the references they've gone for are either vague and dull or just seemingly the first thing they thought of.

Yeah.

So one of the biggest areas in the middle of the park, you spend a lot of your time walking around it, is called Amity,

which is the name of the township in Jaws.

And there's like a pool area, I guess, splash thing, I don't know, right in the middle that always seems to be empty and dried up and looks like shit

that's themed around the town from Jaws.

There's no mention of Jaws.

It's just called Amity.

And it's like kind of rickety, they've got these buildings and they've got these fake fronts that make them look like rickety, old wooden, vaguely New England buildings, I guess.

Yeah, but they just fit in perfectly with all the other rickety, old, crappy buildings.

It's so weird.

And the layout is like, you can tell that they've got relatively limited space.

And they're like, where are we going to put so-and-so ride?

Like, shit, I don't know.

Just jam it in there.

They plonked stuff everywhere.

So you kind of, there's no flow.

And quite often there are dead ends where you're like, shit, we've got to go all the way back and around to go around this ride.

There's no way through.

So it's very badly laid out, in all honesty.

And there was this one bit.

We're standing there after getting off the extremely high energy

flying fish ride where we're like getting ourselves together and Sarah's checking the camera and stuff.

And there's a speaker attached to a tree and it's playing fake commercials.

It's so loud.

It was louder than anything else.

And it was an advert about diarrhea.

And it was like really, really loud, obnoxious, faux American ad.

about diarrhea and it had like diarrhea sound effects.

Yeah.

And I was like, what is happening?

Like, what does that have to do with any kind of theming or thought park?

It's not funny and it's just boring and shit, literally.

It was just so bad.

It had

been so confused.

You know, when you pour chunky soup into a bowl, it was like, it was like that sound, but very loud.

You know?

I mean, what are you going for here?

What's the angle?

Like, you hope and we go, haha, diarrhea.

That's funny.

Honey, let's get a hot dog because there's like food stores around there.

What are you doing?

Are you saying saying the food's going to give me the shits and I should be laughing about it?

Like, well, what is happening?

So, it was, it's just really bad theming.

But then you go to like the saw ride, that's well-themed.

Like, that looks cool.

It's like, oh, yeah, it's done on the emergency vehicles, like, all blown up.

No, no, no, that was swarm.

That was sorry, that's

that one was the theming

swarm was pretty cool, too.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like there's been a disaster, there's some kind of flying alien here.

Look out, the world's falling apart.

So, when you're going to it, there's like an ambulance tipped over, and there's like a fire engine crashed through a building, and a billboard, you go right through the billboard on the roller coaster.

So, like, it's cool, but the rest of the

feels like they still have to be

a way to theme it because it is fucked, right?

So, you just, you know, you let the you let the hooligans into graffiti up a bit, you just don't tidy up the mess, don't hide the janitor.

Very clever, but yeah, the rest of the, I don't know what the theme of Thought Park is or if they've even put much thought into it, it just needs updating, it does, it needs a little bit of updating, I'd say.

Just like a bit of, i mean it it it's the season maybe in the summer it's a lot nicer but like you know just some just some flowers tidy it up a little bit um you know have a have a think about some some some details you know like sight lines and and stuff like that you know maybe maybe try to plan the layout a little bit better um

So is Saw the Ride themed after the movies of Saw Saw movies?

Yeah.

Right.

So there is like movie tie-ins to to to properties that are not particularly uh not owned by disney right right right i mean it's going to be stuff like that but i mean it it's it's a it's apparently it's a good ride like you know it's got good like actors pretending to be i guess people from saw yeah i think they do like uh like immersive sort of like they there's like jump scares and stuff you know like there's yeah actors that come out of the walls and and stuff all that kind of shit like it's gotta and you've gotta be a certain age to go there so that adds to the the sense that this is gonna be scary like it's good i've seen the the saw actors walking about and it's like all right this is this is at least an effort at theming but some of them are just just awful um and like in the queue for the flying fish one they've got this again another faux american voiceover a guy saying uh hey buddy no smoking in the queue okay so uh put that out thanks buddy just playing over and over again and there's no one in the queue So it's not like someone's pushed a button to say, please stop smoking.

It just plays.

I'm like, what, what is that?

That's just annoying.

if i'm queuing for a ride i don't want to be badgered by some fake voice especially when i'm fucking not doing shit yeah it was just like that all the time that it's just really annoying voiceovers and theming but hey what are you gonna do there's there's there's 11 saw movies good god that's a lot of sawing where's the hammering movies because you can't have sawing without hammering you can't just cut wood you got to do something with it you could drill into it you could

driller killer yeah that's that that's a thing they got the driller killer eight nine to i see 11 so which are the there's two future films there's also three short films it's going to be one of those ones where it's like the first one was really good the second one was not so great the third the fourth and the fifth were like straight to vhs and then the seventh one was a reboot and it was amazing and then the eighth one was like not so bad but it wasn't as good as the seventh one the big reboot and then the rest of them are probably not very good and that's exactly right it's going to be it's gonna be that sort of scenario right there'll be like one or two gems in there and then the rest of them will just be there's uh here's a little right you know there's a website called rating graph which i always use when i because you can it's really nice to go put on like i don't know the office or game of thrones or look up one of these um things and it like rates every imdb episode of the series and you could do it with like little franchises as well and as you can see uh there is a definite downward trajectory oh man on the on the saw movies as expected right

um

But that's that you're right.

That's how these things were.

They become like a parody of themselves, don't you?

Yeah.

They were kind of shit anyway, right?

They were just super gross out stuff.

You know, that was, that was the idea, right?

It was kind of like very, very

overly gruesome.

