This Is Why We're Like This

Julia's name twin, Julia Rios (AKA Dr. Chess Julia) and her cohost JJ from the Chessfeels podcast join us to talk about Spaceballs. Full show notes including transcript at https://www.juliarios.com/spaceballs-the-podcast-with-jj-lang-and-julia-rios-from-chessfeels

Friend of the pod Kelly joins us to talk about commercials for Canadian theme parks and attractions. Full show notes including links to the commercials and a trascript at https://www.juliarios.com/after-these-messages-canadian-commercials-with-kelly

Friend of the pod Kelly joins us to talk about the fever dream that is The Country Bears. Full show notes and transcript at https://www.juliarios.com/the-country-bears-with-kelly/

Chia and Dan talk toys and commercials of their childhoods! Full show notes with links to commercials and a transcript of the episode at https://www.juliarios.com/after-these-messages-thingmaker-with-chia-and-dan

Friends of the pod, Chia and Dan, join us to discuss a movie Chia remembered as VERY ROMANTIC! Child of Glass is an adaptation of the first Blossom Culp novel, The Ghost Belonged to Me. This episode is a wild ride that takes us into explorations of Richard Peck’s work, Disney’s low point in the late seventies/early eighties, and the way the scariest thing about this movie is its insistence that slaveholders in the south were deeply romantic. We also take a huge detour into past life reincarnation pods, and discuss how sometimes you gotta pretend an ice cream bar is actually pie if you want to eat it while reenacting your friend’s murder over and over again…Here’s Chia’s hazy summary:“So, I watched this is the gymnasium of my elementary school, probably in 4th grade? It might have been 5th. In my memory of it, a boy moved into a haunted house and fell in love with the ghost of a little girl who I think was trapped in a china doll? Also, I got to sit next to a boy I had a terrible crush on and the whole thing was just very romantic.”Chia was… not very right at all about the plot of this one. But don’t worry, we spend almost as long as the length of the film explaining what she missed!All this, plus Geoffrey does an impression of Vincent Price AND sings a little impromptu Blondie parody.This is Must Listen podcasting, everyone!P.S. If you want to see the short (like 8 minute long) excerpt adaptation of the book this is based on that Vincent Price hosts, that’s about seven minutes and thirty seconds into Once Upon a Midnight Scary. P.P.S. If you want, you can also read a full transcript of this podcast. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, Gwynne Garfinkle is back with us to talk about obscure children’s shows from her youth. Specifically, we talk about Hobo Kelly, the magical hobo clown who has a leprechaun fly her around and drop her off at Hobo Junction. Sure and begorrah, ‘tis she! If you are like, “whhhhhaaat?” —yeah, so were we! Here are the only clips we could find. Here’s a teeny 30 second clip medley. And here’s the full Hobo Kelly opening (very low quality, sadly)We could not find more of this, but Gwynne remembered being excited about Hobo Kelly’s magical sunglasses and bag full of prizes. Di you ever see this as a kid?Next we watched a segment of Zoom about a girl named Noreen who broke her arm. That segment starts 12 minutes and 25 seconds into this episode.Geoffrey had a little trouble saying “regularly” at the ending this episode, which led us to conclude he’s probable Scottish… And we watched this tiktok, which is not safe for work. If you would like to read a transcript of this episode, you can do that here.Check out Gwynne’s books, including her novel, Can’t Find My Way Home, a political ghost story about a soap opera star in the 1970s who is reunited with the ghost of her best friend who died protesting the Vietnam war. She’s also got a poetry collection called People Change.If you would like to listen to one of her stories, you can find “A Wild Patience” in three parts on Escape Pod: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.And if you want to read a free story, you can check out “Sinking, Singing” in the May 2021 issue of Mermaids Monthly.If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of a PBS show beloved by kids in the 1970s: Zoom! No, it is not the video conferencing tool… Our guest this time is Gwynne Garfinkle, who wrote a letter to Zoom that was read on the air in 1974! Gwynne grew up to become a writer of novels, stories, poems, and more, and it all started with Zoom. Check out Gwynne’s books, including her novel, Can’t Find My Way Home, a political ghost story about a soap opera star in the 1970s who is reunited with the ghost of her best friend who died protesting the Vietnam war. She’s also got a poetry collection called People Change.If you would like to listen to one of her stories, you can find “A Wild Patience” in three parts on Escape Pod: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.And if you want to read a free story, you can check out “Sinking, Singing” in the May 2021 issue of Mermaids Monthly.Here’s Gwynne’s summary of Zoom:ZOOM was a 1970s kids show on public television that was produced in Boston. A group of kids sang songs, performed skits, (I think) showed the audience how to make crafts etc., read letters that kids sent in, and (I think) had "rap sessions" about various topics. There were also documentary segments about other kids. (I remember one segment about a girl who broke her arm, had to get a cast, etc.) The cast changed from season to season; I think kids could only stay for a season or two. My favorite cast member was Bernadette, who did a trick with her arms that I can do to this day. The show also featured a language called Ubbi Dubbi, in which you add "ub" before every vowel. If you sent a SASE to the show, they would send you ZOOM cards (each card featured a cast member on one side and some ZOOM-related activity on the other side). I used to own a bunch of these. There was also a ZOOM book and an LP. I'm not sure how many times I wrote to the show before they read my letter on the air. It was definitely a memorable event in my young life, to the point that I remembered which cast member (Shawn) read my letter!Here is the link to my ZOOM episode (queued to the segment with my letter): https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-60cvf203?term=GARFINKLE&proxy_start_time=644.06We had never seen Zoom before, but we thought it was a really interesting show! Did you ever watch this as a kid? Or, perhaps you watched the 1990s reboot? Let us know!We learned a lot of things from this discussion, including that Gwynne’s favorite cast member, Bernadette, is now an energy sound healer! You can read a transcript of this episode here if you like. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Greetings on this, the first Annual Snowmo Sapiens night! With a potentially historic blizzard in Boston, we present you this very on topic podcast episode about a 1942 Disney short starring Donald Duck.It’s Donald’s Snow Fight!Geoffrey remembered this one from his childhood, and this is not exactly an After These Messages, but it is sort of in that spirit, recorded to go with The Dog That Stopped the War. We get into a BUNCH of stuff with this, from inventing new holidays to discussing François Truffaut’s famous assertion that there’s no such thing as an antiwar film, to the Finnish Ducktales theme, to Splash Mountain and The Song of the South. So, cozy up in a blanket, build yourself a snowman (or put three ice cubes in an adult beverage), and join us for some anti-clericalism and fornication (okay, only a little mention of that, not the actual deed), ‘cause it’s just six months til Snowmer! You can read a transcript of this episode here if you like. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Hey! It’s a new year! And we are starting it off on a super downer note with a movie about a dog dying… Uh. Sorry? But possibly our suffering is your joy, in which case, you’re welcome!We also have a new feature at long last: transcripts! You can get the transcript for this episode here.You can watch the preview for this movie (in French without subtitles) and get the sense of the goofy sound effects and NO WARNING that this is a movie about a dog dying horribly. Before we proceed further, please heed Geoffrey’s warning from 35 minutes in (right after we talk about the singer of the end credits song and her history with abuse): 35:10.99GeoffreyWow We should... We should just put a ah ah like a comprehensive stone cold Bummer warning on this episode.… Yeah Sorry. the abuse thing is just for a couple of minutes (from about 33 minutes to 35:10) if you just want to skip that bit. If you’re still with us, here’s Geoffrey’s summary:“I know I watched this at some point when I was young, but I remember almost nothing about the circumstances. Was it on tv or did we rent it? Can't be sure. I know there was a large-scale snowball fight, and I was jealous because we didn't have snow when I was a kid and I thought an epic snowball war would be totally awesome. I also was a big fan of the Donald Duck cartoon where he has the snow war with Huey Duey & Luey. Anyway, there's a totally sweet snowball war but I guess it gets too real and then the dog dies in the snow.”This is pretty accurate! Also we learned there are a few differences in the subtitles, like a main character, Pierre, is called Marc in the subtitles, apparently! And then there’s Frankie Four Eyes… This movie has a 7.6 star rating on IMDb! People really do apparently love it! Are you one of them? We would love to know. P.S. We tried a new recording style with a soundboard and… the outro did not work as planned. Please enjoy the chaos as we scramble to recover. It’s pretty silly!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Eugenia Triantafyllou joins us again from Greece to talk about Greek television and a very specific episode of Storybook International: The Forbidden Door! If you aren’t familiar with Eugenia, be sure to check out her awesome stories!You can watch The Forbidden Door here.Here’s Eugenia’s Summary:“This was a show I vaguely remember, and to my childhood eyes it felt like a documentary because even though it had fairytales the way it was filmed felt very down to earth. I think it was called Storybook and it had folktales from many places in English, but for us there was narration over it in Greek. Perhaps why it felt like a documentary. The beginning was a bard singing a song and then the folktale would play. This particular tale was about a guy who is told not to open a door. Something like Bluebeard, but he wasn't getting married to someone, I don't think. Of course he opens the door and there is a giant on the other side and he pics the guy up and then I am not sure what happens but I remember him being devasted after that, and this did something to my kid brain. It was very weird/existensial and it stuck with me.” Eugenia also told us about Froutopia—not Fruitopia, the 1990s US soft drink, but a Greek TV show about anthropomorphic produce.And here’s the Greek TV sign on/sign off Eugenia remembers from her childhood.According to Eugenia, this is called “The Little Herd Boy” and it is by one of the master flautists, who was a legendary player. How cool is that? Meanwhile if you want to see pictures of Skeletor, who is ADORABLE, check out our Instagram! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Happy Halloween! We have a special spooky tree for you! Eugenia Triantafyllou joins us from Greece to talk about Goosebumps! Eugenia has written a lot of great stories, and you can find them at her website, but if you are wondering where to begin, you might try listening to “My Country Is a Ghost” on Podcastle!But first… Goosebumps!Here is Eugenia’s summary:There was an episode of Goosebumps that was about a city where everyone was some kind of ghoul because a factory accident had turned them into one. A new family moves into the town unaware that everyone wants to eat them and the teenage kids (son?) discovers that pretty fast.What was the unnerving thing about this was that these people were not dead/ghosts, nor vampires. They lived seemingly normal lives, families with children and they were just altered so drastically by a factory accident but they kept trying to live like before. With the small change that they wanted to eat people.This summary was pretty spot on, though it did miss some plot points. We dug way into the story and had a lot of fun doing so! Did you ever read or watch Goosebumps? Let us know! And be sure to check out Eugenia’s work!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

