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#4. Alien Invasion (plus Thanksgiving tips!)
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Dudes Chatting — Alien invasion movies: Built around Sonny's rave for Arrival (near the top of his year-end list — "like Contact but more artsy"), the guys taxonomize the whole alien-invasion genre: insect (Starship Troopers), germ (The Andromeda Strain), hard sci-fi (Contact), and B-movie schlock (Killer Klowns from Outer Space, They Live, the notorious Breeders). JVL again plugs Edge of Tomorrow (as in every prior episode) and re-champions Contact; Vic delivers a loving deep-dive on the bleak 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Donald Sutherland's final scream) and the 1980s V miniseries; Sonny defends the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds. JVL relays "shoe-leather reporting" from UVA's Paul Cantor, who pegs Mars Attacks as the key populist rebuttal to globalization-era invasion movies. Rapid-fire confessions: JVL has never seen Star Wars or 2001, Sonny's never seen any Body Snatchers, and Vic's never seen Avatar (cue relentless unobtainium mockery).
Reviews: Arrival (Sonny) — probably his movie of the year; the "ooey-gooey" citizens-of-the-world message is weak, but the personal, time-bending structure and Amy Adams are superb.
Thanksgiving special (supersized bonus segments): favorite dishes (Sonny's canned green-bean casserole with the all-important onion topping; JVL trolling hard for tofurkey and real — not jellied — cranberry sauce; Vic's mother's French chestnut-and-pork stuffing), an extended and very I-95-regional "favorite rest stops" bit (New Jersey Turnpike supremacy, Cheesequake, the Howard Stern men's room), and a Spirit of the Week: Bulleit Rye. Plus the recurring Corrections segment. (No standalone Box Office segment this week.)
Full transcript
?00:00:00♪♪
Guest00:00:10And now there is much we can learn from each other if we can negotiate a truce. We can find a way to coexist. Can there be a peace between us?
?00:00:23Peace. No peace.
Guest00:00:29Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.
Vic00:00:33♪♪ Hello and welcome back to The Weekly Substandard. No, this is not Nina Blackwood from MTV. This is Victor Matus recovering from a nasty bout of laryngitis. I am here in the studio with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. It's good to see you both. After a week hiatus, Jonathan, how have you been?
JVL00:01:04I've been great. Two of my kids got up at 2:30 in the morning last night and we're just telling each other stories and then we're upset when I inform them this is not allowed. That's lovely.
Vic00:01:14And also, on that note, Sonny Bunch, welcome back. Where have you been?
Sonny00:01:19I was in Reno last week, which was very nice. I went to Lake Tahoe. I paid my respects to Fredo. Did very little, a bit of gambling, and then sat around with the in-laws a lot.
Vic00:01:34It was fun. The great thing about having the sort of recovering from laryngitis is I get to do my Frankie Patangeli impressions.
Sonny00:01:40Wait, can you explain to me the MTV VJ reference from before? Yes, Nina Blackwood.
Vic00:01:45Who is Nina Blackwood? Oh my gosh. She was around when you were born. She started actually maybe two years before you were even born, Sonny, and she was one of the original VJs, but her voice is like this, and she is actually on satellite radio now, and if you hear her on the 80s on 8 channel, it's like this. That's great. So it was really sexy in the 80s, and now it's kind of just smokey scary. But anyway, as I was saying, it allows me to get my Frankie Patangeli impression here
JVL00:02:12about you, Sonny, being up there in the Sierra Madre, drinking your champagne cocktails. That's right.
Sonny00:02:19Yeah, that's good. It's going to be one of those episodes.
Vic00:02:21Thank you. And as you know, people here have been recovering still from the election that we so presciently sort of predicted. The outcome, if you listen to the other episode ...
Sonny00:02:33The previous episode. Oh my gosh. Last time on The Weekly Substandard.
Vic00:02:36We really nailed it on the head. It was scary. It was like Nostradamus. But anyway, people are preparing for, of course, the arrival of Donald J. Trump and the transition team. But as you know, Sonny, it's not the only arrival that we're preparing for, is it?
Sonny00:02:55No. Well, arrival ...
Vic00:02:57There's a team of monkeys who sits around writing these transitions for you. Yes. It's all over my head. I spent weeks on the segues.
Sonny00:03:04Yeah. I'm with JVL. You need new monkeys. So arrival is actually, it's been in theaters for two weekends now. We're holding over for another because somebody was too sick to do this. Cough Victor.
Vic00:03:19You know, it's been going around, I just want to point that out. Swift got it. Mike Warren got it. Granted, all three of us were drinking from the same Solo cup. Maybe that didn't help.
Sonny00:03:27Yeah, this is why you got to stop spitting in each other's mouths. So arrival in theaters now. Everyone should go see it. It's probably at the top of my list of movies of the year. It stars Amy Adams as a linguist who must help the United States government solve the language riddle of an alien invasion of sorts. Aliens have come to town and they want to explain some things to us and we don't know how to talk to them, but we also don't know how to talk with each other. The humans. And it's partly about different nations not trusting each other, language barriers, empathy, learning to be better citizens of the world. That stuff is ooey and gooey and bad. But what's good is the way the film is structured, and I don't want to give too much of it away, but it is really more of a personal story about Amy Adams living her life. And the ways in which sadness and tragedy makes us complete humans.
Vic00:04:35Jonathan, you were going to say something there.
JVL00:04:37I'm just glad that we have a movie with this message, because I feel like here in America today, we do so much hearing, but not enough listening.
Vic00:04:45Yes. Sonny, tell us, who is the villain, really, in this movie?
Sonny00:04:51The villain is a lack of understanding. It's really more of a context.
Vic00:04:56Well, you know, I saw the movie with my eight-year-old son. Sorry. I know it's kind of G-rated material for him these days, but I went to see it, and anyway, I came away thinking that the enemy in this movie was right-wing radio.
Sonny00:05:12It is. Well, you know, this is one of these things that, like, six months ago, I would have been really kind of annoyed by, and, you know, like, oh, you know, right-wing radio doesn't have the ability to, like, make soldiers want to blow aliens up on their own, and contravene orders, but, you know, but I am going to tone that criticism of the film back a little bit because, frankly, these last few months.
Vic00:05:37Well, you know, at first I was worried about giving away the ending, but since I actually have no idea how it ended, I think that's a safe bet. I'm still waiting for the future me to tell the present me how it ended, anything like that. I hope that didn't require a spoiler alert.