I think the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they did similar things with as well.

I think there's quite a few movies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre,

but I think there's only a couple that people really sort of of look back and say, Yeah, that was a good one.

But then

there are more?

Yeah, there are nine Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Yes, but it's one of those like the first one came out and probably became a cult classic.

And everybody was like, we need more.

And they're like, okay, great.

Let's do another one.

And then the follow-up was not great.

And then they probably, some company picked up the brand as it was just dying or it was sold off for nothing sort of thing and tried to revive it and failed.

And, you know, like

all these IPs will have a similar sort of stuff.

I mean, he may fall a bit.

It may bring a lot.

And it's a huge game and a huge name now, but

it was almost dead, you know, like before it was picked up by Bethesda and they made a bunch of big games out of it.

You know what I mean?

It's true.

Yeah.

I think that rebooting these old IPs can sometimes, I mean, look at what,

you know, Disney did with Marvel kind of thing, you know, really sort of took a lot of that and,

you know, really ran with it.

And I think they were hoping to do the same with Star Wars, and they certainly put a lot of effort into making it.

Yeah, I don't know if it's quick enough.

They just pumped out so much Star Wars stuff.

And I feel like, as much as I like Star Wars or have liked Star Wars,

there is a line where it's just too much Star Wars, you know, you can have too much of a good thing, you know.

So here's my question: smoke and crack.

When do you think the sequel went from being something that people made fun of and was generally considered a joke and was inevitably expected to be worse to being something that people thought, oh, I can't wait for the sequel?

Like more recently than surprisingly, probably more recently.

Oh, it's recent.

Because when they made the Star Wars movies, that was different.

But Jaws was one of the biggest movies of all time, and nobody thought Jaws 2 was going to be any good.

and they were right.

Yeah, and then you had Jaws, you had Jaws 3, and then you had- That was Jaws 3D.

Okay, Jaws 3 was Jaws 3D.

So, Jaws 3.

Jaws is a weird one, right?

I think from what I remember, it went a bit of the way of the Alien, the original Alien trilogy, where the third movie was about a mother and

a baby.

There was a fully grown baby.

And I'm pretty sure that the third alien movie was something about that as well.

Yeah, Ripley.

Doesn't Ripley have sex with the alien at the end of the third one, or she has a baby?

That's four, I think.

I think that's four.

And she's half alien.

Her DNA becomes fused with an alien somehow when they clone her or something.

Sure.

That sounds right.

The third one is the one on the prison planet.

David Fincher.

One of his.

Alien three with the

hypertext 3.

Yes, the little...

Alien Cubed.

Yeah, Alien Cubed.

That was, I think, David Fincher's first movie was Alien 3.

And apparently he never wants to talk about it again and hated it as a filmmaking exercise.

There is a funny video that's done the rounds recently on the internet of the whole point of Alien 3 was that the chestburster came from a dog.

So it has inherited properties of that creature.

which is something that we hadn't seen in previous alien material, was that if the alien comes out of a dog, it's going to be a bit more like a dog.

It's like, where did this come from?

So the dog alien is very quick and slightly smaller and runs about very quickly.

So the thing is, originally, instead of using CGI, which they didn't actually use CGI, it's they blue screen a puppet of the alien into the footage, which is why it looks like shit.

But one of the other options was they were going to dress a dog up as an alien and run it around.

And if you look at the footage, it just looks like a dog in a funny costume.

And you can see why they didn't didn't do it.

But so that's Alien 3.

She does die, spoiler alert.

There's a chest burster at the end that is in her, and she throws herself into a furnace and dies

in a terrible shot, really awful shot.

The alien bursts out, and she holds it close to her and descends into the furnace.

I don't know how deep this furnace is, but she turns into a little dot at the end before she hits it.

It's awful.

So that's Alien 3.

Alien 4, Alien Resurrection.

Is a dreadful, dreadful film.

And I thought that all the Prometheus and uh, the other one, I can't even remember what it's called, were also dreadful films.

Covenant, yeah, Romulus was the recent one, which wasn't so bad.

No, it was bad, it was it was bad.

It was, I mean, considering like oh, you mean the most recent?

Sorry, I haven't seen it very much.

I haven't seen it yet, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it was, it was honestly

felt like a bit of a reimagining.

I will say this: certainly, from what I've seen, people are saying it was good.

I've got to ask, could it have been any monster?

And if the answer is probably, then is it really an alien movie?

Like, I I feel like Aliens, the aliens were so core to the film, and the same obviously for Alien, that I don't know if the most recent one, Romulus, could have just been basically any monster or not.

So I'll have to watch it.

But I'm concerned that it's not alien enough.

It's just

some basic teen horror, isn't it?

More or less.

I think that there's two schools of thought here.

One is that there is already such a strong series behind it and following behind it.

And the originals were so good that sequels are always going to have to live up to that.

And that's inevitably going to bring them down being compared to the original.

Also, remember, sequels always, you've lost that

original idea, that original shock, that original surprise, that original unknown, right?

In the first movie, you don't know what's going on for a long time until you finally see the alien.

When you watch a sequel, you're going in.

with that spoiled right so it's always inevitable that a sequel will never be as impactful as it's original and unless you can reinvent it somehow or rebuild it somehow or rebuild it.

The other thing is that when you have a string of terrible movies as sequels, and then you have

the ninth one in the series or whatever is finally good, is it this great sigh of relief?

It's like, oh, finally a good one.

Do you see what I mean?

Or finally someone that's watchable?

Like, I'm wondering what impact that has.

So, yeah, I mean, part of me is like, I enjoyed it.

