Fun Size Episode 77 – A Plague of Ricks [CLIP]

We’re back yet again for another Fun Size episode, exclusive for our Patreon supporters!

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!

To unlock this episode in its entirety — and many episodes more! — just support us on Patreon with at least one measly dollar a month!

Join us!

Episode 57 – Sorcerer (1977)

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.

Fun Size Episode 75 – Literal Toilet Money [CLIP]

We’re back yet again with our 75th Fun Size episode, exclusive for our Patreon supporters!

This month, we’re continuing our talk with Carol Brouillette, and it may be time to crown Dave Bautista as the greatest professional-wrestler-turned-actor of all time. We look at his choices, roles and performances from Knock at the Cabin to Blade Runner 2049, and compare him to his squared circle contemporaries like Dwayne Johnson and John Cena.

Then we chat about the type of gimmicky overpriced restaurants for the uber-rich that marry pretentiousness to a giant price tag. What separates fine dining from obscene performative consumption that doesn’t taste good, isn’t filling, and costs the same as a month’s rent? Can you even feel like a good person eating something like that?

To unlock this episode in its entirety — and many episodes more! — just support us on Patreon with at least one measly dollar a month!

Join us!

Fun Size Episode 73 – But, She Has a New Hat! [CLIP]

We’re back with another new Fun Size episode, exclusive for our Patreon supporters!

This month, we’re continuing our chat with Kayleigh Casterline, and digging into the intersection of sports, video games and capitalist rent-seeking.

The new wrestling game, AEW: Fight Forever, is claiming that it won’t ask you to buy an entirely new game every year, the way that their rival the WWE does (not to mention the NFL, the NBA or MLB). They say they’re going to sell you a game once, and then update it.

What is the promise of this approach? What are the potential pitfalls? What happens to your video game roster when another wrestler does something unspeakable?

Plus, more media has entered the public domain! And we’re one year out from the most famous rodent of them all joining the army of the publicly-owned!

To unlock this episode in its entirety — and many episodes more! — just support us on Patreon with at least one measly dollar a month!

Join us!

Fun Size Episode 71 – That’s Capitalism, Baby! [CLIP]

We’re back with another new Fun Size episode, exclusive for our Patreon supporters!

This month, we’re chatting about the wonder of the public domain and open source software, and how it helps make our show possible and helps create community — and how capitalism puts up walls and exploits them to seek rent.

We talk a bit about how the world’s richest douchebag tech bro finally gave us the nudge to get our show off of Twitter, just in time to watch him burn it to the ground. A billionaire narcissist and the internet’s favorite hellscape: those crazy kids deserve each other!

Who ever said that capitalism was a meritocracy? Spoiler: it’s billionaires.

Also: come out to our special movie screening on December 8th in Seattle and support the PNW Starbucks Workers United labor union relief fund!

P.S. – Mike doesn’t actually smoke. He wanted to be clear about that.

To unlock this episode in its entirety — and many episodes more! — just support us on Patreon with at least one measly dollar a month!

Join us!

Fun Size Episode 66 – The Word for That Is “Extortion”

We continue our chat with Michael Warbington and dig into a rich vein we usually leave unmined: video games.

With different levels of skill, engagement and knowledge, we look at the experience of gaming in 2022, the intersection of art and commerce, the prevalence of in-game microtransactions, getting mercilessly griefed by racist swearing twelve year-olds, and a game’s replayability. What do we want out of the gaming experience?

Fun Size Episode 65 – From Sublime to Disgusting (And Everything in Between)

We’re back with Kirby Green and talking about the strange and surprising wholesomeness of Jackass Forever, the history of “caught-on-video” media, and the opportunistic moral panics they often inspire.

While we talk about how a franchise famous for dangerous stunts and painful assaults on the testicles has become one of the few things in America that we can all agree on, and how it might just be a model for body positivity. And we look at its far more morally reprehensible and shamelessly exploitative media ancestors like Faces of Death, Bumfights, Girls Gone Wild, COPS, and whatever weird VHS tapes that scary kid from middle school with the shuriken in his pocket was bragging about watching.

Fun Size Episode 63 – I Want Willem Dafoe in Every Movie

Has the world gone mad? Well, yes. But we’re also looking back on 2021 as a remarkably great year at the movies! We’re still talking to Tobiah Panshin for an uncharacteristically positive and optimistic discussion about the current state of cinema. For real!

We briefly touch on: The Last Duel, Titane, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Licorice Pizza, The French Dispatch, Dune, C’mon C’mon, Spencer, Malignant, The Suicide Squad, The Twentieth Century, and The Matrix Resurrections.

Plus, would it be so bad if the world we lived in was just a computer program?

Episode 49 – Santa Claus: The Movie

The legend comes to life.