Sonny00:05:52I don't know. It doesn't matter. What does it matter? Nothing matters anymore.
Vic00:05:55So you understood the ending. Is what you're saying?
Sonny00:05:56Yes. I'm not going to explain it to the audience because that that would, in fact, require a spoiler alert. But I'm just going to like, what do you think happened? Was it? Do you do you think that it was like a dream? I appreciate. No, no, no, no, no. Did Amy Adams wake up in the shower and you were like, oh, yes, no, it was.
Vic00:06:14I appreciate the flashbacks. And I thought I understood the concept of the flash forward. But there seems to be something going on here more than that because it's affecting the flash present. If that makes any sense. And I don't know how to read those circles. I'm sorry. Even at the end of the book, I don't understand.
JVL00:06:32You weren't able to understand the squid ink? No, I don't.
Sonny00:06:35The aliens in this movie, for people who haven't seen it yet, look basically like giant squids and they squirt their ink onto the glass and they make little drawings and like the little squiggles at the end represent like life or nuclear Armageddon or, you know, whatever.
JVL00:06:51Well, the giant squid is only the most terrifying animal on Earth. So I would trust an alien who showed up here.
Vic00:06:55You know, Jonathan would have been that soldier listening to the radio and then taking his orders from them.
Sonny00:07:02Squid are cannibals.
JVL00:07:04Do you know that? Like, they'll just eat each other. If you're like fishing and you catch a squid on the line, like the other squid will just be like, ah, and jump right on and eat it.
Vic00:07:10And I know you're sort of a squid expert, Jonathan. Is it true there's only one thing that's non-digestible in the squid?
JVL00:07:17The beak. The beak, yes. They don't have a mouth. They have a giant claw-like, almost like the beak of a parrot. Yes.
Vic00:07:24And it just doesn't decompose at all.
JVL00:07:25No, so the reason we know about, you just wound me up to make me embarrass myself again. But you know what? I'm just going to, no shame, no judgments, go forward. So when the giant squid, which is one, as I said, the most terrifying animal on the planet, the reason we've never seen one alive, a fully grown giant squid alive, so the reason we have estimates of their size is because they have found the beaks of them inside the bellies of dead sperm whales, because the sperm whale is the only thing which can hunt and kill them.
Vic00:07:55Now, that in itself sounds very scary. That would be a great movie. You should have a movie about a guy hunting a sperm whale.
JVL00:08:01Maybe a book.
Vic00:08:02Well, that too, maybe. Like a book. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's start with a movie first. Like most great classics, they start with movies, like Romeo and Juliet, and then they move on to, you know.
Sonny00:08:11I mean, what is a book but a script and, you know.
Vic00:08:15Would you consider Arrival, would you consider Arrival Sunday to be one of your favorite all-time alien invasion movies? And if not, what is it? What else do you like?
Sonny00:08:26Well, it's a very interesting movie in that it is kind of like Contact, but more artsy. And it is... More artsy than Contact? Way more artsy than Contact. Way more artsy. But it has been sold kind of as this like action thriller, which it's not that at all. It's not that at all. I don't know if it's my favorite alien invasion flick. You know, I'm... When I'm... I'm going to sit down and throw in an alien invasion flick. It's going to be like an action-adventure type movie. It's going to be an Independence Day or, you know, War of the Worlds or something like that. Which one? Before we get to Independence Day. You're garbage. You're a garbage human being. No, I'm with Jonathan on that. Oh, my God. You're both garbage.
Vic00:09:13That was too crazy. War of the Worlds.
Sonny00:09:16Maybe this is just because I'm a little bit younger than you. I saw it in the movie theaters. This was like a formative cinematic experience.
Vic00:09:22You were three, I think, at the time. Which you're, of course, referring to Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds, not the Orson Welles' War of the Worlds.
Sonny00:09:31No, not the radio broadcast War of the Worlds. But there was a movie. That's not what I throw in. There was a movie. Yeah, there was a movie, not an Orson Welles movie. And I am referring to the Steven Spielberg War of the Worlds, though. How about you, Jon? It's pretty good.
JVL00:09:43Actually, I thought the Steven Spielberg Cruise War of the Worlds was pretty good. I feel like we've now done, is this our fourth or fifth episode? Fourth episode, and I've mentioned The Edge of Tomorrow in every single episode. I really like it. That's one of my favorite alien invasion movies. I really, really love Contact. I actually just rewatched it, and it is, I would say, I watch a lot of movies while running on the treadmill, and Contact is like the lower threshold of enough action to keep you invested in what you're watching while you're running like six or seven miles. And it's pretty great, and you have Nell hearing things, and the great Bill Fichtner, who is I think that might have been the first time I'd ever seen Bill Fichtner on screen, and he's a fabulous character actor. How about Rob Lowe as the Ralph Reed character?
Sonny00:10:32Rob Lowe as Ralph, not just like as little, almost literally. As like, almost literally. Ralph Reed. Basically dressed as Ralph Reed.
JVL00:10:38The only time Tom Skerritt has ever been bad in a movie, I think. Was he really bad, though?
Sonny00:10:44Wasn't he just speaking for the rest of the world? He was greedy.
JVL00:10:47A reunion between Jake Busey and Jodie Foster, for they were together for the first time
Sonny00:10:51on screen since they were kids, I think.
JVL00:10:55I love almost everything about that movie. When you say almost, I'm going to throw a name out there. Matthew McConaughey. Did you like him? Was he sort of- Young, young.
Vic00:11:02I thought he was like Joel Osteen, wasn't he? He was sort of a spiritual leader.
JVL00:11:05A little bit, yeah. A little bit. And there's sort of a May-December thing going on. It's unstated, because they try to play him as older than he actually is in that movie, and they play Jodie Foster as younger than she actually is. It's great. This is Zemeckis at the height of his powers, for me. I really dig that. Let's go, Forrest Gump.
Sonny00:11:22Garbage.
JVL00:11:23I don't know. But when you think about alien invasion movies, you have to really, I think, resegment them down into sub-genres. We were laughing about this. If you go to Box Office Mojo, you can look up the rankings of box office by movies for the category of alien invasion.
Sonny00:11:41The highest grossing alien invasion movie of all time is The Avengers, which is not
JVL00:11:47an alien invasion movie.
