The Iron Giant

Transcript

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Speaker 16 Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one, let alone your child's favorite retro film about nuclear holocaust.

Speaker 16 I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris. But, Chris, we've got a special guest with us today.

Speaker 17 We do have a very, very special guest. I am very excited because we are joined by Alex Steed of the absolutely wonderful You Are Good podcast, which we had the pleasure of guesting on.

Speaker 17 He's also the host of the OC Again Rewatch podcast. So for all you guys looking to head to California

Speaker 17 sometime soon, check that one out.

Speaker 17 As I mentioned, we had the honor of joining Alex on You Are Good to talk about Galaxy Quest, one of my favorite movies of all time.

Speaker 17 And so I thought it only fitting to have Alex on what went wrong for another one of my favorite movies of all time, The Iron Giant, because it's all about me.

Speaker 17 Alex, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much.
It's perfect because I was a beat Nick Maynard child. So this is a deeply resonant text.

Speaker 17 I am excited.

Speaker 17 Well, speaking of, so Alex, we'll let you go first and then Lizzie. Had you seen The Iron Giant before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for today's podcast?

Speaker 17 I loved the Iron Giant and I, because I have a soul, and I, uh, I saw it originally in the theater the day after I got my wisdom teeth out. And so I was

Speaker 17 chemically vulnerable and I

Speaker 17 balled for not just the last bit where it is the time to ball. I balled for maybe the last full act of the movie.

Speaker 17 And then later I would take like young, there were a couple of screenings of this

Speaker 17 a handful of years ago, and I would take sort of like young family members to go see it who'd never seen it before. Like this is a,

Speaker 17 I watched a behind the scenes special about it, and they said something to the effect of,

Speaker 17 if this is a movie that you love, this is a movie that you become an evangelist for,

Speaker 17 especially like for people who are close to you. And that's like very much been my experience.
And then to, you know, the points I made earlier, it takes place in Maine. So that is huge.

Speaker 17 Not a lot of media, unless it's by Stephen King, takes place in Maine. So you're always very happy to see it when it happens.

Speaker 17 Stephen King, of course, Murder She Wrote,

Speaker 17 Dark Shadows. Like, that's what we got.
And then,

Speaker 17 yeah, it's huge. I love this movie so, so much.
I was happy to watch it again and love it all the same, if not more.

Speaker 17 Lizzie?

Speaker 16 Well, I suppose I'm ready to be evangelized because I don't have a soul.

Speaker 17 I had never seen

Speaker 17 it.

Speaker 16 I know. I know, you guys.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 16 I had never seen the Iron Giant before. I was very excited to watch it.
And I watched it last night.

Speaker 16 I've got to tell you guys, I did not like this. It's not that I hated it at all.

Speaker 17 Well, Lizzie's not going to be joining us for the rest of the day.

Speaker 17 Lizzie, I'm so sorry I started like that. No, it's good.
You're not wrong.

Speaker 16 You're not wrong, I think.

Speaker 16 Maybe this is why. All I could think think the whole time I was watching it is like, this is not for children.

Speaker 17 Like, this is not made for children.

Speaker 16 I don't, I would be very curious to hear, because it sounds like, Chris, you probably did watch this when you were a kid.

Speaker 16 I just couldn't believe how much of it is about nuclear warfare and like relatively complicated concepts of nuclear warfare.

Speaker 16 The whole last act, Mansley is just trying to blow up a child as well as the whole town. And they keep telling him, like, but the kid's with him.

Speaker 16 And he's like, aim the missile right at the child's head.

Speaker 16 That's a lot of the movie.

Speaker 16 That being said, wonderful voice cast. I wish we could see more of Jennifer Aniston doing voices.
I really enjoyed her. I thought the animation was beautiful.

Speaker 16 I loved sort of the depth to it, which is something we talked a little bit about with, you know, Toy Story. Obviously, this looks very hand-drawn.

Speaker 16 Chris, I'm sure you'll talk about it, but really gorgeous. I, too, enjoyed that it was in, I believe, the fictional town of Rock, Rockwell, name.

Speaker 17 Although there is a rock port. There sure is.
But yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 16 I just, to me, it felt a bit like a

Speaker 16 pastiche of so many other movies that to me were maybe a little bit more successful at appealing to both adults and children. Like there's so much ET in this.

Speaker 16 And that was the big one that stood out to me where it just, it felt like it missed a bit of the fun and games that ET has.

Speaker 16 And the other thing I felt while watching it is, I was like, I wonder if I would have enjoyed this more had this been live action, which is not to say that the animation wasn't beautiful.

Speaker 16 Something about the animation made it feel so like it was geared towards children. And then the plot itself is so very like

Speaker 16 depressing and, you know, warfare based and like military-industrial complex focused that it felt a little incongruous to me. So, that was my take on the Iron Giant.
Loved Vin Diesel.

Speaker 17 Loved it. One of his, one of his best roles.

Speaker 17 Yeah,

Speaker 17 he plays one word. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I do actually love Vin Diesel. He's great in this.

Speaker 17 I took a screenshot of like a behind the scenes of him voice, doing like voice cast stuff. And he's like, it's for the sound effect.

Speaker 17 It's for like the foliar or whatever, but he's like eating like cabbage or something and wearing his sunglasses in a dark room. He's over tastefully wearing a long sleeve shirt, as my friend said.

Speaker 16 He's also, I will say, also really good in saving Private Ryan, which would have been around the same time. So

Speaker 17 yeah,

Speaker 17 we'll talk about the timing of that. So

Speaker 17 I

Speaker 17 vehemently disagree with Lizzie, and this movie is a masterpiece. Although I have a theory, Lizzie, as to why

Speaker 17 I have a slightly gendered theory. No, I think you're right.

Speaker 16 I actually, I was thinking that I do think that this, I understand why this would appeal to boys a lot more than girls.

Speaker 17 You mean Terminator 2 meets E.T., you think? Would be a

Speaker 17 Terminator 2 and E.T. So, you know, in Terminator 2, we got Linda Hamilton, though.

Speaker 17 I do think that, as we will get to, the pitch that Bradbird came up with for this movie, which is an adaptation, it speaks to something that I think. So I saw this in theaters.
I was 10 years old.

Speaker 17 This movie blew my mind and I loved it. I loved loved that it didn't talk down to me.

Speaker 17 It also made me cry at that age, but it got down to an idea which is, at least I can speak for myself at that age, I was very interested in playing war, playing guns. And

Speaker 17 I really thought this notion of what if a gun had a soul

Speaker 17 was really beautiful. And this idea that the war at the end ends up being self-inflicted is really, you know, kind of poetic.
And the sacrifice that the Iron Giant makes and that your

Speaker 17 strength is not in offense, but in defense, right? It's in protecting the things that you love. And

Speaker 17 I also found, especially at the time, the animation particularly moving because it was the first film that I really felt successfully combined 3D animation and 2D animation in a really organic way.

Speaker 17 The Iron Giant is done three-dimensionally, and then the rest of the animation is traditional, you know, 2D cell animation. So I loved this movie for, I loved it when I was 10.
I love it now.

Speaker 17 I actually, while Lizzie, I agree with you, I think the plot elements are very adult. I actually think the message is more appropriate for kids than the message of Toy Story even.

Speaker 17 The message of the Iron Giant, you are who you choose to be, is a wonderful message, I think, for kids. And it's something I...

Speaker 17 I'm excited to share with my daughter and I hope she likes it and wants to talk about it.

Speaker 17 Whereas I actually think Toy Story is a slightly more complicated message, which is you kind of have to accept who you are independent of where you fall in the loving order, you know, of those around you, et cetera.

Speaker 17 And, you know, the existential crisis that Buzz goes through, for example. So I agree with you.
I think the plot is somewhat more adult. I do, I think the themes are appropriately

Speaker 17 geared toward both children and adults.

Speaker 17 But I wonder if there's, and I would be curious if our audience feels this way, if there is a slightly gender bias, you know, to this movie, because to me, it really felt like it was aimed at little boys who are so obsessed with turning everything into a gun.

Speaker 17 And I was definitely one of those little boys.

Speaker 17 Not that girls can't do that either. I just, it's definitely a gendered thing.
But maybe, Lizzie,

Speaker 17 I can convert you to a believer that the Iron Giant, while maybe not your cup of tea,

Speaker 17 was and remains a unique unique and incredible accomplishment of animation and an important piece of animation history.

Speaker 16 I feel certain that you can. That I will not deny.
Can I say one other thing about this?

Speaker 17 Oh my God. No, this is a good thing.

Speaker 16 One of my favorite things about this was how much of the DNA of the Incredibles that you can see in it.

Speaker 17 That will briefly come up. There are some Brad Bird...

Speaker 17 ideas of individualism versus family, etc.

Speaker 16 The retro setting, a lot of the dialogue, the way that they talk, like some of the setups. Yeah, it was very, you can tell how he stepped from this to the Incredibles.

Speaker 16 And I do, I love the Incredibles very much.

Speaker 17 I won't get into partisan politics, but I did feel like while watching this, that this movie should be

Speaker 17 force-fed to everyone in Congress and

Speaker 17 in the executive branch like the end of a clockwork orange. Like I think that their eyes should be pried open and they should watch it and forcefully receive this the message of this movie.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 17 I watched the House of Dynamite last night and I was like, I actually think Congress should watch this before House of Dynamite, personally.

Speaker 17 I also, Lizzie, it's so funny that you, I think you're right that the message is sort of intense for not the message, but the delivery and the plot is sort of intense for kids.

Speaker 17 Chris, I think you're right with regard to who it appeals to. And just what's so wild to me watching this is like, again, this is about sort of nuclear anxiety, of course.

Speaker 17 But the fact that, again, as the thesis is that Chris had spoken to, what if a gun had a soul, thinking about the fact that it is so regular now for children at the youngest ages to have to carry backpacks suited to understanding if there's guns in them and go through drills just in case someone's coming into the school to hurt them in one way or another, makes this so scarily more resonant than when it was like a Cold War,

Speaker 17 like a nuclear anxiety film.

Speaker 16 I wonder if that is maybe what gave me a hard time with it, just because I did not see this when I was younger and I did not see it around the time that it came out. And there was something about

Speaker 17 how

Speaker 16 war-based this movie was and how much everything revolves around, like, yeah, the whole thing is that he's he's a weapon, but that he can choose whether or not he's a weapon and, you know, who controls him and if he controls himself and all that.

Speaker 16 But yeah,

Speaker 16 I think maybe where my brain was going was like kids already have to, you know, deal with

Speaker 16 this stuff so much. And these days, I think a nuclear threat is maybe more present than it was when this movie came out.

Speaker 16 This movie was almost not parodying it, but it is a little bit when it shows the like duck and cover sequence early on. You know, that's almost like a, remember when they had to do this type thing.

Speaker 16 And now watching it, it's like, God, my kid's going to have to go to school and she's going to have to do drills.

Speaker 16 And like, there was an element of it that depressed me a little bit that I wonder if maybe it wouldn't have had I seen this when it came out.

Speaker 17 Well, let's talk about the details. Can't wait.
So, The Iron Giant is a 1999 animated movie directed by, as we mentioned, Brad Bird.

Speaker 17 It was written by Tim McCanleys, who did receive the screenplay credit. Brad Bird was also a writer on this movie, as was Brent Forrester, who was also uncredited.