We’re back for our second Spooktober episode with another adaptation of Godfather Death, this time with Muppets!We think we would have found the devil puppets a little scary as kids. What about you?Here’s Geoffrey’s summary:This has some similar story elements as Macario, and when I saw Macario I was all "Oh wow, that's like this other thing I saw, except Death was a muppet." Also, I think he tries to go to both Heaven and Hell, but they won't take him.Fair enough, though Geoffrey left out a bunch of the plot of this one. We both thought this was charming and fun! If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

It’s October, and you know what that means: time to meditate on spookiness, skeletons, and death! To get us going, Geoffrey brought us a Mexican film from 1960, which he once watched in Spanish class.Here’s Geoffrey’s summary:“Macario is about a woodcutter who is super hungry in Mexico. He's so hungry he decides that he won't eat ever again until he can eat a whole chicken all by himself. So he's basically starving until his wife gets him a chicken so he can stop with this nonsense.He runs out into the woods to eat it. On the way, the devil asks for half, but he says Not Today, Satan. Then God asks for half, and he basically says "You don't need any chicken, this is just a test, and that's bullshit and I'ma eat this chicken." Then Death asks for half, and he shares with Death, because if Death's come for him at least he'll get to eat half a chicken while death is busy with his.Anyhoodle, Death is so pleased that he gives him a magic potion or something that will cure the sick if Death is only at the foot of the bed, but not if he's at the head of the bed. He becomes rich curing people but the Inquisition comes for him. I won't spoil the ending.”We liked this one! It’s our first of two adaptations of Godfather Death. Come back next time for a different take!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

After watching High Spirits, we went all in on the silly and spooky combos. This episode goes many places, but one of them is to the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada. Here’s a picture from the visit Julia made back in 2018. For more pictures from that visit, check out our Instagram!Okay, so we watched Peter O’Toole performing Hamlet backwards in this Hut Pizza commercial.Then we imagined being very rich and flying Pan Am First and Clipper class. Pan Am wasn’t just for the ultra rich though! Pan Am Budget—You CAN go to EuropeWe wondered how this movie was actually advertised, so we watched the High Spirits TrailerAnswer: it surprisingly gives a rundown of most of the plot, and makes it seem more coherent than it is!After that, we wanted to see more haunted hotels, so we watched a news broadcast in two parts. Ghost hotel part 1annnnnnnd Ghost hotel part 2 After this was when Julia told the Clown Motel story, and Geoffrey told the story of the time he went on a ghost tour in Salem, Massachusetts with a group including Kim from the Return to Oz episode and Tori from The Peanut Butter Solution episode. Have you ever visited a haunted hotel, been on a memorable ghost tour, or been burned for witchcraft just because you made aloe vera? We’d love to hear all about it!Thanks for listening!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Julia brings us something … unexpected. It’s a 1988 sex farce with ghosts, both real and fake. Also Peter O’Toole. What? Yes, really. Here’s Julia’s summary:Steve Guttenberg and his wife(?) who I think is blonde? Go to a castle … in Scotland or Ireland maybe? And then there are ghosts there and the wife, or maybe both parties, fall(s) in love with ghost(s). There’s a scene where a male ghost rubs a woman’s back, maybe in a bathtub. And I am pretty sure they say, “I would tup with thee.” I remember being simultaneously really excited to see this movie because ghosts but also scared … because ghosts. I am so curious about what else actually happens in this movie…This is all right enough, but misses out on a ton of the plot. There’s so much more to this movie—and our discussion, which runs as long as the movie itself… You’re welcome/we’re sorry?If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

In honor of the new Masters of the Universe animated series, this week Geoffrey brought some episodes of the 1980s He-Man cartoon to the table. Perhaps fittingly, since this cartoon was explicitly made to market the toys, Geoffrey didn’t remember plots so much as toys that he liked to play with.Skeletor and Evil-Lyn sit sprawled on the floor of a cave after Sh’Gora knocked them down in “To Save Skeletor”. In this episode we discuss “To Save Skeletor” and “The Mystery of Man-E-Faces”. In our bonus episode for paid subscribers, we’ll be talking about “Disappearing Dragons”Here’s Geoffrey’s hazy summary:“I watched He-Man all the time when it was on TV when I was a kid, but can't remember a single plotline from an episode.  What I remember is the theme song: ba da DA da, ba DADA da da da, ba DADA da da da, da da and the bit where he says "By the Power of Greyskull, I have the Power!"  I also remember having many He-Man toys and playing with them a LOT. They were cool as toys went, and much bigger than Star Wars guys, which I also liked. I had battle armor He-Man and Skeletor, which had breastplates that showed marks on them when you clicked them, like they'd been hit in the armor. Super cool. The guys in these episodes are ones I am pretty sure either had myself or friends had: Kobra Khan, who was an action figure and also a squirt bottle; Webstor, who had a hook thing; Man-E-Faces, whose face turned around; Lockjaw who had cool arm attachments; and Whiplash, who you could turn sideways and then he would spring back and you could hit things with his tail.  Oh, also, I was a big Cringer fan.”We were surprised at how much we found this to be okay watch!We also talked a bout about The Toys That Made Us, a Netflix documentary series that has a great episode about the He-Man toys. We definitely recommend that one if you think it sounds fun. Geoffrey recommends the new Masters of the Universe animated series, though he does give a minor spoiler/caveat about the premise of it. Julia hadn’t seen the series and was surprised by this spoiler and felt like it was understandable why it might upset He-Man fans. If you’ve seen the new one, what did you think? If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Flash fiction writer Kayleigh Shoen (or as we like to call her: Princess of Soup) joined us again to talk about all things Punky Brewster related after we watched The Perils of Punky!We started by watching this commercial for a Punky doll.This commercial is super freaky because it starts with a doll and then shows an entire family of Punky clones. WHAT IS HAPPENING???Anyway, they say at the end that Brandon and Glomer are sold separately so all of us were like, “Wait, who’s Glomer?” And that is how we ended up watching this interminable segment of the Punky Brewster cartoon, Glomer’s Story. There’s a part two, but none of us could bear to spend another several minutes on this one. Glomer was voiced by Frank Welker, a prolific voice actor we have seen before in such things as The Chipmunk Adventure, where he voiced the villain’s two yappy dogs. Fun fact: he was also voice of the anaconda in Anaconda.From here we moved on to some commercials for things Kayleigh remembered from her childhood. We started with Get in Shape, Girl. This was a whole toy enterprise that revolved around telling little girls they really needed to workout more… cool. Kayleigh had the Get in Shape, Girl barre.Kayleigh was so into this leotard and tights aesthetic that she wore it under her regular clothes. Ahhh, the 80s!This led us to discuss LA Gear and British Knights shoes and the terribleness of women’s fashion and its lack of pockets.From there we went to a non-gendered exercise toy: Pogoball! We heard this as telling us we could become a Pogoballmancer. Please, someone make us this fan art.We looked into whether adult sized Pogoballs exist and found these terrifying Kangaroo Sky Runner shoes. Then we moved to She Ra. We watched a sequence of these and at first weren’t into the song, but then it took over our brains…From She Ra to Frosta and Catra… who meowsFinally the Crystal CastleKayleigh and Julia both had some of these dolls, but Geoffrey had some awesome He Man action figures. We then talked about the various He Man cartoons and movies. Which… is maybe a little bit of a sneak peek at what you can expect to hear from us next… Meanwhile, Kayleigh introduced us to the concept of the collectible Masters of the Universe sticker book, where you had a book, but in order to see the pictures, you had to buy a tone of sticker packs that were sold in mixed lots like baseball cards. Also mentioned: This oral history of the Disney Afternoon. Worms of Gummi! (If you know, you know)If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