Sonny00:11:48Number two is The Transformers.
JVL00:11:49Transformers is not really an alien invasion movie. You're talking about superheroes and robots. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, there's the insect. There's the insect alien movies, like Starship Troopers. There are germ alien invasion movies, like The Andromeda Strain. There are the humanoid alien, like, I guess, like the E.T. Kids sort of alien. E.T., I guess, is an alien invasion movie of a sort. And then there are, like, the hard sci-fi movies, which are, I would say, at contact, I think I would count as a hard sci-fi. The Andromeda Strain probably count as hard sci-fi. And I don't know. But there's something about this genre, the whole alien invasion genre, which is really lends itself to the B movie. And I love, like, They Live. Yeah. They Live is great. Yeah, yeah. The Faculty. I think Jon Stewart's only feature film appearance is in The Faculty. No, no.
Sonny00:12:35He was also in Big Daddy. Is he in Big Daddy, too? He's in Big Daddy. He's, like, Adam Sandler's. Oh, he's a lawyer, right? He's Adam Sandler's dick roommate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who is the actual father?
JVL00:12:42The Thing, Mars Attacks. I don't know. We've been talking alien invasion. Are we allowed to broaden this out to, like, V? Could we broaden that out to V? Yeah, that's alien invasion. It's an Asian television show. Yeah, which is, for me, like, the gold standard.
Sonny00:12:58V, the, like, one that came out in, like, 2005 or 2006 or whatever, right? That one. That one's so much better. Yes. Moreno Baccarin was so good in that movie slash TV show.
Vic00:13:11No, I think Jonathan and I were talking about the one from the 80s. V, The Final Battle. V, The Final Battle. I was in, we were in fifth grade. With Michael Ironside. Again, I've mentioned Michael Ironside in every podcast we've done, too. And Michael Ironside played Michael Ironside yet again. It was gripping. It took up a whole week. It took up a whole week of my fifth grade. And to the point that we came in one day and everybody was just, you know, lethargic. And the teacher finally said, what? Has everyone been staying up watching V, The Final Battle? And that actually was true. And it was at that turning point when you realized, first of all, that the aliens were not your friends. And two, the woman was pregnant with aliens. Do you remember this? The alien baby. Alien baby. Alien baby dream sequence.
JVL00:13:48Alien baby from the Freddy Krueger guy. Yeah, Robert Englund. Robert Englund.
Vic00:13:52That's right. And she dreams.
Sonny00:13:53Was it Robert Englund? Robert Englund, a V?
Vic00:13:55He was. He was.
JVL00:13:56But a nice one. He was a beta. He was a beta V. He was a beta V. Part of the fifth column led by Martin. Don't ask me the character Martin's last name, but Martin was the really good alien leader who led the fifth column. That's right.
Vic00:14:08Versus Mark Singer, who was the leader of the Rebel of the Americans. Beastmaster Mark Singer. And the thing about the dream, there was a dream sequence where she imagines having the baby and she comes out and she looks perfectly healthy and happy. And then the baby opens her mouth. It's got a fork. It's got a tug. And it was wild. But then in reality, the baby was fine. And then they go, wait a minute, you have twins. And it was always a matter of, it's like sci-fi meets soap opera. And it was, it made for great. In the 80s, gripping television.
JVL00:14:38So what you need are, you need, if you're going to have this prototypical alien invasion film, you need like the giant alien ships just appearing all over the globe, right? And they have to be enormous and sort of opaque. You don't quite know what's going on. You have to be able to get establishing shots at all. Like, you know, one over the Taj Mahal, one over Big Ben. And then you need to have some sort of, I think, colonization, right? This is, I guess, one of the reasons Independence Day left me flat is because they just cut out the entire middle section of your classic alien invasion three-act play, where the second act would be something like, oh, we discover who the aliens are and what they want. And we're surprised by it. And then you go to act three, which is the fight. And Roland Emmerich is like, hey, dude, let's fight. You know, like, we don't even like to make a pretense.
Vic00:15:28That's it. They traveled a very long distance to pick on us and guns blasting. Right.
JVL00:15:32It's act one straight to act three.
Sonny00:15:33This is wrong. I mean, first off, this makes me wonder if you've even actually ever seen the movie Independence Day. They have one whole scene where Bill Pullman goes in to the aliens, you know, and he's like, hey, what do you want? Why can't we have peace? And the alien's like, no peace. And this is, of course, the perfect metaphor for life in America. In basically all centuries.
Vic00:15:57And they used a virus, right, Sonny? That's how they were able to stop the aliens. A computer virus. Yes.
Sonny00:16:01They used a Mac. By Jeff Goldblum on a Mac book, right? They used a Mac to write a virus for an alien operating system, which is pretty impressive because I can't even make my Mac and my PC laptop talk to each other.
Vic00:16:16I was barely able to hit record on this episode, so don't ask.
Sonny00:16:19Yeah, that's true. We were literally in here for minutes, folks, trying to get. You mentioned the B alien invasion movies, JBL, and this is also one of my favorite subgenres. I think it's everyone's. Of course, you have the schlock, like Plan 9 from Outer Space, and then all of the stuff that the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys make fun of, et cetera. My personal favorite in this kind of subgenre is Killer Clowns from Outer Space. Killer with a K, K Clowns, Clowns with a K. It's one of the campgrounds of America, the KOA. Anytime I see a word that should be spelled with a C, I get some sort of weird, icky feelings of grossness.
Vic00:16:58There was a Chris Christopherson Cold War television show called America with a K.
Sonny00:17:03Yeah, exactly. But it's so fantastically bad with evil popcorn and cotton candy that turns people into monsters. If you can find it on, I think it's on Netflix. I think it's streaming on Netflix.
JVL00:17:15I actually looked up a number of these movies on Netflix before, and the one I was most taken by, I would say the 13-year-old version of myself would have been unbelievably titillated by this. It's a 1986 film called Breeders. The tagline is, The Manhattan General Hospital has admitted a string of young women who have been raped by something otherworldly. The perpetrator only attacks women who are virgins. And the whole thing, I mean, you should spend, this is not a... There's so many things I'd like to say, and I'm not going to say it. This is not a recommendation, exactly. This is not a recommendation, but it is one of the rare occasions when I watch 15 minutes of this, and I thought, you know what? If I was a feminist grad student doing my Ph.D. in gender theory, you actually could get an entire dissertation out of this movie. Like, it is kind of misogynistic crap and amazing in its own way.