Speaker 17 Brad Bird did receive the screen story credit, and as you mentioned, Alex, it is based on the book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes.

Speaker 17 It was produced by Alison Abate, Des McCanniff, and executive produced by Pete Townsend of The Who?

Speaker 17 For my favorite reason.

Speaker 17 Can't wait.

Speaker 17 Quick sidebar on Pete Townsend before we dive in.

Speaker 17 Because this is a children's movie, I do think it's important to mention in 2003, a few years after The Iron Giant came out, Townsend was put on a sex offender's register for a few years after he admitted to the police that he had used his credit card to access a website with child sexual abuse images.

Speaker 17 Okay, we're going to leave it at that and get back to The Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 It stars Eli Marienthal as Hogarth Hughes, Vin Diesel as the Iron Giant, one of his first major roles, Jennifer Anison as Annie Hughes, Harry Connick Jr.

Speaker 17 with our Patrick Wilson best looking guy from your hometown award, Harry Connick Jr.,

Speaker 17 accomplished musician and wonderful actor, Christopher McDonald chewing up all the the scenery still in the show as Kent Mansley, John Mahoney as General Rogard, and many, many more.

Speaker 17 It was released by Warner Brothers on August 6th, 1999. It's my birthday.
Oh, wow. A gift for me.
A gift for Lizzie.

Speaker 17 And as always, the IMDb log line reads: A young boy befriends a giant robot from outer space that a paranoid government agent wants to destroy.

Speaker 17 Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, The Giant's Dream, which, Alex, you probably just watched, the making of documentary.

Speaker 17 2024 Q ⁇ A with Brad Bird at Retro Replay 1999 the year that changed cinema that's a screening hosted by landmark theaters letters of Ted Hughes the book compilation and many many more articles retrospectives and interviews with those involved in the film now two brief disclaimers as you may have gleaned Today's episode will include, unfortunately, discussions of suicide, matricide, and domestic abuse.

Speaker 17 And we will be be talking a little bit, you know, about Sylvia Plath as well. And I'm excited to get into that in an unexpected way.

Speaker 17 Today's story, I think, is very much about how things all too often fall apart, like the Iron Giant does in this movie, and how sometimes we can put them back together.

Speaker 17 But the Iron Giant doesn't start in Maine, unfortunately. Sorry, Alex.
Sorry, Lizzy. Nor does his story start in California.
It doesn't even start in the United States.

Speaker 17 It starts in England with a bedtime story, which poet Ted Hughes made up for his kids about a very giant iron man.

Speaker 17 He was taller than a house, he had eyes like headlamps that changed color with his mood, and he ate barbed wire like spaghetti.

Speaker 17 Perhaps most important of all, when he fell apart, he could simply put himself back together piece by piece. And for the Hughes children, Frida and Nicholas, things had fallen apart.
Now,

Speaker 17 several sources claim that Hughes wrote the book to help his kids cope with the death of their mother, who, if you're unfamiliar, was the singularly talented Sylvia Plath.

Speaker 17 Lizzie, do you have much experience with Sylvia Plath? Anyone want to do a brief two-sentence on Sylvia Plath?

Speaker 16 Of course, I have experience with Sylvia Plath. I was once a teenage girl.
Sylvia Plath was a really, really amazing poet, author.

Speaker 16 Her probably most famous work is The Bell Jar, which, if you've never read it, you should. Semi-autobiographical, although not exactly.
Her poetry was really,

Speaker 16 you know, I joked that it's something that tends to appeal to teenage girls. I think it appeals to everyone everywhere.

Speaker 17 I reread the Bel Jar.

Speaker 16 It's so good. It's amazing.
The Beljar is incredible.

Speaker 17 Also, so funny.

Speaker 16 Yeah, she is very funny.

Speaker 17 So funny. It's like Fleabag, 1963.

Speaker 16 Yes, Fleabag actually is a fantastic reference for Sylvia Plath. She's very sharp.
She's very quick.

Speaker 16 She is not afraid of things that are physically gross, which was unusual, whether that's, you know, like sexual things, physical things, menstruation,

Speaker 16 but talks about it in a very human way,

Speaker 16 was not afraid of, you know, discussing violence, both emotional and physical. And

Speaker 16 she also struggled her whole life with anxiety and depression. And very tragically, she did end her own life quite famously, I believe, by putting her head in the oven.

Speaker 17 Indeed. In July of 1962, basically, she discovered that her husband, Ted Hughes, was having an affair with their friend, Asya Weville.
Plath was that winter left alone to fend for their two children.

Speaker 17 One was two years old, one was basically nine months, I believe. It was one of the coldest winters on record.
Pipes broke, you know, pipes froze. There's no TV, excuse me, there's no telephone.

Speaker 17 And she's writing poetry when she can around taking care of the kids. And it was in that winter when her first novel, The Bel Jar, was published in the United Kingdom.

Speaker 17 It wasn't published in the United States until until years later.

Speaker 16 And to be clear, she was American, not British.

Speaker 17 She was American, that's right. And she's living in the English countryside by herself while her husband is off with another woman.
The Bell Jar was not well received when it first came out.

Speaker 17 It was a big collective critical shrug, and it was described as juvenile by many people.

Speaker 17 Later, as you mentioned, Lizzie, it would be recognized as, I'm not trying to be reductive, but it was kind of the female catcher in the wry, I think, is how a lot of people have seen it.

Speaker 17 That February, she committed suicide, as you mentioned,

Speaker 17 basically carbon monoxide asphyxiation. She was 30 years old, and so eventually Ted Hughes wrote this story of the Iron Man down.

Speaker 17 So the original story does share some DNA with the movie, but it was pretty different. So it was divided into five chapters to be read over five nights.

Speaker 17 There is a boy named Hogarth, which is where our name comes from. Although at first, he betrays the Iron Man.
So he basically

Speaker 17 helps set up a trap for the Iron Man to fall into so the farmers can trap him. But then he feels bad about this.
He takes the Iron Man to a scrapyard. The Iron Man gets to eat all he wants.

Speaker 17 And then there is a giant space bat angel dragon the size of Australia that appears in the sky and lands on Australia.

Speaker 17 And there's a big battle between the Iron Man and the Space Dragon where they compete about who's tougher. And he lies on hot

Speaker 17 like coals basically. And the space dragon lies on the sun.
And then the Iron Man wins. And the Space Dragon lives on the moon and sings for us for the rest of time.

Speaker 17 And it gets a little out there, it feels very much like a fairy tale.

Speaker 17 There's a lot of dream logic, uh, it's very loose, it's very, it's not grounded in our world, I think, in the way that the final film is.

Speaker 17 So, it gets published in 1968, and it was renamed in the United States the Iron Giant. Any guesses as to why?

Speaker 17 Iron Man, yeah, because of Marvel's Iron Man, exactly. Yeah, which was already an existing character.

Speaker 17 So, in 1968 that is the same year that an 11 year old boy named brad bird began animating his first short film so brad bird's from montana and like a lot of young kids he loved to draw and it's not that his drawings were particularly great but they were really unique for one reason if you read them sequentially they told a story

Speaker 17 so where most kids probably myself included, would spend a lot of time trying to make one drawing, you know, look great, he's making drawings that are actually telling stories and so he falls in love with disney films like the jungle book which came out in 1967 and he had a family connection to composer george burns and if you guys don't know the name george burns he's like maybe the most prolific disney composer of the mid 20th century sleeping beauty 101 dalmatians sword and the stone jungle book aristocats robin hood the works so he goes to disney tours the studio, and he meets the nine old men.

Speaker 17 These were the core animators who had worked at the studio from the 20s to the 80s. A couple years later, Bradbird sends in one of his early animations.
Disney gives him an internship.

Speaker 17 He is on his way. He's the Wundeken and he knows one day I'm going to join the nine old men.
But the problem is things at Disney were starting to fall apart.

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Speaker 17 Lizzie, we just talked about this on Toy Story. Can you talk a little bit about what happened at Disney after the death of Walt Disney in 1966?

Speaker 16 Of course,

Speaker 16 I can.

Speaker 16 They entered into the dark ages of Disney, which was the time between, you know, the movies of the, I believe, 50s to mid-60s that we know of as sort of, well, really 30s through early 60s that we know of as kind of the classic Disney films, into a period where Disney really was not having a lot of hits in terms of movies.

Speaker 16 they were very focused on things that they felt were

Speaker 16 more surefire income providers like theme parks, for example. This is when, you know, Disneyland opens, Disney World, all that.

Speaker 16 And also, that they became more focused on the art than they did the story behind the movies.

Speaker 16 So it's called the Dark Ages because they just, they didn't have a lot of hits and they were really struggling in the animated film department.

Speaker 17 Alex, do you have any favorite Disney films? Anything stick out at you? Just from any time. I'm just curious.
Not from the classic era, but from the Ashman revival era.

Speaker 17 Like that's kind of when I came online. So The Little Mermaid, probably the biggest of them.
Right. So the Renaissance.
It's a great movie. My daughter is The Little Mermaid today for

Speaker 17 Halloween.

Speaker 17 I woke, it is Halloween, and I went outside today, and almost like a storybook, a little girl saw me, and she goes, Happy Halloween. I'm going in Snow White.
And I was like, oh my God, I love it. But

Speaker 17 it wasn't until we started doing the show and sort of researching and understanding the history behind these things that I could understand that The Little Mermaid was my favorite and also Little Shop of Horrors.

Speaker 17 And it wasn't until, you know, 30 years later did I realize that they are structurally the same because they were created by the same person.

Speaker 17 So you're talking about

Speaker 17 the Disney or the 2D animation renaissance, right? Which will come in about... 15 or 20 years.
But things at Disney, as you mentioned, Lizzie, don't feel how they once once did.

Speaker 17 And one of the people that felt that Disney had lost its way was a man named Don Bluth. And I'm sure you guys know the name Don Bluth and Don Bluth Animation.

Speaker 17 He was at Disney, and like you said, Lizzie, he felt that they were focusing way too much on the humor, on getting laughs, on setting up theme park rides, and not on the story, which is what he had fallen in love with.

Speaker 17 So in the late 70s, he and a dozen other animators or so just flee the studio in the middle of the night, basically.

Speaker 17 And this is right after Brad Bird has shown up with a box of his things for his first big job at Disney. So Brad Bird shows up right when everyone's like, time to get out of here, kid.

Speaker 17 So Don Bluth and his friends leave and they set up a new studio. And meanwhile, Brad Bird's going,

Speaker 17 what is this? This isn't the Disney I toured when I was 11. This isn't the Disney I interned at.
And the thing about Brad Bird,

Speaker 17 he wasn't saying that to himself. He was saying it to everybody around him, including his bosses.

Speaker 17 He was just saying, like, you guys aren't standing up for the Disney principles that the old Disney masters taught us.

Speaker 16 Oh my God, corporations love that.

Speaker 17 Yeah. These guys have been at the company for decades and they're basically saying, shut the fuck up to this kid.
And he didn't shut up. And so they fired him.

Speaker 17 And so Bradbird was very quickly fired from his dream job at Disney. And meanwhile, Don Bluth is busy.
He and his compatriots release one of my faves, The Secret of Nim, if you guys haven't seen it.

Speaker 17 Oh, my God.

Speaker 17 Lizzie, if you're looking for a movie to haunt children that is animated. Oh, here.
Here you go. Sign me up.
Secret of Nim and the animated adaptation of Watership Downhood. Oh, my God.

