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.

We were super close. We were going to do a special episode 300 special on a 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 the 90s. We had the 0.1s and 0.2s.
Yeah, we're way past 300 now.

It's yesterday's news.

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 yeah I got else 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 um

you know being ill for a start but also working on jingle jam and keeping keeping keeping the torch alight for 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,

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 uh we texted lewis and said holy crap we're having so much fun when are you gonna be here and lewis was like elameo i'm not on the train so yeah 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 at midnight and stay in a travel in and i was like do you know what i'm not doing that it's fair um

i was like i was like no i'm not

doing that um but

life happens you know you went to thorpe park you can't say that oh yeah you can't actually say that

i didn't go to thorpe park yeah would you know what sips it was raining all day at thorpe park this is the first time sarah has ever met you yeah right because you don't make it down for jingle jam because you've got the three kids you've got other obligations your you know house is falling down, various issues, right?

Yes, yes. Um, there's the boilers on fire,

sewage pipes back up, back to the 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 a good, 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 um london no from twitters

it was not rush hour oh it was not at all i went down 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 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 eight, whatever,

with a view to starting it, whatever time. Yeah,

what at like 8:20. 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 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 must have the tallest and fastest roller coaster of the uk i was not ready for it like i've ridden roller coasters the 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. 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 looking.
Oh my God, God, man.

He looks like he's 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 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 your genitals explode like the death star oh 100

right that's your it's your one-time it's like if 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 me do you do you did 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.
They didn't get off. 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 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 sips to their credit, also rode a roller coaster.

So they didn't ride Hyperion. Neither of them were up for it.
No, they didn't. 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 around 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 uh 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

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 the 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.

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 swerve. 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 around again. Yeah, it was like a bad thing.
I mean, it was a very tame roller coaster, in all honesty.

Like, 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.

And 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.

Yeah, Tuesday. It was a Tuesday in the middle of at the start of October.
There's no half term. There's 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. Yeah, 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, so, so, space.

So, 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 seen 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 spicy. 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 uh

it's very British, you know, it's a bit a little bit shitty. It's a bit shitty.
Yeah. It's a bit run down.
It's a little you know it's 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 it it's everything's very sort of clean and detailed and precise and stuff and

you you you build a bit of a standard around it you know everything yeah 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 um

quite a few of the rides were closed because of the weather i think um but the weather didn't help

let me con let me place some context on everything i just said Yeah. It was raining all day.
So it was.

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, 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

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 weather is

not that much difficult to do.

The weather's pretty inclement at the best of times, sort of thing. 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, Sibs? 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 city. It was.
It very much was a lot like the Grizzly. We drove down the whole

dog.

Well, not that I'm aware 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 they stop come on lewis remember he he ties the dog up to the back of the car and doesn't realize it and then they they stop somewhere for a rest and they find the the the leash and the collar uh 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 uh because they accidentally killed the old lady's dog oh shit the really snarly that's how you know that they're a bad guy right that's right yeah

these days 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, 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 sound effects. I was so confused.

You know, when you pour chunky soup into a bowl, it was like, uh, it was like that sound, but very loud. You know, I'm like, what are you going for here? Like, 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 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 got them in the emergency vehicles, like, all blown up.
No, no, no, no. That was Swarm.

That was Swarm. Oh, sorry.
That's Swarm. So, Swarm.

The theming looks cool. 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 a ambulance tipped over and there's like a fire engine crashed through a building and a billboard you you go right through the billboard on the roller coaster so like it's cool but the rest of the

feels like they that's a really

way to theme it because it is 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 just needs updating it does it needs a little bit of updating I'd say.

Just like a bit of, I mean,

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.

You know, have a, have a think about some, some, some details, you know, like sight lines and stuff like that. You know, maybe, maybe try to plan the layout a little bit better.

So is Saw the Ride themed after the movies of Saw

movies? Yeah. Right.
So there is like movie tie-ins to properties that are not particularly not owned by Disney.

Right, right, right. I mean, it's going to be stuff like that.
But I mean,

it's apparently a good ride. Like, you know, it's got good actors pretending to be, I guess, people from Saw.

Yeah, I think they do like immersive sort of like there's like jump scares and stuff, you know, like there's actors that come out of the walls and stuff. All that kind of shit.

Like it's got to, you've got to be a certain age to go there. So that adds to the sense that this is going to be scary.
Like it's good.

I've seen 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 awful.

And like in the queue for the flying fish one, they've got this, again, another faux American voiceover, a guy saying,

hey, buddy, no smoking in the queue, okay? So 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.

It was just like that all the time. It's just really annoying voiceovers and theming.
But hey, what are you going to do?

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've got to do something with it.

You could drill into it. You could.
And that's why they have

driller killer. Yeah,

that's a thing. They got the driller killer.

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 going to 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 a here's a little, 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 things, and it like rates every IMDb episode of the series.

And you can do it with like little franchises as well. And as you can see, uh, there is a definite downward trajectory

on the on the Saw movies, as expected, right?

But that's that, you're right.

That's how these things were. They become like a parody of themselves, don't they? 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 look back and say, yeah, that was a good one. But then.
Oh, there are more?