Vic00:18:06What I always find fascinating about the great alien invasion movies is the great ones, the aliens in many cases are incidental. You know, I mean, they're important to keep the movie rolling, but in many ways, the movie is more of a, a reflection of humanity, as you mentioned, with Arrival. What does it say about us? And you think about War of the Worlds, the Tom Cruise Spielberg War of the Worlds. What does it say about sort of mob mentality in moments?
JVL00:18:35Who's the, what's the scariest scene in that movie?
Vic00:18:37Oh, the one with Tim Robbins. With Tim Robbins, right.
JVL00:18:39The aliens are much less scary than Tim Robbins.
Vic00:18:40Yeah, I was also going to say when one person had a gun and everyone wanted the car, and the mob is surrounding the car. Terrifying. And there's no aliens in that either. And so what does it, you know, what does it say about them? And so for me, I always thought one of the scariest alien invasion movies of all time was Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1978. Not the one from 1956. That was with Kevin McCarthy. Although he makes an appearance in the 1978 version. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, the aliens, again, they're not like they land in different places with spaceships and then guns blasting and then a war happens. They appear as, as spores and in the dust. It's in the air and pods. And, and it begins to affect how, you know, people are behaving. And what turns out is people are going to sleep and they've been infected by these spores and then they get surrounded by these pods and then they wake up and they're still human, but they're no longer them. Their soul is gone, but the aliens are now using them as a host body and there's no more. It strips them away of all emotion. And so the main actors in the movie, everywhere they're turning to, people are like, you know, so-and-so is acting so differently lately. You know, the guy at the dry cleaners is acting differently lately. All of a sudden it's your best friend and then it's your husband and then you have nowhere to go.
JVL00:20:03Uh, one of the great movie about capitalism.
Vic00:20:05Yes, maybe. Well, you know, the original body snatchers movie was, uh, the cold war allegory about, you know, who amongst you can we trust, you know, but,
Sonny00:20:12but in 1978, it works as both pro and anti. Yes, it does.
Vic00:20:17And, and, and the thing is it had a happier ending, the 1956 version, uh, the 1978 version, which is very reflective of the year 1978. This is really not a happy ending. And I saw this as a kid. And, uh, that was one of the first times you realized that not every movie has a happy ending and it's horrific. And I'm not going to say how it ends, but you can
JVL00:20:35spoil movies that are 40 years old. There's, there's a statute of limitations.
Vic00:20:39There's a long scene at the very end because, you know, the only people who survived managed to stay awake. It's very much like, um, uh, Freddy Krueger,
JVL00:20:47nightmare, and don't go to sleep.
Vic00:20:49And Donald Sutherland is acting like an automaton. And he's going through in order to blend in with the other aliens, he's able to do all his different things and go with the crowd. He go up into an elevator out, and then he's standing out in the middle of the square in San Francisco and the woman, his friend, uh, she shows up and she survived, she survived too. And so she sees him and she starts, you know, crying in tears of joy. Thank God we both made it. And Donald Sutherland just looks at her. And then the last thing he says is he opens his mouth and this alien noise comes out of his mouth and he points at her cause they're all pointing and ratting around and she screams and that freeze frame scream and it's over. That's the end.
Sonny00:21:29Yeah, I will be honest. This is a big confession I'm about to make. I've never actually seen any of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies. I've never, I am embarrassed and it's, I mean, I know what they're about and I've, you know, read the summaries and I've even used GIFs on Twitter, uh, of the Donald Sutherland pointing, you know, you got to see it now, but I, now, but I like, I, you know, the problem is I don't, I feel like you've already seen it because I just gave away the ending. Now I spoiled it for me.
Vic00:21:57You have to see, you know, who was also in this movie is Leonard Nimoy, Leonard Nimoy's in the, in the movie and he's the voice of reason.
JVL00:22:02Oh, that's right.
Vic00:22:03So they always say, oh, turn to doc so-and-so because he's like this expert psychologist and he can explain everything logically, rationally, and then eventually, you know, he changes and then he actually explains on, on behalf of the aliens. Uh, and he has this line and he says, he says, we came here from a dying world. We drift through the universe from planet to planet, pushed on by the solar winds. And that's all you needed to know. You know what I mean? And it's coming to, and that's all they do. And, and their whole point is, wait, how is that
Sonny00:22:31any more explanatory than what they say, what they do in independence day? It's the same thing.
Vic00:22:36Well, he says we adapt and we survive. The function is survival. We don't know what's going on in independence.
Sonny00:22:42No, they're just, they're mining the earth.
JVL00:22:45Independence day is an action movie. This is a thriller. You know what?
Vic00:22:49I'll, I'll, I'm going to top you right now.
Sonny00:22:51Okay. What, what have you not?
Vic00:22:53Sci-fi movie. I have not seen Avatar. Oh, wow. Look, they just passed out. I am now alone in the studio. Thank you.
Sonny00:23:02I mean, I, I, I mean, frankly, you're not really missing out on that much. It was like the greatest, biggest movie of all time. Well, just because it grossed a lot of money. It doesn't make it mean it was good. Yeah.
JVL00:23:10I feel so much better now. The cultural footprint of Avatar is about like three inches big. I mean, it, it, it left no mark. I'll tell you, Jonathan, what turned me off. Do you disagree? That's what she said.
Sonny00:23:21Uh, no, uh. I, no, you're totally right. I mean, I, like, I couldn't name a single, I couldn't recite a single line from that movie. I can't really think of an image from the film other than like the Smurfs going, ah, when their tree gets blown up by the heroes of the film. The, uh, the marine humans who are trying to get the unobtainium. The unobtainium. That is the mineral they're trying to get. Well, that's the thing, Sonny. The unobtainium.
Vic00:23:46That was what sort of turned me off. I didn't like the idea of humans as the bad guys in this whole sort of environment. But they're not the bad guys. They're the good guys. Environmental lecture. I just didn't want that.
JVL00:23:53I have to say, so there was a, it circulated, I don't know, like three years before the movie came out. An early version of a scriptment. So not a script, but like a 60-page camera and treatment of the script. And it was amazing. Actually, it was much more hardcore. It was a, it was much more hard sci-fi, actually. And I read that years before the movie came out. And I was like, wow, this is awesome. This is going to be great. And then the movie, this is one of the rare occasions where, Cameron seems to have made a worse movie than he set out to make. But it was, I would say, it was worth seeing in the theaters on a giant IMAX screen just to see technically what he did with IMAX 3D. Did you see it in 3D?