Part of me is like, is this just because everything I've seen so many bad ones?

Right.

Or is it because like it's finally a good one?

You know, I don't know.

So if we think about the, I think this idea of franchises, right, is where it started.

This idea that you don't just have sequels, it's part of a franchise.

So let's take the Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland, right?

I wouldn't say that the sequels have been progressively worse.

I would, in fact, say that they...

they were really good.

And like Spider-Man Homecoming is probably one of the better ones in the series.

Well, the original Avengers movie is really, really good.

But Avengers Endgame and

that whole sequence, they're sequels, but they're really, really good.

And I just want to know, what was the tipping point?

Where did we go from making sequels and expecting them to be bad to sequels being expected to be part of a longer thing?

And when did it become okay to brand them as a franchise?

Because when Die Hard came out, people didn't say this could be the start of a franchise.

They had no idea.

And it was expected that Die Hard 2 and 3 and however many were not going to be as good.

So when did it change?

That's what I want to know.

What was the film that invented the franchise?

Yeah.

I think that this has been a thing since ever, though, right?

Like, I think even in the Victorian era when fucking Charles Dickens was writing his shit, you know, people were like, oh, give us a sequel to this one that's done well.

You know, in fact, he didn't write a lot of sequels, did he?

Charles Dickens, that's a bad example.

I can't think of

big, like, I feel like big trilogies, big sequels were, were, like, probably started in the 80s, but before that, you would have had

like

a looser

collection of films, like in like a series, if you like.

But I don't know if you necessarily had to watch them in order.

Whereas like a full trilogy, like, for example, like Star Wars, the trilogy, or like Aliens, the Indiana Jones movies, those trilogies are the Jaws trilogy I guess so if you think about sequences or franchises as they are called now of films yeah I think horror movies was one of the things where it was quite typical for you to have a horror movie where you've you've established that there's a scary villain I mean you've got Friday the 13th you've got nightmore in Elm Street you've got those kind of movies where they're like we can just make more of these Halloween yeah people just want to watch a horror movie but they were seen as schlocky and and kind of shitty um

and if you look at like robo cop roboccop one big film robo cop two pretty shitty toy story the first film in that franchise was obviously huge but the sequels didn't feel like i'm expecting this to be shitty at that point it felt like this is going to be better and and i think this toy story films have all had really good seat yeah sequels like i i don't think i've seen a toy story film that i i haven't liked you know no they've all been really good I don't think some of the sequel movies' characters were as big as the original characters, for example.

But the movies themselves were all very good.

You know, they weren't,

they didn't feel like, oh, you know, two and three should have just gone straight to home video.

But it felt like what it is.

I mean, The Godfather, one and two.

I don't think anyone thought that Godfather Part two was a dog shit sequel.

It was like a part of the book and a continuation of the story.

three was not good but the point is it felt like back then you had to have a good reason to have a follow-on movie like it had to continue the story it had to be part of a trilogy or something like that or people would say this is a clash grab whereas all of a sudden we're like oh it's a franchise that's fine and we've almost bought into something that the movie studios must

love that they can find a film like the Avengers, make a bunch of money from it and go, we could just make another one.

And no one's going to be like, it's a cash grab sequel.

They're going to be waiting to see it and they're going to be invested in this franchise.

I just wonder where that tipping point came because it happened between the 80s and now at some point.

Yeah, for sure.

But I think, again, I think there's always been this push by certainly by publishers, but okay, like Sherlock Holmes, he famously hated Sherlock Holmes, you know, because anything else he tried to write was

hated Sherlock Holmes.

The father

hated, famously hated.

You looked at the mirror every day and he'd say, I hate Sherlock holes

but and and it's it happens all the time right to writers and everyone who gets something successful and then they're like they get typecast or effectively that they get stuck with their their thing right like even like i mean when you talked about amity i'm sure that's probably a reference to like the amityville horror right maybe which is

amity is is the oh you mean what in jaws it was a reference back to the horror yeah i would imagine right oh i don't know

because Because that was very famously the cart, the whole true crime.

Um, was it even true crime?

I can't remember.

It was like a novel, but it was like a semi-realistic sort of story of murders that happened, right?

Um, yeah, yeah, maybe.

I don't know.

I think they just tried to make a very pleasant-sounding seaside town holiday destination.

Jaffeo Jr.

was an American mass murderer.

So, yeah, so it, it, and then the amateur, because it was real, they couldn't copyright that, I guess, it's a real place.

And it's had, you know, absolutely tons and tons of books and movies and horror movies based on this, you know, about some murderer going around, you know, God, look at this.

God, Jaws scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.

I was really small and it was on TV and I was.

I felt like I was like traumatized for life.

Do you know what I think that I oddly enough, a video popped up on my feed the other day saying the scene that terrified a generation was the scene, it's not all the scenes with the shark, although the scene where the young girl at the start goes swimming and gets pulled down is I was really traumatized by that scene.

Yeah, I was as well.

Because it was so realistic.

That was awful.

But if you think about the way horror movies were made, a lot of the time there was like eerie music build up and it was like, oh, don't go in that creepy house or don't go down in the basement.

You sensed the peril coming.

If you look at the scene that I think was probably the most famous scene, certainly the most famous shot, is when they're all on the beach and the little kid gets attacked.

and it does that the famous zoom it wasn't made by by uh spielbert but it was made famous by that shot in jaws where the background recedes and he comes forward that famous sort of counter zoom i think they do it with his i think you dolly backwards and zoom at the same time is my best yeah yeah um that shot yeah the reason that that sequence for me was so scary is because there's no scary buildup in the same way.

It looks very realistically like a bunch of people having a day at the beach and they're all acting acting very naturally.

