Tag Archives: clowns

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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Fun Size Episode 50 – It’s Just the End of the World as We Know It

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In our double-sized fiftieth Fun Size episode, in the middle of a global pandemic and nationwide uprisings against systemic and racist police violence, we sit down with Sam Mulvey of KTQA radio in Tacoma, to….talk about something something…

Did we mention that Zack Snyder broke the third seal by announcing the release his own — inevitably underwhelming — cut of a superhero movie you don’t remember? What are the limits of escapism in a real world on fire? Is it even possible to watch a cop show with ungritted teeth anymore? We try to keep it together, and dig through the wreckage for some kind of meaning.

PLUS: a major announcement about the show at the end of the episode!

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Fun Size Episode 41 – Clown Ronin

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We sit down some more with Patrick Johnson to share our mixed feelings about Todd Phillips’ bleak and controversial Joker film.

We dig a bit into the film’s strong lead performance by Joaquin Phoenix and its very on-its-sleeve cinematic inspirations from films like Taxi Driver, Death Wish and the King of Comedy, and try to figure out whether it actually works or not. Does it transcend both its pastiche elements and its comic book origins, or is it a well-made and ambitious mess?

The answer is…complicated.

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Fun Size Episode 36 – Peak Clown

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In our latest fun-sized chat with Tobiah Panshin, we dig into the topics that really matter to working people, like the media depiction of Clowns, and how it’s affected their public perception. Is the happy clown character now a totally dead concept?

We briefly dive into the phenomenon of the Simpsons, and how what was once a controversial program has survived long enough to see an entire culture change around them. We pick at how the experiences of comic book stores and video arcades have fundamentally changed since we were children.

And finally, in a reaction to a recent Rob Kelly podcast, we ask: how can we make obnoxious people shut up in a movie theater?

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