Speaker 16 Talk about trauma. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I saw that when I was five years old at a friend's birthday party and when the hills ran red with blood as the dogs were tearing them apart. Yeah, that was a lot.

Speaker 17 An American Tale, another favorite of mine, and The Land Before Time, of course,

Speaker 17 a classic produced by Steven Spielberg.

Speaker 17 Now, Bluth's defection from Disney is seen by some historians as the move that sparked the 2D animation renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s.

Speaker 17 This is more commonly called the Disney Renaissance, and it is an incredible run of films that dominated the box office and Oscars. And things just just really in animation came back together.

Speaker 17 So, Alex, you mentioned for Disney, the breakout movie was The Little Mermaid. That was the movie that turned the Sizzles under Katzenberg and Eisner.
This turns the studio around.

Speaker 17 And then you just have this crazy run: Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast. But you also have things like The Rescuers Down Under, and even other studios like Warner Brothers.

Speaker 17 They're getting into television. Steven Spielberg's got Tiny Toons Adventures, Animaniacs, Paramount, Fox, Universal.
Everybody's reviving their long-dead animation units.

Speaker 17 Ralph Bakshi, Hanna-Barbera, you've got Fern Gully, the Swan Princess, the Page Master,

Speaker 17 the real stinky cats don't dance. You got all of them.

Speaker 17 Everybody's putting out these movies because they're making a ton of money. Like the thing I think that people forget is Aladdin made $500 million at the box office.

Speaker 17 These movies were incredibly profitable. And so in late 1996, to consolidate their their film businesses, Time Warner acquires Turner Broadcasting.

Speaker 17 And so they merge Warner Brothers with Turner Broadcasting. And in this deal, they get CNN, the Atlanta Braves, Cartoon Network, the Warner Brother Library pre-1947, the MGM Library, and

Speaker 17 maybe most important to our story, the last three months. of a young Brad Bird's contract.

Speaker 17 So Brad Bird didn't build his reputation inside of Disney. He built it in animated television, and he was known for making TV episodes that felt like movies.

Speaker 17 So he'd attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg back in the early 80s. So this would have been a few years after he was let go from Disney.

Speaker 17 And there was this segment of his test reel called Family Dog that centered on this pet's perspective of his dysfunctional family. And Steven Spielberg thinks it's really great.

Speaker 17 So Bird joins Amblin and he starts working as a writer on amazing stories. Are you guys familiar familiar with the Spielberg show, Amazing Stories? Alex, you want to give any sort of little log line?

Speaker 17 Yeah, it was like kind of a, again, this was a time when like family entertainment was slightly terrifying. And yes, it was like a lot of

Speaker 17 like kind of like an anthology series that was family programming that also kind of had the vibe of the poltergeist.

Speaker 17 Yes, it was like family anthology Twilight Zone. It was like it

Speaker 17 was weirdly dark in certain episodes. It was very Amblin-y in that, like, goonies can be a little dark, or Temple of Doom was extremely dark, right?

Speaker 17 You know, you have some of these Amblin films really rode that PG-13 line.

Speaker 17 So he co-writes an episode. He storyboards another segment of Family Dog, and this gets adapted into a standalone episode of Amazing Stories.

Speaker 17 So it's a fully animated episode of Family Dog, and it's really weird. It's really funny.
It's like very dark.

Speaker 17 Basically, it's kind of from the perspective of this little dog that was designed by Tim Burton. So it has a Frank and Weeny kind of design.
And the dog's family is horrifying.

Speaker 17 The kid is kind of like Sid in Toy Story. He chases the dog around with a vacuum.
The mom

Speaker 17 definitely has some ennui and is struggling with her suburban life. The dad is just watching cheerleaders on television.
Long story short, like the dog fails to be a guard dog.

Speaker 17 So they take it to this weird institute to learn how to be a guard dog.

Speaker 17 And then he becomes such a good guard dog that he starts a life of crime with these criminals and starts robbing people it's a very very weird show but it became a favorite not only was it a ratings hit but a lot of people in the animation industry really loved it because it's got this really offbeat sense of humor this like really honest look at an american family it's a little dark it's got really cool cinematography especially for an animated show like it's very dynamic it moves a lot and so Brad Bird spends a lot of his time on the feature side, just in development hell.

Speaker 17 All of his projects like get noted to death but two producers james l brooks and sam simon take notice of him and they poach him for the simpsons and so he goes and joins the simpsons and that's where he learns how to work on crazy timelines with a really small team so they spun the family dog into a tv show without bird's involvement Basically, he wanted more control than he was going to have.

Speaker 17 That show got panned, and Bird really wanted to make movies. And it's during this time that he wrote the first draft of The Incredibles.
The Incredibles?

Speaker 17 what yeah about 10 years uh too early so he tried to tackle a different movie called ray gun

Speaker 17 g-u-n-n it was this like film noir action movie detective in the future scene from 1939 right very much the uh art deco mutter modern sort of uh rocketeer vibes i think is how i would describe it and he's working at raygun at turner when they merge with warner brothers and warner brothers says yeah yeah we don't really want to we're really not really interested in this, Brad.

Speaker 17 And Brad's like, Okay, great. I'm just going to get fired again.
I'm going to have to go do something else. And they say, Well, hold on, stick around.
We have a lot of projects in development.

Speaker 17 Do you want to work on one of these? And Brad Bird is not very excited because, as he put it, Warner Brothers at that time had like 45 projects in development.

Speaker 17 And if you have that many projects in development, you have nothing in development because it tells you that you're not focusing on anything. You're just throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Speaker 17 So they said, pick some spaghetti off the wall and choose which one you want to do. And one of the pieces of spaghetti that he picked was the Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 So, how did the Iron Giant end up at Warner Brothers in the mid early to mid-90s for Brad Bird to pick up? And how did it get there from 1968 England?

Speaker 17 And it's a little bit of an unusual story and it involves Pete Townsend of the Who.

Speaker 17 This was my favorite thing to learn about this. It's so weird.
Okay, so 1976, the story's been out for a few years. This is just before Don Bluth's going to bail on Disney.

Speaker 17 Pete Townsend, lead guitarist of The Who, was trying to start a publishing company. And his business partner was handing him examples of types of stories he thought they should focus on.

Speaker 17 And one of the stories he gave him was The Iron Man, or as it was called in the U.S., The Iron Giant. Townsend loved it.
But he doesn't option it. A few years go by.

Speaker 17 He starts working as an editor for a publishing house that has published a lot of Ted Hughes's work, and he remembers the Iron Man.

Speaker 17 So he goes to Hughes and he says, I want to turn the Iron Man into Alex. Do you know this part?

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's, I forget what, I forget if it's the same title, but he basically wants to turn it into a Pete Townsend penned musical. A rock opera musical for the stage.

Speaker 17 Lizzie's face is skepticism. That's fine.
I do want to say, though, just based on, you know, who properties that became rock operas.

Speaker 16 I was going to say, have we all seen Tommy?

Speaker 17 Right. This is what

Speaker 17 there is a reality in which the Iron Giant is directed by Ken Russell. And I want to see that movie, but we're not, that didn't happen.
This is where we went. Right.
So.

Speaker 17 Ted Hughes, I think, probably said, I have no idea how that you're going to do this, but he said, sure. You know, he said, go for it.
It's been eight years.

Speaker 17 I don't think anybody else has approached him that I could find about adapting this.

Speaker 17 and it doesn't seem like townsend really had a novel angle on the story in my opinion he kind of picked just the most obvious one which is the iron giant or the iron man and space bat are parents the iron man is a stand-in for ted hughes the space bat is sylvia plath and hogarth represents their children again lizzy's face is

Speaker 17 how I feel about it too, which is

Speaker 17 not interesting and it's reductive. Now, Hughes, to his credit, had reservations about this.
He thought this was too specific and it actually is not, was not his intention and how he wrote it.

Speaker 17 He wasn't alone, Lizzie. Don't worry.
Nobody wanted to stage this show.

Speaker 17 Nobody.

Speaker 16 Spacebat versus Iron Man?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 But Townsend was undeterred. So he packaged the music he wrote for it as its own concept album.
which was released in 1989 called The Iron Man the Musical.

Speaker 17 And I listened to to it. Do you guys want to hear

Speaker 17 a little bit? I didn't know it was out. Oh, it's been out.
Wow. It's been out for quite some time.

Speaker 17 It came out the year I was born.

Speaker 16 It's been out for me and Chris's entire lives.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Here we go. I just picked this one because the chorus has the words Iron Man in it.
Great.

Speaker 17 Listeners, if you want to listen along, you can open up Spotify, YouTube, and type in Over the Top by Pete Townsend from the Iron Man the Musical album.

Speaker 17 Wow.

Speaker 17 Got some Randy Newman in there.

Speaker 17 It is like. Wait, I'm sorry.
Are you guys familiar?

Speaker 16 This is going to be relevant, I promise. Are you familiar with the fact that Robert Pattinson recorded two songs for the original Twilight soundtrack?

Speaker 17 I've got a reason for that. No, because of you.
Okay.

Speaker 16 That was so unintelligible. That's like what famously the songs that Robert Pattinson recorded are, you cannot understand a single word he's saying.

Speaker 17 It's like,

Speaker 16 I have no idea what Pete Townsend was saying in any of that other than, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 Look,

Speaker 17 Townsend wrote this whole album. You can listen to it.
I'd listened to it once all the way through. Again, it's not, it's, it's not that it's,

Speaker 17 it's just, it's hard to imagine the movie that goes with it, is how I would describe it.

Speaker 17 But you can see it because he hired an animation company to help him make a short film as a music video for one of the songs. A Friend is a Friend.
It's a mix of live action and stop motion animation.

Speaker 17 It shows the story up until the part where the Iron Man escapes from the trap that Hogarth has set for him.

Speaker 17 Long story short, the album flops, but over in Ireland, English animator Richard Baisley, remember that name, was working on the tiny king and queen in a movie I quite liked, Thumbelina.

Speaker 17 Not sure if you guys remember that one. And couldn't shake a particular feeling that the Iron Man would make a great animated feature film.
And Baisley worked at Don Bluth Studios.

Speaker 17 So he calls his boss and says, here is a 10-point outline complete with character designs. This is exactly the type of movie that we should be doing.
It's not a Disney movie. It's something different.

Speaker 17 It's very nuclear war heavy. It's very, there's a lot of new movies.

Speaker 16 Kids are going to love it.

Speaker 17 There's guns.

Speaker 17 It's very difficult to understand.

Speaker 17 It's funny, this feels optimistic for a Don Bluth movie, honestly.

Speaker 17 I agree, but that's kind of my point: it does kind of feel

Speaker 17 Don like in his wheelhouse, in my opinion.

Speaker 16 You've made a good point now that I think about The Land Before Time, the most depressing movie I've ever seen, where you literally know they're just all going to die at the end of it.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 16 No one dies in this. You're right.
It's great.

Speaker 17 We do talk about death a lot, though. Like, who knows? Like, killing's bad, but we're all going to die, me included.

Speaker 17 Me too.

Speaker 17 He lost his dad in the Korean War. How much more do we need to say? All right.
Don Bluth, though, couldn't see it. Maybe there wasn't enough death.
I don't know why.