So, you feel safe, you feel almost like you're watching real life.

So, when the horror happens, you immediately think, This is like I've actually seen this in real life, and this is horrifying.

And there's no gap where you're like, This is obviously fake, or oh, that monster looks so rubbish.

It really feels horrifying and real.

It stays with me.

My sister didn't go in the ocean for years after

no, it was scary, yeah.

I think it's that.

Um, I don't know if you've ever been somewhere before where somebody's collapsed or somebody's hurt themselves or whatever.

And when it happens, it feels surreal, but also the whole tone of everything around you changes, right?

There's like you can, you can feel like a panic and a worry in everybody around you, like everything, right?

And I think, I think a scene like that probably captures those elements too, which makes it feel like a bit.

you know, you might relate it back to something that you've seen in real life or witnessed or been around where you where you can feel that feeling as well.

Yeah.

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What do you guys think of all these fucking like

shit movies?

Like they're amazing.

There's tons and tons of movies.

Man, I don't even watch movies anymore.

I honestly can't remember the last time I went to see a movie.

Like, I've taken my kids to see stuff, but I've, I, I've very rarely now will seek out a movie because there's all of these very low-budget, like,

being filmed by a 12-year-old camera phone in some sort of 24-hour movie challenge.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And with Amityville, like, just in 2022 alone, okay,

there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve movies called Amityville something.

Um, there's a movie called Amityville Death Toilet.

There's a movie called like Amityville Christmas Vacation.

Yeah, like just trying everything, you know, Amityville Gas Chamber, Amityville Vampire, Amityville Moon.

Like, it's nonsense.

You see, I mean, the thing is, I think it's a natural thing to want to capitalize on a previous success.

You see it on YouTube all the time, right?

Like, I'm sure we've all tried to do it before.

We've done something that's that's worked, and then you've thought, fuck, you know, let's do that again, or maybe just change it up a little bit.

But, like, you know, even some of the best parodies on like YouTube or whatever, though, there will be some sort of follow-up that is just not as good or nowhere near as good in some cases.

You know what I mean?

Like, I think it's a pretty natural thing for people to want to try to do, you know, like, you know, recreate a success or recreate like a big moment.

but it

it's weird because the first one it like the the first one always just

the more you think about it uh it's the the first one's always such a fluke you know like it's you can't you you can't plan the first one you're just trying something and hoping that it works but with the second one you're trying to understand what made the first one so special and then recreate that and it never works and yeah and they never exactly they never quite get it yeah do they yeah like they they they always assume there's some other reasons behind why it was a success.

But having said that, sometimes

like the first movie, I mean, there's a whole bunch of examples of this in the 80s when James Cameron did the sequels to movies, right?

He always did part two.

He did Terminator 2, which was amazing.

And he did Aliens, which was amazing.

And, you know, like it's just a completely bring in a completely different person and let them go with their vision of what a sequel should be, I feel like has a better chance of working than having the original person do a sequel, especially if it's a sequel that is not already planned.

You know, like if you have a like a set of books or you have a set of scripts that it's like, this is the first movie, this is the second movie, which is a continuation, and this is the third, which, you know, like the second movie is going to be this bridging movie or whatever.

Then maybe fine, yeah, it'll work.

But I think in those cases, bringing somebody else in and letting them just kind of go nuts with what they think is going to be a good sequel can work sometimes too.

I mean, it did work.

Those were huge movies.

Yeah, I think that taking a movie that's unexpectedly done well and making it better is

not always, and it hasn't always worked, right?

But it is, people do want more of something they like.

It feels like there's money in that.

It was pretty fucking bad.

It was lucky to get a sequel and even more so lucky to get a fucking amazing sequel like this the second movie blows the first movie out of the water like it's not even a contest the first movie was dog shit

compared to the second one quite the take i think it was okay compared to the four more recent ones that is definitely i don't think i disagreed with the take less You like the first one better than the second three of this podcast.

No.

You prefer Terminator 1 to Terminator 2.

Call it dog shit is incredible.

Compared to Terminator 2, it is dog shit.

I'm sorry.

It's not dog shit, dude.

It's

they're both good movies, but Terminator 2 is obviously the superior Terminator.

I like it.

How much fucking money Terminator costs to make?

Name.

Yes, it does.

Okay, compared to the show.

Here's a little pop quiz for you.

Can you name one of the other

name?

Name

the others Terminator movies.

Name one of the other four.

Terminator Darkness.

Terminator Salvation.

Terminator Genesis.

Genesis.

It's all fucking continuations of Skynet and shit.

Well, Genesis was spelled like Gen.

Yeah, it's pronounced Genesis.

Genesis.

Yeah.

Oh, why did they do this?

I mean, it's a cool character and they want to make more movies.

I think the thing is, people aren't automatically assuming a new Terminator movie is going to be shit.

Not up to a point, anyway.

Eventually, they're like, oh, these have been dog shit.

But there was Terminator 2 Judgment Day was obviously a great fucking movie.

One of the best action movies ever made.

Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines was shit.

The Rise of the Machines.

Terminator Salvation

was shit.

Terminator Genesis was shit.

Terminator Dark Fate is alright.

It actually wasn't too bad.

It was pretty bad, but it wasn't too bad.

And then Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was a TV show, I had no interest in that.

I don't know.

I feel like

the whole franchise afloat is Terminator 2.

I think without it, it would have been...

I don't even think they would have bothered to make as as many movies as they did.

I think they only made that many movies off the back of Terminator 2, basically, because it was so big.

So James Cameron's first movie was Piranha 2, the spawning.

Yeah.

What?