Yeah. There are nine Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies.

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

like and I and it's a huge game and a huge name now but it was it was 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 I think that the rebooting these old IPs could sometimes I mean look at what what you know Disney did with Marvel kind of thing, you know, they 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 in

it. 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: smoking 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 like when they made the Star Wars movies, that was different.
But Jaws was one of the biggest movies of all time.

And 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 that was Jaws 3D.
Okay, Jaws 3 was Jaws 3D. So, Jaws 3,

Jaws is a weird one, right? I think it 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 that was a fully grown baby and i'm pretty sure that the third alien movie was something about that as well because uh

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 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 around 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? And 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,

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. You can see why they 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.

uh and i thought that all the pre 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 it 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 not bad apparently felt like a bit of a a reimagining

but i i will say this certainly from 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 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

a 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, 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 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 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, 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 have 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 mean, I can't think of

big, like, I feel like big trilogies, big sequels were

like probably started in the 80s, but before that, you would have had

a looser

collection of films, like in

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

Whereas like a full trilogy, for example, like Star Wars, the trilogy, or like Aliens, the Indiana Jones movies, those trilogies, 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 established that there's a scary villain. I mean, you've got Friday the 13th.

You've got Nightmare in Elm Street. You've got those kind of movies where they're like, we can just make more of these.
Halloween.

And people just want to watch a horror movie. But they were seen as schlocky and kind of shitty.

And if you look at like RoboCop, RoboCop one, big film. RoboCop 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 I think this Toy Story films have all had really good

sequels. Like, I don't think I've seen a Toy Story film that I haven't liked.

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. Yeah.

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 2 was a dog shit sequel. It was like a part of the book and a continuation of the story.

3 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. fucking 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.
It did.

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 Sherlock Holmes hated Sherlock Holmes.

Your father

Doyle hated, famously hated. He looked in the mirror every day and he said, I hate Sherlock Holmes.

I can't stand this guy.

But, and it happens all the time, right, to writers and everyone who gets something successful and then they're like, they get typecast effectively, they get stuck with 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 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 that was very famously

the whole true prime.

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?

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.

And then the Amityville, 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 buildup 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 Spielberg, 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.

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 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 that monster looks so rubbish. It really feels horrifying and real.
It stays with you. My sister didn't go in the ocean for years after.

No, it was. It was scary.
Yeah.

I think it's that, I don't know if you've ever been somewhere 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 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 or been around where you where you can feel that feeling as well yeah have you ever browsed in incognito mode yes i know i have doing it right now it's probably not as incognito as you think Google recently settled a $5 billion lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode.

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What do you guys think of all these fucking like shit movies? Like that amaz. There's tons and tons of animals.
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'm

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?

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 right

um

there's a movie called amityville death toilet there's a movie called like yes amityville christmas vacation there's 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 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 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's weird because the first one, like, the, the first one always just,

the more you think about it, 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 two which was amazing and he did aliens which was amazing uh 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 i think in those cases bringing somebody else in and letting them just kind of go nuts with what they they think is going to be a good sequel can work sometimes too.

Yeah, 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, the second movie blows the first movie out of the fucking 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've disagreed with the take less.

You like the first one better than the History Abyss 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 moves, but Terminator 2 is obviously the superior Terminator. I agree.
It's so much fucking money Terminator costs to make

the show. Yes, it does.
Okay, here's a little pop quiz for you. Can you name one of the other

name

the others Terminator movies? Name one of the other four. Terminator Darkness.
Terminator Salvation. Terminator

genesis

it's all it's all spelled wrong 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 like 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 three rise of the machines was the rise of the machines terminator salvation

was

terminated genesis was terminated dark fate it's all right it actually wasn't too bad it was pretty bad but it wasn't too bad um and then terminator the sarah connor chronicles which was a tv show i had no interest in that um i don't know i feel like i think the only terminator

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 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?

I'm not sure his his first movie was, but he was in 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 Tomato of the Killer Tomatoes.

Yeah, I remember that. That's a very,

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, do you know what I mean?

Some of the movies that came out in the 80s, the action movies, all the Schwarzenegger Stallone movies, what 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 gonna be this year? Oh, what's the what's the big movie gonna be?

It was, uh, it was, it was pretty, it was pretty

funny. This is funny.
I'm not, I'm not trying to advertise, but I just put out an hour-long uh essay on YouTube about what makes a great action movie. And it's interesting to hear you talk about them

sort of fondly.

You did this recently, didn't you? I put it out this morning.

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 demo the 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. Yeah.
God, thank you. It's just 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 love 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, 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.

I don't know if you've seen Police Story, the Jackie Chan action movie, Police Story. No, I don't know if I've seen it.
Great. Terminator, obviously, we've heard your opinion on Terminator.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yeah, all the Indiana Jones movies.

At least the original, like Temple of Doom,

Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Last Crusade, I like it. 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 can't remember.
It was

49, yeah, it's all theming and stuff, 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 some insane number of movies on there.