This Christmas Eve, we’re back in the studio to celebrate the season with Rebecca Friedman of KTQA-LP 95.3 FM, and dive into the 1985 holiday movie where Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the father and son producer team behind the Christopher Reeve Superman films try to make lightning strike twice with a mythic origin story for jolly old Saint Nick himself in Santa Claus:The Movie!

Rescued by a group of elves after being caught in a deadly blizzard, a 14th century toymaker fulfills an ancient prophecy to become an immortal holiday gift giver to all the children of the world. Colliding with the free enterprise crassness of the 1980s, Santa Claus is despondent after one his elves is manipulated into working for a unscrupulous and greedy toy executive who wants to steal Christmas for his very own.

Fun Size Episode 60 – George Lucas Martyrs

We’re back with Chelsea Rustad to dig into the big questions. Have we hit the barrier when technological advances on video quality, frame rate and sound are butting up against the point where human senses can no longer perceive the difference in quality?

What about cars? Clothing? Is there a point where an expensive T-shirt can’t really get much more technologically advanced than a cheap one, and it makes no sense to charge big prices for it?

Plus, we touch on the recent lawsuit by the estates of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to nullify the Marvel copyrights to the characters created by those artists, and the knee jerk reactionary response from some fans. And maybe…just maybe, we’d get better stories if these characters were allowed to lapse into the public domain.

And we talk about history’s greatest victims of targeted oppression: gamers.

Episode 47 – F for Fake

“Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?”

In our latest Single Serving Selection, we’re joining librarian and artist, Kit Laika to turn our critical eyes to the final film directed by auteur Orson Welles, a conventions-defying documentary about frauds, fakers, and art forgery: F for Fake.

Welles delves into the world of two (or is it three?) spectacular liars. One is Elmyr de Hory, notorious art forger who paints replicas of masterpieces so convincing that they’re said be hanging in many prominent museums, and even the original artists claim to have created them. The other is Clifford Irving, the novelist and writer who exposed Elmyr’s forgeries in a tell-all book, before being revealed as a charlatan and fraud himself. It’s a deeply philosophical and nonlinear exploration of art, authorship, and who the real phonies might actually be.

Episode 46 – Wonder Twins by Mark Russell and Stephen Byrne

“Wonder Twin powers — Activate!”

This month, we’re balancing teen angst and superheroics with returning guest Paul Hix of Waiting for Doom – the Doom Patrol Podcast to gush over over the hilarious satirical DC Comics maxi-series: Wonder Twins!

Exiled to Earth from the utopian planet Exxor, super-powered teens Zan and Jayna must now juggle high school with their after-school internship with the heroic Justice League! But they must also grapple with strange new Earth concepts like crippling debt, shocking inequality and mass incarceration; and they begin wondering if beating up costumed criminals and throwing them in jail is really making the world a better place…

Join our official RvtM Discord server!

Fun Size Episode 56 – “The Customer is Always Right”

We continue to work the registers with Tobiah Panshin, going to places both weirdly metaphysical and painfully mundane.

First, Mike thinks it might actually be preferable to live in a hypothetical computer simulation than a “real” universe. What is real, anyways? Does that make our programmers gods?  Is the act of creation inherently selfish — and if it is, does that even matter?

Then, we look at a recently unearthed-on-YouTube reality show, Airline, about ticket agents and flight attendants weathering often-drunken customer abuse and demands. It triggers all sorts of all-too-familiar customer service flashbacks. Plus, Mike remembers that one time he almost got into a fight at the airport.

Episode 44 – Fight Club

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

In the first Single Serving Selection in over a year, we are Jack’s complete lack of surprise. We’re stealing human fat from dumpsters and peeing into fancy soup with friend of the show Patrick Johnson. This month, we’re breaking the first two rules, because we’re talking about 1999’s Fight Club.

Is this David Fincher dark comedy a brilliant and scathing satirical deconstruction of toxic masculinity and how disaffected men can be drawn into extremism and violence? Or is it a shallow and pretentious edgelord glorification of the same thing? Or is it somewhere in between? We dig into the cult film we all adored as young twenty-somethings and dissect it under the harsh light of 2021.

Fun Size Episode 53 – Rest in Piss, You Piece of Shit

In our latest plot to lose any conservative listeners, we’re back!

We’re chatting with Joe Preti, who offers his defense of the much-maligned and frequently buggy Cyberpunk 2077. We dig into the often unreasonable expectations of both gamers and game companies, and why the video game industry exploits their workers and releases unfinished, broken games.

Is online gaming inevitably toxic and ugly? Are we doomed to racism, selfish teammates and endless griefing? Can we bake solutions into the programming of the games themselves?

And why does it seem like everyone on the political Far-Right from Ben Shapiro to Steve Bannon to Adolf Hitler, is a medicore failed artist, movie producer or screenwriter?

And we say goodbye to a dead radio icon with all of the respect and dignity he deserves.

NOTE: The Skype audio was not up to our usual standards, but we still think it’s listenable. Our apologies! No apologies are offered to Rush Limbaugh.