So it was like a schlocky horror sequel to the movie Piranha, and it was like a big, I think a

and what was George Clooney's first movie?

Don't look it up.

What was his first film?

Well, I don't know what his first movie was, but he was in Roseanne Roseanne for a while.

That's the first time I ever saw him.

He was one of Dan's

working-class friends in Roseanne.

So he was in a film called Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Oh, I remember that movie.

You can look it up.

He was in that.

Killer Tomatoes of the Killer Tomatoes.

Yeah, I remember that.

That's a very I guess it was like it, but that was a parody, right?

That wasn't like an actual, that was like on purpose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Silly, right?

It was a comedy.

It was supposed to be a comedy, maybe.

I don't know.

Some of the movies that came out in the 80s, the action movies, all the Schwarzenegger, Stallone movies, Bruce Willis,

man, they were, it was, it was exciting times for movies, wasn't it?

Every summer, you know, everybody was like, what's it going to be this year?

What's the big movie going to be?

It was pretty, it was pretty

funny.

This is funny.

I'm not trying to advertise, but I just put out an hour-long essay on YouTube about what makes a great action movie.

And it's interesting to hear you talk about them uh sort of fondly you did this recently didn't you i put it out this morning um and it's just

another one of these though last year no i didn't do an essay i was going to but i was thinking of ways to do it what i was going to have was clips of these movies in but it turns out that doing that is a fucking nightmare right like doing putting movie clips in your am i having like a deja vu you definitely made this movie at some point you definitely made this video and i watched it before.

Did you show me like a...

I might have shown you the script.

I don't know.

Did you show me the script?

No,

I did not do a video about a great action movie.

No, I recorded this and put this out this morning.

What the fuck?

Am I having a breakdown?

Did you watch

the video I did about apes in movies?

Yes, that will probably be it.

Yes, the great, great ape war.

You put that out during...

During a podcast.

You told me about this at the pub.

Okay.

God, thank you so much.

It's just what makes a great action movie.

And the funny thing is, so I don't want to go into this again because it's all in the in the vid, but I get it.

I'm going to list you some movies, okay?

And you tell me what you think of them, sis.

All right, here is the list.

Die Hard.

The first one?

Die Hard, yes.

I loved it.

Predator, the original Predator.

I really like that too.

Okay, some, but just

to

sort of give you some context around this, a lot of these movies I haven't seen since probably like 19.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

So at the time, I loved them.

The First matrix i loved it yeah rambo first blood the first rambo i loved rambo first blood aliens aliens the second one aliens oh i loved it uh i don't know if you've seen police story the jackie chan action movie police story uh no i don't know if i've seen it great terminator obviously we've heard your opinion on terminator raiders of the lost arc yeah all the indiana jones movies the the the at least the original like temple of doom yeah yeah lost arc and the last crusade i liked so what about heat did you see heat i liked heat okay what about lethal Weapon?

Lethal Weapon, I liked, yeah.

Did you see a Korean movie called Old Boy?

No, okay.

What about Point Break?

Point Break?

Yeah, I saw it.

I liked it.

Yeah, Keanu Reeves, right?

Point Break.

What about Leon?

Leon, yeah, that was the one

with

the older French guy and the younger girl, right?

He's protecting her.

Yeah.

Star Wars, the Star Wars trilogy.

Yeah, the original Star Wars, yeah, for sure.

And what about the original Mad Max movie?

The original Mad Max movie, I've seen it, but it was so long ago i was i remember

theming and stuff like that like like like the aesthetics but i don't remember the story or anything right so that list of movies 48 sequels from those movies discounting star wars which is i mean some insane number of movies on there

so those movies i guess were the birth of the franchise because they must have been yeah because people started making them but why why were action movies the ones that had franchises i don't know but you've got to remember too like there was the, there was like the really big action movies, but then there was like a there was a there was like a sub-industry for action movies as well.

You have had all the Dolph Lundgren stuff, you had all the Steven Seagal stuff in the 80s, remember?

Like Under Siege and

all of those,

the sort of the like the lower rate action movies were all very popular as well, weren't they?

And they had many, many, many

mad sequels.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of these are vehicles for specific actors though in a sense you still see it today

with you know people like the rock you know they want to do an action movie with the rock um and it's sort of they work that's where they start you know with the planning for it it's not like so if if i may in in most of those films that i listed most of them the actor in the lead role is not necessarily a film star at that point.

No, that's true.

And I think that quite a few of them, it either revitalized their career or made it.

Uh, and the sequels that they were in were also big as long as the original star was still in it.

The moment I think of stars,

right?

Yeah, I mean, like people would watch a Scharzenegger movie, right?

And they'd expect a certain you know what you're gonna get.

He's the Rossiel of actors, he's I mean, I think that in a sense, looking at his

the movies that he's attached to is also like a be like a line through Predator was a cool movie.

What a great movie.

I love that.

Yeah.

Just, I love the whole,

you know, they got picked off one by one, but each character was like kind of cool in their own right and stuff.

And like, I was.

Makes you a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus.

Oh, man.

They have continued like Prey.

Have you seen Prey?

Yeah, I thought it was decent 2022.

I thought it was decent.

No.

It was like, it's a predator movie.

I mean, and in fact, like, they've done, they've really heavily leaded into the crossover with aliens as well, which is which I've I've really liked.

I think that's a fun

so I want someone to correct me if I'm wrong.

This started the aliens and predators there was a there was a comic publisher called Dark Horse Comics.

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure because I remember buying it there was a comic called Aliens vs.

Predators.

There was yeah, and that was like the start of this whole aliens versus they're in the same universe.