Speaker 17 He said he felt there wasn't enough material for a full-length movie. And I do think that's true if you just go by the book.
I read the book, and

Speaker 17 I think it works really well as a kid's nighttime fairy tale. If you did a straight adaptation, it would be a mess.
He thinks maybe it's a short film.

Speaker 17 But Pete Townsend wasn't done. And for better or worse, we kind of owe

Speaker 17 this movie to Pete Townsend in a lot of ways. So, back in England, Ted Hughes' phone starts ringing off the hook, and it's reporters.

Speaker 17 They go, What's it like working with Pete Townsend on the Iron Man musical? And Ted Hughes says, I have no idea what you're talking about. That idea never went anywhere.
Turns out it did.

Speaker 17 Townsend had reworked the script with theater director David Thacker, and the musical was already in rehearsals at a theater in London, and it was a constellation prize. Lizzie

Speaker 17 basically they wanted to do Tommy, but that wasn't available. And Pete said, well, I have Iron Man.
And they said, okay, fine.

Speaker 16 And they did.

Speaker 17 And it wasn't available why?

Speaker 16 Because the rest of the band was like, no.

Speaker 17 I believe because Tommy was still running in the United States, in New York. So they went with the Iron Giant and they made some changes.
The Space Bat. became a sexy space bat.

Speaker 17 Yeah. And there were modern messages about things like fast food and pollution.
When we know that this face bats a stand-in for Sylvia Plath, and then we say that the upgrade is sexy space bath.

Speaker 17 It's too much.

Speaker 17 It's great. It's great.
You know what Sylvia Plath would have loved to be memorialized as? A sexy space bat.

Speaker 17 I am the arrow.

Speaker 17 So is that Halloween's tonight? Because that would be my costume if I had some time to forget. Yeah, you know what? She would have liked that, I think.
Halloween costume for her.

Speaker 17 She absolutely would have.

Speaker 11 Exactly.

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Speaker 17 All right. The show opened on November 25th, 1993, and it was panned so hard.
Critics, nobody liked it. There were a lot of problems.

Speaker 17 Number one one was that Townsend had told everybody that it was going to be better than Tommy. And he was like, this is going to be the best thing since Tommy is going to be better than Tommy.

Speaker 17 It was not. The other thing is, it was impossible to understand what was happening.
So, Lizzie, you mentioned you can't understand what he's saying in the songs.

Speaker 17 And if you had not read the books, there was no other explanation of the plot. They didn't put a plot summary in the brochure in the

Speaker 17 playbill. They didn't put the summary of the plot in the playbill.
So nobody knew what was happening. Even Ted Hughes said if he hadn't written it, he wouldn't know what what was happening.
Oh, no.

Speaker 17 So the bad reviews kill the musical's chances of getting funding.

Speaker 17 And so it reaches a dead end until Des McCanoff, who is the co-writer and director of Tommy and had been helping on Iron Man, says, maybe it's not a musical, maybe it's an animated feature.

Speaker 17 And it's important to remember, animated musicals are breaking box office records in the United States. This is immediately after Aladdin has hit $500 million.

Speaker 17 Townsend's in. Ted Hughes says, sure.
So they go to Bruce Berman, president of worldwide theatrical production at Warner Brothers, and he says, of course, we're developing everything.

Speaker 17 Let's take some more spaghetti.

Speaker 17 But to be clear, this makes a lot of sense. This is a pretty beloved children's story with a musical legend attached, you know, to make the music.
And they've already made the entire album.

Speaker 17 So theoretically, Warner Brothers won't have to pay for that again as they go forward into production.

Speaker 16 Did they listen to it, though?

Speaker 17 I don't know, probably probably not.

Speaker 17 So they make a few changes. They decided to move the story from England to Maine.
Brad Bird has also said that he came up with that. So take that with a grain of salt.

Speaker 17 This is when they decide to combine cell animation and computer graphics. Now, do you guys know one of the first instances when this was done on a Disney movie? No.

Speaker 16 Is it the Lion King?

Speaker 17 No, it was Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom scene. Do you guys remember when they dance in the ballroom? The ballroom is done in three-dimensional 3D, is CGI 3D.

Speaker 17 And it would be done really effectively in Tarzan with all the trees that he goes parkouring on in that movie. Because

Speaker 17 can I ask you a question, Chris? Movie magician.

Speaker 17 The reason for doing this, right, as I understood it from watching this documentary, is like matching two-dimensional movement through space is very, very difficult to coordinate through actual animation techniques.

Speaker 17 So like what a computer adds in this situation is essentially like physics understanding that like animators isn't necessarily like coming naturally to like two-dimensional animators.

Speaker 17 Is like that the reason why we started doing this?

Speaker 17 Yeah, I think so. They, they specifically wanted to make the iron giant

Speaker 17 have a weight.

Speaker 17 So, they wanted to make sure that when he moved, it felt like he was heavy. That's difficult to do in 2D, and it's a lot easier to do in 3D.
That may tie into the physics, as you mentioned.

Speaker 17 So, like, when his arms swing and they like swing through three-dimensional space, it looks like they have, there's some actual density there.

Speaker 17 Whereas, if you do it in two-dimensional space, things can look a little weightless as they just dance across the screen.

Speaker 17 And then I think, like, in the case of Beauty and the Beast, for example, that moment was just so kind of like, oh my gosh, the world opens up in this ballroom scene as they fall in love.

Speaker 17 And wow, the camera's sweeping around them, right? It through three-dimensional space in a way that would be really difficult, if not impossible, with traditional 2D animation. Yeah.

Speaker 17 And so, like, if the background is, it's again, it's like with the parallax and the rotating perspectives, if the the background's having to move while the heroes are moving as well, that becomes really difficult with 2D animation.

Speaker 17 But if your background can be a 3D asset that you can move the camera through, that becomes much more achievable. And the flip side.

Speaker 16 To me, at least one of the easiest places to spot it in the Iron Giant is like when you see the giant come into the town looking over the houses of Rockwell.

Speaker 17 Yeah, amongst many other moments. So the space bat, I want to be clear, is still very much a part of this.
I don't know if she's sexy or not, but they're even considering

Speaker 17 a third. Yeah.
They're considering a third animation type, which is Claymation for the Space Bat.

Speaker 17 Wow. It's still going to be a rock musical.
And I would like to share one of the early design options that they looked at for. the Iron Giant because it was a very different animation style.

Speaker 17 And I'm curious to hear what you guys think. And listeners, if you're interested in seeing what we're talking about, we will post it to our Patreon for free.

Speaker 17 So you can go to our Patreon, check out the Iron Giant posts, and you can find this illustration there. Hmm.

Speaker 17 Really?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 This bums me out.

Speaker 16 I don't, I guess I don't hate it. It's a little sort of like, it's like Tim Burton meets the Wizard of Ozzy.

Speaker 17 He kind of looks like a rooster. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I don't like it at all. It makes me upset.

Speaker 17 Look at it. I,

Speaker 17 I, no disrespect to the artists, and they may have just been following a directive. I think it looks so zany and weird and not grounded.

Speaker 17 It looks like a, it looks like a Saturday morning cartoon to me, as opposed to like a feature film, in my opinion. So they're adapting this story, and I just don't think

Speaker 17 it's working. I don't have a sense that it's in development hell because of this,

Speaker 17 but based on what we finally get versus where they were, I think the problem is this movie has no heart, right? It has no reason to exist right now.

Speaker 17 They've basically just adapted the original book straight up, and there's not really like a core idea to it. They needed someone to give the Iron Giant a heart.

Speaker 17 And you alluded to this at the beginning, Alex, but in 1994, Brad Bird was very much still putting his heart back together.

Speaker 17 So in 1989, Brad Bird's older sister, Susan, was fatally shot in her home by her estranged husband in a murder-suicide.

Speaker 17 Her obituary called for any memorial contributions to be made to the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence or Handgun Control, Incorporated.

Speaker 17 She and Brad Bird had been extremely close, and Bradbird was lost. He says he retreated from the world for a while, and then he read The Iron Giant, and he had an epiphany.
And I'll read his quote.

Speaker 17 What if a thing developed a soul? And what if that thing found out that it was designed to kill, but it didn't want to kill? What if a gun had a soul and didn't want to be a gun?

Speaker 17 So Brad Bird went back to Warner Brothers. He didn't run anything by his development executives.
He went straight to the heads of the movie division and he pitched the Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 It's 1957, Sputnik's in the air, the Cold War is on, and there's absolute paranoia about the Russians.

Speaker 17 This giant thing splashes down in the middle of the ocean, and a lonely kid, he's telling the giant about life. The giant is like a newborn child who one day discovers that he has this terrible power.

Speaker 17 You have rock and roll paranoia and government agents and the army and robots. How is that not great for animation? Let Disney do the fairy princesses.

Speaker 17 You know, that's fine, but why can't we do something that's very different? End quote. It's a great pitch.
He wanted to cut the space bat, add in new characters, a single mother, a beatnik, a G-Man.

Speaker 17 Halfway through the pitch, one of the executives elbows another one, like, write this down. And they did, write it down.
Brad Bird wrapped up, and Warner Brothers said,

Speaker 17 all right, we'll do it. But there was one big problem.
Brad Bird had never directed a movie before. And Brad Bird had a reputation for being an asshole.

Speaker 17 I left this behind the scenes documentary, thanking God I never worked for Brad Bird. Wow.
An incredibly brilliant storyteller

Speaker 17 Who, by his own admission, I think, is incredibly difficult to work with.

Speaker 17 I would especially imagine top-down to manage. He'd been fired from Disney for being a pain in the ass.

Speaker 17 And according to one source, when Bird was in contract negotiations at Warner Brothers, the head of animation got calls from other people in the industry warning him that they were, quote, playing with fire.

Speaker 17 which may be why they hired a second writer while they were making Brad Bird's deal to make this movie. So Tim McCanleys had written two or three scripts for Warner Brothers.

Speaker 17 They'd optioned secondhand Lions, which wouldn't be made until 2003. And he'd done a few revisions for other films.
He gets a call.

Speaker 17 Studio head Lorenzo de Bonaventura sends him the CD of Pete Townsend's Iron Man rock opera. So very much still thinking it's going to be a Pete Townsend rock opera.

Speaker 17 And Warner Brothers sets up a meeting. Here's his recounting of the conversation.
Warner Brothers.

Speaker 17 Brad Bird just told us how to do the Iron Giant, but they're giving us two months to make this deal, and we want to hire you as a writer now. McCanley's, well, can I meet with Bird?

Speaker 17 Warners, no, he won't meet with anyone while we're making the deal. McCanley's, what is his pitch? Warners, well, we have somebody writing up what we remember.
McCanley's, excuse me? End quote.

Speaker 17 The most

Speaker 17 haphazard process. So it seems like Warner Brothers wants to get a writer on before Bird is fully hired so that Bird cannot interfere with the process of bringing a writer on.

Speaker 17 Let's discuss some of the key key contributions that McCanley's makes because they're very important.

Speaker 17 He makes Dean an artist who lives in a scrapyard where he makes art. Which I loved.
He makes paranoia the real enemy of the story instead of Russia.

Speaker 17 And most importantly, and this is a reflection of that, he changes the ending. According to the version of Bradbird's pitch that the executives wrote down, the movie would end with the U.S.

Speaker 17 and Russia throwing nukes at each other over the horizon. The giant stops it, but in the process dies.
And McCanley says, you can't kill E.T. Let's do an E.T.
with the ending. And we bring him back.