For the first time in a year and a half we actually met in person to record this one! Flash fiction writer Kayleigh Shoen joined us to talk about an episode of Punky Brewster that scared her as a child: The Perils of Punky!Cherie, Margaux, and Allan stuck in giant spiderweb in a cave in The Perils of PunkyHere’s Kayleigh’s hazy recollection:“I was very into Punky Brewster at an age when I was too young to read clocks, so even though I loved it, I had a hard time being a regular viewer. I think I remember it being part of a Saturday morning block with PeeWee’s Playhouse and Hey Vern, It’s Ernest, but I’m not 100% certain. Punky Brewster has some more famous episodes like the fridge episode and the Challenger explosion episode and the must-increase-our-busts episode, but I’ve chosen the episodes that were most memorable to me – THE SPIDER EPISODES!  So, I actually didn’t even realize this was 2 episodes because I think I only saw the first one and then – like I said I had no idea what time it was on or even the days of the week -- I probably didn’t see the show again for another month. I was so little that I couldn’t even really follow stories on tv. I think the first episode ends with Punky seeing a spider the size of a human adult and I was just like wow that was a really scary episode! I think I remember even thinking maybe Punky died at the end. I remember it’s set in a cave and she gets separated from her friends. Maybe they’re camping? The spider is very large and very furry.The first thing I’m looking forward to seeing again is Punky’s style. Punky was a style icon to me as a kindergarten/first grader. I was very much a dresses with pigtails girl, and thanks to Punky I added a lot of insouciant touches like bathrobe belts and mismatched socks to put my own stamp on everything.I’m also looking forward to seeing the opening credits so I can work out what Punky’s actual backstory is. What I remember can’t possibly be true – that her mom deserted her in a laundromat and then Punky went to juvie before she somehow dropped in on an old guy and convinced him to adopt her?  Maybe I should’ve suggested the first episode, actually.”So much to unpack here. First, Kayleigh was basically right about the actual premise of the show. It was very much grounded in real life issue special episodes, so this weird supernatural one where the kids go into a cave and get attacked by a giant spider is really out of the ordinary. Second, there’s a whole lot of Native American cultural appropriation that happens in this particular 2 part episode. It was the mid 80s, the same era as Poltergeist II, so this shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but it still definitely didn’t age well. We also talked about Mike the Headless Chicken… which was a real chicken who survived a botched beheading attempt and lived for 18 months longer. Wikipedia has details, but be warned that they aren’t for the squeamish. Geoffrey gives us a lesson on the history of the band Oingo Boingo, and Julia and Kayleigh share choice nuggets of trivia from oral histories of the Punky Brewster refrigerator episode and of The Perils of Punky.If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

For the first time in a year and a half we actually met in person to record this one! Flash fiction writer Kayleigh Shoen joined us to talk about an episode of Punky Brewster that scared her as a child: The Perils of Punky!Cherie, Margaux, and Allan stuck in giant spiderweb in a cave in The Perils of PunkyHere’s Kayleigh’s hazy recollection:“I was very into Punky Brewster at an age when I was too young to read clocks, so even though I loved it, I had a hard time being a regular viewer. I think I remember it being part of a Saturday morning block with PeeWee’s Playhouse and Hey Vern, It’s Ernest, but I’m not 100% certain. Punky Brewster has some more famous episodes like the fridge episode and the Challenger explosion episode and the must-increase-our-busts episode, but I’ve chosen the episodes that were most memorable to me – THE SPIDER EPISODES!  So, I actually didn’t even realize this was 2 episodes because I think I only saw the first one and then – like I said I had no idea what time it was on or even the days of the week -- I probably didn’t see the show again for another month. I was so little that I couldn’t even really follow stories on tv. I think the first episode ends with Punky seeing a spider the size of a human adult and I was just like wow that was a really scary episode! I think I remember even thinking maybe Punky died at the end. I remember it’s set in a cave and she gets separated from her friends. Maybe they’re camping? The spider is very large and very furry.The first thing I’m looking forward to seeing again is Punky’s style. Punky was a style icon to me as a kindergarten/first grader. I was very much a dresses with pigtails girl, and thanks to Punky I added a lot of insouciant touches like bathrobe belts and mismatched socks to put my own stamp on everything.I’m also looking forward to seeing the opening credits so I can work out what Punky’s actual backstory is. What I remember can’t possibly be true – that her mom deserted her in a laundromat and then Punky went to juvie before she somehow dropped in on an old guy and convinced him to adopt her?  Maybe I should’ve suggested the first episode, actually.”So much to unpack here. First, Kayleigh was basically right about the actual premise of the show. It was very much grounded in real life issue special episodes, so this weird supernatural one where the kids go into a cave and get attacked by a giant spider is really out of the ordinary. Second, there’s a whole lot of Native American cultural appropriation that happens in this particular 2 part episode. It was the mid 80s, the same era as Poltergeist II, so this shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but it still definitely didn’t age well. We also talked about Mike the Headless Chicken… which was a real chicken who survived a botched beheading attempt and lived for 18 months longer. Wikipedia has details, but be warned that they aren’t for the squeamish. Geoffrey gives us a lesson on the history of the band Oingo Boingo, and Julia and Kayleigh share choice nuggets of trivia from oral histories of the Punky Brewster refrigerator episode and of The Perils of Punky.If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

After Garfield in Paradise we watched a few related vids, and had a pretty far reaching conversation about society and culture… But first, this 1957 Chevy Bel Air Commercial.We agree that this car does look really cool, and the commercial is effective. Geoffrey even cited topspeed.com’s claim that there has never been a more iconic American car. Next we watched this Jack Benny clip with Frank Nelson.Frank Nelson was the hotel clerk and the rental car clerk in Garfield in Paradise, and he seems to have been really famous for always performing as this character. We finished with Wolfman Jack signing off.This one opened the floodgates about parasocial relationships. We talked about modern stuff that encourages them, like TikTok and Podcasts, and Geoffrey even brought up the old story about the audience running away from a train on a screen in the 1890s. This also led to us talking about younger people trolling older people, and eventually Obvious Plant and the Italian artist who recently sold an invisible statue for $18,000. Geoffrey also referred to this clip from The Venture Brothers when we mentioned Gen X…Thanks for listening!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