But I think it came about because in Predator 2 with Danny Glover,

at the end, he goes on board the Predator ship, and one of the trophies is the skull of an alien from the Alien franchise.

And I think everyone saw that and soiled themselves and immediately decided to start making comics about it and creating a whole new thing because it's just hinting at it.

It's kind of like a nerdgasm.

It's like, it's like it probably was even just a reference, right?

That thing in the movie.

But I think people love the ideas, like, why not?

Yeah, that actually is totally make you know, these two universes do not have have to yeah there's no they're they're they are jointly but i mean can you imagine other film franchises where that happened i was thinking just off the top of my head if in diehard there's a scene where captain kirk and spock beam down

into nakatomi plaza

do some mission and then beam back up you'd think what is happening

but i would love that if it turned out that somehow that everything that's happening in nakatomi Plaza was somehow also happening at the same time, there's no time travel.

This is all happening within the Star Trek universe.

This is this is potentially not Earth, and this is all canon now.

The Star Trek exists within the same universe as Diehan.

I'm just trying to think what would be the weirdest crossover tie-ins where a movie out of nowhere, another movie steps in.

Fucking hell, there's nine alien movies.

Oh my god, we need like two dice.

We need like we need we need like two to roll some dice and just have like

you know, two

contesting franchises.

I'm gonna Google 80s movies and I'll just pick two: Full Metal Jacket and the Goonies.

How about that?

They drop into Vietnam vets.

Yeah, yeah, that could be it.

The Goonies could be like the precursor to

them arriving at boot camp for Full Metal Jacket.

Yeah, all the kids from the Goonies grow up real quick when they hit the fucking,

you palm and puke!

You stand up straight when I'm telling you, like they suddenly have to face uh, the drill sergeant, you guys.

Yeah, sloth is like on the M60 kind of ship.

All right, what about uh platoon and E.T.

Oh man, imagine, imagine like you're you're in a foxhole, you're being attacked

in the middle of the night, and everything is going crazy or whatever.

You turn around, and E.T.

is just in your foxhole with you with his little finger lit up.

Oh my god,

okay, yes, E.T., take us, get me out of here

ghostbusters with the terminator but like the the skyner is actually like a ghost it's like a sentient

scene ghost that'd be so bad that would be really bad yeah

what about driving miss daisy and beetlejuice uh i mean

i don't think that would be too insane you know like beetlejuice it in its own right is just an insane movie and idea for a movie.

I think if you combined it with anything, it would still be insane and then just spill into whatever movie it was paired with.

You know what I mean?

It's possible.

It's possible.

What about Beetlejuice and Goodwill Hunting?

Beetlejuice is just his therapist?

Beetlejuice, I hope I turn up to your house one day and you're just not here.

Oh, man.

How do you like them, apples?

There's There's a lot of potential here for crossovers.

Dead Poets Society and

I don't know, Escape from New York somehow combined to make a film.

Like this is the next thing.

This got to be the next thing, yeah.

Movie mashups where they're like, they actually take two completely disparate films and characters and somehow work them together into a story.

I reckon there's a screenwriting challenge there.

Definitely.

Like you've got to get like in Robocop,

a gremlin sort of.

It's that it's that, or it's like, it's like they did with Rogue One.

They'll take some small part of a successful movie and they'll spin off from that.

Oh, Rogue One was fucking great.

It was so good.

And it was clever too, because it was just like one line in Star Wars, and then they spun off this whole, you know,

side quest, which was...

a really neat idea.

I imagine they did that with like heat.

A movie about the ER

after the shootout, or during the shootout, they're bringing all these like people in that are that have been shot by these guys that are having this massive gunfight in front of the bank and stuff.

And then E.T.

saves them all.

And then E.T.

comes down and saves them all.

And then Beetlejuice

fucks them all.

Yeah.

And Snake Pliskin comes in.

What a great name.

By the way, if you haven't seen the sequel to Escape from New York, I think it's Escape from LA.

I think I'm right.

I haven't seen it.

There is a sequence in that where he gets in a submarine that takes him to the city from wherever the base is.

It has to be seen to be believed.

I urge you to watch this sequence and just let me know when you get to the bit with the CGI shock because it's one of the worst things I've ever seen.

It's unfucking believable.

Just leave it out.

They put it in.

They shouldn't have put it in.

It was really bad.

And another John Carpenter film is called, I think it's In the Mouth of madness 1994 sam sam neil is in it there's a there's a the special effects in that are very very very poor some of the special early special effects are a bit like even the original ghostbusters i don't even think most people i don't even think you can watch the original version of ghostbusters now because it's been they've redone a bunch of the effects and stuff oh really yes i'm pretty sure the the like the original original version the effects are like a bit ropey even at the time the the guys who were all working on it and stuff were like, we were just trying anything to make it look passable, but it was difficult.

I thought they did.

They've since gone through and they've remastered a bunch of the effects and stuff.

And it now is seamless, like looks good.

But you watch, sometimes you watch it, you're like, holy crap, these effects are really good, but they were not.

If you watch the original, they were really bad.

I mean, technically, like any movie could be in the Matrix, right?

Any universal could crossover with.

Yeah, because it's meant to be the real world.

Yeah.

It's like a recreation.

But if you do that, because you know, there was a there was a

TV show made in the, I think it was the 70s and 80s called Saint Elsewhere.

Have we talked about this before?

What about Frozen and Memento?

A guy with tattoos all over him turns up in Arendelle and doesn't remember anything.

And they have to figure out what how his wife died.

Saint Elsewhere was like a medical show, like ER or something like that.

Oh, really?