Speaker 17 Have the giant save the day in a much smaller one-missile kind of way, removing the part where the U.S. and Russia are sending the nukes at each other.
It's self-inflicted.

Speaker 17 The United States paranoia gets the best of itself. So Brad Bird's deal gets finalized on a Friday.
And on Monday, McCanley's comes into the office and Bird just goes, who are you?

Speaker 17 And McCanley says, hey, I'm here to write your script. And Bird goes, no, I'm writing the script.
And McCanley says, look, whatever you want to do, I'm here to work for you.

Speaker 17 And I've worked on five movies at Warner Brothers and they all got green lit because I know how these guys think and I can get your movie green lit.

Speaker 17 Plus, I got my own movie I want to make called Dancer Texas. This is just a gig.
But Brad Bird says, fine, fine, fine. But just so we're clear.
We're not making a musical.

Speaker 17 And McCanley's probably has the Townsend CD on him at this point in time. He's like, excuse me? We were hired to do a musical with Pete Townsend.
He is our executive producer.

Speaker 17 He already wrote the songs. Like, this is the album.
This is what we were here to do. And Brad was like, I don't care.
We're not doing it.

Speaker 17 We're flying to see him on Thursday, and I'm telling him that we're not doing it.

Speaker 17 So they've got storyboard artists waiting. They're scheduled to meet with Townsend on Thursday.
They lock themselves in a room for 12 hours a day to break the story.

Speaker 17 They start comparing their Hollywood scars. They quickly become friends and they fly to London and they say, Pete, we love you.
We're not using your songs. And he says, that's fine.

Speaker 17 I already got paid. And that was the end of Pete Townsend's involvement in the Iron Jack.
That's amazing.

Speaker 17 I would watch like a 12-hour documentary about like high-profile musicians' involvement in animated movies because it's

Speaker 17 sting in Emperor's New Groove. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking.
It's always weird. It's never not weird.

Speaker 17 How about the fact that Cats Don't Dance was supposed to be a star vehicle for Michael Jackson, and then he just pulled out of the movie and it bombed. Like,

Speaker 17 yes, it's always weird. Because animation takes forever.
And I think, you know, pop stars are on a cadence where they are not waiting around forever for something to finish.

Speaker 17 It would be amazing. So they fly back to Los Angeles.
There's 200 artists ready to roll, and they have two months to finish a script. Now, by 1996, Disney animated films had gotten expensive.

Speaker 17 So $30 million in the late 80s, you know, Little Mermaid, that's cute. Aladdin, 96, Hunchback of Notre Dame, $70 million.
Hercules, $85 million. Mulan, $90 million

Speaker 17 for a few reasons. Paper was so expensive.
It was a paper.

Speaker 17 Everywhere.

Speaker 17 People were expensive. So the Disney Renaissance and competition with DreamWorks in particular had sparked all of this wage competition, right?

Speaker 17 If you wanted the best artists, you had to pay them like the best artists. And Warner Brothers just couldn't afford to do that.
When Turner and Warner Brothers merged, we talked about this.

Speaker 17 Cats Don't Dance, which was a Turner broadcasting animated movie, was in post. That came out and oh my God, did it flop.
It made $3.5 million against a $32 million budget.

Speaker 17 So the budget for Warner Brothers Family Entertainment's first fully animated feature film, Quest for Camelot, was set at $40 million, which was basically less than half of what Disney was paying.

Speaker 17 And this was going to be true for the Iron Giant as well. So they basically had to find a team of young artists, new artists, retired artists that we could pull out of retirement.

Speaker 17 It was going to be this ragtag crew of underdogs. But the good thing was, Brad Bird is kind of like this comics comic of animators.

Speaker 17 So that amazing stories episode he'd done, The Family Dog, was kind of the stuff of legend. And so there were a lot of people that wanted to go work with Brad Bird.

Speaker 17 And he had a lot of contacts, like through The Simpsons.

Speaker 17 And, you know, some of these artists that they pulled in, they got some, I think, underrated talent because they were getting an opportunity that they couldn't get at Disney.

Speaker 17 So, Dean Wellens was one of the artists. He said, if you looked at my resume at that point, you would have said, you're not allowed in this building.

Speaker 17 Dean Wellens went on to do Treasure Planet, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Frozen, so many more movies.

Speaker 17 So I think they're getting some really great animators who just don't have the resumes to go to a DreamWorks or to go to a Disney. But they did get a couple big names.

Speaker 17 And one of those names was Richard Baisley, who we discussed had the first idea to do the Iron Giant as an animated feature. So he had graduated from Don Bluth and he had gotten his dream job.

Speaker 17 He was now a lead animator at Disney working on Hercules. Wow.
His buddy calls him up and says, hey, Brad Bird's making the Iron Giant at Warner Bros.

Speaker 17 So Baisley comes in for a meeting with Brad Bird and he's blown away by Bird's take.

Speaker 17 And Bird leans back, puts his feet on the desk and says, do you want to keep making the same old music all over and over or come make something new?

Speaker 17 And to everybody's shock, Baisley leaves Disney to go work at the Backwater Warner Brothers production of The Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 But Baisley said, never before had I been so excited or so sure about how good a project was going to be.

Speaker 4 Paige de Sorbo, they are Tommy John.

Speaker 11 Exactly.

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Speaker 17 Now, let's talk about the giant because the giant looks great. I think the giant is designed really wonderfully,

Speaker 17 very expressive without being distracting in any way. And Brad Bird called in a heavy hitter that we've discussed before on this podcast.

Speaker 17 So, director, producer, and visual effects artist Joe Johnston, I'm sure you guys are familiar with some of his work. He directed The Rocketeer, Jumanji, Honey, I Shrunk the Canadian.

Speaker 17 It all makes so much sense. And do you know how he broke into Hollywood? No.

Speaker 17 One of his first big jobs was designing the Millennium Falcon on Star Wars. Oh, wow.
Okay. Joe Johnston has had such an amazing career.
He's so talented because...

Speaker 17 He's able to lend so much to other people's projects, but also helm projects of his own. And I think that's such a unique skill set to be able to do both of those things.

Speaker 17 So Bird asks Johnston, hey, can you just like moonlight for us for a little bit? So he did the first drawings of what Brad Bird considers our giant.

Speaker 17 And then these sketches were refined by production designer Mark Whiting and animator Steve Markowski. So they ditched lips and tongue, which were just getting in the way.

Speaker 17 And they say, all he needs to show emotion is a combination of movable upper and lower eyelids, right?

Speaker 17 So they can kind of do this and this, and make him look like his eyes are expressing in some way, and a jaw that can slide up and down at the back.

Speaker 17 And all of a sudden, they have this really emotive character. And now they just need to find his voice.

Speaker 17 So, mid-90s,

Speaker 17 Warner Brothers is thinking, we're going to need some big names on this movie.

Speaker 17 Like, if we're going to compete, you know, Toy Story, Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, two of the biggest stars at the time, we got to get some big stars.

Speaker 17 And Brad Bird says, I don't care about anybody on your list. I want my people.
I don't give a shit.

Speaker 17 And Warner Brothers says, Brad, the only way we're going to go to your people is if everybody on our list says no. And that's the only way we're going to go to your people.

Speaker 17 You can actually hear him complaining about this in that documentary, Alex. Like, there's this moment where he says, The pressure's on for me to approve it.

Speaker 17 It doesn't matter whether they're appropriate or not. I got to go through them before I can go to my choice.
He's so upset about it.

Speaker 17 Now, there was one studio suggestion that Brad Bird actually liked, who did end up casting the movie.

Speaker 17 If you guys could guess who both Warner Brothers and Brad Bird liked, that ends up in this movie, who would you guess it is?

Speaker 16 Harry Connick Jr.

Speaker 17 No, I unfortunately know the answer is Jennifer Anniston. That's right.
It's Jennifer Anniston.

Speaker 17 Enormous star off of Friends. Fifth season at this point in time.

Speaker 17 I still think has proven to be

Speaker 17 maybe the underrated comedic motor of much of that show. She is an incredible performer.

Speaker 17 An amazing physical comedian. Just an incredible.
I think she and David Schwimmer are two of the best physical comedians of the 1990s. They are amazing.

Speaker 17 What they can do is unparalleled. So this was her first voice acting role.
And like you said, Lizzie, where is her voice acting career? I know. She's lovely.

Speaker 16 She's really good. She's really good.
She's just a great actress in general.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Okay.
So, Alex, I won't ask you this because I think you probably know, but for Dean, Lizzie, the studio wanted an actor who was not a musician, but was a very good dancer.

Speaker 16 John Travolta.

Speaker 17 Very good. John Travolta.
For Dean. Who, you know what? Harry Connick Jr.
is great. He would have been good.

Speaker 17 I think Travolta would have been good. Definitely.
But Bird always wanted Harry Connick Jr. because he's so good in Independence Day.
I'm guessing it was more hope floats that

Speaker 17 he was going to it. Both great.
Now for Kent, the studio wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger or, I believe, Jennifer Anderson's then-boyfriend Brad Pitt.

Speaker 17 The Arnold Schwarzenegger thing for that character makes no sense to me. Like that that character would be Austrian makes no sense.
Yeah, you're not getting any other accent out of Arnold.

Speaker 17 It doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, it's a tough one.
Now, they went with Christopher McDonald, Happy Gilmore, Leave it to Beaver, Flubber. He's perfect.
And then

Speaker 17 for Hogarth, they just saw everybody. And they ultimately chose 12-year-old actor Eli Marienthal.
He'd been in a few movies.

Speaker 17 He was in the slums of Beverly Hills, and she was actually wrapping his role as Stiffler's little brother in American Pie. I don't know if you guys remember that character.

Speaker 16 He's really good in this.

Speaker 17 He's great. His voice is like just rough enough, but still young, you know, that it really works.
And then, of course, for the Iron Giant, they cast a then-unknown Vin Diesel.

Speaker 17 He had done Saving Private Ryan, but it hadn't come out yet.

Speaker 17 And it was actually because he was friends with one of the production assistants, and the production assistant suggested his name, and Brad Bird just fell in love with his voice.

Speaker 16 It's an amazing voice. Like, come on.
If you heard Vin Diesel for the first time and you need someone to play a metal-eating giant alien, there's no other choice.

Speaker 17 Cinema.

Speaker 17 Yeah, no, he's great. I agree with this.
They say you can hear his heart when he speaks. And so they knew even they were going to electronically modulate the voice, you'd still hear his heart.

Speaker 17 And I completely agree. Now, one of the big problems that they had run into on Quest for Camelot is that they were trying to imitate the Disney model.

Speaker 17 And the Disney model has a lot of bureaucracy, right? There's like a lot of processes and everything's very formalized. But with Warner Brothers, they didn't have that many animators.

Speaker 17 So it really just meant they had all these middle management people, it sounds like, and they were, you know, basically picking over everything that was being done.

Speaker 17 So everything was being watched very closely, but they had to move really quickly. And these two things are at odds, right? They have half the budget of a Disney film.

Speaker 17 And so while a Disney movie might take five years to make, they have about two and a half years to make the Iron Giant. So Bird tells the team, we're going to be tough on everybody.

Speaker 17 You'll hate us in the short run and you'll love us in the long run. I do love that disclaimer.
When he said that, I was like, that's good. I have a feeling you're going to live up to this promise.