After a long break we return just in time for Summer Vacation with a travel themed episode! It’s Garfield in Paradise! Paradise World, to be exact. Which is definitely not Hawaii. Garfield sings “Hello Hawaii” in a dream sequence while traveling third class on a plane to Paradise WorldHere’s Julia’s summary:“I remember watching this as a TV special, and mostly I remember that there is a volcano and that Garfield and Odie may get sacrificed? It erupts and possibly the lava is yellow? Also I think Garfield and Odie have flower anklets, like leis, but anklets. My biggest memory of this was that later at school a classmate of mine was very know-it-all about this and said that it was clear that the lava was actually just made of butter and was a special effect... because it smelled like butter... and that this was a smell-o-vision special. I still have no idea if she was serious or just completely messing with other kids.”Yes, the lava was sort of yellow, and there was a flower anklet, but not on any of the animals. Also, the plot of this was way weirder and full of Wolfman Jack than either of us remembered. Turns out Geoffrey can do a pretty good Wolfman Jack impression, too…If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Julia’s sister Kat is back to talk Buttercream related things. Truly a noble deed, since, in Kat’s own words, “I’d rather watch a movie about butt cream.”We started with The Buttercream Gang in 30 secondsWe did not find this particularly representative of the whole of The Buttercream gang, though it does contain that song… Next we tackled The Buttercream Gang recut as horrorWe felt this one was a more accurate representation of the actual movie. Next we watched the Trailer for The Buttercream Gang 2: The Secret of Treasure MountainThis sequel apparently casts Eldon as the hero, and sends these kids to … a monastery? We guess? The discussion on this led us to the original viral video (which was a Vine. Remember Vine?) that was the basis for the macaroni in the pot line in WAP. This video is only 6 seconds long, but still manages to be not safe for work. Meanwhile, if you are unfamiliar with WAP, you can find that (also not safe for work) video here. We finished with some You Got the Right One Baby Diet Pepsi commercialsSo much going on here. This led us to discuss cola ad legends of yore. Like foreign markets claiming Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From The Grave and Coca-Cola translating to Bite The Wax Tadpole. We also talkie about (but didn't watch) this commercial for Chloraseptic, which Julia mistakenly remembered as being for Triaminic. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Julia’s sister Kat joins us to talk about a weird Christian movie that she watched in school and later begged her mom to buy for her: The Buttercream Gang. There’s so much to discuss about this movie that we had to break the show into two parts, and this is Part 2. Part 1 is here. Here’s the official trailer for this movie, which kind of seems like it makes more sense than the whole movie actually does. Last episode covered the plot analysis. In this part we get into the lessons this movie taught us, the most dated moments, and of course whether we would show it to a child (spoiler: we would not). Did you see this as a kid? Let us know!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Content Note: We talk a lot about our experiences growing up in an area with a lot of conservative Christians and LDS church members. We also briefly touch on real gang violence and mention the death of one of Julia’s high school classmates. We don’t dwell on that for long, but it is mentioned. Julia’s sister Kat joins us to talk about a weird Christian movie that she watched in school and later begged her mom to buy for her: The Buttercream Gang. There’s so much to discuss about this movie that we had to break the show into two parts. Here’s a clip from the movie, containing the song that plays two full times in the movie and then again over the end credits. This clip contains one of the montages we discuss in depth, including the part where teens pull small children off a see-saw and start using it themselves. Here’s Kat’s hazy summary:My hazy blur at the moment is some kind of white boy soul redemption. Maybe there were bikes and a tree? And autumn was in there too. Pretty sure there were fallen leaves in the woods. My school had some weird program in which we watched the movie and then could buy it. I have no idea why that was a program for a lot of reasons. I was definitely pedaled the white Christian savior message. Only a few years later I moved on to watching Welcome To the Dollhouse on repeat. Big leap Basically Kat had forgotten the entire plot…Anyway, one of the weird things about this one is it is supposed to be set in Illinois, but it was filmed in Utah, which looks nothing like Illinois. However, Utah is also where Troll 2 was filmed! Which led us to have some questions about the possible supernatural underpinnings of this … odd … small town. If you haven’t watched Troll 2, we recommend it. Here's our episode about it. We will catch you next time, with the thrilling conclusion to our Buttercream Gang discussion!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