And at the end of the series,

it's basically revealed through this sort of convoluted final episode that the entire thing took place inside the imagination of a young autistic boy.

Right.

Well, okay.

Like, he's literally like it pans out from the hospital, which is like it's a snowy day, and it pans out.

And it turns out it's a young boy who'd appeared in the show a little bit holding a snow globe that's got Saint elsewhere in and everything that happened all the series were in his mind that's the end of the series it was a big big story at the time because it was like shit right however there were a lot of people that appeared in that show as characters that they played in other shows or actors who'd played other characters in other shows so the idea became how big does this rabbit hole go what else is connected to saint elsewhere and is therefore canonically within the imagination of this one boy and that was kind of the joke so you can look it up because there's a load of stuff for it.

Because Carla, Rhea Perlman, Carla from Cheers, right, right, right.

The end, I don't want to spoil anything, but the end of Super Mario 2 on the NES had an ending like that too.

Right.

He was just dreaming the whole time.

And when you look back,

you know, it was a bit of a wild game.

It was, it was, uh, it was, you know,

it deviated away from the original principles of Mario for sure.

So I guess it could be

a dream.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know,

I want to say that's just a fun thing they added on the last episode.

I don't think they intended where they started writing it.

No, they did not.

Lost went a bit that way as well.

Didn't it?

It was...

Remember the TV series Lost?

Well, people talk about it like that, but actually, I don't think that was...

I think that's the takeaway people got from the final series, but I don't think that was the actual entire intention.

I think some of the final series was

after they were dead or whatever.

God, I don't know.

It doesn't matter.

No, it doesn't.

But, God, that show, I remember, I loved it at first.

The first season was just like, oh, man, this is a good idea.

I actually watched such a cool show.

Such a good idea for a show.

Recently.

Oh, yeah.

Didn't grip me.

Oh, didn't grip me.

Did you grip you during

your watch?

You giving it the old steel hand grip.

Oh, man.

No, I mean, it's probably aged a bit now, too.

I mean,

I love The Wire, but even

going back to watch The Wire,

it feels like stepping back in time a little bit too, you know?

Like it's

aged a little.

I mean, it still holds up.

It's still fantastic series, but it has definitely aged a little.

It's of its time.

Try watching Hill Street Blues.

It's all on Channel 4.

Let's see.

Anyone who hasn't seen it.

I'd seen a little bit of it when I was a kid, but never really appreciated it.

It was so far ahead of its time, it's ridiculous.

Go ahead and watch that show.

Brilliant, brilliant show, especially the first few seasons.

But that is a superb television program.

1981.

Doom Street Blues.

It's so good.

It was hugely influential.

Some of the elements of the I've been watching Monk, which was on

2002 or whatever, in the background.

You're watching that on Dave?

No, it's on Netflix.

Everyone's on Netflix.

Oh, it's on Netflix.

But it's like, it's fine.

But it's kind of like sometimes a little bit like, ooh.

Like, you know, like some episodes of Friends have bits moments where they're like, oh that wouldn't be okay now you know especially since certainly to begin with it's a comedy show mostly about this guy's ocd tendencies right that most of the laughs come from him you know straightening stuff or like you know the the classic joke in monk actually and this isn't too bad is they're in some situation where they're trapped in a freezer or the water's rising or they're on the edge of a cliff or they're in a flaming car whatever right they're about to die somehow and monk's like quick grab that thing And so they stretch and they strain and they grab the thing.

And he uses it to like adjust the mirror or screw something in.

Do you know what I mean?

He uses it to, because he's like, oh, the picture wasn't straight.

Do you know what I mean?

And that was bot bugging him.

And they're like, but I thought that was going to be the main joke.

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

I feel like another series that was like, was influential on a lot of stuff that came after it was Malcolm in the Middle.

It felt like

really sped up comedy, but like

it's the same kind of of um sped up comedy as like uh was in like scrubs and stuff like that, you know.

You had like all the all the scene transitions were always like with that whoosh sound, you know, go like whoosh, and then it would, you know, it would transition just immediately into like screaming or chaos or something like that.

But it was quite

funny, yeah.

But when you compare that to like a show like Friends or Seinfeld or like the like the really big prime time comedies before it, they're so slow.

You know, like everything is so like Friends is fucking so slow.

Like every lead up is just like, you know, like, it just takes the whole show to lead up to a joke sometimes.

And, but, like, I found with Malcolm and Middle, everything was just like really fast, really chaotic.

I mean, it was like, you know, kind of like

the show was meant to be like that, but there's so many shows that came after that that were like that too, you know, like that, that really, the really quick like transition and the chaos and stuff like that.

Scrubs, I think, was a lot of fun.

That was like the tail end of that style of sitcom because then it, the office came along.

Yes, because

it was all awkward.

Because they took away the laugh track.

The loss of the laugh track changed the pace of

films.

It was with like a camcorder.

Yeah.

It wasn't a live studio audience.

Friends had studio audience, Seinfeld had a studio audience.

Fucking the Big Bang Theory had a studio audience.

So I think at that point, you could make a decent case for having a giant trapdoor under the theater.

And everyone who's attended a live filming of the Big Bang Theory has dropped into the air.

Big Bang Theory, I never watched.

I think I was just too old for it.

Or, you know, it just wasn't.

No, I think you're just not insane.

I think you did maybe watch an episode and realized it was going to be covered as well.

The young Sheldon one

at the dentist the other day.

Fucking hell.

It's so bad.

Like, I just, just, I couldn't even hear it.

It was all subtitled because I was waiting waiting at the dentist's.

You're having your teeth in the children's room.

What's better watching an episode of Young Sheldon?

And I was watching this and reading it.