Speaker 17 Absolutely.

Speaker 17 But I do like the acknowledgement. That's all I need if I'm working in a situation like that is let me know up front what we're in for.

Speaker 17 Exactly. And they did, I think, change things in a slightly more transparent way.
They went to this method where they were openly critiquing everybody's work together.

Speaker 17 And so it's nobody was maybe beyond reproach. And it was about, okay, we're going to get to the best idea by airing everything out.
This actually became a lot more efficient.

Speaker 17 And they saved money by spending a lot more time on storyboarding and then animating only once things were really, really, really finalized in the storyboarding state.

Speaker 17 And so to convince the studio that they knew what they were doing, they also came up with a new way to make their story reels.

Speaker 17 And story reels were, you know, storyboards played in, you know, sequential order with voice over animation and music and sound effects behind them. Lizzie, I'm sure you came across that on Toy Story.

Speaker 17 This is very a common way to show this is what this reel of the film is going to look like when it's finally animated.

Speaker 17 So they actually brought these into a very new computer program called After Effects

Speaker 17 that nobody has heard about, right? Right? Alex, I mean, you probably, I mean, have you used After Effects? Sure, absolutely.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's like I was in commercial video production for a long time, and you use After Effects for so many different things, but just to know that this was novel and this was like how they were setting themselves apart from Disney technologically

Speaker 17 incredible to me.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's like using this technology to make the demonstration, like the rough versions or the pre-viss is that much more dynamic and that much more convincing, which then gave them a better idea of what the final product looked like.

Speaker 17 So they would have fewer issues with the final animation and they would have to reanimate it fewer times as a result. And then they needed to figure out how to integrate the 3D and the 2D elements.

Speaker 17 So as I mentioned in Beauty and the Beast, Bradbird felt like you could see the styles clash, like the ballroom looked too clean relative to the animation.

Speaker 17 So they actually created a program that would introduce imperfect hand-drawn lines into the computer-generated Iron Giant so that it would fit in better with the 2D animated world.

Speaker 17 So it's like rather than enhance the quality of the 2D, let's degrade the quality of the 3D to bring them together.

Speaker 17 Things behind closed doors, though, were tense because of the budget. And this is between Bradbird and Alison Nabate.

Speaker 17 And so one of the animators apparently describes it as like a little kid hiding up in his bedroom while mom and dad were fighting because his office was right next to their offices.

Speaker 17 And Abate was very polite about it. She basically said, you know, Bird's vision for the movie is bigger than the time and the money that we have.

Speaker 17 And like her responsibility is to keep this thing under budget.

Speaker 17 And his responsibility is to make the greatest possible movie that anybody has ever seen because that is Brad Bird's determination at this point in time.

Speaker 17 And this is when kind of both the best thing in in the world and the worst thing in the world happens. And that's on May 15th, 1998.
They release Quest for Camelot.

Speaker 17 It's the first fully animated feature for the studio. Did either of you guys see this movie? No.
I didn't even know it existed. Yeah.
Well, you and most of America, because this movie... bombed.

Speaker 17 It had an incredible voice cast, Carrie Elwis, Gary Oldman, Eric Idle, Don Rickles, Jane Seymour, Celine Dion, Pierce Brosnan, Jalil White, Gabriel Byrne, Bronson Pinchot. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I want to know, this is my time that I've said on other shows, but I was once blocked on Twitter by Eric Idol

Speaker 17 because I joked that I thought that if George Harrison was still alive, he would have turned to QAnon and someone brought him into it and he blocked me immediately. So

Speaker 17 this is my time to share this factoid.

Speaker 17 It's an appropriate time.

Speaker 17 That's amazing. Retroactively, that's why Eric Idol's movie bombed.

Speaker 17 You'd think he could take a joke, but no, I understand. No, no.
No, no. He was probably just thinking to himself, well, well i did not come up with that so

Speaker 16 a famously unfunny man

Speaker 17 so quest for camelot had been expensive it had gone over budget 40 million dollars still less than a disney movie but it only brought in 38 million dollars it also had i think i have seen have you seen this i may have i don't remember it at all The imagery looks familiar.

Speaker 17 It's a musical. Yeah.
It's a little janky. Yeah.

Speaker 17 It had a really tough production. Oh, yeah.
I can see. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I know this exists. Yeah.
They reassigned animators from Space Jam to this, like away from this movie to Space Jam. I mean, because, and then Space Jam made a lot of money.

Speaker 17 And so this movie lost its animators. One of its directors was fired.
One of the effects supervisors recalled. The head of layout was kicked out.

Speaker 17 The head of background, the executive producer, the producer, the director, all the heads rolled.

Speaker 17 But what's interesting is I get the sense that Quest for Camelot actually gave the Iron Giant a lot of air support because this was the troubled child at the studio, Quest for Camelot.

Speaker 17 And then after Quest for Camelot bombed, the studio cleaned house. So the animators are busy on the Iron Giant so they can all of the executives above them.

Speaker 17 And all of a sudden, it's not top-heavy anymore. Brad Bird said it was kind of like having free run of the Titanic.

Speaker 17 And he uses that metaphor because after the Iron Giant, Warner Brothers has decided they're going to shut down their animation division. So the Iron Giant is the last movie in the house.

Speaker 17 And it sounded like that they were already, they already had cold feet about animation because of things sort of like the scenario you just described.

Speaker 17 And so that relationship between Abate and Bird was so contentious in part because not only is she doing the sort of liaising that a producer has to do in representing the studio interests, the studio is already very weird about what they're doing with the future of animation.

Speaker 17 And there's that part in the documentary where they're like, you know, this, that documentary, I think, was pulled from footage that was shot right after the movie came out.

Speaker 17 And and they're like what was it like working with brad and she's just like i have to think for a minute i hated working with brad yeah good for her i really felt for

Speaker 17 her more than i ever feel for someone who's representing studio interests not because not just because of that contentious relationship but just thinking about being someone who is trying to balance delivering the creative product of someone who's clearly a visionary, something that would become a a masterpiece for them.

Speaker 17 And then also having to balance

Speaker 17 the uncertainty of a studio seems like a horrifying position.

Speaker 17 Yeah, because on the one hand, she's probably saying, Brad, I want to help you, but also, Brad, if you don't shut up, they're going to kill this movie. Like, they don't care.

Speaker 17 They don't care about animation, right? This isn't Disney where they need to release an animated movie every year or on a two-year cadence, and they're not going to kill this project.

Speaker 17 Warner Brothers is looking for every excuse to get out of the animation business at this point in time. So, I agree.
It's like, on the one hand, she's trying to keep it on life support,

Speaker 17 you know, and I'm sure, but I'm sure Brad can't see that because he just sees her as an impediment. And he's, you know, if you're not helping him,

Speaker 17 the sense I get with Brad Bird is he's kind of the type of person where if you're not helping him, you're in his way.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 so, I agree. I think that would be an impossible position to be in.

Speaker 17 Doesn't sound like it was a great experience for her. Although she's gone on to do to produce some incredible and animated films.
She's continued in animation.

Speaker 17 So I think it just wasn't a good relationship between the two of them. Now,

Speaker 17 they did all of a sudden have a lot of creative freedom because of this. So the movie continues to come together and they make some important changes.
So there's the deer scene, Lizzie,

Speaker 17 where the Iron Giant witnesses the death for the first time. In the first version, they went with more of like a mice and men.
And the giant, the giant accidentally killed the deer.

Speaker 17 No, he lennied the deer.

Speaker 17 He lennied the deer. And they said that was too sad and too dark.
So then they toyed with the idea of them just finding the deer dead. And then they landed on the hunters.

Speaker 17 And then we understand the gun, and it works very well. According to Brad Bird, his favorite moment of the Iron Giant happened during prose production.
They're in the editing room.

Speaker 17 All the lead crew members are watching the scene where Hogarth teaches the Iron Giant about souls, and there is not a dry eye in the house. Except mine.
Yeah, except for Lizzie's.

Speaker 17 Quick thing on the score. Bird scores the film with a collection of Bernard Herman cues.
That's for you, David. 50s and 60s sci-fi film musical score.

Speaker 17 And then Michael Kamen comes in to score the film. He goes to Eastern Europe in search of an old-fashioned sounding orchestra, which he ended up finding with the Czech Philharmonic.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 he said they recorded it without using sync. So there was no like click track or anything like that.
They recorded it just playing the music and then laid it in on top.

Speaker 17 Now, as the movie rounds third base, another shoe drops. And I'm sure this was frustrating for you to watch as it was for me,

Speaker 17 Alex. The downside of all of this freedom is that the Iron Giant is an orphan and they won't give it a release date.

Speaker 17 So it's been aiming for the summer of 1999 this entire time. And you can see early casting documents, early scripts, and they're all saying summer of 99, summer of 99.
And they're entering 99, right?

Speaker 17 Winter of 99, January, February, and they're clearing all these hurdles, and they don't have a release date. There's no release date for this movie, which is insane.

Speaker 17 They do these release dates a year in advance. Abate said she was at toy fairs and licensing fairs, and they'd say, When are you coming out? This is great.
And she says, I don't know.

Speaker 17 And because she doesn't know, she can't get self-space at Toys R Us. She can't get a Happy Meals deal.
And all of these deals were so important to these animated movies at the time.

Speaker 17 And Bird said that there was a lot of concern about marketing the movie because there were no sidekick characters.

Speaker 17 So there was like only one character that could be made into merchandise, which was the Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 Nobody wanted the Hogarth toy or the, although a Kent Mansley, I work for the government toy would be really sexy space bat. This is where that would have come in.
Bring her back.

Speaker 17 That's what they're like. Could we get a mold of Sylvia Plath? And could we? Could it be sexier? Could it be more of a bat?

Speaker 17 I think this is, I think the problem, there's two problems

Speaker 17 that Warner Brothers is dealing with. The first problem is Tarzan.
So, Tarzan is Disney's animated summer tent pole for 1999. It is like everything that the Iron Giant is not, right?

Speaker 17 It is a recognizable name.

Speaker 17 It has a killer soundtrack by Phil Collins. Amazing.
Who all the youngsters love. We did.
I know. It was a great, actually a great, I really like that soundtrack.

Speaker 17 Yeah, my girlfriend from high school, who was a cheerleader that only wore pink, loved Phil Collins because of that movie. and it was so funny and anachronistic just to see that happen.

Speaker 17 It was great. It had also incredible 3D backgrounds, which looked like paintings.

Speaker 17 They developed this really cool software that allowed the trees, even though they were three-dimensional, to be given this painterly, like living tissue look as Tarzan is parkouring across them.

Speaker 17 It is an 800-pound gorilla. It cost a then-record $130 million to make.

Speaker 17 The most expensive animated film ever made, and Disney was spending another at least $70 million to market it.

Speaker 17 Toys, books, plushies, McDonald's happy meals, even a banana flavor chocolate bar with Nestle that I remember, I think I remember trying one or hearing about it. It sounded horrible.

Speaker 16 I remember the toys for sure.

Speaker 17 And then if they waited too long, Pixar was dropping Toy Story 2 in November.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 The other problem is that Warner Brothers was pouring money into live action, specifically Wicca Wicka Wild, Wild West. Yeah.

Speaker 17 The big spider from Superman Returns. That's right.

Speaker 17 Yeah, the noted Kevin Klein Will Smith buddy comedy.

Speaker 16 Which we will cover.