OMG it’s a big time nostalgia fest in this episode! Kate from Ignorance Was Bliss joins us to discuss one of her very favorites: The Princess Bride!We’d all seen this one too many times to count, so it’s definitely not a hazy memories sort of episode, but it’s still a lot of fun! We also talk about The Olsen Twins for a while in the middle for some reason. Because sure. Why not?We hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as we enjoyed making it. And, hey, why not check out Kate’s show when you’re done here? This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Evan joined us to watch stuff related to Legend and D&D, since he played a lot of D&D around the time he also watched Legend as a teen. First we watched Lily’s Song, which is one of the Jerry Goldsmith songs that didn’t end up in the US release of Legend, but which IS in the European release. Next we watched the preview for Mazes and Monsters, a movie Julia had to watch and discuss in depth on The Skiffy and Fanty Show a few years back. That preview is kind of goofy, but the movie is pretty depressing. Annnnd, we dove deeper into depressing territory with our next thing, a 60 Minutes segment about kids killing themselves and others allegedly because of D&D. We don’t really recommend watching this one, because it’s a big downer. Also, content warning for this section. We don’t go into depth on suicide, but we do talk a little about viral challenges that have hurt and/or killed people in more recent years, like the cinnamon challenge and eyeball shots. After all that we needed a palate cleanser, so we watched this Carnival Cruise line commercial.This commercial showed up because Geoffrey was searching for Tom Cruise Commercial 1985, thinking he would get something to do with Tom Cruise. LOL nope.This led Julia to talk about the experience of trying to become a travel agent in the beginning of 2020, the worst possible time. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Geoffrey’s friend Evan Dawley, author of Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, joins us to talk about a movie he watched like ten times as a D&D-loving teenager: Legend. This movie was directed by Ridley Scott (what!?) and stars a pre-Top Gun Tom Cruise and his love interest, Mia Sara (AKA Sloane from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).Tim Curry as The Darkness, AKA The Big D, in Legend (1985)Here’s Evan’s Summary:Legend was on cable back when I was in my early/mid-teens, not long after my family got cable, and when I was playing a lot of D&D, so I watched it many times. With all that, I was expecting to have a good memory of the plot, but as I sat down to write this, I realized that there are a lot of gaps in my memory—or maybe those are in the movie itself? So, here goes. The movie is set in some idyllic village, where the lead character, a young woman (Mia Sara), wanders in the fields on a perfect summer afternoon, to the sound of synthesizers. She heads for the forest, passing the cottage of a familiar older woman—who is evidently from a lower class—who warns her to be careful as she heads into the forest; the older woman specifically warns the young woman about “old oaks.” As she walks among the trees, the sky turns dark, the wind picks up, and she is suddenly in a different realm. I think she literally falls down a hole. In this new realm, which is dark and scary, she encounters a few characters who I guess are there to help her, but are really kind of weird. There is a seriously creepy, and shirtless, elf who does most of the initial talking; a short creature with a human body and a boar’s head who says less; and a dreamy, loin-clothed youth named Jack (Tom Cruise); this is the only name I remember from the entire film. They try to help her, I’m not sure initially from what, maybe to get home, maybe from the darkness in the realm. They go to some fancy house, where they encounter an impressively-designed demon (Tim Curry), who Boar’s Head refers to as “Big D!” The young woman falls under his spell and is transformed from Sweet Country Girl to Scary Goth Princess. Jack comes to her rescue, I think he wields a sword in the process, they escape from the demon, return to the place where she entered the realm, and then she crosses back into her familiar forest. She walks home on a perfect summer’s day to the sound of synthesizers.This movie had a synthtastic 80s soundtrack (well, the US version did, anyway), and great creature work, but tonally and plot wise, it is a hot messssss. Evan remembered a lot, but also forgot a lot of stuff, like Lily’s name, and that the Tim Curry demon was called “The Big D” because… of course he was. … Evan also forgot the unicorns… So there’s that.Geoffrey points out that this is the second movie we’ve done with a gump in it. Weird. This one is way different than the one in Return to Oz, though. Thanks to Evan for joining us!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Hot on the heels of the Futurama pilot episode, we decided to check out some Y2K related videos.First up, we watched this Y2K survival kit commercial.We followed that up with a news broadcast about people working overtime on New Year’s Eve in 1999.This one led us to talk about Dominos Pizza and reminisce about our episode on Will Vinton’s Claymation career, in which we watched some of the Dominos Noid commercials. Then we watched the trailer for Kull the Conqueror:This one because Geoffrey’s conspiracy theorist teacher had some idea that the creature in Kull the Conqueror looked exactly like a demon who had tried to pull his soul out of his body in a dream. This led to us talking a LOT about The Weekly World News. And finally as palate cleanser, we watched this video of someone feeding a farting wombat:Survey says: neither of us wants to try to feed a wombat. We’ll appreciate them from a distance, thanks. Happy 2021 again! May your year be full of wombats, but only from a distance, corn if you like that, banana flavored medicine if you like that… and if not? Break that syringe in half! You don’t have to take this!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! Wow, it’s 2021 and already things have gotten even more bonkers than they were in 2020. This future we’re living in can be pretty disorienting, so we thought this would be a great time to revisit a story about someone else having a pretty bonkers new year: Philip J. Fry. We watched the pilot episode of Futurama, which both of us have seen as adults, but not for a few years. Neither of us wrote a summary, but we both remembered the loose plot premise: Fry goes to deliver a pizza on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and falls into a cryochamber that freezes him for a thousand years. He wakes up to find out that he is now destined to be a delivery boy in the year 3,000. Image Description: Philip J. Fry accidentally frozen in a cryochamber with a beverage in hand on the night of December 31st, 1999. The New York skyline is visible outside. We had a lot of fun watching this one, which (spoilers for our lightning round questions) we both thought definitely did hold up. What we both didn’t remember was the extended joke sequence about a suicide booth, which we didn’t feel aged well. Inevitably, when talking about time travel and the year 2020, we had to bring up Julia Nolke’s “Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self” series of videos. We talk a bunch about our memories of New Year’s Eve 1999 and the Y2K panic leading up to it, and Geoffrey tells us all about a job training class he took from a whack conspiracy theorist who warned him about “KY2000” and the impending collapse of society. Of course we then had to acknowledge how this might have influenced Geoffrey’s previous podcast, Doorway to the Hidden World. Julia wonders how past guest Kimberly Meyer feels about Futurama’s heads in jars. Anyway, Happy New Year! Our 2021 wish for you is a boring year where news calms doooooown! And may you have eggs outside your house! If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Content warning: we end up talking about racist WWII propaganda, 9/11, and internment camps for a while around the 30 minute mark in this episode. If you want to skip that, we resume our talk about the Grinch at the 36 minute mark. We’d also like to apologize for the sound quality. We’re not exactly sure what happened between this episode and the last one, which we recorded on the same evening, but Gillian’s connection seems to have been full of feedback this time. We did our best to take out the worst blips, but if things sound odd, that’s why. We blame 2020.Gillian Daniels joins us again to talk about a Christmas special she remembers liking as a kid even though she never celebrated Christmas. Gillian is a fantasy and horror writer, and you can find her at gilliandaniels.com, on twitter as @gilldaniels, and on instagram as @gillianlynndaniels.We all agree: This one is a classic for a reason. It has great voice actors, great music, and great animation. Here’s Gillian’s summary:What I remember of the Grinch special from the seventies (?):- "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" song- Max the dog, reluctant and with antlers tied to his head- The Grinch joyfully stealing everything- Cindy Lou-Who meeting the Grinch and thinking Santa's real- The Whos down in Whoville being okay with all their stuff stolen the next morning and then singing it out- Grinch being okay with Christmas and getting to cut the roast beastThat was all pretty spot on. We really didn’t imagine going into this that we would end up talking about 9/11, beowulf, and kink shaming in the course of this conversation, but there you go. It’s a whole journey. Also, Geoffrey sings a lot! If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Gillian Daniels joins us to talk about A Rugrats Chanukah! Gillian is a fantasy and horror writer, and you can find her at gilliandaniels.com, on twitter as @gilldaniels, and on instagram as @gillianlynndaniels.Image Description: The Rugrats (Chuckie, Tommy, Phil, and Lillian) watch as Grandpa fills a menorah with oil.This special is 25 minutes long. We talk for… an hour and 20 minutes… We have a lot to say about the Rugrats, apparently!We also have a digression into the world of TGIF, and particularly the time travel special night of linked episodes. And here’s a whole write up about bathing boots, which were apparently optional. You just… you just never know where this podcast is gonna take you.Happy Chanukah! We hope you have a mirable (noooo, why is this the worst word?) of perfect latkes!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Gwendolyn Kiste joins us again to talk about stuff related to Red Wind, and stuff she remembers from her childood. Hills Department Store: Where the toys are. This commercial from 1986 inspired some unease. Perhaps, dare we say, terror? But Gwendolyn SWEARS Hills was actually really fun and not scary. Somehow we ended up watching the live birth of a Cabbage Patch Baby. This a thing you yourself could go see in person in Georgia….Gwendolyn was quite taken with the Babyland USA website, and said she’d go there herself if we weren’t in the middle of a global pandemic. Next up, we watched Elvira selling Coors Light. Gwendolyn remembered loving Elvira as a kid.The Geoffrey founds this Best of putting things into the shredder. We thought we were going to just watch like one or two minutes of this, and then we all ended up being mesmerized by it and watched the whole thing. Thankfully, no humans were shredded in this video, but we all agreed that possibly scarier than Red Wind was the idea that this person seems not to be wearing eye protection. YIKES!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and Boneset and Feathers (among other things), joins us to talk about a movie she somehow saw as a seven or eight year old: Red Wind. Gwendolyn is awesome, and we encourage you to check out her work!Image Description: Therapist Kris Morrow goes through a gate next to an “EXOTIC SEX” sign in search of the club her patient frequents. Gwendolyn posted about this movie on Facebook, and Julia immediately knew we had to cover it. Here’s what Gwendolyn posted:Okay, everybody: there's a movie I've been trying to remember the title of for years, so let's see if someone can help me with it.(Full disclosure: I saw this film for the first and only time more than twenty-five years ago when I was a kid, so some of these details may not be exact.)So first off, this movie was fairly sleazy, like one of those low-rent thrillers they produced a lot of in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think it was made-for-TV, but like Showtime or Cinemax or USA Up All Night made-for-TV. Again, pretty sleazy. Way too sleazy for a kid to be watching, but too late now. I swear it was called something like "Red Willows" or another title with Red in it, but that might be totally wrong.The plot was typical thriller stuff: a plucky heroine dealing with a serial killer. I'm fairly sure it takes place in the Pacific Northwest since there's a lot of logging equipment hanging around, which comes up later. As the heroine is dealing with the murder plot, she falls in love with a guy who's helping her, and--who would have guessed it?--but that dude turns out to be the killer. When she discovers he's the killer, he tries to kill her too, but she fends him off, at which point he asks her to kill him so that he stops killing people. Rather than, you know, calling the police or something, she obliges by putting him in a contraption that looked a lot like a wood chipper. Which seems like the most difficult way possible to casually murder someone, but hey, I'm not a plucky heroine in a sleazy 80s/90s thriller, so what do I know?Now here's the part I remember most clearly: as she puts him through the wood chipper, he says "I love you," only the words are all warbly and distorted because he's obviously being put through a wood chipper. She goes into absolute hysterics at this point, as though she's been waiting a long time to hear him say those three special words to her, and now he's done it, only it's too late because there's tons of blood running out of the wood chipper (the movie is very specific in showing her both feeding his body into the chipper and the resultant blood seeping out the other end). The reason this movie has stuck with me is specifically this scene, and not for its violence but for its inexplicable take on relationships. It led me to the unshakeable conclusion that adult relationships must be both terrifying and confusing, and I promptly resolved to live a life without relationships ever because that seemed better than being expected to put your serial killer-lover in a wood chipper (which again, just seemed like a lot of needless work).Then the last scene has her musing all philosophically in voiceover as she walks through her Pacific Northwest wilderness property where she put her killer-lover in the aforementioned wood chipper, and I think there's even a dog frolicking beside her, because this movie managed to be both sleazy AND maudlin.Now, again, some of these details are probably off. Perhaps it's not a wood chipper she uses but instead something like a stump grinder or a harvester. I don't know. I was like seven when I saw this. It looked like a wood chipper to me. And this was absolutely before the wood chipper scene in Fargo, because I distinctly remember when I saw Fargo for the first time thinking, "Oh this is like that other sleazy movie!"I've searched for the title repeatedly over the years, and I've never been able to come up with what it is, leading me to believe that perhaps I've slipped into a Berenstain Bears reality in which this strange little sleazy movie does not exist. Which is probably kinder for everyone in this reality, to be honest.At any rate, if I did not in fact dream up this film, I would love it if someone could tell me the title, if for no other reason really than morbid, sleazy curiosity.Gwendolyn was pretty spot on in that summary, though there was no dog, and the movie is set in Miami, Florida. It’s also just dreadful, and full of sleazy insinuation without any on screen sex, but plenty of blood coming out of a wood chipper at the end. It also has one of the least believable S&M club scenes we’ve ever seen. This led Geoffrey and Gwendolyn to compare it to Exit to Eden, a 90s BDSM comedy starring Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Akroyd. We didn’t discuss this in the podcast, but apparently that one was based on an Ann Rampling (Anne Rice’s erotica pen name) novel, but Hollywood decided to add in a comedy plot? How… how did Anne Rice feel about the Exit to Eden movie? We would 100% not show this movie to a child, and we also note that this podcast episode contains discussions of murder by wood chipper, and S&M, so, you know, take that under advisement.If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

This week we’re joined by Kimberly Meyer, author of Murder at Constellation House (a cozy cosmic horror mystery set in Newport, Rhode Island). She brings us one of her childhood traumas: Return to Oz! Opinions vary wildly about this one, so get ready for a hot debate! Image Description: Princess Mombi holds a disembodied head before putting it on. The Princess Mombi scene in particular was the scariest for young Kim. It’s available to watch on YouTube if you don’t want to watch the entire movie (though, honestly, Julia thinks you should just watch the whole thing on Disney Plus).Geoffrey brings writer and director, Walter Murch, who has a primary background in sound design and video editing (for which he’s won Oscars!) to the table as his most notable person, and Julia waxes ecstatic about foley again—it’s like a repeat of The Land Before Time episode. This movie has a ton of satisfying sounds! We also mention Will Vinton, who did the claymation in this movie (previously seen in The Adventures of Mark Twain and California Raisins episodes), and Fairuza Balk, who turned in an AMAZING performance, and did all her own stunts!We also talk about the political allegory interpretation of the first Oz book, which turns out to date from 1990. Kim also brings up an early episode of the Lore podcast about mental institutions in the past. You know, in case you want to listen to something lighter.*Julia also mentioned that Tik-Tok sort of sounded like Box from Logan’s Run. This video is just a loop of Box talking about proteins from the sea. Thanks so much to Kim for joining us! Check out Murder at Constellation House, available in paperback and e-book from Amazon. *By “lighter” we mean, definitely not lighter. Not even a little bit. The history of mental institutions is heavy stuff. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