I just thought, Jesus Christ, who fucking watches this shit?

It's the worst.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I mean, I already had a phobia about being at the dentist.

Now it's even fucking worse.

I don't know how they thought that doing a full spin-off series of

one character on that show.

Are you kidding me?

It's seven seasons of Young Sheldon and still going.

Oh my God.

Seven seasons?

When does that air on TV?

Or does it not?

Is it just streamed?

Like, is it on

this airs on CBS?

Right.

What?

At like seven o'clock at night on a Tuesday or something.

Do they still do that?

Or is it?

I think so.

It's just still going.

People love this.

People love Bill Bank Theory and they love Young Sheldon.

They do.

Why?

Yeah.

They love it.

How many people are we talking here?

Millions.

Dude, people like NCIS.

If you've ever seen that, it's 10 million average viewers every episode of Young Sheldon.

People watch that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not really that many, considering.

Is that just in America?

Not for TV, dude.

I know, but

TV?

Okay, 10 million over here.

Yeah.

The population is like 70 million.

10 million in America's population?

400 million.

That's not that much.

Yeah, but they've got a million channels.

I guess.

At any one time, they could be watching anything else.

They're watching that shit.

It is Thursday nights at 8 p.m.

Oh, I set your fucking watches, boys.

That used to be 8 p.m.

Thursday night.

No, that used to be the slot for either Seinfeld Friends or Simpsons in the 90s.

That's your big one.

Thursday night at 8 o'clock.

God knows why.

Maybe this is good.

Maybe this is a good show, guys.

What are the ratings like on it?

I can tell you, though, from watching it briefly at the dentist's office, it did not seem like a very good show.

But I could be wrong.

Maybe I gotta give it a try.

I feel like you gotta watch a season of something to be able to comment.

I'm not watching a season of how many episodes per season is it standard

like network television 24 episodes.

Let me blow your mind.

Let me blow your mind.

22 episodes.

There have been 141 episodes of Young Sheldon.

I know.

141.

Okay, but it's about a kid.

Kids grow really quick.

So they've had to change the actor around a bunch of times, right?

I have no idea.

They would have had to.

There's no way you're doing six seasons of a show about a kid, and that kid is still.

I mean, even Macaulay Culkin became an adult at one point.

Nobody ever thought that could happen.

No, it's the same kid.

He's been doing it for seven years.

He's got to be like 30 years old now.

He's 16.

Fuck it.

Yeah, so he started off at nine and now he's 16.

Did you watch Modern Family?

The kids grow up in that.

Is that the one with Al Bundy in it?

No, yeah, he's one of the guys.

I tried watching it.

I couldn't get into it at all.

That's what my youngest absolutely adores that show.

Really?

It's quite funny in parts.

Like, it's genuinely quite funny.

What's that other one?

It's like called like This Is Us or something like that.

I think it's more like emotional, like sentimental.

Oh, yeah, I don't know.

I can't remember the name of it, but.

There's so many shows that I haven't heard about.

Well, here's my recommendation so far.

The Penguin, been really good so far.

If anyone's

telling me about it,

The Penguin.

Slow Horses, a lot of people have missed that show.

Great fucking show.

Really, really, really, really good.

And 48 Hours, 24 Hours of Police Costed.

If you haven't seen it, brilliant.

I love being a bit of 24 hours.

24 Hours, baby.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's it.

I'm writing them down.

Young Sheldon.

Yeah.

One season of Young Sheldon just

so you can safely comment on it.

I've been watching Industry, which is pretty good.

Been into it.

It's good.

It's very raunchy, but it's good.

Industry.

Before that, what did we watch?

I watched Chaos on Netflix, which I really enjoyed it.

It's got Jeff Goldblum in it as Zeus.

And

I thought it was good fun.

I've got to say.

I thought it was good fun.

Season one of Love is Blind UK.

I would not recommend it.

It's a new series of Married First Sight Out as well that we haven't started watching.

We should criticize.

We should criticize with what we watch.

We're like shitting on Young Sheldon while we're watching Monk and Love is Blind and 80s movies.

Man, if you want to die on the Young Sheldon Hill, though, be my guest.

If you really think that that makes you better

or clever or whatever.

Also, I'm going to be honest.

I'm not a Wyster, man.

Go for it.

I think there's a difference between watching a very light drama like Monk and a show that's just meant to make you laugh and is meant to be a comedy.

Because to me, it's more offensive if it's bad comedy as opposed to just bland background drama like Monk.

Like, Monk is low stakes.

It's fine.

Sometimes you've got quite a clever reveal or a cool story, whatever.

That's fine.

But Young Sheldon and Big Bang Theory are meant to be funny.

And when you hear people laughing at something that is objectively, objectively not funny, I get upset.

And I'm sure I'm not alive.

I just think it's a hard sell to get an adult into something.

I think a lot of these shows maintain their popularity because they're things that people started watching when they were a kid and just continue to watch it because there's like a comfort factor.

I've got some news for you guys.

Uh, there's some latest news out of Thorpe Park, they're opening their new franchised ride, the Young Sheldon

Bazinger.

I hope that there is a

faux American ad that plays on loop with lots of farting and diarrhea in it.

I got terrible diarrhea.

I just watched Young Sheldon and I can't stop shitting.

No whoopsies.

Oh no.

That's literally what it was like, by the way.

Oh, God.

Right.

Well, that's enough of this.

Hell yeah.

We missed Lewis News.

We'll pick it up next week.

Yeah, we'll have to do it next week.

Yeah.

We'll get double next time.

Holy crap.

All right.

Take care, everyone.

Bye.

Goodbye.