Category Archives: New Episode

Podcasta la Vista, Baby! Episode 31 – FUBAR

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Heroes Don’t Retire. They Reload.

This month, we’re joined in the studio by not one, but two guests, Carol and Dave Brouillette of the late Hands Free Football soccer podcast, and suffering through all eight episodes of the Arnold-helmed Netflix series, FUBAR!

For decades, CIA operative Luke Brunner has been living a double life. To his suburban family, he’s been a traveling salesman of exercise equipment. But this work cost him his marriage and strained his relationships with his adult children. Now with retirement looming, Brunner looks forward to the chance to possibly winning back his ex-wife. But when he’s called back into action for one last mission, he’s shocked to discover that his daughter Emma has also been working in espionage for years. Now they must work together to take down an international arms dealer, repair their relationship, and keep their work and home lives separated.

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Episode 60 – Zardoz

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Into a world of eternal life, he brought the gift of death

This month, we’re eating green bread and refusing to go to Second Level meditation with Joe Preti of the late View from the Gutters comic book podcast to dive into the weird and psychedelic science fiction cult film, 1974’s Zardoz!

In the year 2293, Zed is a murderer disciple of Zardoz, a floating stone god who arms and commands him and other “exterminators” to roam the post-apocalyptic wasteland and kill human survivors. After learning the terrible truth of Zardoz – that the god is actually an airship –  the disillusioned Zed stows away aboard his “god” and is delivered into the Vortex, a hidden city of immortals that created Zardoz to manipulate humanity. Thrust into a bored and stagnant society that has forgotten about passion, sexuality and death, Zed’s very presence threatens to tear their fragile civilization apart.

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Fun Size Episode 83 – The Best Chris

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We’re back in the studio with Joe Preti, and talking about Martin Scorsese’s three hour crime epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.

Plus, a conversation about the death of the movie star as the driver of cinema. Are there any modern stars who can transcend their signature characters or franchises and elevate any movie they star in? And we lay our cards on the table: Hemsworth, Evans, Pratt and Pine. Who is the best and worst Chris?

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Fun Size Episode 82 – X-Pac Heat

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We’re back with Kirby Green to talk about her favorite trash TV obsession: 90 Day Fiancé! We look at the show that throws the best and worst elements of romance, desperation, immigration law, and repulsive people, into a television blender and we look at the horrifying and endlessly addictive slurry that pours out of it.

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Episode 59 – Halloween III: Season of the Witch

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…and now the earth will run with blood again!

We’re getting into the spirit of the spooky season with returning guest Kirby Green, and unmasking the underrated black sheep of the Halloween horror franchise: Halloween III: Season of the Witch!

Dr. Daniel Challis stumbles into a mystery after a man clutching a rubber mask is murdered in his hospital by a strange figure who immediately sets himself on fire. He soon joins the victim’s daughter on a quest for answers that leads them to a small California factory town behind the mask, this year’s hottest selling Halloween item. They are soon caught in an occult conspiracy involving a druidic cult, Stonehenge, murderous androids, and bloody mass sacrifice!

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Fun Size Episode 81 – Sadness and Anxiety Being Poured on Your Naked Brain

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Though conflicting schedules this month have made a regular episode impossible, we’re back in the studio to chat about the stuff we’ve been reading and watching, and of course… we’re talking about Star Trek. Plus, Mike talks about trying out some new manga series, including one that he didn’t really care for, and another that may be one of his new favorites. Including one manga in particular that may be one of the most traumatizing and artistically impressive things he’s ever read.

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Fun Size Episode 80 – Dangerous Banned Secrets of the Hidden Masters

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We continue our chat with Sam Mulvey, and tear the still-beating heart out of the world of martial arts frauds and scam artists. From manufactured biographies involving hidden temples and battles to the death, to selling mail order pamphlets through comic book ads promising access to forbidden techniques, we look at the grey area between the real and the phony.

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Podcasta la Vista, Baby! Episode 30 – Twins

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Only their mother can tell them apart.

This month, we’re learning the first rules of a crisis situation with returning guest Sam Mulvey of KTQA 95.3 FM radio, and exploring the first installment of the Schwartzenegger/Reitman collaboration trilogy, the wholesome eugenics comedy: Twins!

Genetic superman and polymath Julius Benedict, raised on a utopian tropical island, learns on his 35th birthday that the government experiment that created him in the 1950s also created a twin brother, Vincent, who was sent to a Los Angeles orphanage. Reunited with a sibling seemingly his opposite – a short, balding, and cynical car thief –  the kind and naive Julius drags his brother on a road trip to find their long-lost mother, previously believed dead. Along the way, they run afoul of loan sharks coming to collect, a high-paid assassin, and discover a loving family they never knew they had.

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Fun Size Episode 79 – The Assassination of Willow by the Coward Disney+

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We’re back again with Joe Preti, and chatting about the emerging streaming epoch and its tremendous downsides as corporate studio overlords start making things you love disappear, making it impossible for these shows and movies to find new fans — and for their creators to get paid for their work.