As a US Election week treat to follow up your Halloween treat, we’re unlocking the original After These Messages episode we made for Mr. Boogedy.Please enjoy this glimpse back in time to the dawn of 2020 when we had NO IDEA what this year had in store. We’re back to talk about stuff related to Mr. Boogedy, and wow, buckle up! This one’s wild!Image Description: A still from “I Told Ya” by D’ Lil showing two tall women in tight black suits standing on either side of David Faustino, who is 5’3” and wearing black overalls with a white, long sleeved shirt. He is, at this point of the song, saying he wants “to get that pussy pussy pussy pussy pussy pussy cat, meow meow meow meow meow, how’s that?” Because of course he is.Let’s Get Down to Boogedy Business!Of course we had to start with the Michael Eisner opening for this movie. But then… we just had to know what David Faustino’s rap career was like. So we watched the video for D’ Lil’s “I Told Ya”So David Faustino was one of the kids (Corwin), but Benji Gregory was another (R.E. or Aurie), and he was the kid on ALF. So naturally we had to watch an ALF cellphone Super Bowl commercial from 2014.Radio Shack went out of business in 2015, so apparently not even an alien life form could save them…This did lead us into a discussion of car phones, which we did not remotely look up any facts about when we were actually recording this. Here’s Wikipedia on the topic, in case you’re curious about their history. We also watched an ALF Department of the Interior Commercial from 1989.Given the state of our planet at present, ALF’s warning hasn’t really helped with that, either. His home planet was destroyed. Ours is dealing with severe climate change. So that’s cool. This did also lead us to consider how ALF is similar to Superman and Princess Leia, though…Okay, so we thought we should lighten up some after that, and since the Davis family moved to Lucifer Falls to open a joke shop, we did a search for joke shops and found a tribute to Don the joke shop guy in Quincy, MA. He apparently ran a joke shop there for 45 years!We also watched a promotional video for a Joke Shop in Athlone, Ireland. That one mostly seemed to be costumes, though. After that, we returned to David Faustino, and watched a supercut of Grandmaster B jokes from Married With Children. Holy Toxic Heteronormativity, Batman!And finally, Grandmaster B rapping.Which is better, this or D’ Lil? You be the judge! This also led us to discuss the boy band Why Don’t We, and their performance on the Today Show.We also watched the official video for this song, so here’s that, in case you are wondering what we’re talking about with the art gallery stuff.Julia sends us home with a story about a New Year’s Eve from the early years of the 21st century that lives on in infamy to this day. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Happy Spooktober! We wanted to give you a special Halloween treat, so please enjoy this bonus episode, which was previously locked to our paid subscribers! We originally recorded this for New Year’s, having NO IDEA the horrors that 2020 was waiting to unleash upon us. Now? Well, we thought everyone might enjoy a little more fun distraction to get through this week. If you love this one, our bonus for paid subscribers coming out tomorrow is Bride of Boogedy! We also did some special Spooktober episodes on Casper the Friendly Ghost and Garfield’s Halloween Adventure. If you do decide to subscribe, you can listen to all of them! Okay, Who’s ready to Boogedy?This is a 45 minute long made for TV spooky and silly movie, which you can watch on Disney Plus if you so desire. Geoffrey remembered loving this one as a kid. Julia saw it once at school and was scared of it. If Julia had written a summary, it would have said, “A family goes to a house and it is scary and there’s a man there and he’s really scary.” But this was Geoffrey’s pick, and his summary is much more detailed!Here’s Geoffrey’s Summary:“A man who sells weird gadgets and his family buy a new house. But it's haunted! A long time ago (Pilgrim times?) there was a nasty old man who sold his soul to the devil for a magic cloak because he hated everyone and his face was all messed up This gave him magic powers. They called him Mr. Boogedy. He haunts the house, and so does some lady and a boy named Jonathan. At the end, I think they suck the cloak up in a vacuum cleaner to save the day.”Geoffrey’s summary was waaaayyy more correct, but it missed a couple of key points.One: Mr. Boogedy’s face didn’t get gross until after he had the cloak and tried to cast a spell that backfired and instead blew up his house. Two: The dad sells practical jokes. And plays practical jokes. So many practical jokes. Including these trick glasses. Image Description: A still from Mr. Boogedy showing a child wearing fake glasses with uncanny eyeballs in them, possibly the scariest prop in the entire film.This movie has a bunch of notable people, and we get into some interesting conversations about stuff like Sean Astin’s family tree, The name of Geoffrey’s first crush, and our theories on what would actually have happened in the 1600s if someone tried to use a devil cloak to magically force a widow to marry him… Opinions vary! Send us your own theory if you like!Happy Halloween!If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get Bride of Boogedy tomorrow! If you’re not, your Halloween treat is this one, but we’re going to put the original After These Messages episode for this movie up for you as our first regularly scheduled November podcast! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Content Note: This episode contains discussions of slavery, racism, sexual assault, harassment, hate crimes, violence, abuse, murder, and more. We start off by discussing a gruesome lynching that happens in the miniseries, and we also talk about modern events of white supremacy and violence against Black people. It’s a heavy discussion. We think it was worth having, but we wanted you to be prepared. Nuance Vivian joins us to talk about a miniseries that made her think a lot about her own experiences as a mixed race person, Alex Haley’s Queen. This discussion is a lot more serious than our usual episodes, and as there’s a lot to unpack, we’re breaking it into two parts. This is Part 2.Nuance plays a cleric in the actual play podcast Fast Times at D&D High, and she’s on staff for some Boston area LARPS. She’s @Shadowravyn on Twitter. Image Description: Danny Glover as Alec Haley and Halle Berry as Queen on their wedding day. Alex Haley’s Queen is a three part miniseries based on a novel about Alex Haley’s grandmother, who was the daughter of a Black slave woman and a white plantation owner man. The story follows her from birth through old age and covers the entire second half of the 19th century. Nuance brought up a few things including:Soujourner Truth’s famous speech from the 1851 Women’s Convention, which may not have been delivered in the way people most often assume. The WGN series Underground, featuring Jurnee Smollett as another light skinned Black person working for white people. The Whitney Plantation is not far from New Orleans. You can visit and learn about the experiences of slaves who lived there. If you want to hear Nuance discussing something lighter, she discussed Garfield’s Halloween Adventure with us as a paid subscriber bonus just a few days ago! We were relieved to find that though it was spooky, it was much less horrifying than Garfield’s Thanksgiving was…If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Content Note: This episode contains discussions of slavery, racism, sexual assault, harassment, hate crimes, violence, abuse, murder, and more. It’s a heavy discussion. We think it was worth having, but we wanted you to be prepared. Nuance Vivian joins us to talk about a miniseries that made her think a lot about her own experiences as a mixed race person, Alex Haley’s Queen. This discussion is a lot more serious than our usual episodes, and as there’s a lot to unpack, we’re breaking it into two parts. This is Part 1.Nuance plays a cleric in the actual play podcast Fast Times at D&D High, and she’s on staff for some Boston area LARPS. She’s @Shadowravyn on Twitter. Image description: Halle Berry in 1860s dress as the title character in Alex Haley’s Queen. This was a three part miniseries based on a novel about Alex Haley’s grandmother, who was the daughter of a Black slave woman and a white plantation owner man. The story follows her from birth through old age and covers the entire second half of the 19th century. It’s also got a giant cast of 1980s and 1990s TV stars. And all the content warnings noted above. If you want to hear Nuance come back for something lighter, she's discussing Garfield’s Halloween Adventure with us as a paid subscriber bonus in just a few days! We’re hoping that will be less horrifying than Garfield’s Thanksgiving was…If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