Speaker 17 We're going to cover it. I mean, on paper, totally should have worked.
Men in Black was a total unexpected hit. This is Will Smith.
He's one of the biggest stars on the planet.

Speaker 16 Men in Black made sense, though.

Speaker 17 No, no, the script didn't make sense, but I'm just saying the elements kind of made sense.

Speaker 17 It was him and Barry Sondenfeld returning to do it again. And they also had had the Matrix breakout huge for them in March.

Speaker 17 So I think they really thought, okay, wow, we're going to be going into, you know, big into live action. And Harry Potter was just on the horizon, etc.

Speaker 17 Nobody's thinking about the Iron Giants. Somebody on the crew decides to do something about it and they leak a rough cut to Ain't It Cool News.

Speaker 17 And at first, Brad Bird is pissed, and then they published their review. And they said that the studio is in danger of making a massive mistake.

Speaker 17 There's a film that they've had yet to pay any attention to, something they've spent no time or money or energy on, and has the potential to be the greatest success out of any of these years' releases.

Speaker 17 I'm writing, of course, about Brad Bird's debut feature, one of the finest animated films I've ever seen, The Iron Giant. Can I say something about that, Chris?

Speaker 17 That I was really impressed by is that,

Speaker 17 as you said earlier, they invested so much into the storyboards and into the sort of the, you know, giving it life via After Effects, et cetera, because Bird had since learned that,

Speaker 17 you know, the less revisions you have to do later, the more money you're ultimately going to save.

Speaker 17 So because they had something that was so structured, they were able to share that as rough cut with Ainit Cool that they wouldn't have had otherwise had he not had that foresight because they didn't share the finished movie with Ainit Cool.

Speaker 17 They finished like the skeleton of the movie and still, I forget who that, it's Mortieri, but I forget the name of that reviewer.

Speaker 17 He had said, he's like, I watched this, it was like the skeleton of this movie and I was still crying at the end of it, which

Speaker 17 led to that sort of movie-saving review.

Speaker 17 The other thing, too, that I think is important to remember is what should have been an advantage is that you could also share this internally with marketing really early on.

Speaker 17 Marketing would then have months and months and months and months of time to develop a campaign that's complementary to the movie and really tease it up in the right way.

Speaker 17 I mean, I completely empathize. I know some people in film marketing where they say, you know, we get the movie, we're getting the movie 60 days before it drops.

Speaker 17 45, and we got to turn around a trailer and, you know, TikTok stuff and promotional materials. It's crazy.

Speaker 16 This was even the same. You know, I worked at Wondery for several years.
This was the same on these big podcast drops, too.

Speaker 16 It would be like, oh, yeah, we have this, you know, limited series that we've spent X amount of money on, and it's this huge, big deal. It's like, okay, well, can we hear it?

Speaker 16 It's like, no, it's, you know, and that was something that had to be changed over time because, yeah, they do need a lot of time to be able to figure out how to market something.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 they finally agreed to test screen the movie in April of 1999. I mean, according to Bird, it just tests off the charts.
Highest testing in 15 years.

Speaker 17 I do want to say a lot of the movies we cover, the director says, best test in 15 years. Like, it seems like a little bit of a, I believe it.
I'm just saying something to remember.

Speaker 17 Now, the studio realizes this movie is going to be great. And now we want more time to market it.
We're going to, let's release it in 2000.

Speaker 17 And I think by his own admission, Brad Pitt was arrogant and he was tired. Right.
And he was Brad Bird and Brad Pitt. Brad Bird was arrogant.
I have something to say about Brad Pitt, right now.

Speaker 17 So do I.

Speaker 17 And he was angry. And he basically said, like, look, you guys had years to get ready for this.
It's time to release it. So they schedule it for August 6th, 1999.

Speaker 17 Lizzie's, and they say, there's this little girl who is

Speaker 17 turning. I'm not going to see this movie though.
She's turning 10. She's not going to see it, but we should definitely do it on her birthday.
She's not going to see it.

Speaker 17 So it gives the marketing team less than four months to promote it. Brad Bird and his team are convinced.
Doesn't matter. This thing's going to be a hit.
They throw a big rap party.

Speaker 17 Marketing starts rolling out. Brad Bird's like, I don't love the trailer.
By the way, I'm guessing he threw a stink about it. I'm guessing it was not just like he let it roll off his back.

Speaker 17 I'm guessing he went to them and said, this is the problem with the trailer. But he figures the movie tested so well, word of mouth is going to carry it through.

Speaker 17 Iron Giant comes out on August 6th, 1999, and the critics love it. Ebert says this is a movie that is trying to move animation in a new direction.
It's so different than Disney.

Speaker 17 It tells a story with no sidekicks, no songs, no dancing teacups. By the way, he loves Disney.

Speaker 17 He's just saying it's very different than Disney, whereas DreamWorks is doing something a little closer to Disney. Brad Bird is very excited.

Speaker 17 He goes to a theater in LA and it has a Johnny Rockets next door. You guys remember Johnny Rockets? Of course.
Now, marketing had told him we're putting giant, iron giant posters into Johnny Rockets.

Speaker 17 Totally fits in with the retro vibe. So he goes into the Johnny Rockets.
There's no Iron Giant poster. He says, all right, well, maybe they missed this one.

Speaker 17 I mean, it is a big one in LA, but maybe they missed it.

Speaker 17 He goes up to the box office. There's 10 theaters.
Each has the logo, you know, backlit with the movie with its font on it.

Speaker 17 Iron Giant is playing in theater 10, and the Iron Giant has been written on a white piece of paper that is taped to that marquee box up there.

Speaker 17 He goes up the escalator, and there's big banners for all the movies releasing that weekend. No Iron Giant.
Looks around. There it is.
A 3D standee of the giant.

Speaker 17 And one of its legs has been ripped off.

Speaker 17 The Iron Giant opened wide on the same day as the Sixth Sense. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 17 Which pulled in $26 million that weekend. The Iron Giant made 5.7.

Speaker 17 It was good for ninth place. Wow.
The Iron Giant was broken.

Speaker 16 Here's what's sort of surprising about, like,

Speaker 16 on

Speaker 16 at a face level, it doesn't make sense that the sixth sense would pull away from something like the Iron Giant. You're talking about what's, you know, technically a horror movie-ish.

Speaker 17 I think it got a lot of those 10, 11, 12, 13 year olds.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's the thing.

Speaker 16 Well, and also, like, this is

Speaker 16 the sixth sense, I think when we talked about it, like, it's a pretty safe, you know, almost entry level.

Speaker 17 It's gateway horror.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's gateway horror. And, and this is something the Iron Giant, first of all, sixth sense, I think, appealed to both boys and girls.

Speaker 16 At a face level, the Iron Giant may be a little bit more difficult to market towards girls, at least at that time.

Speaker 16 And yeah, I never would have thought about that, but I can completely see why the Sixth Sense would destroy this movie.

Speaker 17 And Lizzie, the vibe, like speaking of Bird's annoyance with the marketing campaign, the vibe of the commercials for this movie were like, get ready this summer for a new form of heavy metal.

Speaker 17 Like, it was not, yeah,

Speaker 17 it was not nostalgic, it was not wide-eyed and kind of introspective. It was very much like, this is a big robot, and he's got a stomp, stop, stop.
That's what I remember.

Speaker 17 I remember big old robot, and yeah, not monster. Do you like monster trucks?

Speaker 16 Kind of.

Speaker 17 Do you like Godzilla?

Speaker 16 You know what I like more?

Speaker 17 Ghosts.

Speaker 16 Ghosts and Tony Collette.

Speaker 17 Are you a little girl that lives in Maine?

Speaker 17 I love this movie.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Okay.
Well, the funny thing about Bradbird,

Speaker 17 as I mentioned, is that he's kind of this comics comic of animators, right? People in the know know how good his stuff is, even though he hasn't directed a movie yet until the Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 And what's interesting is that people in the know knew that the Iron Giant was great.

Speaker 17 That fall, The Iron Giant cleaned up at the 27th annual Annie Awards, which are basically the Oscars for Animation. It was nominated for 15 and it won nine.
Wow.

Speaker 17 Meaning it won more than a third of all of the categories in the competition.

Speaker 17 It beat out Tarzan, it beat out A Bug's Life, it won best animated theatrical feature, best character animation, best effects animation, best music in an animated feature production, best production design in an animated feature production, storyboarding, voice acting, writing, and best directing in an animated feature production.

Speaker 17 Now, Warner Brothers, to their credit, knew we messed up a little bit with the release of this movie. So they revamped for the home video release.

Speaker 17 According to the Wall Street Journal, they cross-promoted with the Pokemon movie. Very smart.
They did a tie-in with Honey Net Cheerios, AOL, and General Motors, all of my favorite brands as a child.

Speaker 17 They got the backing of three congressmen and the founder of Action for Children's Television, Peggy Charon, who very much loved this movie and also said that the campaign for it originally, the theatrical one, was the quote, worst ad campaign I've seen in a long time, end quote.

Speaker 17 So the Iron Giant was released on VHS and DVD on November 23rd, 1999. All in all, I read that they spent $35 million promoting the home video release of this movie.
Oh, wow. And it paid off.

Speaker 17 It became a cult classic. As you mentioned, Alex, people evangelized this movie to their friends and family.
And this is where I really grew familiar with it.

Speaker 17 I did see it in theaters, but I would watch it on Cartoon Network. They would do these 24-hour rerun movie marathons of the Iron Giant on Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, starting in the early 2000s.

Speaker 17 Now, the movie was dedicated to Brad Bird's sister, Susan Bird, and it was also dedicated to Ted Hughes.

Speaker 17 Hughes did not live to see the film, but he did read the script and was very pleased before he passed away.

Speaker 17 Now, Brad Bird, we're going to cover more of his movies, so we don't need to do his full legacy, but, you know, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol, very, very good live-action film.

Speaker 17 Incredibles 2, and he's currently in production on Ray Gun. Full circle.
That movie came full circle. Okay.

Speaker 17 Now, before we end, there's just this, there's one part of the story that has bugged me because the version of the story that I'd always heard was this was based on a story written to comfort Ted Hughes' kids.

Speaker 17 I'm so glad you're talking about this.

Speaker 17 And then Brad Bird was dealing with the death of his sister, and then he made this movie. And that's technically, factually true.

Speaker 17 But I didn't really know much about Ted Hughes, and I didn't know much about Sylvia Plath before researching this project.

Speaker 17 And we don't need to do a giant addendum, but it's important, I think, to give a little more context. So

Speaker 17 Ted Hughes published this story in 1968. He and Sylvia Plath had a very tumultuous relationship.
Sylvia Plath did attempt suicide at least one time before she was with Ted Hughes. It's possible.

Speaker 17 one time shortly before her successful final attempt. So let's go chronologically.

Speaker 17 About a year after the book was published, Asia Wevel, with whom Hughes had had the affair that precipitated the end of his relationship with Plath, committed suicide in the exact same way that Sylvia Plath had asphyxiation from a gas stove.

Speaker 17 She also killed their child, four-year-old Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura. That is Ted Hughes' third child.

Speaker 17 There were never any criminal charges or anything brought against Ted Hughes, but I do think it's important to mention that this exact circumstance repeated itself with him a second time

Speaker 17 and more important in 2017 previously unpublished correspondence between sylvia plath and her former therapist allege abuse at the hands of ted hughes he obviously has passed away can't defend himself this is um

Speaker 17 these these letters have been reviewed and and released and whatnot You can find that information online. And so

Speaker 17 Ted Hughes didn't really strike me as a hero as I was kind of going through this and reading more about Plath and whatnot. And so I decided I need to reread some of Plath's stuff too,

Speaker 17 because

Speaker 17 again, I don't know. I just felt like I needed a more complete picture.
And so I reread The Bell Jar. And it's so good, so great.
And she's so funny.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's so tragic, but it is so funny at the same time. It's such a not sob story.
She's like, she remains endlessly witty, even as the book gets so dark.

Speaker 17 And what was interesting is that I found that there was this really intriguing strand of DNA that the Bell Jar shares with the Iron Giant film.

Speaker 17 And in a lot of ways, I think that the film is much more sophisticated than the book it's based on. And so in the Bell Jar, Lizzie, I'm sure you remember this.

Speaker 17 Esther, the main character, thinly veiled, perhaps Sylvia. is told by her dullered love interest at the beginning who gets fat when he has tuberculosis it's so funny.
I need to say this.

Speaker 17 It's so funny. This suitor's mother says, and I'm paraphrasing, what a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

Speaker 17 A man is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots from. And then Esther laments, that's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married.

Speaker 17 The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from.

Speaker 17 I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like colored arrows from a 4th of July rocket.

Speaker 17 And so, what I wanted to end with, and I'm so sad that we lost Sylvia Plath so young, she was such a talent.

Speaker 17 But what I love about the Iron Giant is that it allows something that we all, or someone that we all have a preconception of what they're supposed to be, to choose what they are.

Speaker 17 And the Iron Giant chooses to be Superman. And Sylvia Plath, I think, very much was rebelling against what everybody was wanting her to be.

Speaker 17 And in her posthumously published poem, Ariel, if you guys read it, one of the last lines is, I am the arrow.

Speaker 17 And so

Speaker 17 to Sylvia Plath, the arrow, and to Iron Giant, the Superman, that is our coverage of the Iron Giant. What a beautiful way to tie that together.
Tenuous, but maybe, maybe we got there.

Speaker 16 All right, maybe you got me to love the Iron Giant.

Speaker 17 All right. Alex, we do something at the end of every episode.
called What Went Right, where you can pick any element of the movie. It could be a particular individual involved.

Speaker 17 It could be an aspect of the finished film. Anything that you feel went particularly right.

Speaker 17 You can go first. You can go second.
You can go last. I'll tee it up.
Lizzie, maybe do you want to lead in?

Speaker 16 My what went right as far as this story today, I think, is Tim McCanley's.

Speaker 16 I, you know, when you talked about the additions that he made to this story, I don't think that this movie works at all without those adjustments.

Speaker 16 They're so smart and they bring so much heart to this.

Speaker 16 That's no knock against Brad Bird, against the original story, against anything, but he feels a bit like an unsung hero in this to have come in and have been able to impact this the way that he did because those are those are some major changes

Speaker 16 that you know might seem sort of minor in the scope of things, but they really affect the movie as a whole.

Speaker 17 I think that's a great.

Speaker 17 great selection.

Speaker 17 Man, it's hard. You know what? I'm just going to do it because I'd feel like no one's going to pick him because he's prickly, but I'm going to pick Brad Bird because,

Speaker 17 you know,

Speaker 17 he does seem like a tough son of a bitch to work with watching that documentary. But man, is he good? And he's talented.
And I think he brought out the best in a lot of people.

Speaker 17 And so I'll give it to Brad Bird. And with that, all of the wonderful animators on this movie who maybe weren't going to get it, who didn't get a shot somewhere else, you know what I mean?

Speaker 17 Or somebody said they were over the hill or whatever it is.

Speaker 17 There's so much talent in this world and it's certain opportunities are gatekept in Hollywood in so many horrible ways.

Speaker 17 And so one thing that I'm thrilled by is that this 2D renaissance allowed for more opportunities, you know, at this point in time.

Speaker 17 I have friends who are writers right now and have been unemployed because there's no writer's rooms, you know, rolling right now for television, who are just, they're amazing writers.

Speaker 17 And you put them in a room and they'll come up with a story that'll do everything you want, you know, to an audience, audience, but there's just not the opportunity.

Speaker 17 And so I'll give it to Brad Bird, who created a lot of opportunity through his passion for this project.

Speaker 17 And just sidebar, Alison and Abate, just God bless. Like,

Speaker 17 God bless you. That must have been brutal.
And I'm saying, I say that with my whole of my heart. That must have been so stressful.

Speaker 17 And also, if you're a producer or an executive who cares about your projects, which so many do, and I know sometimes we tend to demonize certain studio executives, but the real good ones, like they care so much.

Speaker 17 She must have just been popping tums throughout that whole goddamn movie to deal with the indigestion of having to serve, you know, the two masters in that instance. So, um, anyway, that's mine.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I just, just echoing the stuff about Brad Bird, that's the thing I was oscillating between while I was watching that documentary is that, is the understanding that if you're up against sort of like a commercial venture like the studio and trying to deliver an artistic vision, every day is going to be a fight.

Speaker 17 But also

Speaker 17 the myth that you have to be a prick to be an auteur is very much a myth.

Speaker 17 So that was an interesting sort of oscillation I was going through while watching that, but I'm very grateful that he fought to make this because I love this movie. Mine is not a person.

Speaker 17 It's just the simplicity of the message, which is what you were saying earlier, Chris.

Speaker 17 I think that it's there are, particularly in the 90s, which was like, be yourself, just be yourself, be eccentric, do the thing, whatever.

Speaker 17 Like, there was everywhere we didn't need another version of that.

Speaker 16 Terrible advice.

Speaker 17 Tell me your weird ass self. I like the very conservative message of like, you are what you do.
I think that that is like extremely important.

Speaker 17 Yeah, you are the sum of your actions. You are the sum of your actions now more than ever.
And

Speaker 17 it's not too late to change your actions to be what you ultimately want to be. And I think that that is a beautiful and incredibly important message.
And that's why this resonated.

Speaker 17 And I think that just the simplicity of that and the reminder that comes with that is something that gives this a little more weight every time I watch it.

Speaker 16 Beautifully put.

Speaker 17 Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 17 Tell the folks, I mean, they can find you on You Are Good. They can find you on The OC Again.
The OC again. Can I say a thing just quickly about what went right about your show?

Speaker 17 The last time you were on my show, I maybe embarrassingly talked about how much I love you guys. I love you both so much.
You're incredible. This show is incredible.

Speaker 17 The thing I want to, and David, David Bowman, an unseen, sort of unseen hero of the show as well.

Speaker 17 Love David's scores for your movies, Chris.

Speaker 17 But we were talking earlier, and Jesse, I was introduced to Jesse, who does a lot of the research on your show. And I think what your show does so well

Speaker 17 is the research. I'm such a research nerd.
Anytime I listen to a show and I hear there's one source, I get preemptively angry. Anytime I hear reading from Wikipedia straight up, I get preemptively.

Speaker 17 Yours is the gold standard. And I'm sure Jesse isn't always recognized as a part of that because you two are ahead of that show.
So I want to cheer you two for doing it, but also.

Speaker 17 This is to the researchers. This is to the archivists.
You all are wonderful. We really appreciate your work.
So thank you guys for making such a high standard of a show.

Speaker 17 I love, love, love what you do.

Speaker 16 Thank you. Yes.
Shout out to Jesse and I'll shout out our other researcher as well, Laura, who

Speaker 16 both do amazing work.

Speaker 17 It's truly what I point at your show as what I think great shows are to many, many people who are getting into this sort of thing every single time. So thank you.
So

Speaker 17 you are good as a feelings podcast about movies. The OC, again, is kind of an OC rewatch show, but really we're just remembering what was going on by way of pop culture at that time.
A lot. Tune in.

Speaker 17 A lot of not great stuff, too.

Speaker 17 A lot of not great stuff and a lot of great stuff really a lot of great stuff sometimes so thank you so much for having me i i love the show obviously and i love this movie and to get to talk talk about it with you two is is such a blessing we loved having you thank you if you guys are enjoying this podcast there are a few easy ways to support us number one leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this show on number two hit follow or subscribe on that podcatcher so you can get every episode every Monday and sometimes Friday.

Speaker 17 Number three, if you'd like some additional bonus content, you can now get our bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 17 You can sign up within Apple Podcasts for $4.99 a month, and you will get at least one bonus episode every month. To be clear, these bonus episodes are a slight variation of our normal episodes.

Speaker 17 We typically cover movies that have been recently released, and they're a bit more skewed towards a review with a little bit of a history of how that movie came into existence.

Speaker 17 If you guys want even more, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with listeners like you.

Speaker 17 You can head to www.patreon.com/slash what went wrong podcast. You can join for free.
You can see updates, musings, etc., from us. For $5, you get all of our bonus episodes and an ad-free RSS feed.

Speaker 17 And for $50,

Speaker 17 you get an Iron Giant-style shout-out just like one of these.

Speaker 17 Brittany Morris

Speaker 17 Brooke

Speaker 17 Cameron Smith

Speaker 17 C. Grace B

Speaker 17 Chris Meo

Speaker 17 Chris Saka

Speaker 17 David Frisco Laddie

Speaker 17 D. B.
Smith

Speaker 17 Darren Dale Conley

Speaker 17 Don Shimon

Speaker 17 Evan Singleton

Speaker 17 Em Zoria

Speaker 17 Evan Downey

Speaker 17 Fabija G

Speaker 17 Film It Yourself

Speaker 17 Frankenstein

Speaker 17 Dalen and Miel

Speaker 17 The Broken Glass Case

Speaker 17 Grace Otter

Speaker 17 Half Greyhound

Speaker 17 James McAvoy

Speaker 17 Jason Frankel

Speaker 17 JJ Robin Doll

Speaker 17 Jory Hill Piper

Speaker 17 Jose Salto

Speaker 17 Karina Canaba,

Speaker 17 Kate Elrington,

Speaker 17 Kathleen Olson,

Speaker 17 Amy Olgisla-McCoy,

Speaker 17 Maria La,

Speaker 17 Lena L. J.

Speaker 17 Lydia Howes,

Speaker 17 Matthew Jacobson,

Speaker 17 Michael McGrath,

Speaker 17 Nate the Knife,

Speaker 17 Mason Sentinel,

Speaker 17 Rosemary Southworth,

Speaker 17 World Your

Speaker 17 C,

Speaker 17 Just C,

Speaker 17 Staff Boshiow,

Speaker 17 Soman Ginani,

Speaker 17 C. Richard Hauer,

Speaker 17 Suzanne Johnson,

Speaker 17 The Rovost Family,

Speaker 17 The O's, Sound Like O's.

Speaker 17 Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of What Went Wrong. Next week, we are coming back with our first holiday movie of this holiday season, Bad Santa.

Speaker 17 So if you guys want to get down with the feel-bad movie of the year, I think I stole that from the girl with a dragon tattoo marketing, join us next week for Bad Santa.

Speaker 17 Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

Speaker 17 What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.
This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer.

The Iron Giant

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Transcript

More episodes from WHAT WENT WRONG

Bad Santa

The Curious Case of Grey Gardens (with Watch What Crappens)

Toy Story

[Bonus Preview] Frankenstein (2025) Review

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