Sonny00:24:36It is one of the few, one of the handful of movies.
JVL00:24:39He invented the technology to do that. It was an amazing achievement. Frankly, I forget what won Best Picture that year, but I would have been fine if it had won Best Picture, solely because what he was doing was creating an economic lifeline for his industry. Yeah, a hurt locker.
Sonny00:24:52Oh, come on, the hurt locker. The hurt locker was much better than that.
JVL00:24:55Well, but in terms of importance for the industry, I would say Avatar is much more important. But anyway, but as a piece of, like, narrative, as a piece of storytelling, it is utterly inconsequential.
Vic00:25:06Do you find that the special effects are dated-looking now, or no? I haven't seen it since I saw it in the theater.
JVL00:25:12I would say this is a movie that probably nobody ever watches on home video because you have to see it on a giant IMAX screen.
Sonny00:25:18I will say that I have flipped by it on, like, FX or HBO or something, and I watched it. Maybe two or three minutes of it, and I'm like, ah, and keep going.
Vic00:25:25Don't the aliens cry when they hunt the animals that they eat? Oh, probably. I don't know.
Sonny00:25:30And they plug into the animals, yes? Well, no, they plug into the earth. They plug into the trees? I don't know. How about you, Jonathan? Maybe they do plug into the animals. Yeah, when they're, like, flying, when they're flying the animals. Or to reproduce. I don't know. How about you, Jonathan?
JVL00:25:46I know I'm known as, to the extent that I'm known anywhere, as the big Defense of the Empire guy. I have never. I have never seen Star Wars. All this time. I just read the Wikipedia entry.
Sonny00:25:58Wow. Wow, you heard it here first, folks.
JVL00:26:01No, it's actually more embarrassing than that. I don't, I was thinking about this. I don't think I have ever seen 2001. It's possible that I saw it as, like, such a little kid that there was no reason I should have been seeing it, as, like, a six-year-old or something. But I don't believe I've ever seen it. And you, as a Kubrick superfan, are probably pretty pissed about this. I sat through Barry Lyndon, God help me, but not 2001.
Sonny00:26:27Yes, I, Sonny Bunch, Kubrick superfan, denounce thee, Jonathan V. Last.
JVL00:26:31It's not fair.
Sonny00:26:32No, I, I, I, 2001 is one of those movies that, I'm actually, as a Kubrick superfan, I'm actually okay if most people don't see it at home. I'm, I'm okay if you don't watch 2001 A Space Odyssey on your, on your, even on your, like, 50-inch plasma.
JVL00:26:49To be clear, if I saw this movie, I saw it, on a 20-inch curved glass, standard definition videotape.
Sonny00:26:56So this is, the first time I saw it, I saw it on a, a, in one of my friend's basement, off a VHS that we got from Blockbuster, uh, that was about as big as, uh, But use your hands, that'll help the listeners at home. Six, six-inch. I'm trying to, I'm measuring out, it's about a, about a, maybe a 12-inch, uh, subway sandwich. Um.
JVL00:27:13If you think that's 12 inches. Oh, geez.
Sonny00:27:15Uh, uh, but, uh, you have to see it, you have to see it, and we are fortunate enough to live in a city, Washington, D.C., that has a very good repertory theater, the AFI Silver. Yes, I love that place. Um, they show 70-millimeter screenings of, uh, 2001 A Space Odyssey. It is worth taking an evening, uh, ditching the family, and going, and just kind of sitting.
JVL00:27:38That sounds great, that sounds like something I'm allowed to do.
Sonny00:27:40And, and enjoying the, the big, immersive screen, because it really, it plays much, much differently with the giant booming sound system, with the, uh, uh, with the huge, huge spaceships kind of cartwheeling through space, set to the, set to the, the, the kind of ballet music. It looks like a dance. It's very, it's a much, much different film, and I, I strongly recommend it.
Vic00:28:03With the exception, I saw this as well at, at a time when I thought I wanted to knock off as many AFI films on their top 100 in the, when they came out in, I guess, 2000, about the, you know, top 100 films of the century. And I figured, you know, I wanted to make my way through that, and so I ended up renting it as well. There's a whole stretch there. Sonny, of, of, uh, 2001, where you're just going through this dimension, and it's, it's a visual, psychedelic journey, if you will. And I think it, it goes on for like five or ten minutes. Yes. And I actually hit the fast-forward button, and it was still going on for a long time.
Sonny00:28:39You know, I, surrounded by... You've never looked more disgusted, Sonny. Surrounded by... Somebody who had fast-forwarded on a Kubrick's movie. Jesus Christ.
Vic00:28:46Jesus. You know what I'm talking, you know that scene I'm talking about? Yes, I know. Why do I have to sit through that? You know, the colors, the noise,
Sonny00:28:52Once again, once again, this is another scene that works much better on the big screen when you're, when you're, frankly, tripping balls. I was gonna say, tripping. When you're, when you're tripping balls, it's much, it's much, much better.
JVL00:29:03Can I, before we, are we gonna leave Alien movies here shortly, or are we still gonna talk about it? Because before we leave it, I actually did some shoe leather reporting for this segment. Oh, please, say your piece. So I went and talked with the great Paul Cantor. Paul Cantor, who some listeners may know as the genius professor of Shakespeare at the University of Virginia, did you ever take classes with him?
Sonny00:29:24I did not, unfortunately. I did not. Boy, that is a huge loss. Look, I, it's one of my many regrets.
JVL00:29:29So, listeners who might be out there who have not, go out and buy a copy of his first book, Gilligan Unbound, because it has the single greatest pop culture and politics essay ever written, which is called Shakespeare in the Original Klingon, which is about the Cold War and Star Trek, and it's just unbelievably awesome. But he wrote a recently, more recently, a collection of essays called The Invisible Hand of Popular Culture, and he has an entire chapter on alien invasion movies, so I reached out to him and talked to him a little bit about it, and he says that the key movie in all of this is actually Mars Attacks, because, so what happens in the 50s and 60s, the alien invasion movies were, as we said, largely about the commies, and then beginning in the 90s with the X-Files, it all became about the problem that was, it was already us, it was the government, and it became, this is globalization and the American fears of globalization and conspiracy theories. And then Mars Attacks comes out, and it is the rebuttal to this, because the elites in Mars Attacks are not the ones with the answers. It's all the, it's like the rednecks and the people out there who are decentralized, and it is a sort of populist response to the concerns about globalism and elite manipulation of the American culture, and that's what Paul Cantor says, and he's smarter than we are, so I thought I would pass it on. Mars Attacks is great. It's pretty funny.
Sonny00:30:50Mars Attacks is great. A little dark. It is kind of dark, right? It's a weird tonal juxtaposition
JVL00:30:56of how funny and bubblegum-y the colors are, then with the weird aliens who almost have like a Minion-esque like gag thing to them, then with like how dark it becomes.
Sonny00:31:05And it also, it's another one of these movies that is like very kind of of its moment, where you have Martin Short as basically the George Stephanopoulos-type character. Yes. And, you know, please continue.
Vic00:31:16Go ahead. No, I was gonna say, there's one great for me with Mars Attacks. It's not my favorite, but there is one, one very memorable scene, and that is with Sarah Jessica Parker, and I believe it was Michael J. Fox. Yes. And they're together in this, right? And they're reading, they're in their New York loft reading the newspapers about after the Martian landing, and Michael J. Fox is reading the New York Times, and it's a very fuzzy black and white photo with a very staid headline that says, you know, sides of alien intelligence, you know, explaining about this arrive at Earth. And then you see Sarah Jessica Parker reading the New York Post, and all it says is,
Guest00:31:55Martians! Exclamation point, you know? And I thought that was just perfect.
Vic00:32:00That was perfect. Do we have corrections, gentlemen?
JVL00:32:04Corrections or clarifications? From friend of the show, Adam White, he corrects, he says that Arch Campbell was actually, had been at ABC prior to being at NBC. So I was not entirely incorrect when I guessed Arch Campbell of ABC. He's been around forever,
Vic00:32:19and I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that he's made the rounds. God bless him. I was going to mention a clarification, which is my love for the original Superman and my love for the original Superman really ends at the end of the movie. So I thought it was going great, and I thought the story was great. It was written by Mario Puzo, and then they had the situation where there's two MX missiles going in different directions.
Sonny00:32:43I just want to hear more about your love for Superman, your love for the Superman,
Vic00:32:49and the MX missiles are going in different directions. And Superman has only enough time to detour one of them. And so he's a man of his word, and he chooses the one that hits.
JVL00:33:01He can fly fast enough to reverse time itself. Well, this is what happens.
Vic00:33:05So he is able to deflect one missile, and when that happens simultaneously, the other one hits the San Andreas Fault, which is a much bigger cataclysm, I think, than Weehawken. And his only solution to that, because he loses Lois Lane in the process, is to reverse time. Well, if you were to do that, he would reverse time. Doesn't everything just repeat itself again? I just, they lost me on that.
Sonny00:33:27That movie was bad, and you're bad for defending it.
Vic00:33:29Okay. Yes, thank you. Sonny, you were fine. You have nothing else to, yet again, perfect. Once again, perfect.
Sonny00:33:36Perfect score.
JVL00:33:372-0. 4-0.
Vic00:33:38Get the gold star. Now, as readers know, this week, this is also our Thanksgiving, special Thanksgiving episode. Supersized. Yes, and so we would like to take some time to talk, first of all, in a sort of, getting us in a Thanksgiving mindset, about, first of all, what do we like eating for Thanksgiving? When you, for me, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, more so than Christmas. I kid you not. I enjoyed my mother's cooking back in the day, and we, you know, and I love eating, and in fact, midway through that Thanksgiving meal, when I'm beginning to feel full, that's when I start getting more melancholy and sad, because I know it's going to be over, and then I can't stuff any more food in my mouth, and it's very sad, and then it's over again for another year. Um, but what about you guys? What do you look forward to?
JVL00:34:26I, you want to go first, Sonny? Sure. You should go first. Sure, I'll go first. Uh, my favorite side dish,
Sonny00:34:33uh, at Thanksgiving, is the green bean casserole. Wow. Green beans, French cut, of course, uh, with the cream of mushroom soup, and you heat it up. Straight from the can. Oh, God, yes. I mean, you mix it all up, and then you put it in the stove, and then in, like, 20 minutes later, you put the onion topping on top, and it crisps. Oh, it's so good. The onion topping is the most important.
Vic00:34:58I look forward to it all year. The onion topping, I agree, is the most important part. Gotta have that onion topping. Gotta have it.
Sonny00:35:02I had, I once heard a story, uh, a friend of mine, uh, who is a, uh, dirty, dirty liberal, uh, told me that she was dining with a bunch of other dirty, dirty liberals, and one of them explained how they were making a, uh, kind of a locally sourced green bean casserole with fresh green beans and, and, like, homemade cream of mushroom soup, and it made me want to retch in my mouth. I was like, that's, that's against the whole point. This is like a $2 dish. Now, I want it mushy. I don't want it firm.
JVL00:35:27I want mushy. Uh, Jonathan, how about you? You know, it's funny. I was, I was putting together a definitive Sagarin ranking of Thanksgiving foods, and I came, my, after my calculations, my extensive research and, and data, uh, mining on this, green beans are tied with yams and sweet potatoes as the most overrated Thanksgiving foods.
Sonny00:35:44It's just a fact. Science. Oh.
JVL00:35:47Uh, no, so look, I mean, everybody knows, Thanksgiving, also my favorite. Of all the holidays. Uh, begins with the Macy's Day Parade. You have pancakes while you watch the Macy's Day Parade. Uh, you look at all the balloons. Santa's at the end. It's the best.
Vic00:36:01Are you clothed when you watch this?
JVL00:36:04Uh, only in pajamas.
Sonny00:36:06Right, you can't put real clothes on until after Santa appears at the Macy's, at the end of the Macy's Day Parade. Um. That's in the Constitution, actually.
JVL00:36:14It ought to be. Yeah. So, I would say, everything is about the cranberries for Thanksgiving dinner. Uh, everything is simply about, uh, a delivery mechanism for cranberries. And you have to have real cranberry sauce. It cannot be the jellied cranberry that comes in the shape of a can. The shape, you can see the line like that. That does not count. No, you're saying that's wrong? And so what you need is, you need stuffing, real stuffing. Although, in this case, I actually like the stovetop. Yeah, stovetop is the only acceptable stuffing. Stovetop stuffing is outstanding. No, this is what I'm changing this after. Everything else is nonsense. But the base. You're going to be edited out. The base of all of this. Stolen over here. Is the tofurkey. And the tofurkey. I mean, look, nobody actually likes, real turkey. Right now, Sonny and I are just looking at each other
Vic00:36:54and we're ready to pull the plug.
Sonny00:36:56This is very much an Arrested Development fourth wall breaking moment where Victor and I have totally checked out of what's being said. Let me just disconnect this. On the podcast because we're horrified. We just heard a word.
Vic00:37:09Tofurkey is the best. You know, that really is a Hillary's America kind of a meal. My God.
Sonny00:37:16This is not.
JVL00:37:17It trumps America. First of all,
Sonny00:37:18can we just acknowledge that Jonathan's defense of Tofurkey, which is not a thing. It's just not. That's a nonsense thing. Completely invalidates his vicious broadside against green beans and yams, but also should highlight the fact that the fact that he likes cranberries makes cranberries totally awful and garbage. And frankly, I've qualified cranberries. I have always ignored as a dish on Thanksgiving. I let them sit there and rot. I would rather. I would rather eat nothing than cranberries. I will have the cranberries in your life. The fact that you like cranberries and Tofurkey just makes me want to be ill. The greatest thing ever. Ill. I love Tofurkey so much I can't even tell you. For days afterwards, I make Tofurkey sandwiches. My God, Tofurkey. That's not even a thing.
JVL00:38:11I like to think of all the happy little turkeys running around in the woods free because I chose not to order them.
Vic00:38:16You know where they drink? You know where they eat Tofurkey? They eat Tofurkey in America with a K. That's where they eat. Yes. No, but my favorite part of Thanksgiving is the stuffing. And my mother makes a terrific one. She learned it from her neighbor whose brother is a French chef. And so this is a real stuffing. So this is not any of the breading and anything like that. It involves, because it's French, it'll involve chestnuts, ground pork loin, celery, cooked together inside the bird. It beats the stuffing out of stuffing. I kid you not.
Sonny00:38:45I'm surrounded by the most un-American people I've ever... Tofurkey on the one hand Tofurkey on the one hand and French stuffing on the other. This is America, save me! Save me! Meat is murder.
Vic00:39:01Okay, let's talk about another important thing about Thanksgiving, something that we don't look forward to. Many of us travel. We go on the roads. Millions of people, you know, travel.
JVL00:39:10Millions and millions.
Vic00:39:12They always interview some guy from AAA who talks about the gazillion people who are on the road. And so as a service to our loyal listeners, we here at The Weekly Substandard would like to provide you a list of our favorite rest stops. Now, this sounds like a Jim McGreevey survey, but it's not. I'm sorry.
JVL00:39:31You park all the way at the end and you flash your lights three times. You know who I am. I hope the state trooper
Vic00:39:36doesn't show up. Okay, so Jonathan, why don't we start with you? You're a Jersey guy. You've traveled up and down the I-95 corridor.
JVL00:39:43I have traveled to all 50 American states, and I can tell you that New Jersey honestly does have the finest rest stops in the world. Not bad in Maryland. Not bad. We have two rest stops in Maryland, the Maryland House, the Chesapeake House. When I was a child, the Maryland House used to have a vending machine that spit out comic books. It was like the greatest thing ever. You put 50 cents into it, it just spit a comic book out at you at random. That is long since gone. You can now, at the Delaware rest stop, which has been recently renovated in the last couple of years, they have a Baja Fresh, which is pretty good, as well, I believe, as a Phillips,
Sonny00:40:20or maybe that's at the Maryland House where they also have Phillips Seafood,
JVL00:40:23which is pretty good. But you can go down to North Carolina, you get these bizarre garbage rest stops where all you do is you pull off and it's like toilets and vending machines. You go up to New York State, like the Sawmill Parkway, and the rest stops are literally, you just pull off the parkway where the cars are still whipping past you, you run inside, and it's like being in a tiny convenience store.
Vic00:40:42That's the same as the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.
JVL00:40:44Yeah, exactly. But you go to New Jersey, and whether you are at Cheesequake on the Garden State Parkway, the greatest name of any rest stop anywhere. Love Cheesequake.
Sonny00:40:55Or on one of the many amazing
JVL00:40:57New Jersey turnpike rest stops, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Stockton, Grover Cleveland, James Fenwick. There are so many of them. My two favorites, Molly Pitcher
Sonny00:41:05and Joyce Kilmer.
JVL00:41:10Joyce Kilmer was my home rest stop, as I like to think of it. And they're just great. I don't even know who she is. You have a Sbarro, you have a Cinnabon, you maybe have a TCBY frozen yogurt a Starbucks now, many of them. They pump your gas for you so if it's a cold and rainy Thanksgiving night for cheaper than you pay in a communist place like Maryland or D.C. We're providing jobs.
Vic00:41:33New Jersey providing jobs.
JVL00:41:34Sonny, it's the best. Sonny, do you have a... Vic, why don't you... Why don't I go into this?
Vic00:41:39Alright, well, my first thought was I don't want to give away what my favorite rest stop is because I don't want everyone to know the little secret of where I like to go because then everyone will go there. And so I thought I'll just do a little misdirection and just recommend everybody go to Molly Pitcher. Nobody ever goes to that rest stop. Exit 8 on the New Jersey Turnpike. Always very quiet and clean. My other thought is if you're heading up 95 North, for me, I'll probably get off at James Fenimore Cooper, perhaps. So to speak. Or Fenwick. So I'll get off there. Isn't there a Nathaniel Hawthorne there somewhere, too? But either is Cooper. Cooper is there. And if you don't go there and you're heading your way, then you've got to hold it all the way to Connecticut, okay? Because there's no other good way. You've got to hold it. Don't go to Vince Lombardi. You know, it's apples up there. Daddy's not stopping the car.
JVL00:42:24What's wrong with the Vince Lombardi? Oh, it's a messy. It's just a bob seat. Same thing with the Connecticut Welcome Center. Isn't it insane that New Jersey has a rest stop name? It's like, you know, we have no good football in the state of New Jersey. We want appropriates. Vince Lombardi's a great guy. He spent five minutes in the state once upon a time. Let's name a rest stop after him.
Vic00:42:42If you're going south, my actual thought is this, which is, you know, the best places to go are not actually rest stops. You know, get off at one of the local towns like Bell Camp, Maryland, which is exit 80 on 95 South. Then you get to avoid all the bad rush at Maryland House or Chesapeake House. There's a, you know, in Bell Camp, the town is very close to the interstate. You've got McDonald's, Burger King. There's even an Arby's. So that's my advice.
Sonny00:43:03My God. This is the worst. Most D.C. slash New York slash New Jersey slash Maryland-centric segment of the show of all time. That being said, that being said, my favorite rest stop is in none of these garbage states that you guys just mentioned. It's exit 101. 40?
JVL00:43:25No, exit 130.
Sonny00:43:26Exit 130 off of I-95 in Virginia, where there's a Wawa and a Burger King. And that's literally all you need at a rest stop. I'll give you props for Wawa. I mean, my God. Wawa is a Jersey thing. This whole rest stop obsession that you New Jersey people have is totally fascinating to me. It's bizarre. It's weird and fascinating. When are they going to? My one real question about the New Jersey rest stop ridiculous system is when are they going to rename one of the rest stops after New Jersey's greatest native son, Bruce Springsteen?
Vic00:44:03That is a very good question because, you know, they haven't gotten to Springsteen yet for whatever reason. But as you know, at one of the rest stops, there's a Howard Stern bathroom. Did you know this? Yes. Howard Stern had Chris Christie, not Chris Christie, Governor Christie, Christie Todd Whitman, rather. Excuse me. Christie Todd Whitman. He had her on the show, and he said, if I vote for you, will you name a rest stop after me? And she made a compromise and named a men's room somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike after Howard Stern.
Sonny00:44:36How is that not illegal? How is that not bribery? Ah, you know. New Jersey, terrible.
Vic00:44:42Let's move on. I want to talk about quickly the spirit of the week. This week we got a good one. It's Bullet Rye. It was resurrected. I went there with the Distilled Spirits Council in 2015. It's a beautiful renovated facility at the old Stitzel Weller Distillery in Shively, Kentucky. There's a sign on the door, by the way, there. I took a picture of it, and it says, we make fine bourbon at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon. And to that I say, God bless. It's really interesting. Rye, since 2009, has now increased in demand by more than 536%. Everybody wants Rye. Rye for all their cocktails. And that is our Spirit of the Week. So how did you like it, Sonny?
Sonny00:45:27Oh, I am a big fan of the Bullet Rye. The Bullet Rye and the Dickle Rye are basically one and two in some order on my Rye rankings.
Vic00:45:37Oh, you don't know Dickle.
JVL00:45:38Can you get Dickle Rye at one of the New Jersey rest stops?
Sonny00:45:41Yes. The Molly Pitcher one, probably.
JVL00:45:44My Smirnoff Ice over here is fantastic, by the way.
Sonny00:45:46Which flavor are you drinking? Lemon. Oh, that's a good one.
Vic00:45:50You should try the Passion Fruit next time. Next episode. That is, I believe, all the time we have for this week's episode of The Weekly Substandard. Yes. Tweet us your questions, complaints, or compliments at VictorinoMatus at SonnyBunch at... Don't bother tweeting me.
Sonny00:46:08Everyone tweet at JBL.
Vic00:46:10By the way, you know, we've got a new fancy logo and all, and we are now on our own on iTunes. Yes. iTunes. So you can go to iTunes separately, just type in Weekly Substandard. There we are. So until next time, happy Thanksgiving. That was great.
Sonny00:46:30You know, it's good that we're telling... The rest up jokes are really, they really work. It's good that we're telling people to go to The Weekly Substandard at iTunes right now at the end of the episode after they've listened to the whole thing. They don't have any idea. It's the payoff. I call it the payoff. After they closed this 20 minutes ago when we were going on about Tofurky.
Vic00:46:49Oh, I was afraid if I mentioned the beginning, they'd be turned off. Tofu's so good. Oh, my God. So I told you the big news for my weekend is I finally got a Blu-ray player in the year 2016. Nice. It's so exciting. Nice. And it has access.
JVL00:47:00I would have given you my HD DVD player years ago if you had asked me.
Vic00:47:03Do you still have your DivX player? That's what I want to know. I skipped DivX. That was for commies. Yeah, DivX was garbage. Good call.
Sonny00:47:09I still have my HD DVD player, though. Yeah, I believe you.
Vic00:47:12Didn't Jonathan convince you, Sonny, to get an HD DVD player? That sounds like something Jonathan would do.
Sonny00:47:16No, I still have it so I can watch Blade Runner. I watch it once a year, and that's literally the only thing I watch.
Vic00:47:21And you watch Casablanca, right, on HD DVD? I used to.
JVL00:47:26HD DVD is just superior to Blu-ray in every way. It's one of these things like the Betamax.
Sonny00:47:32No, this is actually wrong. It's the opposite. HD DVD, people thought it would win because it was cheaper.
JVL00:47:38No, it was more expensive. And better. It lost because of just corporate backing. Yeah, the corporate money was all with it.
Vic00:47:44Anyway, I've been watching Netflix. Amazon is very exciting.
JVL00:47:48Oh, you found that you can get Netflix streamed to your TV box?
Sonny00:47:51I don't even know what stream.
Vic00:47:51Streaming is, but you know what? But here's the problem. Then it stops like every five minutes. Oh, got a buffer.
Sonny00:47:56You know, you and Matt Labash are the only person, the only people in the world that I know who still get actual discs delivered to them from Netflix. No more.
Vic00:48:03No, no, no, no. So I canceled that. Now I'm on this new thing where, you know, without any connection to wires, it just travels through the air. Wow. That's like magic.
JVL00:48:11Can you control your Blu-ray player with your flip phone?
Vic00:48:15With my BlackBerry, yes. And so I'm watching Stranger Things. I finished that. That's a terrific show. What's that? We can't. You've got to watch it, and then we'll talk about it. It's one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Okay.
Sonny00:48:25You know what you would probably say about Stranger Things if you watched it?
Vic00:48:28Those were the outtakes. Those are the outtakes.
Sonny00:48:30We're still doing the outtakes. I was trying to set up the punchline for the outtakes. Which was? Do you know what you would say about Stranger Things if you saw it, JVN?
JVL00:48:38I'm sure it's fine.
?00:48:40Okay.
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