LJ is back to talk Pine-Sol and Michael Cunio and Supercrossed, the motocross movie made by the same guy a few years later. LJ wanted to make sure everyone knew that she likes to ride bicycles and not motorbikes, by the way. You can check out some of her bicycle related adventures on Instagram where she is Randonnista. Fun Fact: We went for Pine-Sol because LJ originally thought that the Vice President in charge of racing was the face of Pine-Sol before rewatching Motocrossed, but it turned out not to be the case. The VP of racing was Aloma Wright, and the face of Pine-Sol for the past 30 years has been Diane Amos. Still, LJ remembered Pine-Sol ads being a constant in many eras of her life, so we decided to take a look!We started with this 1990s commercial. Then this one from 1997.And this one from 1996.Then we watched this one from 1994 with a tiny Tahj Mowry in it!This one is prescient! Little Tahj would star in Smart Guy, a show about a super smart kid just a few years later. Finally, we watched a spot from 2020, because, yep, the Pine-Sol ads are still featuring Diane Amos even now! What a run!After that tour de Pine-Sol, we decided to check out the musical stylings of the evil French motocross rider, René Cartier, or Michael Cunio as people who aren’t familiar with Motocrossed might call him…Our discussion of Michael Cunio spiraled into talking about studying abroad, sparkling wine vs. Champagne, and Julia’s favorite French candy. Image Description: Julia on the beach in 2016, carrying 20 packets of Kit Kat Ball after having discovered that St. Martin counts as part of actual France, and thus carries Kit Kat Ball. VICTORY. Lastly, we watched this trailer for Supercross.We decided we would prefer not to watch the whole of this one. We’ll stick with Motocrossed. We do appreciate that Channing Tatum’s character is named Rowdy Sparks, though.If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Geoffrey’s improv partner LJ, who is also the host of Bike Talk on MIT’s radio station, joins us to talk about an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that takes place in a competitive sports context. No, it’s not She’s the Man! It’s a different one! Motocrossed was a direct to TV movie from the turn of the century, and though neither Geoffrey nor Julia had heard of it before, it played a big role in LJ’s growing up years. Image Description: The DVD cover for Motocrossed with Dean, Andrew, and Adrea’s faces across the top, and a a fully kitted out motocross rider doing some sweet motocross tricks underneath. Lots of questions arise as we talk about this one, but perhaps most importantly, how did motocross community members get and share news in 2001? Email? Web? Paper newsletter? If you are a motocross historian and archivist, please contact Geoffrey!We also have some different twin film digressions, and we learn that given the NSYNC vs. Backstreet Boys fandom choice, LJ is NSYNC all the way. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Kenny Gray of Mess + Finesse is back to talk all things tangentially related to The Land Before Time. First we watched Vin Diesel showing off some of Kenny’s childhood fave toys: Street Sharks. This one led us to talk about Kidz Bop and specifically their version of “Float On” by Modest Mouse. Next up we watched the trailer for The Land Before Time 14. This one led Kenny off on a Star Wars tangent. Why? Because these dinos never revisit the wasteland. It makes more sense when he says it. We also talk about deadbeat dino dads, and possibly unlock the secret of why three horns don’t play with long necks???Finally we watched a series of previews shown before The Land Before Time on a VHS tape in 1996. Timmy the Tooth is truly horrifying. Somehow Kenny watched every single one of them as a kid, but is still alive? Geoffrey talks about how the director of Mad Max Fury Road also did Babe: Pig in the City, Kenny sings some of the dark and gritty broadway musical he envisions for Land Before Time, and Julia tells the complicated backstory of Lady Clarissa Blacktail and Miss Letitia Geraldine Fluffington, Baker by Appointment to the Crown. We also talk CGI and Kenny recommends this video about how David Fincher uses it.If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Content Warning: We briefly discuss the death of a real child in this episode. We don’t go into a lot of detail about it, but if you would rather not hear about it at all, skip from 52:30 to 53:35.Kenny Gray of Mess + Finesse joins Julia and Geoffrey to discuss one of his childhood faves: The Land Before Time. What happens when Don Bluth stares at the moon while smoking a clove cigarette? Perhaps this treatise on humanity thinly disguised in (really weirdly scaled) dinosaur trappings!Image description: Petrie stands on Little Foot’s head while Ducky looks on from below. Petrie is carrying a rolled up tree star. This discussion goes into some fascinating places as we talk the joys of good foley effects, dark themes in children’s media, a soothing Swedish picture book about the inevitability of death, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of language as fossil poetry, screen writer Stu Krieger’s Tedx Talk, Jenny Nicholson’s deep dive into The Land Before Time straight to video sequels, and more!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Geoffrey and Julia take a look at some Warner Brothers things tangentially related to Tiny Toon Adventures. We started off with a look at Loonatics Unleashed, a gritty sci-fi future with Looney Tunes characters. This one led Geoffrey to dis Space Jam and talk about his idea for a gritty reboot of The Jetsons. Does anyone want that?Nest we watched the Dodo scene from Porky in Wackyland, a Looney Tunes piece fro 1938. So that’s apparently where Gogo Dodo comes from. It’s definitely wacky. Also Geoffrey reveals that he finds Porky Pig to be a sub par Looney Toon. Julia is not so sure. Julia remembered visiting the Warner Brothers Store in the 90s, so we watched someone else’s nostalgia video about the stores. Warning that this one takes a sharp turn into September 11th talk. Our talk about Warner Bros. stores led us to reminisce about childhood visits to Universal Studios. Finally, we watched this ad for a Visa Check Card from the 1990s when people had to be told what a debit card was because it was not assumed to be standard. Whoa. Bonus: This commercial actually takes place inside a Warner Bros. store!Did you visit a Warner Bros. store in the 90s? Did you watch Loonatics Unleashed? Do you have a bone to pick with Geoffrey about the merits of Space Jam or Porky Pig? Let us know!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Julia and Geoffrey watch the first episode of Tiny Toons Adventures.Image description: Babs and Buster Bunny popping out of a rainbow ring with the words Tiny Toon Adventures.Here’s Geoffrey’s summary: TinyToonAdventures, if I remember correctly, was part of the "Kids shows with younger versions of the originals to make the kids like it more even though the characters were for kids shows to begin with so why is that necessary?" run of shows. This was more high-class though, because it had pedigree.  It was sort of the bridge between traditional Looney Toonsand the Animaniacs. There were versions of each old-school character and they went to school and had adventures, and I don't remember much of what they did.  Oh, and I felt very clever for figuring out that the human girl who was overly affectionate was the updated version of Hugo the Abominable Snowman."and Julia’s:Babs and Buster Bunny are twins who live in Acme Acres with a cast of other small tooncharacters including a duck girl? Webigail??? And a human girl named Elmyra who wants to smother fuzzy things with too much affection. I remember feeling super cool for getting some of the references, and especially for already knowing They Might Be Giants before i saw this cartoon because I was a super nerd who listened to the album Lincoln a lot in like 5th grade...What were we wrong about? Several things. Babe and Buster? Not related! Webbigail? From Ducktales! Julia remembers loving this show as a kid, but as adults… we were both underwhelmed.What do you think? Did you love this? Should we try another episode? Do you have a favorite?If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Geoffrey’s friend Micah is back again to talk about all the weird Disney movies we grew up watching previews for back before the Disney Renaissance of the late 80s and early 90s. We start by talking about the trailer for Watcher in the Woods, which seems so much scarier than the actual movie! We actually have a good bit of Watcher in the Woods talk for the first 18 minutes of this episode, so clearly that movie left us with a lot of thoughts!Then we reminisce about many of the classics in this medley of Disney previews from the early 1980s. Julia googles “Disney movie lobster slap” and Micah tells us a horrific story about his association with the Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Also, wow is that “Walt Disney and You” theme song an earworm!The Disney movie lobster slap in question turns out to be from Herbie Rides Again (1974).Then we watch a George Burns commercial for the Pollenex smokeless ashtray. Wow, this is some really bad innuendo. We also discuss whether the Disney previews made us curious to watch any of these movies now. Apple Dumpling Gang? Pollyanna? What do you think?If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Geoffrey’s friend Micah joins us to tackle a long-feared feature from his and Julia’s childhoods: The Watcher in the Woods!Note: the version we uploaded on the 15th of July is the corrected version. If you downloaded this on the 14th or the morning of the 15th, you will have a version that is missing a couple of minutes of Julia’s audio at about 1 hour in. Image Description: a row of reflections of a girl in a white dress wearing a white blindfold. Here’s what Micah remembered:“When I was a little kid we didn't have a VCR. I don't think we got one until I was around 12. One of the only times we watched videos was when we went to my grandma's house on weekends or holidays. She had Beta for a while, but soon switched over to VHS. In any event, my grandma was really into renting Disney movies for us. Unlike all the other video cassettes, the Disney videos came in big clunky white cases, not the thin brown ones. At that time, in the mid-80s, there weren't that many animated Disney features to choose from, but there were lots of live action movies -- stuff like "Treasure Island," "Swiss Family Robinson," Davy Crockett versus Mike Fink, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," etc. Before every Disney movie started there were previews of other movies, and they alwaysincluded "Watcher in the Woods." It scared the crap out of us. (I recently asked my sister what she remembered about "Watcher in the Woods" and she replied, "Only that it was terrifying.") The scene with a girl looking into a mirror, this apparition of another girl with a blindfold gazing back at her, and the mirror shattering is what I remember being most terrifying. That preview alone was enough to give us nightmares. Whenever it came on we would run and hide or insist on fast forwarding. We weren't brave enough to watch "Watcher in the Woods" until we were in middle school. As I recall, the movie was about a blonde girl and her family, who had recently moved to England. There was a creepy old neighbor lady who said the blonde girl looked just like her own daughter, who had mysteriously disappeared during an eclipse many years before. A bunch of scary stuff happened -- including that breaking mirror scene -- involving some kind of creepy presence in the woods, but I don't recall the specifics. The blonde girl got a boyfriend and they tried to reenact some sort of occult eclipse ritual to figure out what happened to the other blonde girl who had vanished back in the day. There was some kind of energy vortex and I think everything turned out ok in the end. That's all I remember.”And here’s what Julia remembered:“It’s a really scary story that’s like in a gothic old house and maybe it’s a ghost story? There’s a girl in a mirror and also a girl who almost frowns and a scary old lady who, I think saves the drowning girl but it looks like she’s pushing her under to trap her underwater. I have no memory of the end but I know my mother made us watch the whole thing because everything came out okay so we shouldn’t be scared. I am actually still scared to watch this again...” And then in a separate email: “(Almost drowns, not almost frowns)”We were genuinely worried about watching this one, and did it live up to the remembered terror? Ummm not really. That said, we all agreed that drowning scene was really intense, as was the house of mirrors scene. We also went deep on this movie’s WILD history, and even watched two alternate endings! This is the one that was on the original theatrical release in 1980 for ten days before the overwhelmingly negative audience response made Disney yank the movie and spend a million dollars coming up with a new ending and reshooting it. And that one was cut down from this original ending, which they didn’t have enough time to make the special effects they wanted for. Notice that both of these endings involve Jan being swept away by the watcher, a weird demon-looking alien thing. Ultimately we think the ending that wound up in theaters in 1981 (and on all the home video releases later) with Ellie being possessed by the Watcher, who later appears as a column of light, is the best of the three available, but none of them really worked for us. We wonder what the rest of the 150 reported endings Disney commissioned from different writers looked like. To be fair, it doesn’t really sound like they were working with particularly amazing source material. Here’s the Kirkus review of the novel. We also talk a bunch about spooky games we remember from childhood, like Bloody Mary and Light As a Feather, Stiff As a Board. Did you play these games? Did you, like Julia, watch this movie as a kid and end up with nightmares? Were you, Like Micah, too freaked out by the trailer to watch it at all? Let us know! Did you love it so much that you personally directed a remake for the Lifetime channel starring Anjelica Huston in 2017? If yes to that last, then OMG, you are Melissa Joan Hart! WILD. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Kris Herndon, artist and writer, is back again this week to talk about Clyde the Safety Frog, which she was originally convinced actually had something do with Death Zones. Turns out, no! Clyde is an unrelated frog puppet safety show…Kris originally also said a lot about how innocent the frog was, and how he didn’t deserve bad things happening to him. He was, Kris said, just trying to survive. We… maybe have some different opinions after seeing this spectacular series of poor choices:Clyde goes hitchhiking.Kris grew up in Atlanta during the time of the child murders (warning: these are rather gruesome), so she definitely remembers being taught never to get into a stranger’s car. Clyde has a gun accident.Clyde manages to injure himself while getting on and off the bus. Clyde learns bus safety.In this one Clyde “plays catch” at a bud stop, which is to say: he throws a rock at his' friend’s head. Then his friend invites him to play tag in the street. Good work being safe, kids! This somehow led us to discussing drugs and peer pressure, and Julia referred to this classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles PSA (“I’m not a chicken. You’re a turkey!”). Clyde decides to ignore all the safety rules.Clyde takes random pills.Look, Clyde is a hot mess, okay. And is his dad a real doctor? We have a lot of questions. We also speculated about what a Clyde safe sex video would entail, and about whether frogs even have sex. Well, friends, here’s an article all about that… Kris also recommends, and feels bad about spoiling “Goodbye My Brother” by John Cheever. So, you know, sorry if you were expecting things from the 1950s to remain unspoiled in the year 2020.We’re also pretty sure that in a pandemic safety video, Clyde would be a super spreader who knows he should wear a mask but forgets to and/or doesn’t wear it properly. Thanks a lot Clyde.Not even Kris still feels like Clyde is merely an innocent frog after all that. We all feel way more bad for Mihi Kwan. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Kris Herndon, artist and writer, joins us to talk about a school bus safety video that traumatized her as a kid: Death Zones. This video is grim AF, so please be advised if you decide to watch it. These are fictional cases, but we do see children die! You are warned!If you are one of the many people who saw this in school in the time between 1975 and at least as recently as 2008, we are sorry for your trauma. On the plus side, apparently school bus deaths have dropped over time, according to this article. So did this video help?Finally, over at Watercolor HQ Kris has an essay about how watching Fruitvale Station is a good way to learn about systemic racism, and everyone should definitely check it out! And if that makes you want to take some action to fight racism, we’re still running our bail fund donation special until the end of June! Send us a copy of a receipt for a donation to Freedom Fund, or Community Bail Funds, and we’ll give you, or the person of your choice 3 months of access to our paid subscribers’ episodes!If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