So those movies, I guess, were the birth of the franchise. Because they must have been, yeah.
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 Lundren stuff. You had all the Steven Seagal stuff in the 80s, remember? Like Under Siege and

all of those

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 lot of these are vehicles for specific actors, though, in a sense. And you still see it today with, you know, people like The Rock, you know, they want to do an action movie with The Rock.

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 I may, 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.

And the sequels that they were in were also big as long as the original star was still in it. The moment of stars.
It's a star power, though, right? Yeah.

I mean, like people would watch a Scharzenegger movie, right? And they'd expect a certain. You know what you're going to get? He's the Russiel of actors.

I mean, I think,

in a sense, looking at his

movies that he's attached to is also like a be a 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 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 they've done they've really heavily leaded the crossover with aliens as well which is which i've i've really liked you know 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 versus 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 idea. It's like, why not? Yeah.

That actually is totally make, you know, these two universes do not have to

be. But I mean, can you imagine other film franchises where that happened? I was thinking just off the top of my head, if in Die Hard, 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 everything 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 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, need to roll some dice and just have like

you know two two contesting franchises i'm gonna google 80s movies and i'll we'll just pick two full metal jacket and the goonies how about that what are you

like

yeah yeah yeah that could be it that the goonies could be like the precursor to uh to to them arriving at boot camp for full metal jacket yeah that all the kids from the goonies grow up real quick when they hit the fucking you pal 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, that 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, CT, E.T., take us.
Get me out of here.

Ghostbusters with the Terminator, but like the Skynet is actually like a ghost. It's like I said to you.

It's like a ghost ghost. That'd be so bad.
That would be really bad. Yeah.

What about Driving Miss Daisy and Betelgeuse?

I mean,

I don't think that would be too insane. You know, like Betelgeuse, 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?

What? 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 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 there's 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 there's a screenwriting challenge there.

Definitely. Like you've got to get like in Robocop,

a gremlin sort whatever.

It's that. It's that, or 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.

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.

Snake fucking Pliskin.

What a great name. By the way, if you haven't seen this sequel to Escape from New York, I think it's Escape from L.A.
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 un fucking 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 film is called in i think it's in the mouth of madness 1994 sam sam neal 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 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 it.

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, Matrix, right? Any universe could crossover with yeah, because it's, I mean, it's meant to be the real world. Yeah.

It's like a recreation. But if you do that, because you, you've, you know, there was a, uh, there was a TV show made in the, I think it was the 70s and 80s called Saint Elsewhere.
Yeah.

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.

That's

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.
What?

What the fuck? 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 was kind of the joke so you can look it up there's a load of stuff for it because carla rear pearl bun 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 a it was you know

It deviated away from the original principles of Mario for sure. So I guess it could be

a dream. But

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.

The 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

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, Dual Street Blues, it's so good, it was hugely influential.

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

2002 or whatever, in the background. And it's you're watching that on Dave? No, it's on Netflix every lunch on Netflix,

but it's but it's like, um, it's fine, but it's 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 ooh 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 they're 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, that's 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 sped up comedy as like was in like scrubs and stuff like that.

You know, you had like 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 uh 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 uh 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 transition and the chaos and stuff like that.

Scrub's notably, 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 wasn't with like a camcorder.

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.

I think at that point, you could make a decent case

for having a giant trap door under the theater. And everyone who's attended a live filming of the Big Bang Theory is dropped into that.
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 just maybe watched an episode and realized it was good as well.
The young Sheldon one.

It was on 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 at the dentist's having your TV

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 for 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?

It just 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 different?

I think so. It's just still going.

People love this. People love Bill Bank Theory and they love Young Sheldon.
I do know. They do.

Why? Yeah. They love it.
How many people are we talking here? Millions. Dude, people like NCIS.
If you still see 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?

For TV, dude. I know, but TV? Okay, 10 million over here.
Yeah. The population is like 70 million.
10 million in American 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 like 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 got to give it a try. I feel like you've got to 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

network television?

Let me blow your mind. Let me blow your eyes.
22 episodes. There have been 141 episodes of Young Sheldon.
I know. 141.

That's good. 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 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 called like This Is Us or something like that.

I think it's more like emotional, like sentimental. Oh, yeah, I know.
I can't remember the name of it, but

there's so many shows that I haven't heard about. Well, here's recommendation so far: The Penguin, been really good so far.
If anyone, oh, yeah, you're telling me about The Batman. Yeah, The Penguin.

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

Great fucking show, really, really, really, really good. Yeah, and 48 Hours, 24 Hours of Police Costed.
If you haven't seen it, brilliant. I love being a bit of 24 hours.
20 other crime

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. Oh, yeah, yeah.
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 Side Out as well that we haven't started watching. But

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.

Like, if you really think that that makes you better

or clever or whatever,

also, I'm going to be a bit more.

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. 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.

Oh, whoopsies.

Oh, no.

That's literally what it was like, by the way. Oh, God.
All right. Well, that's enough of this.
Hell yeah.

We missed Lew's News. We'll pick it up next week.
Yeah, we'll have to do it next week. Yeah.
You get double next time. Holy crap.
All right. Take care, everyone.
Bye. Goodbye.