The streaming services are getting worse and more expensive and several beloved shows that have never gotten a Blu-Ray release are fading into the ether. So is it time to bring back… physical media? And now that pirating is the only way to get certain movies and TV shows… does anybody still remember how to use bit torrent?

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Episode 58 – Hudson Hawk

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Catch the Excitement. Catch the Adventure. Catch the Hawk.

We’re breaking into the Vatican and trying to get a good cappuccino with Joe Preti as we reappraise the much maligned — and genuinely underrated — 1991 Bruce Willis box office bomb about daring heists and alchemical miracle machines: Hudson Hawk!

Eddie “Hudson Hawk” Hawkins is the world’s most famous cat burglar. He’s just gotten out of prison, he’s trying to go straight, and he just wants a good cappuccino. But instead he’s being blackmailed — by local mobsters, his parole officer, a pair of psychotic billionaires, and even the C.I.A. — into stealing the artifacts of Leonard da Vinci from the Vatican museum, so they can reassemble his legendary device for turning lead into gold, and destroy the world’s economy! So now, Hawk and his best pal Tommy have to save the world in just six minutes and change. How about it? “Side by Side“?

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Fun Size Episode 78 – Video Game Dr. Mengele

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This month, we’re joined again by Dave Brouillette, and talking about the pixelized Stanford Prison Experiment that was The Sims, and how eventual boredom can turn a gamer into a cruel capricious god tormenting their own imaginary people.

We dig into real and fictionalized depictions of evil from Orson Welles in The Third Man to a documentary about former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara to the subway murder of a homeless man in the middle of a mental health crisis. Are these things an inevitable part of the human experience, or are they only inevitable because we’ve built a world around greed, competition and personal ambition that incentivizes these outcomes?

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Podcasta la Vista, Baby! Episode 29 – The Villain

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Vile, virile, vivacious, venomous, varied, voluptuous, versatile, venturesome, vibrant, vulgar, vast, vunniest vilm of 1979!

We’re strapping on our seven shot six-shooters and stocking up on barrels of glue and giant boulders with Dave Brouillette of the Hands Free Football podcast to talk about the underwhelming screwball comedy western from the beginning of Arnold’s career: The Villain!

Hapless outlaw “Cactus” Jack Slade is blackmailed by a scheming banker into robbing a cache of money from a business partner’s buxom (and sexually frustrated) daughter, Charming Jones, who is trying to return it to her father. “Cactus” Jack is going to steal every last trick from Wile E. Coyote’s playbook, but he’s got to get through a certain musclebound Handsome Stranger, oblivious to both the robbery attempts — and Charming Jones’ advances!

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Fun Size Episode 77 – A Plague of Ricks

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This month, we’re upturning the rocks of our childhoods and looking at all the bugs and worms, like the uncomfortable fact that serial bully and sexist Rick Berman still has any relationship to Star Trek media anymore, and how growing up sometimes means having our love of franchise media becomes more complicated.

Plus, a quick rundown of the history of professional wrestlers owning (and not owning) the rights to their own names — and that one time that Vince McMahon tried to “recast” a couple of names he owned with new wrestlers.

And why are all the worst people named Rick?

And lots more unhinged leftist rantings! We drop the mask and chat about the evils we’re all complicit in by living under capitalism. You know, because we’re a pop culture podcast!

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Fun Size Episode 76 – Make It Work.

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This month, we’re going boldly with Michael Warbington into the deep, inconsistent, and often-confusing world of Star Trek uniform design! Why did Starfleet have the exact same red naval uniform for nearly 70 years before they started to update their uniforms every few years in the 24th Century? Why do they keep designing great uniforms for flashback scenes that we’ll never see again? Why do people keep changing their clothes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Why do the crews of the U.S.S. Titan and the U.S.S. Ceritos have completely different uniforms? And don’t get us started on the constantly changing Admiral uniforms.

We’ll need positronic brains to sort this all out!

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Episode 57 – Sorcerer (1977)

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WANTED. Four men willing to drive a cargo of death to escape a life in hell.

This month, we’re going on a jungle suicide mission with Camp Director and President of Camp Quest NorthWest, Michael Warbington, and plunging into the gritty, globetrotting William Friedkin classic about desperate men looking for a way out of purgatory: 1977’s Sorcerer!

Four men exiled in a corrupt South American country, hiding from their pasts and unable to afford the bribes necessary to escape their fates, are given an opportunity to get out. An American getaway driver, a Palestinian militant, a disgraced French investment banker, and a Mexican hitman must drive two trucks across 218 miles of narrow mountain roads and dense jungle, to deliver a cargo of dangerously unstable dynamite to put out a raging oil fire. But if the rotten bridges, armed bandits, and leaking nitroglycerine don’t kill them, growing mistrust and despair just might.

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