In the wake of our “Doug Bags a Neematoad” episode, Julia and Geoffrey decided to explore the many commercials Billy West did voiceover work for. SPECIAL NOTE: For the month of June, send us a copy of a receipt for a donation to Freedom Fund, or Community Bail Funds, and we’ll give you, or the person of your choice 3 months of access to our paid subscribers’ episodes!First up we watched Billy West talking about his work as the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee and the Red M&M.Which is how we learned that Billy West is a professional bumblebee and Geoffrey … is not. Then we took a look at the thing Geoffrey was the most excited for: The Marfalump. This was an alien creature designed specifically to tie in with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace annnnnnd Pepsi products! We watched this Marfalump commercial.And this documentary by the person who sculpted the Marfalump model (which, btw, we’re super impressed with the sculpting!).That documentary included not only the behind the scenes look at how Pepsi created the character, but also a Marfalump commercial which definitely wants us to think pod racing is cool.We talked about how much fun it is to play villains, and how often the people who play villains are kind and empathetic in real life. This led to some discussion of how Mick Foley (who wrestled as the villain Mankind in the WWE) does a lot of charity work with children and other traumatized people, and how Margaret Hamilton (who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz) came as a guest on Mr. Rogers so that children could see that she wasn’t really scary in real life. And we finished out this episode by talking about “The Real Life Lord of The Flies” — an account of several teenage boys being stuck on an island in real life, and how they worked together to support each other and survive instead of tearing each other apart. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, friends! We’re a bit loopy in this one because time has lost all meaning! The weird throwback 60s vibe of Bluffington, the town Doug Funnie just moved to, is not really helping matters, either!Image description: Bully Roger and Doug look on as Porkchop (Doug’s dog) stands covered in mud, and pretends to be a neematoad. This show has lots of talent. Billy West is amazing, and the music slaps. But… we didn’t really love it. What about you? Got fond memories of this one? Do you remember liking it like Julia, or hating it like Geoffrey? This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Vlad Barash is back to talk about the 1985 Soviet Russian production of The Hobbit! Check out Vlad’s website to see his various projects, including the game he co-wrote with his partner, Lorraine Fryer, Demon Mark: A Russian Saga! If you want to watch what we watched for this one, here’s a handy link with English subtitles. And here is a link to a video without subtitles, but with better visuals.Image Description: Gandalf from the 1985 Russian Hobbit. We have a tangent about Lindsay Ellis, including some discussion of her three part series on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and some discussion of her Cats video. We also talk a bunch about spiders—both real and fictional. Oh, and the amazingly bizarre Gollum costume in this film…Image Description: Gollum, from he 1985 Russian Hobbit. Green face paint, a green spandex… swim cap??? and, uh… fangs? We are really not sure what is going on here. If you’re having fun listening to us, please tell your friends about us! Subscribe to our newsletter at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com for free, or pay $5/month to get access to two bonus paid episodes each month! We’re also on Patreon if that’s your jam! Rate and review us! follow us on Twitter where we’re @thisiswhy_pod! And, of course, you can always drop us a note at at thisiswhywerelikethis@gmail.com. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe