Shane R. Monroe
Hi, everybody, this is Shane R Monroe, and you’re in the passenger seat with me. It’s passenger seat radio. This is the PC edition. I’m not in the hot tub. I’m not in the car. And in fact, I have a returning special guest, Mike Lorraine, which, of course, was on my show previously, it seemed to be of interesting topics to everybody. So welcome back, Mike.
Mike Lorrain
Hey, thanks for having me, Shane. I am sitting here in my car, outside a large hotel in Chicago in the driver’s seat, I’m not driving. So kind of funny.
Shane R. Monroe
It’s kind of it’s so weird. You know, when you think about the technology, you’re sitting in your car in the middle of like, nowhere, no wires, no cables. I mean, I know. It’s like commonplace thing for, you know, Gen Z to be completely, you know, carefree and wireless and totally, you know, anywhere and everywhere. But it for me, you know, back, you know, back when you still had to have a disk drive plugged into your Commodore 64 It’s it’s still occasionally stuns me to think that you’re sitting in a car in the middle of nowhere. And we’re doing
Mike Lorrain
it oh, you know, and oh, and I got to bring this up, Shane. You said disk drive. I have to share something with you when I was flying out. You know, I mean, like you I love my 80s and I’m definitely an 80s movie afficionado. But I will be the first to say I’ve not seen every 80s movie ever made. And so on the plane, I brought an 80s film that I believe is one you like that I never saw. It’s called Electric Dreams. You’ve never seen Electric Dreams? No, no. And now I’ve watched the first half of it. I got through the first half. But what a great movie. I was like, Oh, I was so surprised it. It’s an I did some research on it. Because I was enjoying it so much. Yeah. And the director of the movie used to do music videos. And I guess it makes total sense because there’s these great musical montage is and no movies.
Shane R. Monroe
Have you got to the one where Edgar makes up the song for Madeline?
Mike Lorrain
No, I have I Well, I haven’t gotten that far. So I I try to remember where I left off. It was that he was talking to the computer. And the computer was asking him questions. But I know eventually the computer is going to you know, probably tried to jeopardize his other relationship. But he mad she looks really good.
Shane R. Monroe
Isn’t she amazing in there? I mean, that might be the most beautiful she’s ever been. I mean, you know, did you ever see that movie of hers called fire with fire with Craig Schaefer. No, I have to decide whether I would recommend it to you or not. This is a movie that I’m almost I’m almost embarrassed to discuss. Because it’s so it’s so not something you would expect me to be interested in. But listen, it’s Virginia Madsen. Right. So that’s why I rented it to begin with way back when. But the storyline is She is like in a convent school. And she meets this kid that’s in a what do they call it? When when you get arrested as a miner and they send you to like a like a camp for juvenile delinquents. There’s a name for that a prison camp? I don’t know. Anyway. And so by happenstance, these two, these two sort of meet each other. And the movie is about them trying to be together. And they’re two completely disparate worlds. It’s a little it’s a little trope ish, right, but, but she looks so good. And I don’t know, there’s something about the movie that draws me to watch it about once the once a year, every couple of years. And that might be I mean, but she was she was I mean, she was probably 18 or 19 in there. And other than Electric Dreams that might be like the most beautiful she’s ever been.
Mike Lorrain
So yeah, and the Wikipedia she talked about that she had the hots for the the main guy during the filming. And I just thought he was so hot. And I really wanted us to hook up but it just never happened.
Shane R. Monroe
That’s a damn shame. Right? Right. I mean, yeah, yeah. And I thought it was I thought I you know, I’ve done a lot of research on Electric Dreams because it is really to me, it’s not just, it is a period piece, but it’s a fantasy. And you don’t typically see period pieces that are like love story, fantasy, you know what I mean? It’s a very unique film in so many ways.
Mike Lorrain
And, and with the music video aspect of the director having done music videos, those montage is I was watching those that okay, this is not I mean, there’s some 80s movie montage is but this is cut a little faster at the time and the whole musical thing where she’s playing in the the cello in the orchestra and the computer is trying to learn the music and understand it is kind of almost like playing a duet with her. Yes, that was just I was amazed. I thought this is incredible. And of course I’m thinking, How did I not see this back then, but I just did forget everything back then we didn’t have the access like we do.
Shane R. Monroe
And let’s be honest. And let’s be honest, if you’d come across that. And so for people who don’t understand this for my younger listeners, of which there are a couple, we didn’t, we didn’t browse Netflix to try to come up with something to watch or have an algorithm that pointed us to, if you liked, you know, this, you might also like these, our algorithm was blockbuster, we would go down to Blockbuster video store, and we would walk a section like horror, comedy, or new releases. And if the box caught your eye, you rented it. I mean, or you picked it up and you looked at the back, maybe you read a little synopsis, but it was all it could, you could completely love the movie, you can completely hate the movie, you wouldn’t know until you actually rented the thing. took it home, plug it into your VCR, and you were watching it halfway through and things like, why this is total crap. But the box looks really, really good.
Mike Lorrain
And you’re exactly right. Everything we decided was we’d browse those covers in the video store and the cover of Electric Dreams was a computer with kind of a sinister smile. And I remember looking at it, and I had no idea I mean, it maybe it should have been called you know, my computer has the hots for me or something. But Electric Dreams? I don’t know, I probably read it thought Well, it sounds like dreaming with electricity. faced on a screen, I wouldn’t it it didn’t really sell me on what the story was about.
Shane R. Monroe
Now. That’s what I said you’d be forgiven. I mean, that’s if you were to walk the video store and you saw that cover. It was like a cartoon picture. The computer had like a devil tail. Yeah, yeah, you want to pick that up? Again. The only reason I picked it up because I had a huge crush on Virginia Madsen as any you know, sis white male, you know, any any sis male for that matter? Anybody? And probably a lot of women too, for that matter, because he’s very attractive. Yeah, but yeah, you trust me the dude, by the way, the on the soundtrack. If you do not own the soundtrack, you’ll have to import it probably. You’ll want to own the soundtrack because it’s so good. But I thought
Mike Lorrain
of you when the ELO song, you know, video. Whoa,
Shane R. Monroe
that’s a great one. That’s from Jeff Lynn. Yeah. Yeah, great song. Great. I had to own that soundtrack. I think they imported that at a very high price on CD. Way back went along with labyrinth. I think I paid 25 bucks to import labyrinth on CD. And this was passed, I don’t know, late 80s dollars, right. So that was a lot of money. And then I think Electric Dreams was the same way. I had to import that CD at a great cost. But this was a soundtrack and it’s funny you say the duel between Madalyn and Edgar. And that’s exactly what it’s called on the soundtrack is the dual
Mike Lorrain
so well and another thing when I was watching it, I thought I’m gonna watch this with Brett my 14 year old because Brett’s my movie buddy and he’s very open to pretty much anything and the as the computer is learning it’s playing out these pop culture TV commercials at the time. I’m thinking oh, this is also a great time capsule of 80s stuff from TV commercials and they were cut quick and even stuff I kind of forgotten about some of the you know, Dr. Pepper and so I thought this little dragon yes, there’s a lot in here.
Shane R. Monroe
Oh, so you did so video is the is the montage where Edgar’s. But you you probably let it ended at the end of that montage. So you don’t see what happens right after that. I’m guessing.
Mike Lorrain
Probably, I guess. Yeah, we might remember why it’s up.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah. Cuz he’s sitting there. And he goes, he starts going through the rhythm, right? He’s like, Okay, so first this rhythm and he starts trying some drum beats and trying to help with like, the rhythm track. And then he’s like, huh, melody, and that’s when he starts looping through the commercials on TV, trying to find something that works and of course, Pepsi. Or, yeah, I think it was Pepsi. Is it? And then he’s like, yeah, now backwards. And then he, he does the reverse of that. And all of a sudden that kicks into that Jeff Lin song, I’m not gonna lie to you even talking about it right now. Gives me a little bit of goosebumps, that moment in time, when he said now backwards, and then they run it backwards. That is like a, like on my top 10 Like goosebump inspiring moments in film. And there haven’t been that many of them. They may have only been 10. You know?
Mike Lorrain
Well, I thought of this when you said that were destroyed because the computer itself is a combination, I think of a bunch of stuff. But there was a shot where the camera pulls back between two disk drives. And it had that very recognizable rainbow color cable that I know was from the Apple two, right? It made me think oh, they they’re using Apple two disk drives, but obviously the keyboard the screen. I don’t know what that is. Yeah, but
Shane R. Monroe
I thought it was really interesting and you probably picked up on this because you’re a computer dork like me. But when he goes to the computer store to get the PDA. She doesn’t name any computer that you heard of at the time. I don’t even know shouldn’t mention Apple, I think she mentioned mentioned Wang and pear. And I’m like going, where was the Commodore 64? That was a huge I mean, commerce 64 was like in one of three homes in the United States at that point. And they didn’t mention that.
Mike Lorrain
It wasn’t pine cone or something like computers.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah. But you know what that movie, you know, listen, I can only see it through rose colored glasses in through nostalgia, but I think it holds up pretty well, because of the Fanciful nature of what the computer was doing at the time. I mean, even now, we don’t have really conversational computers like that. I mean, we had Cortana, or, you know, virtual assistants, but nothing like that sort of AI back and forth that he was doing with Edgar and certainly nothing where it’s kind of learning. With you, I guess. I don’t know. I think it holds up, right. Well,
Mike Lorrain
I think so to it, it was, you know, at the time, they were trying to predict the future. And it’s not quite what it is at this point. But we’re kind of still headed that way. I mean, the whole idea of the computer warming and artificial intelligence, because he spills his drink inside the keyboard. You know, that’s fantasy. It’s like you said, but even the way we process things, when you look at a screen, and it’s a computer, you don’t have a lot of time. And so they just have big, bold text on the screen as it’s talking. And I thought, man, today, our ability to process is not that quick. And so you have to have things really clear and easy to understand on the screen like that. And so I was fine with it, it holds up, I think, really well. Like I said, I’m going to show it to Brett. And I think you’ll enjoy it. It was fun.
Shane R. Monroe
It’s actually really cool that you get to see it for the first time. With its age, and with where we are technology wise, you of all people would be able to say, how well does it hold up? I can’t because you know, it’s part of my you know, my built in lexicon of movie Love at this point. But
Mike Lorrain
But that’s, again, when I was watching it, and I was thinking, why did I not see this back then? And that incredible? I am what I’m watching it now.
Shane R. Monroe
And now you can be as disgusted as the rest of us that this movie isn’t on Blu Ray, it’s very difficult to find a great copy of it. It’s not HD, I can’t get it in 4k. The mean, even the even the more even the stuff you can find is very limited. You know, it’s really one of those things where it’s like, Why didn’t this movie get more? Something? Why isn’t it not getting more attention? You know, but anyway, Boy, that’s
Mike Lorrain
a great yeah, that’s just like Herman’s Head, right?
Shane R. Monroe
What is that? I don’t understand. Well, yeah, like you’re in the industry. Right. Why do you think Herman’s Head is not available? Why is it why is it essentially ghosted from Fox?
Mike Lorrain
I think it all comes down to rights and copyright and actors, deals with the studio, all those things play into basically the permission because, you know, Herman’s Head, I’m sure all the actors deals were based on the television, air airing, you know, broadcasting and at the time when Herman’s Head came out, I don’t think there was DVD yet is part of the whole package. And so for them to do a DVD release, I guess, or Blu Ray, they would have to have make new deals with the actors. And maybe someone is stalling. You know, that whole thing with the when they remade the Addams Family pinball, virtually they couldn’t make a deal with Christopher Lloyd and so fester is clearly made to look different. Yeah, it’s stuff like that
Shane R. Monroe
stuff broke my heart to breaks my heart when stuff like that happens. You know, I understand from the legal blah, blah, blah. But I mean, it all boils down to money, right? I mean, if Christopher Lloyd had been given enough cash he would have he would have granted his right. I mean, what other reason would there be? You know, unless you have some weird thing with the manufacturer of the pinball, they screwed him and so he doesn’t want to be part of that. I don’t know.
Mike Lorrain
Well, and absolutely, and probably the one thing that I you wish you could know more about those deals, but those are the things that nobody ever publishes. It’s never talked about, you know, if it’s talked about, it’s something like, Yeah, everybody’s just really excited to be working on this and we’re happy to do this. And you know, that’s bullshit, right? I mean, there’s all kinds of behind the scenes negotiating going on, but again, those are the you never know. You know, I wish I could no more because I I look at it as a way to learn how deals work, which is educational, but it’s really hard. The money is the part of things that is so hard. Get Get your head wrapped around because it’s always done behind closed doors, and it’s never put out there.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, even just understanding how like, like people work. I mean, like you said, it’s educational, not even from just a deal perspective, but because I mean, you’re in the business. So professional, you’re interested in how those deals are brokered. But for me, it’s like, it’s like, when do you remember? Of course you do. When Batman two was first announced, or no, I’m sorry. Batman Returns anyway, early in the Batman lifecycle, the Tim Burton, Michael Keaton Batman. I remember reading this article about, and this is, of course, you know, Batman, too, didn’t quite have the numbers, and it was mired, and all that weird stuff, because of the McDonald’s play said and blah, blah, blah. But that’s thing of lore. But I remember when I was reading this article about the next Batman movie, and Tommy Lee Jones, of course, was to phase and he went he you know, so they were interviewing them? And they said, so are you really excited to be attached to this Batman project? Are you? Are you going to do it, there’s rumors that you’re going to be met. And, and Tommy, Tommy Lee Jones, and you know, for me, it’s like, Oh, my God, you’re in a Batman movie. I mean, that’s like gold, who’s gonna say no to that? And Tommy Lee Jones, his response was, so business and clinical. And listen, how old was I at that point, right? I mean, I was a teenager. So I didn’t have that full sort of visibility, but he’s like, you know, I think it’ll work out if it if it if it works out financial, and he had this really cold sort of, you know, you know, if it makes sense, from a financial standpoint, blah, blah, blah, basically saying, if they pay me enough, I’ll do it. But it was just kind of weird. You know, it’d be like, of course, he’s gonna do it, why wouldn’t he do it? Why wouldn’t you want to be part of this unbelievable franchise, it’s making, you know, millions and millions of dollars. But, you know, he, you know, he had his own thing about it had to make sense to him. And apparently, he didn’t really want to do it anyway. And, as you can see, sort of phoned his lines in half the time anyway. But
Mike Lorrain
speaking of actors not really want to do it, you just created a perfect segue into discussing Halloween. And I can talk about this quite a bit. But first of all, I will say, my son, Brett, and I watched the original John Carpenter Halloween just a week ago. And I will admit, I thought I seen that movie, and I hadn’t. And it was a great, great film. But then right after that, we watched the brand new movies that made us on Netflix about Halloween. And one of the things out of that was the Donald pleasant, the actor, he really didn’t want to be in that movie, somehow. He just wanted the money. And so they said he was drunk, most of the time drinking wine all the time. They were filming. I thought, once again, you know, sometimes actors, they just don’t give a crap. And but they’re there and, you know, but he of course, delivered some lines. And that movie, oh, death has come to our town. I mean, he’s these big lines that you still kind of look at today. They’re very, they’re very, you know, theatrical, and, you know, only could be written and spoken like that. So.
Shane R. Monroe
But I love that series. By the way, I watched all of those the movies that made us I watched that whole season. And yeah, I’ll watch the Halloween one too, of course. And I thought that was really interesting. That like, he went out drinking the night before or something, and he still showed up for that car scene. And he did. I was sitting there looking and going. He didn’t look drunk. I mean, that’s that is I mean, he’s a great actor. You know, no matter how you know how fucked up you can still work in your, I guess your I mean, does that make him professional? I don’t know. I mean, you shouldn’t have been out drinking the night before. But if the performance doesn’t be like that, who cares? I guess, right? I don’t know. I’m on the fence about one.
Mike Lorrain
Well, and what else is different people handle their alcohol differently. And so maybe he was a nice drunk to where he he could be, you know, pretty buzzed, but still kind of like so deliver the lines and still kind of take some direction that you know, there’s stories of course other actors that show up on set drunk that are belligerent and you know, and don’t take direction and then is the end up causing a whole bunch of problems
Shane R. Monroe
all right, turning the TV off. Yeah, I just got my I just cut my, my virtual assistant turning off the TV. So it’s actually kind of funny. That’s a good side story. We’ll get back to Halloween kills in a minute. My son in the morning just like when I was a kid, I would always the first thing I would do in the morning when I would get up is flip on the TV and put a tape in. And so I lived I lived in movie land in my teens. I had, you know, I had two VCRs I was constantly copying movies, I would rent movies. These 10 for $1 Liberty video, which of course, you know, where Liberty video is, was. And, and I would I would have, I had hundreds and hundreds of tapes of copies three movies per so I would get up in the morning and I would flip on the TV and I would hit play on the VCR and I would have some movie going and when I got home from school, the same thing would happen. I do my homework I you know, be playing on the game. But I always have I always have a VHS on in the background. And it’s funny because I’d go pick up my friend Carl, I would walk up to his house and we walked to school together. And when I got to his house, he would always have the Rocky movies playing. He had a tape that had rocky one, two, I guess he was that two, three and four on there. I don’t know if he had the first one. But I’d walk up to his house I don’t we open the door, I’d go in and he’d be like packing up his stuff. And there’s Rocky one of them playing in the background was an interesting culture. And I don’t know where I was going with that. Oh, I know. So my son now he gets up in the morning, he flips on the TV, and he puts on comfort programming, whatever that might happen to be at the time. And so this morning, it was Modern Family. And so he had Modern Family building in the background and, and I realized as we were talking and I saw my mic picking up I’m like, Oh crap, I wonder if that TV is, is getting picked up on our recording. And so I thought I would mute my mic and tell Google to shut the TV off. Unfortunately, I put my mic back on, just in time to hear Google’s report. So
Mike Lorrain
when you think about I mean, I have to add when you talk about just the video rental store, I mean, we’re talking about looking at covers, but I was thinking about how you know, we would copy movies, I mean, you’d rent a movie and then hook up to VCRs and try to copy it and or copying off Showtime anyway you could build and of course, you know you, my friends, they owe us he extended play mode because you could fit three movies on a tape and but I think back about all the work. I mean, I rented a VCR from the movie store one weekend and tried to copy you know, Star Wars The important movies to me. Yeah, but you know, the quality is, is crap now, and it’s worthless. I mean, all that effort. I mean, it’s the tapes are gone. There’s no point in it. But at the time, it was a lot of work. And we did it.
Shane R. Monroe
We did. And mean I mean, I spent and I would I think over the course of my my video piracy, teenage years I probably put in this is an array in mid early mid 80s. dollars, probably about $200 in macro vision copy protection, solutions, right? Because that was a big thing. And so I remember buying my first macro vision, removal. For those of you have no clue what the hell we’re talking about. video cassette tapes had a protection scheme built into them, some of them did, called macro vision. And essentially when you when you would play the signal, and I’m sure there’s a much more technical version of this, and maybe you can elaborate you probably know more than I do. But the idea was that the sync signal coming from the VCR as long as it went to a display source like a television, that’s why it didn’t affect the tape, when you were just watching it on your TV, it would look fine. But if you tried to pan the signal over to a recording device, the recording would come out with black and white, it would roll it would do all of these crazy things, and your copy was completely worthless. And so the original the early boxes were manual processes. So the first box, I had like three knobs on them one to adjust the copy, I can’t remember all of them. One of them was a brightness, and there was two other knobs. But you could be and I remember specifically recording Lethal Weapon two, this is really weird that I can remember this. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. But I could totally tell you about lethal weapon to copying. But what happened was is when you started the recording, you would dial it in first, right? You wouldn’t even start recording, you would just dial in what looked good, because you’d have to sort of compensate for all of the blemishes that this macro vision was think of it is the de novo of it today, right? And so you would dial it all any be like great. So you’d start recording and this was all real time you couldn’t do speed recording or two times or four times, you had to do it like in real time. This is what he means by wasting a lot of time. And then the first explosion that happened. The brightness level got the brightness on the screen got so high that the dial settings that I put in couldn’t compensate for it. And so then the explosion caused the video to completely trash itself for, I don’t know 15 or 20 seconds being the perfectionist that I wasn’t one of the best copy possible. I would then have to go back rewind to the explosion. Play the explosion through again this time, not shutting down on these little dials to try to compensate for the explosion but not trash the rest of the picture. And then once I had that done, I’d rewind both tapes. Start over again. That’s what Mac Yeah, it was at that point,
Mike Lorrain
good technical term was, what it was doing was messing with the VCR is Auto Gain control. Ah, okay,
Shane R. Monroe
that makes sense. So one of the newer one of this knobs was a gain of some sort. Yeah.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah. So you were trying to combat re compensate for that with your stuff. So yeah, I never had any of that stuff. But norB, my business partner, he spent some more time trying to defeat that macro vision like he did.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, well, later on. Of course, once. You know, once the technology caught up a little bit, there was a one box nine volt battery solution, which is absolutely amazing. And essentially, was a little black box literally and figuratively. You plugged video in and had video out, you put a nine volt battery in and you’re done. I mean, there was no knobs, there was no gain controls, or none of that nonsense, and yet a perfect picture every time. So that was an evolution. But I went through, I think three different boxes before I finally had one that would you know, do the deed.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah. So just so much work back then that? I mean, of course, you don’t have any of that work anymore. Like you said, the quality was really terrible at the time, we just didn’t have any better
Shane R. Monroe
that we didn’t know any better. Yeah. You know, it’s really funny as people are like, why would you spend all of that time instead of just buying the movie that you wanted? And there’s, there’s an interesting side story to that. Because you couldn’t buy movies back then if you did, they were $105 apiece, right. So so if you wanted to own Star Wars, the only way to do it was to pirate it or spend $105 on the tape. And then eventually the market opened up into that used market where they would after Star Wars was done, you know, and they had 500 copies of Star Wars, they would liquidate 200 copies of them, and you could pick them up for 20 bucks, but they were used God only knows how many machines those things.
Mike Lorrain
We didn’t have that kind of money back then.
Shane R. Monroe
Do $100 That’s 1983 money. $105. That’s, I mean, that’s, that’s ridiculous. And of course, it was all about protecting the rental industry, right? If you could go and buy Star Wars for 20 bucks on VHS, you certainly weren’t gonna rent it for five. Not if you’re planning on watching it more than once, you know. And so they may. Go ahead.
Mike Lorrain
I I’m amazed how many people I share this information with don’t remember, but I remembered as clear as day is just like what you were saying. There was such a separation from the cost of buying a movie to you know, renting, I mean, it made it to where you pretty much rented. But do you remember the movie that changed that that broke that barrier? And? No, it was Batman. I’m talking to Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson Batman. When they first came out with that on video, they started selling it, I think it was 2995. And they were selling it at pharmacies, drugstore. I mean, everybody was selling it. And I remember I bought it, just because for the first time I could buy a movie, you know, I remember. But that changed everything. When they when they put out Batman, the Warner Brothers decided they were gonna make it affordable. And everybody was buying it. And of course then that just started changing the prices of movies,
Shane R. Monroe
that you remember that the initiative was called price to own price to own is what it was called. Hmm, yeah. Yeah. And you’re right. And then of course, you know, for me, I tapped into that, that used market really quickly. So well. I sound like a dirty, filthy pirate. Almost every movie that I truly loved, right? That wasn’t just a one time watcher type scenario. For me. It was about time shifting a lot, too. I could set up a movie to record as I left for school, right? And then I could watch it later. So I could literally commit, you know, 10 tapes over the weekend. And then I can watch them whenever I wanted to. Because video rentals were timed right? You only had him for 24 hours. Yeah, and when the when the tapes were not available. I mean, listen, if it was a brand new release, and it’s there was that two week window or so where that new release was absolutely batshit crazy to get a hold of. If you saw it in there, you grabbed it, whether you had time to watch it or not, you grab that shit and you made a copy of it. So that you know and then you took it back the next day, even if you didn’t get a chance to watch it because you might not get it for two or three more weeks because it wasn’t in stock, but it wasn’t a store that added That’s right. What a crate. You know, it’s amazing. Listen, I’m not a streaming fan by any measure of the word but I it’s it’s fascinating, just the disparity of you and I as childhood versus my son or your son’s childhood, where everything is literally on demand whenever you want not everything but what you want is on demand almost, you know, seamlessly
Mike Lorrain
well, and I will tell you This, this is a thing I can’t stand is everything is going towards a subscription model. And I mean, you know, you’ll never own it, you have to pay by the month or by the year. And I can’t stand it. I mean, what I see is even when it comes to software, I mean, it’s going to subscription. So like you said, streaming services, anything and subscription to me is the death of being able to control your cash flow just of what you decide to spend money on. Because so many times you buy it and then all of a sudden, you just kind of get used to it or you forget it or you don’t use it, but you’re still paying it.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah. Well, and for me, you know, part of it so part of it for me, is that right? I prefer to own I do have I do respond to a tactile response, right. Like when I got my these incredible hulk discs in the mail this week, there’s a tax I get a dopamine hit from opening a DVD or a Blu ray and, and taking the discount and putting it into a caddy. Not a caddy, but a drive a drawer on my drive. There’s that that’s that brings me pleasure I’m turning the movie on yet, but holding it looking at the artwork, seeing what’s included, evaluating the discard, going through the menus. All of that, to me is part of the experience which I’m really sad is dead to most people.
Mike Lorrain
I am 100% with you I feel exactly the same way and when I hold that disk in my hand I feel like it’s mine. And and that also I can watch this when I want and I’m not reliant on a working internet or a service that’s going to take it away from me when I don’t know it’s mine. I have control and that I think maybe this is my old man 80s upbringing but I still like that appealing but but I think the other generation a lot of people from our generation don’t care they just don’t care. Yeah. And I try to remind you know people occasionally when they tell me well I can watch anything I want what I want I’m like no you can’t I mean it’s gonna go away all of a sudden you’re gonna go there and it’ll be gone
Shane R. Monroe
you know and that’s it’s weird you look at like say you know cuz you know all about this rocky for Director’s Cut thing that’s coming out right I’ve already got tickets my son and I are going actually I don’t really really so Sylvester Stallone took the opportunity during the COVID closed down to create a director’s cut of rocky for now listen love rocky for hate rocky for I can see both sides of it. To me. It’s like the ultimate 80s period piece. It’s my hands down favorite Rocky movie. I know blasphemy and all that good stuff. I love it. It’s got the greatest montage of in my opinion of any movie ever. The no easy way out from Robert Tepper montage is my absolute favorite if he cut that out I’m gonna kick his ass. But essentially you know, there’s a lot of things about rocky for there’s 40 minutes of additional footage in this movie in this director’s cut 40 minutes. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good 40 minutes. But the fact that I’ve seen some of the footage, he’s released a tiny bit of it and I’m it adds a it removes the sort of superhero aspect of the movie. That’s what I call it. Where it’s literally you know, it’s more of an action movie than it is a drama and but a lot of the things that he’s cutting back in look like it brings some of the OG rocky kind of drama back to this to the franchise a little bit, so I’m excited to see what they do with it. But you know, it’s it’s, it’s funny. Rocky for how old rocky for 30 years, 35 years old, somewhere, right? And 35 years from now, what’s the hottest movie right now? That’s that’s let’s say Halloween kills in 35 years? Is anybody gonna be making a director’s cut of Halloween kills? Is anybody going to be watching Halloween kills? Are they going to rerelease Halloween kills in the theater for the 35th anniversary? And have people going to see it? The answer’s no. Right? No, no. And name anything that came out this year? What about this dune? That’s getting all this press WRITE? Everyone lives then some of the new dune right 35 years from now are we We’re talking about the 1984 version of Dune right now. If dune gets remade in 35 years, or however long it’s been are we going to be talking about the dune that came out this year? Probably not.
Mike Lorrain
Well, everything’s disposable. And I share this story with a few people especially my kids, I try my hardest when it comes to my kids to try to get their brain wrapped around what it was like to see movies. Back when you and I were growing up and my my story is that I say to like Brett, I say look when Star Wars came out. I went to the theater my dad took me and I watched this movie and it blew my mind and like everybody and afterwards you’re just you just feel like you know the world. I mean, you have this experience. And then you walk out of the theater. And all you’re left with is what you can try to remember. And maybe talk about it with your friends and try to remember with your friends, all the things that happen. But that’s it. I mean, there’s no way to watch it again, unless you go back to the theater. And then when it left the theater, it was. Yeah, having I mean, this was 77, even before the movie rental video, stuff had started to happen. And so I still think a part of me, nowadays, the fact that I can own these movies and watch them. I think it just, it’s part of because I remember a time where I couldn’t. But now, like you said, when Halloween kills or doing anything, it’s just disposable. I mean, kids watch them. And they don’t think those kinds of things when they leave the theater. They just think I saw it. I’m done. I move on. What’s the next thought that? There’s not that man? I wish I could see this again. I mean, they could if they want, but there’s so many other things to watch.
Shane R. Monroe
It’s right. There’s a lot of noise going on. Right. I mean, there’s, you know, and that, and I think that’s the part that bothers me the most is we both know, and anybody who’s listening to this know that right now there is amazing content out there to be viewed. I mean, what I mean, there is a Star Wars out there somewhere. How are you going to? How are you going to find it? How do you know what it is? How we’re, how can that impact? And how can that be the art that Star Wars was Star Wars, changed things? It changed well changed a lot of things really. I mean, not just from, you know, movie making, but but culture. I mean, Star Wars is pop culture. You know, Halloween kills is not going to be pop culture, you’re not gonna be talking about in 20 years and making Halloween kills references, right. So how do you but there’s so much crap. And it’s all about feeding the value of yet another streaming service? If you think about it, it’s not a matter of, we’ve got the best stuff on. Peacock, we got the best stuff on Amazon, we got the best stuff here. We got the best stuff there. No, no, we got more of it. We’ve got, you know, and we’re constantly adding more, more and more and more. So the it’s not about quality, it’s about quantity, because they have to justify asking you to pony up another 15 bucks a month for yet another service. Yeah, people think that somehow that it would I mean, and this is an I wrote about this in my digital distribution article back in, like 2014, when this was starting, was everyone believes that there’s going to be a one stop shop. I mean, look at Spotify, I get every music I want on Spotify, one service, one fee, all the music, I want no charge. And like, you’re not going to get that with video. You’re not gonna get that with movies or television. It’s not gonna happen. Well, sure it’s going to happen. It’s a matter of time. No, it’s not. And here we are, right, here we are in 2021. And God only knows how many services you have to be subscribed to, in order to get even, I guess there’s got to be a name for this. But like, if you if the scuttlebutt around the watercooler is about Game of Thrones or it’s about squid gamer, it’s about this or it’s about that. In order to make yourself relevant in these discussions, how many streaming services do you actually have to have over, let’s say, over the course of a year, in order to be able to be participatory in basic social discussion? Right. So, I mean, when when the boys came out, there was a there was a whole bunch of stuff about that. That’s on Amazon, right? House of Cards, I think was on Amazon, I mean Game of Thrones. Right? So that’s HBO Max squid game is what on Netflix, so you have to have them all. Or you have to have a good portion of them. Right? I mean, if you unless your dirty filthy pirate in which you can get them all for nothing, but I guess my point is, is the people who said I hate cable, because it costs so much every month, and I’m not getting you know, there’s nothing for me to watch. And you know, I’m paying $150 A month well, you’re paying 150 bucks a month now. You don’t see it because it’s being renewed
Mike Lorrain
there’s a show I listen to called the business a podcast that comes out of LA and oh, it was years ago the the people that run that were predicting that people were cutting the cable and they don’t understand that when they think that they’re gonna save money, but they’re gonna end up paying more when everything goes with separate streaming services, and they called it Yeah,
Shane R. Monroe
that’s right. I mean, I don’t know it’s it’s, it’s it’s tragic to me that there could be a piece of artwork out there. Like Star Wars. I mean, listen, we all know that Star Wars isn’t as much artwork as maybe it was back then. But It did change things you can’t, you can’t take away from what it was at the time that it was. But to think that there is something out there that you might miss, or that could have been a cataclysmic event, so to speak. That is that is being watered down, diluted, locked away behind a exclusivity. It disturbs me and is like a filmmaker, it’s got to make you batshit crazy knowing that that sort of thing is going on.
Mike Lorrain
Well, the other thing I’m going to add, just talking about how everything is so disposable today. I also feel like when it comes to storytelling, we’ve just hit a point where it’s i i never seen my kids when I show them movies. ever be, you know, emotional about anything. And I, my case in point is, when Spock died in Star Trek two, I will be the first admit I cried. That was a very hard scene for me to watch, even when I’d run it on video, too, because it was just difficult. And it brought emotion me and when I tried to explain to my older son, when he died, we left the theater, we didn’t even know he was gonna come back. I mean, it was he was done. And that’s when, and now I mean, character dies in a movie. Who cares? They’ll be back next time. Nobody ever dies anymore. And I guess someone could say, well, you know, Spock started that because they brought him back. But I will still say that that wasn’t even really the plan. At the time. They just saw that. Leonard Nimoy was done and he wanted out. And so I feel like with today’s stuff, it’s just it adds to the disposability. And I guess the one story I’ll share, just because I think it’s a funny one. It’s probably the one time like, I felt like my son Brett did get emotional into the movie. And I cherish that moment because I felt like, okay, it was at the end of the first part of the Avengers it when, when Thanos got his way and all the people started disintegrating. It was when Peter Parker disintegrated and he’s gonna talk, you know, in his face disintegrates. I remember my son bread, who at the time was, you know, about 12, He was distraught. I mean, he was quiet. I could see it in him and I was inside as they can find. You know, we found that we got it. And he I remember, a couple days later, I said to my wife, I said, you know, Hey, Brett, Cynthia hasn’t seen the vendors, do you want to go see it? Whether she wants to see it? And he goes, No, thanks. I’m gonna pass. And again, I was just thinking, Man, this is probably the only time this might ever happen. And he told me later, he says, Why didn’t know they were making a sequel. And see, that was why he said, he thought that was it. But how often does that happen?
Shane R. Monroe
You know, I’m gonna I’ll be straight with you, you, you, you, you. You put your heart on a sleeve on the sleeve for a moment, I’m going to do the same thing for you. There are some movies that I cannot watch. ever again. Or if I do I have to leave before a particular scene happens, because I can’t handle it. And I will tell you right now that it is probably been trying to do the math in my head. 30 years since I’ve seen the neverending story. And I love Wow, I can’t watch it. You know why can’t watch it? Take a guess. So you probably could guess you could probably no.
Mike Lorrain
I’m not sure I’ve I’ve seen that movie, but not as much as you so I don’t know it as well. So you’re gonna have to just tell me?
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, so the horse gets killed. The horse dies. Okay, the kid and the kid is screaming out for his horse and the horse is sinking in the quicksand. And this was no, this is no the horse comes back in the last real bullshit. There’s none of that going on. That horse is gone. And that kid what’s his name? Noah Hathaway or whatever his name is? Which by the way? Oh, I wish I could tell you this story. But I can’t Oh my God, I’ll tell you off air. I’m going to pull a Howard Stern. I got to tell you a story off air about Noah Hathaway tried to remind me. Okay, I’m gonna love this. But anyway, the kid is so distraught about that horse going down and the horse is going down. And the kid knows he can’t do anything about it. And go back and it’s isolated on YouTube. I’m sure go back and watch. I mean, I don’t know if you can, if you can get the same emotion, you know, being your age and all that stuff now, but that traumatize my ass. And even today, even thinking about it, I’m getting, I’m getting sad. The music video actually has a quick clip of the horse going down. And even the music video for it’s the movie version cuz there’s two different versions of Neverending Story music video, which I bet you knew that one of them is the quote movie, movie version or Movie Edit. And and so yeah, it even that’s difficult for me that little quick clip and it’s like now I know why I can’t watch that. movie, I can’t watch the movie.
Mike Lorrain
And the important thing about us going through that as kids, I think it helped us figure out how to deal with our emotions. However, that was, I mean, movies brought out emotion. I mean, not just making you laugh, but making you sad. And now, I just because no one’s dead. It’s possible. I mean, for me to even feel like anything. I rarely get that way. And, you know, then you go down the lower generation, even more. So. It was a movie I watched recently, I remember where they have to think of what that was, but the character was was gonna die and I didn’t even care in fact, oh, darn it. It was I was I actually felt somewhat insult. Oh, I know. It was the last James Bond movie. No time to die. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. I did not but I don’t Can I talk spoilers here? Should I not? Um, how old is that movie? Came out like two weeks ago.
Shane R. Monroe
Oh, geez. Alright, so spoiler alert. We’re going to talk about the new James Bond movie. I would say go ahead.
Mike Lorrain
Okay, not mad if I was to say well, it’s kind of a joke in itself is that the end of the movie James Bond dies. But that’s stupid. You know. James Bond of course and even in the credits it says James Bond roll return but you know, they have this whole moving scene where he’s gonna die. You can see a common right I thought himself really they’re gonna go there. They’re gonna try to make me feel something that he’s dying and I was insulted. Thought this James Bond has done 30 movies James Bond does not die. And you as a director sir are trying to stir emotions in me. And I am disgusted with you for doing that. You shouldn’t go there. There was a Joe somewhere else.
Shane R. Monroe
It was a cheap ploy. Yeah, and they
Mike Lorrain
also kill Felix to Felix you know, his CIA friend who’s been in a billion of the James Bond movies too. They kill him too and I thought really okay you’re gonna kill him you’re trying to trying to make me feel something that these beloved characters are going away? And I thought oh, go there with that. That’s not this kind of franchise you don’t do that. But they did. So anyway, no,
Shane R. Monroe
it’s funny you mentioning that. So are you following the new Masters of the Universe? Revelation thing are you what side of the fence? Do you sit on that? Or do you not sit on the fence at all with that?
Mike Lorrain
I have not been following it. So I’m I am not on the fence anywhere
Shane R. Monroe
or near though. So let’s let’s talk about this for a minute because this this this is exactly what you’re talking about. But even more so well, in a different let me just explain. So in master the universe revelations, this is the new Kevin Smith project, right? It’s on it’s on Netflix, and it’s a new animated series, but supposed to be a little more adult geared. Right. So it’s supposed to be the grown up version for he-man. Because let’s be honest, the Filmation was a kid show. But this is supposed to take the beloved IP and sort of make it a bit more serious. So this is nothing new. This concept but that’s what they’re trying to do. And so they released they released part one, which is five episodes and part two just got announced and they’re gonna release I think another five episodes. And I unfortunately, here’s another spoiler alert and you haven’t seen it but I don’t know if you even will if you if you’re not if you’re not built in yet, but so in the first episode, he man is dead. He’s killed. Right? And you’re going that’s cheap. He’s not Yeah, he’s he’s so not this is this is okay. So it’s you’re going to wait a minute, but wait a minute. It’s not he man in the Masters of the Universe. It’s just Masters of the Universe. Maybe they could kill him off now. That’s stupid. I killing off that’s a dump. Why don’t even think that they’re not killing off he man the you know. And so then they take a story arc a couple of episodes and they allow you to and of course it’s a female character. It’s Tila right? So she now gets the spotlight for a couple of episodes. And boiboi the Reddit community the fan base they all lost their shit. You killed off he man. You’re transitioning to a powerful female character this is the most woke shit I’ve ever seen. Blah blah blah. How could you destroy a massive How can you destroy the IP by killing he man and I’m sitting there going okay, I kind of get the slant about handing it over to a female character. I’m like, but you guys have lost your shit. If you think for a minute that he man’s dead you guys you’re completely gone. And of course three episodes later he man is back. And you’re going to see what’s wrong with you people.
Mike Lorrain
See there’s the problem right there you set it all with with how you described it is that why do you kill a character you kill a character to bring out an emotion because when someone dies, we’re sad. That’s why you would do it. But now, when they kill a character, you’re not sad, you’re disgusted or irritated. And that’s to me a failure as a filmmaker, don’t go there. There are other ways to tell stories if you want to elicit emotion in your audience find another way. Stop doing the cheap, easy death. It’s it’s a cop out.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah. And you know, and so the, I guess, you know, and so the idea was that death is and again, I’m not a filmmaker, so feel free to jump in and course correct my ass. But, you know, to me, death, you know, and I think they said this actually in Armageddon or something like that, which is goofy as shakes. It’s a Michael Bay movie, and you’re not looking for deep shit in a Michael Bay movie. But this sort of stuck with me. It’s like, somebody said, why do people die? Right, why do people die? And the answer, of course, is to make life worth living.
Mike Lorrain
That’s good. That’s just good writing.
Shane R. Monroe
That’s just great writing, right? I don’t care who it’s Michael Bay or not, but to make life worth living, right. And so, to me, when you use death in cinema, it is to make something worth it. The the greatest possible sacrifice is made in order to make something of value elsewhere in the film. Right? We are we, you know, somebody has to die in order in order to make this act necessary or warranted or worth it. But like you said, it’s cheap stuff now. It’s, it’s like, Ah, see what happens when I kill bond? Ah, huh. Yeah, shut up. You know,
Mike Lorrain
I have to tell you another funny movie story based on exactly what you’re saying. Which it was a good ending. I did do remember the movie Enemy at the Gates.
Shane R. Monroe
Oh, man, I couldn’t pick out the box covered at Blockbuster. But the name is familiar.
Mike Lorrain
It’s a it’s a sniper movie. It’s with Jude Law. And it’s about it deals with its kind of during the Russian Revolution. So it takes place in Russia against you know, when Germany is fighting, and Ed Harris is this top German sniper who’s brought in to try to take out Jude Law who’s sniping Germans. So
Shane R. Monroe
dude, I can I can see it. I know. I remember the trailer and I remember the storyline now. Yeah, yeah, but I didn’t see it.
Mike Lorrain
Oh, great. Well, I’m gonna have to slightly spoil the end. It’s still worth watching. But, but it ends where obviously, you know, a sniper battle is in a movie is going to be a cat and mouse experience. And at the very end, through a sacrifice of a friend Jude Law is able to reveal where Ed Harris was hiding. And Ed thinks he shot dude law but he didn’t. Right and so and he climbs out of his hiding spot as the German and is walking towards to find his kill. And then the camera reveals Jude Law’s character with his gun right on him. Just pointing that and adherents realizes I’m dead. I’m good. This is done. So at that moment, me and my friends were waiting for the speech. We’re waiting for him to say, you know, so we finally meet. And no, he just flat out to shoot some no talk. No, nothing. I remember my one of my friends started cheering and clapping. And he was going Bravo in the theater because we were so used to the cliche, final talk and others not he just shot him and so forever we love to mock that, you know, as if he would have said, you know, like, Darth Vader, you know, Sue, we found me mobile. Oh, yeah, no, it’s
Shane R. Monroe
writing.
Mike Lorrain
Ang just dead and so it was very satisfying. Unclean shade ending where it was just like it would be in real life. There’s gonna be no talking to each other ships and you’re done.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, the first thing the first the first one of those that I can remember. And it you know, the best part about that is you just don’t see it coming in. It’s amazing, right? Diehard diehard when he’s got to Kagi at the computer terminal, and he’s make trying to make him put in the password. Yeah, and they go through this whole bit. He’s like, I just don’t know, you’re just gonna have to shoot me like, okay, boom, and just took it away. Right? And I’m like, oh, there was like, No, there was no discussion going on. Here’s like, all right. And I think Connor did that too. I think too, when when, when Milkovich goes up to the cockpit. And the guys like, the guy’s like, You can’t kill me if you kill me who’s gonna land the plane? He just pulls the trigger kills. He’s like, I don’t think that far ahead.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, that’s good. And see we can count those things on, you know, one hand Which, right, I still don’t think they’re done very much, which so when they are, they’re memorable and a little more satisfying, because it’s kind of a little more realistic and, you know, types of speeches can be okay, they just better be a really damn good well written speech to where you’re, you’re gonna, you know, feel something or experience something or find find something out of the clever writing. So, in other words,
Shane R. Monroe
the death has to be there for a different it has to be there for an important reason. And it may be the important reason is that speech, right, because maybe that that closes a plot point or something that so why is this happening again? And the only time you find out is during that final speech before you know pulls the trigger, you know, pulls the lever to kill the guy, whatever. But yeah, it has to mean something. It has to be there for a reason, not just because, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell you what, so go ahead.
Mike Lorrain
Well, I was gonna say you want to talk about Halloween kills it all.
Shane R. Monroe
We do. We do. I got I’m trying to keep notes on other topics. I want to I want to boost over with you. So let’s talk about Halloween. So let me let me let me go on record before we get started. So you don’t think that I’m a complete douchebag the Halloween the Halloween franchise doesn’t mean a lot to me. It is not I mean, I’m a horror fan which is really wears on your horror fan but you’re not Halloween fan? How can that possibly be I just listen there’s there’s certain franchises that I’m just not into and Halloween is one of them. So if you ask me what Halloween movies I’ve seen or say remember in Halloween three the season of the winch. I actually like Halloween three, but like one, three and Halloween h2o is pretty much it. Right? Sort of like Nightmare on Elm Street. I’ve seen them all. But if you want me to talk about them, we’re going to talk about 137 and two, maybe, maybe two. So just understand that I’m not I don’t have the rich Halloween tapestry background that might make well, discussion interesting.
Mike Lorrain
Let me enlighten you a little bit on the first Halloween film of why I thought it was so great. First of all, it was it was I had no idea. They were going to have all these steady cam shots. And so the whole movie starts where the camera is basically the kid Michael Meyers going up to the house looking in the Windows come in through the door, up the stairs, and it’s all can’t float me camera. And I remember thinking oh, my gosh, steadycam. This is really cool
Shane R. Monroe
was. The first was that one of the first ones was it? Which one was it? I just saw that. The movies that made us and I thought they talked that that was one of the first steadycam flicks.
Mike Lorrain
It was it at the time, it wasn’t even called steady cam, I think it was called Pana glide. But it was a brand new technology. And they talked about in the movies of madness that Halloween had a $300,000 budget and they spent 70,000 of that to rent that piano glide system. So they could do those shots. And right there that made the movie not your typical independent film or even your typical horror film. And so after that opening scene, they continue to use the paraglide which makes sense, they’re trying to milk that 70,000. So they’re constantly walking with Jamie Lee Curtis and her friends down the sidewalk. And it just creates all these great shots. I mean, following Michael Myers along the fences, he’s kind of stalking just right away, I was enjoying it, even for that reason. And it’s slow paced. And of course, being an older man like me from the 80s I still appreciate the slower pace films, I’m totally fine with them. And I enjoy just kind of looking at the picture and stunning things without cuts, causing me to have to reset my eyes every time there’s a cut to try to decide what to focus on. Which is one reason I really like long shots. It’s just easier for your eyes to study things. But that was just a really great surprise watching the original Halloween was the steady cam aspect of of the movie and I think that’s one reason I enjoyed it a lot more. So
Shane R. Monroe
it was like a filmmakers perspective on that. Yeah.
Mike Lorrain
So and I also liked that the kills there were there weren’t a lot of them. But for the most part they were they were very suspenseful. I mean, I kept when the first girl died, I kept thinking okay, she’s gonna get it now. He’s laying out the window stuck she’s gonna get it nope, it was just a lot of stalking, you know, a lot of shots where she’d move and Michael Myers would be in the reflection or he’d be outside the door watching and it went on and on to the point I thought okay, I don’t know I don’t know when it’s gonna die. And I thought well, that’s good. Now I don’t know. Now I’m just kind of gonna have to see and I like that and I will I made that point because I’m going to bring it up when we move over to the new Halloween kills movie.
Shane R. Monroe
Oh oh, dead air.
Mike Lorrain
Are you there? I was. I was just You know, I wanted to make sure i i Stop and give you a chance to rebuttal.
Shane R. Monroe
No, no, no rebuttal. Um, yeah, I mean, again, listen, I probably saw Halloween maybe once. I mean, I’m sure I saw it once, maybe twice. And I think for for me, you know, I’m more interested in in sort of the, the Kruger esque horror where we’re trying to figure out different ways of killing the deserving teenagers. I mean, listen, I know that’s very, that’s very non artistic. And I do like there is there is suspenseful horror that I do like to. But most of the time, if I’m going to see a movie that sort of, you know, purported to be a splatter fest, I’m gonna get my splatter in. But I do understand how great great tension and such can make an AMAZING film.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, and I guess what I’ll say is just a little bit of backstory. I’ve, I was part of a group of four of us that made a movie called frayed, a horror movie, which I know you’ve talked about in the past. And, you know, we got you, you have one of two blu ray copies in existence, that I was happy to share with you, of the film. And so and a lot of the inspiration for frayed came from the movie Halloween when when my co filmmakers wrote the script. And so they, they want to see every Halloween movie that comes out. No, even though if it’s going to be crap, they still want to go. And so I, you know, we all were. And at the end, it was a piece of crap. And at the end, I remember through the movie, I was thinking this, this is just so badly written. And there’s so many points of moments where I’m just thinking, this is Tom. And at the end of the movie, the other three guys were really rocking back and forth. And I was kind of reading the credits. And at the end, I thought maybe likes movie early. And I said, Did you like this thing? They all said, No, we thought it was terrible. I said, Okay, good. I didn’t do it. And, but what I will say a few things about and I can talk about a spoiler free, but Jamie Lee Curtis, I bet they used her for a day, because she was barely a movie. And then they bring in Well, Pat and veteran actor Well, Patton, who I’ve liked, it’s been a lot of great movies, he must have been there for a day too. And he’s a good actor. You know, he was definitely delivering the Donald pleasant type speeches and, and it was, you know, okay, but they’re barely in it. And then you get to the kills. And there are lots of kills. They’re very gory and gruesome. And you know, well done. But my thing about this, the kills are the easiest thing to do in a horror movie. I mean, you could make a two hour movie and just have kills and have them be cool looking where people are like, Oh, that was brutal. I was cool, whatever. But it’s the story that’s wrapped around it, which is what you’re going to walk away with, hopefully, with some kind of experience or feeling or something. And the story was terrible. And again, Jamie Lee Curtis barely in it. But the other thing I want to come back to the original Halloween about the stalking aspect, there was so much suspense from seen Michael Myers, apparently appearing here and they’re stalking his prey, so to speak. But in the new movie, you see the characters, and you know that he’s around, but you never see him until he blasts through the door like a superhero with superhero strength hours and takes them out. And so then there’s no suspense. It’s just an attempt to to jumpscare but and the other aspect is Michael Myers really now has become a superhero because he can throw people around and and do things with superhuman strength. So right there another thing to take you out of it. It’s you can’t really bind to this this lanky, escaped convict is this. This is a subhuman person. So I I thought it was pretty bad. So I mean, are you going to watch it? Shane, I know you I know you have it in your library?
Shane R. Monroe
No, I’m actually probably not going to watch it. I do pick up things for friends and family to watch. And, you know, that seemed like something people were talking about. Again, and again, by oddly enough, you know, for me, I have no idea where I’m going with this. But I don’t know that. I like Season Two The Witch a lot. Probably because it wasn’t a Michael Meyers movie. I remember seeing the first one. And I may I may I’m sure I saw the second one because that’s what you did as a teenager went to the movie and you went to the theater and watched movies you weren’t allowed to watch because you weren’t old enough. And you snuck in anyway. It was more. That was more of the process than actually watching the movie. But I remember Halloween three Season of the Witch and watching that going. Hey, this is kind of cool. I mean, there’s no there’s no Michael Myers in here. It’s like it’s sort of like house and house too. The second story, you know, it has nothing really to do with the first one. And that’s okay. I kind of dig that. Which is sort of like what I consider a Nightmare on Elm Street. Part two is we’re using the property, but it’s not really part of the canon, it is an attempt to try and look at it in a different way. Which to me is why I think two would be a great movie of Nightmare on Elm Street to watch when you’re done with the rest of them. Right? So you watch one, three, or one through seven, omit two, and then go back and watch to see this is what this is what they tried out. This is a different. This is a Freddy Krueger, multiverse sort of thing. It’s a different. It’s a different universe version of Freddie. And if you can take it out of context, it’s actually it’s actually a decent movie. But when you go dude, why is Freddie running around a party? Nobody’s asleep? What the hell is this? What this means? Out of context? Are you going? Okay, that’s kind of cool. Freddy is actually more of a possessive demon entity versus, you know, a vengeful spirit that can get you in your sleep. I mean, but that doesn’t mean but yeah, like you said, if you take it, if you’re looking at it as part of the series, you know, Michael Myers wasn’t invincible. In the beginning he was. And that’s the magic of everything right is we don’t we don’t care about people’s invincibility or their strengths. We’re we’re more comfortable when we’re looking at them empathetically and experiencing their weaknesses, right? Which is why I’m always such a huge fan of alter egos of superheroes. I’m much more interested in Clark Kent and Superman, Superman is boring. I’m interested in Clark and what’s what’s his What’s that got to be like? Walking around knowing you’re this, you know, basically a god. But yeah, keep it a secret. I mean, I don’t know. It’s like this inevitable whole thing I talked about on the last episode of passenger seat Radio, I’m much more interested in Banner than I am the Hulk. And the 70s version of the Hulk was a banner story. It wasn’t a Hulk story. Hulk just happened to show up twice an episode.
Mike Lorrain
Well, it makes a character interesting as their vulnerabilities. In many cases, what you’re talking about is really not the superhero. But the other part that has the vulnerability maybe has a dark past that they’re trying to deal with. And that’s interesting. That’s interesting, right? And you’re trying to pull something out of that, whether in the way the actor portrays a character or just try to learn something from what their struggle might be. But I was gonna tell you, I’ve not seen these into the witch, but there is an homage to that. And the new Halloween kills that my friends pointed out to me that I wouldn’t have known. But it’s small, but
Shane R. Monroe
pumpkin mask thing? Yeah, yeah, basically, at least they try me. I guess you got to give them a point for trying. But a lot of times, to me, that seems like pandering at this point. Yeah, they’re
Mike Lorrain
trying to service something to make you think, oh, there it is. Oh, yeah. They care about me. No, no, no. You know, the other thing about Halloween kills that I want to mention is it also stars Anthony Michael Hall.
Shane R. Monroe
No kidding.
Mike Lorrain
Oh, kidding. I know. It’s
Shane R. Monroe
crazy. I mean, I’m a big fan of deadzone. Right. I mean, I thought, I know a lot of people gave him shit about that series. I really enjoyed it. Him being in that. So I haven’t seen him since. So that’s kind of interesting that he’s in that Well, I
Mike Lorrain
think of him still, as you know, in his movies.
Shane R. Monroe
Right. He’s, he’s a John Hughes kid. When he
Mike Lorrain
shows up, though, he’s bald, and he’s pretty puffy in the face. And he looks old and James paid actor. Yeah, he looks old. And I was thinking, you know, he’s our age. And I mean, you know, you and I are getting old but we still look all right. I don’t think I’m an old man. But I looked at Anthony Michael. Hi, thank God, he just looks old.
Shane R. Monroe
And you didn’t do that for the show. That’s like, that’s what you suspect the actor actually looks like now. They’re not. They’re not looking them up for the role.
Mike Lorrain
I mean, he was pretty bald. And I don’t know if he’s bald in real life. But his just his. He just didn’t look. He didn’t look young, young or even like 50 He just he looked like he was 60 to 70. To me.
Shane R. Monroe
Wow. Yeah, like to be rough on people. I mean, time is a cruel man.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, it is. So Michael Hall fans, he’s in a
Shane R. Monroe
well, you know, and so you don’t have the benefit of having a transitionary period with him like I would I bet he wouldn’t. It wouldn’t probably bother me as much as you because, you know, I had what, six seasons in a TV show where he wasn’t. He wasn’t the geek.
Mike Lorrain
I met that help. Because?
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, yeah. I mean, some people are holding up pretty well. And it surprises me every now and then, you know, because I get sucked into we’ll have YouTube like everybody else and, and I’ll find you know, where are they now? Here’s the cast of Superman. Yeah, then and now you’re going Ah, look at what happened to Margot Kidder. But some people are holding up pretty good and you’re wondering you know how much is that? You know? Good Doc’s are good genes, right? Like Lori Loughlin is holding up pretty good my son and I just watched. We watched licensed to drive and then after that I flipped on secret admirer, which in my opinion is probably when Lori Loughlin looked her absolute best. And it’s like, you know what? She held up pretty good.
Mike Lorrain
I mean, I haven’t well, and you’ve seen all the movies that made us. You seen all the movies that made us on Netflix? Yeah, and so we can talk about aliens and Robocop, but in Aliens, the girl who has played the kind of the, the girl Oh, my, oh, God, she looked terrible.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, you know what else I did not know until recently, which totally blew my mind. The step parent or the foster parent in Terminator two that puts the knife through the guy’s head via the milk carton is the same. her. That’s her? Yeah. And I will be fine. Dude, that wolf, that whole wolfy shit is a household phrase. I swear to God in the in the last 48 hours, maybe 72 hours. My son has uttered the terms. Hey, hey, Janelle, what’s wrong with Wolfie? It’s amazing. I guarantee in 35 years, there’s no lines from Halloween kills that are going to be uttered by anybody or their children.
Mike Lorrain
Absolutely, that’s true. That’s, I mean, that’s some of the best fan of movies is when you can sample great lines and apply them to your daily life in whatever you might be doing at that time, which is so much.
Shane R. Monroe
It really I wanted to have a day at work where all meetings, all interaction were all done only with movie lines just to see if we could do it. Couldn’t get anybody to buy off on that though, but it’s worth it.
Mike Lorrain
Well, and so on the flip side in the Robocop the girl she looked great, Nancy Allen
Shane R. Monroe
she’s looking fantastic. Our Yeah, I mean, she was in like, carry man. I mean, you think I remember from Robocop, but dude, she was in the original carry movie. And she still looks great. I mean, you think about that. Wow.
Mike Lorrain
Yep. So good for her. Aging is hard. And some people age better than others. And some people will try more than others. But
Shane R. Monroe
let me like look a little harder. She’s obviously had a ton of work done. But she’s she’s holding up great. Who did I say the other day that I just couldn’t believe looked as bad as she did. And I mean, I don’t mean any of this, like in a misogynistic way. I mean, time is a cruel mistress. And who was it? I was just thinking, you know, you have one of those discussions with your friends where it’s like, you know, no matter even if she’s 70, I’d still have to add itself to do or just to say that, that you did her? And I can’t remember, well, it was good.
Mike Lorrain
Well, I gotta, I gotta ask you to predict something. Because when I talk about ageing, I’ve always wondered this. So Shane, I’m going to ask you, when is the year going to be where I decided to listen to pastor see radio, and I hear, boom. Oh, you’re
Shane R. Monroe
gonna sound like that. It’s got a it’s got to happen sooner there sooner or later. I mean, it’s hard to believe that like, passenger seat radio is like 15 or going on 20 years old. I mean, that’s just blows my mind to think about that. And yeah, I mean, if he’s
Mike Lorrain
our voice gonna become that old man voice at some point. i Oh, my God.
Shane R. Monroe
I don’t I don’t want. Aging is fine. Yes, aging is fine, but I don’t want I guess I don’t want the stereotypical things to happen. Right? I don’t want to walk like an old man. I guess. I mean, aging aging so much better for men. I feel so sorry for women to be honest with you. Because like, dudes, I’ve seen dudes that age really poorly. But for the most part, like most dude, see, as long as they give a shit, right? As long as they’re, they’re doing something to take care of themselves. They look okay. In some cases, they look even better older than they do younger. But yeah, I just I don’t want the voice. I don’t want the walk. I mean, the mindsets already starting to kick in I can’t I can’t help that I guess but, but I’m trying really, really hard. And you know, when I taught martial arts and I was around kids a lot or the younger generation and I had to force myself to stay current and force myself to stay in touch with you know, the current generation. I think I think that helps keep you a little bit younger. It keeps your mind flowing in a different direction. But I haven’t done that like 10 years so I’ve lost any of that sort of edge but
Mike Lorrain
Well, what we’re hoping is we don’t sound like Tom Skerritt because you know, you think of Tom scared and Top Gun, how he’s just very authoritative command commanding voice and then the stuff he does now it’s like
Shane R. Monroe
well, let me look at Sam Elliot held that guy and he still sounds great. I mean good for him.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah. So the question is, did they have something to do with it? Or did they? Or did they have no ability to fight it?
Shane R. Monroe
I know. I know. Was it the was it the six pack a day cigarettes that caused it? Or was it just Mother Nature being a bitch? Yep. Hey, listen, have you seen that? Listen, I’m gonna I talked about this a little on the last episode, but I’m gonna bring it up because I’m curious if you’ve seen it or not. And I I’m pretty sure you haven’t. But have you seen that recent Nicolas Cage movie Kill Chain? I have not. Probably never even heard of it. Right.
Mike Lorrain
I’m not I’m not.
Shane R. Monroe
And so. So I was in a mood to watch some Nicolas Cage schlock. Right, and let’s be honest, I mean that I can I can come to terms that I like schlock sometimes. And I’m a Nicolas Cage fan. I mean, I love this stuff from the 90s I haven’t liked ghostwriter put me in a frickin coffin and bury me now I like a ghost writer. But lately, he’s put out so much crap that I’m concerned that the quality has gone way down. But apparently I don’t need to be worried because he’s done a couple of movies in the last few years like Mandy and pig. And these are all like getting, like good reviews. I mean, people, people like it. And people don’t like Nicolas Cage for some reason. I don’t know why I like Nicolas Cage. But
Mike Lorrain
I with you. I’m a Nicolas Cage fan as well. I am and so
Shane R. Monroe
and so I was I’ve got like I got probably 20 movies of his backed up on my Plex server that I just have. I’ve never watched I’m thinking if I need a Nicolas Cage fix. I’m going to get it. Right. I’ll get my Nicolas Cage. I’ll pull one of these on. So I was in the mood for my Nicolas Cage Shlok and I put on this Kill Chain expecting it to be a Nicolas Cage lock movie. And I was like I was I was I? I don’t know if it’s because I went in so low that a decent film managed to smack me upside the head and I went, Hey, what’s going on here? This is some quality film right here. What’s going on? Why am I watching this? Where’s Nicolas Cage? Yeah, by the way, Wasn’t he supposed to get this movie? And I’m like, Well, maybe that’s why it’s so good. I’m totally sucked into this right now. Right? And, and so I get to this point where they start speaking another language. And it didn’t sound like Spanish to me. But apparently, maybe it was I don’t know. But there’s no subtitles. This is the problem with with piracy, right? You get something on the internet, you might not get the proper product. And so I’m like, so in some movies, right? They use foreign language to kind of keep you in the dark. So it’s intentional that there’s no subs. Right? They just want you to know they’re speaking. They’re speaking another language. It’s Asian, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And they they just want you to understand from a from a prospective point of view, but you’re not supposed to know what they’re saying. But in this movie, I started watching and I’m like, am I supposed to be paying it? Am I supposed to know what they’re saying? And it wasn’t like one or two phrases. It was like a few minutes of dialogue and I go, God damn it. Where’s my I gotta go find I gotta go find subs for this cuz I’m stuck into the movie at this point. And so I go out looking and I get like 10 Different subs subtitles sets for this movie. Not a single one of them show the foreign language piece, which I don’t understand how that could possibly be. But that’s what it was. I found oddly enough, I found like a Mandarin Chinese set, which does me absolutely no good. But I fast forwarded to the spot in the movie where the dialogue is, and there they translate it for Mandarin. But no English ones have the translation. I’m starting to lose my shit. I mean, I became completely obsessive about this. Because I bested in this movie, I got to have I got to know what they’re saying. And so it turns out so I actually went the legit way if you could possibly believe it. I had to go up to Amazon where Amazon Prime Video has the movie available to watch for free. And they had the proper forced English subtitles for those pieces of the film. Now, in hindsight, I can tell you right now that you really don’t need to know what they’re saying. It’s fun to have there but it’s it you don’t need it for the movie, which even pissed me off marks I blew an hour trying to find the right subtitle track.
Mike Lorrain
I have a good subtitle story for you.
Shane R. Monroe
me just a second let me roll up on this this Kill Chain thing and then we’ll go to that wonder. Or but it’s one of those movies and I don’t. I’m trying to remember a specific example of this type of movie but they don’t really exist anymore. There are movies where like, every real is sort of a different story. It’s like an anthology, you know, like Catseye or one of these movies where they they chain three stories together but the chaining is so fucking loose. That it’s like yeah, okay, that’s why cat’s there just to get us to another story, but it means just go to the next room, just run to the next room. Well, this is like almost an anthology. But the stories are so well interweaved that you’re going, mmm, we just, we just left real one. I mean, it’s not real one, but you get the idea. We just left this story. And it seamlessly transitioned us into this other story, which has its own whole complete background to I mean, it’s, it’s not, I don’t even know how to explain it other than the fact that I was so taken in by this movie. And I was so I mean, obviously, I spent an hour trying to dig up the subtitles. But it’s like, and then you’re, if you’ve seen a movie, where you’re two thirds of the way through and you go, Oh my God, I hope the ending doesn’t suck. Please don’t let the ending suck, please. Because this movie has been so good. So far. If the ending sucks, I’m going to have to kill myself because I enjoyed it so much up until this point, right. And so as it turns out, the movie delivers, which is fantastic. I didn’t expect it to do that. But you, but But it’s like anytime that I can be taken in by something modern or new media. I feel like I feel like I’m required to like take an ad out in the paper or something. And share that with people. It’s like Guys, guys, guys, forget about squid game for two seconds, you need to go watch this kill chain. I know it says Nicolas Cage, don’t laugh, you should watch this. I was totally sucked in. Anyway. So back to your subtitle story.
Mike Lorrain
Well, and before I do, just to just put a cap on what you’re talking about. It’s another hard thing about the time we’re living in is whenever someone tells me I should watch something, I think I probably would enjoy that. But I I have this backlog of stuff I’m supposed to get to. And I think that’s the case for anyone. Yeah, it’s hard to find time to watch stuff. And there’s so much content. We’re in content overload in this day and age, and you know what it
Shane R. Monroe
is for me, you know, it is for me what the risk factor. I can put I’ve got a I’ve got a media closet right now filled with 3000 pieces of physical media. I could go in there with my eyes closed, grab one from the shelf and throw it in, and no 100% for a fact that I’m going to get my hour and a half or two hours. My ROI is going to be extreme. It’s going to be a fantastic movie I’m gonna enjoy just as much as the first time I watched it. And that is that is that’s money in the bank, right? If somebody I kind of trust tells me about a movie that should be good or a TV show. Hey, listen, you need to watch the first five episodes before it gets good. Do you’re asking a lot for me? That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Listen, if you tell me get out in 30 minutes, like if you say, here’s a movie, if you’re not into it in 15 minutes, get out. Or if you’re watching the series, it’s a 10 move. It’s a 10 part series. watch the first episode if you’re not good, get out. But it’s like, it really starts getting good about five episodes in I’m like, then I’m not wasting my time. I’ll go I got I’ve got movies out the ass that I’m dying to watch again, that I would much rather watch than what you’re recommending. I’m sure it’s good. But anyway, go ahead. Sorry, I didn’t mean to trail
Mike Lorrain
off on that. Well, just to add to that, as a filmmaker, you know, we make a lot of corporate videos these days, and we try to make them really short. I mean, we try to hit five to 10 minutes at the most. But I’ve stopped where I even tried to show them to people. I mean, even when I’m in the room, I just, I feel like I actually almost feel guilty. Like, I’m basically asking them to give up 10 minutes of their life, and I feel bad about it. Because it’s in first of all our corporate stuff is kind of I mean, if I’m gonna show him something, I’ll show him something that at least has actors and it’s, you know, interesting, and there’s somewhat of a story, but I still I just I don’t even usually show people that I work on that much. Because I feel like their first thing their eyes are looking at is the time bar that they’re studying. How long am I slaved to the screen. And I want to, I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to make someone feel that way. So I just, I just don’t even. I mean, you know, it’s funny, I will say this here. It’s kind of a sad thing. But even my own family. I mean, my parents, my sister. I mean, I used to always try to show them stuff I made. And I would always say Mom, Dad, here’s the latest video he did and they watch you know, and but I remember showing my sister something and in the middle of it, she was looking at her phone. And as a filmmaker, there’s nothing that will crush you more than when you’re someone’s watching your content and they’re looking at their phone in the middle of it, dude, then that’s what a killer and at that point, I thought I am never going to show my sister anything I ever do again, unless she asks, and I made a decision three years ago. Has my sister ever asked me to watch anything I’m doing? Never. And she, you know, she’s a great person, the good sister, we have a great relationship. But when we get together, no, he says, How’s work going? And I always say, it’s going really good. And she says, Great. And that’s it.
Shane R. Monroe
That’s it. You know, it’s funny, because Go ahead.
Mike Lorrain
No, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I’m
Shane R. Monroe
just gonna say, you know, there was a period of time in my own social circles, right? I don’t have a big social circle. I have probably five people that I wrap aside from family, right, that I wrapped myself within my own little private Discord server, my own private little chat going on. And these are the people I’ve known 1015 2025 years. And over the course of time, in some cases, I would recommend something. And they would essentially tell me, it was a big waste of their time. And it’s like, okay, so you didn’t see what I saw. That That makes sense. I mean, the topic didn’t work for you. I had a moment within that film that was probably worth more than the whole film. And I recommended it based on that moment. Right, because I was so moved by it, it’s like it’s worth it’s worth ingesting the rest of the schlock in order to get to the cake. Like Dark City. A dark city was really hard to get through but by the end like the last 15 minutes or so worth the first almost hour that you’re like, just please just sit through it. Please don’t Don’t turn it off. Just get to here and I promise you the payout happens I swear it but I’ve gotten to the point now where even like this kill chain, you know, which I feel strongly about listen, I went out and bought it like on the on Blu ray the second I got done watching it. It For Me to add something that’s prior to 1990 anything that’s not a catalog title least it’s it’s like a grueling decision whether I’m gonna buy it or not. Because catalog titles I know. I’m going to watch again. Am I going to watch free guy a second time? Probably. I’m big Ryan Reynolds fan. I enjoyed the film. I bought it. I got to watch it again. Maybe. But that was that I struggled over whether I was going to buy that film or not. Because it was something recent that you know, and while it did, it did entertain me. It didn’t move me it didn’t leave me, you know, changed or something. So I’ve gotten to the point now, where even if I do stumble upon something that it’s like, fire, somebody needs to see this other than me. I stopped I just I can’t handle wasting somebody’s time anymore. Just like you were saying I if I if I recommend, you know, I think that the movie in question and Chris Henschel is probably knows that I’m reaching out to him with this. There was a movie, it was a, it wasn’t great, but it was it was better than 90% of shock that was on at the time, there was this sort of a horror movie called as below as, as above is below or something like that. It took place in the French catacombs. Right. It was a horror movie. And it was, you know, it was it was it was above par. And I recommended it. And essentially, you know, I’m still paying the price for recommending that film. And it’s like, okay, well, I’m, I’m done recommending shit to you guys. So we’re done here. I will tell you that I saw a film and I said, I enjoyed it a lot. I bought it on Blu Ray, if you choose to watch I’m not recommending shit anymore.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, and I mean, the true test is my own family. You know? I mean, I thought, well, if they really would like to see what I’m doing, I’m going to just let him ask and they don’t ask. And I don’t think it’s because they think I don’t want to watch, you know, my son or my brother stuff. I don’t think it’s that they think that I just don’t think they think about it at all. I just, I don’t want any more guilt of trying to force them to watch something when they weren’t asking. So I’m done. And I’ve like you said, I feel that way with most people. I really, I mean, I don’t show my stuff to anyone unless they ask and you know, no one really asks, I mean, the people that watch our content, or the people that work at the companies we do videos for and they have to watch it. Yeah, and you know, we’ll get nice emails from from people in the companies we do some for they’ll say that the video did was great. I laughed. It was, you know, funny, or it really hit the nail on the head. I mean, we get nice emails, and it’s great. And I think yeah, we did a good job on this. But sadly, I don’t try to show it to anybody.
Shane R. Monroe
And you know what, you know, and I think that I think honestly that that says something about society as a whole. And I think say that because if you go to YouTube, pick any video you like, right? Even if it’s like well produced great content and amazing speaker, right? It’s, it’s, it’s a great video, go down to the comments. And somebody is shitting on that video? Absolutely, probably more than one. And so you so you start. So you start thinking about this, and it’s like, How is anybody? How is anybody encouraged? At all? Other than, you know, I want to be a YouTube star, I want to be an influence want to be a celebrity? I mean, other than that, what’s what’s your motivation? I mean, money, I guess, right? I mean, if you’re getting paid, like you, you make money make me that’s your livelihood, you make these videos, and whether they’re, quote, unquote, boring or not, or required watching and not, you know, opt in watching, that’s what you do for a living, that’s your job. But these guys that are that are making, like me on YouTube, right? I make a couple of bucks. I mean, listen, I’m not gonna say I’m, you know, some, you know, purist, I don’t believe in making money on my content, I used to feel that way. Not anymore, because YouTube’s gonna make money on my content, whether I get any of it or not. So I’m just opting in to get my share of the pie as well. Now, when I still when I make websites, when I do tutorial websites, or I do something, as a community project, I don’t have ads in there, I don’t have ad banners, and then I’m paying out of pocket for web storage. But, but these, I don’t, it’s so Vogue, to shit on everybody else’s work. And I don’t know, I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know where I don’t know where that came from. Really.
Mike Lorrain
I think it comes from, that people can hide behind a non Hades a non Dimity. I always struggle with that word. It’s because you’re you’ve got that shield, where no one knows really who you are. Anyways, just a friendly username. And I think people feel very safe crapping on other people’s stuff, because it’s never gonna come back to them. I can safely do it and have fun seeing maybe possibly someone else get upset. I mean, you know, nor my business partner, he’s got 50,000 followers on his norB cam channel. And he’s told me that he knew that he was getting popular when, when people would trash him on his videos, but other people would defend him in that same thread, and he said, I knew I was getting out there when that was happening. Because he says, I don’t even need to defend myself, there’s just other people that are going to argue for me so that I find that entertaining and fascinating to see people argue about my content. And I don’t say a word I just, I remain silent. It’s like, you know, let him go at it. So, you know, keep out what you’re doing. And when you see people trashing you and other people defending you in your comment section, you know, you’re getting somewhere.
Shane R. Monroe
I just think it’s a really, it’s, I think it’s just a terrible, I think it’s just a terrible thing. And, and I kind of I kind of relate that, you know, back to the whole, the whole Facebook thing, you know, I’m really happy. They’re getting their asses kick right now, because everyone knows, I am no Facebook fan. But I feel I feel that they are probably instrumental in creating the negative feedback loop scenario. You know, Google is just as bad as Facebook, it’s like, yeah, but Google doesn’t make people feel bad in order to get views. And that’s what Facebook does. They figured out that, that controversial or shitty things in your feed, things that piss you off, engage you more, it gets more engagement to piss you off and to say negative things that are going to cause you anguish, than to provide you with things that bring you pleasure. And who could possibly be behind a company that that’s their bread and butter. You know? I don’t know. And so for me, when you talk about big data, and you talk about, about negativity feeding the internet, I mean, to me, Facebook’s that poster child, and I’m glad that they’re getting their asses kicked. It’s a shame that are getting their asses kicked harder. But whatever. We take what we can get when it comes to regulation in that respect, but I think I think that has a lot to do with why the negativity happens for really no good reason. I mean, this guy, I know what it takes to make one of these videos, you know, these people who make 20 3040 minute videos, and listen, anybody can flip on a microphone and blab for five minutes, seven minutes, right and pop a video up. You know, listen, that’s that’s, to me. That’s kind of lazy. There’s like no post production. They literally shot it on their phone. They did no editing and they uploaded it. Okay, whatever. But these people who make 20 3040 minute videos that are that have all All of the trappings that go with it. They make it look easy the good ones, right? But I know what that takes. And unless there’s blatant misinformation in there, shut your fucking mouth. Leave that guy alone. And nothing nice to say my mom said it. nothing nice to say don’t say anything at all. Why do you want to get on that guy? I mean, come on, this guy probably spent 2020 hours putting that video together. It didn’t cost you anything except maybe watching an ad at the beginning. It didn’t cost you a thing. And You’re shitting all over this guy’s work that he actually cared about? And where does that come from? That comes from the power of negativity, selling ad space, or clickbait. What a terrible, terrible world we become.
Mike Lorrain
There’s always gonna be that 1% out there people that are that are all about the negative, and you know, Facebook and YouTube gives them a chance to have a quote, voice and spew some of that and I’m with you. I I mean, I, you know, norm on his channel is posted some heartfelt kind of moments in his life when when not just good things have happened. But tough things have happened, like with his family or anything. And I look and there’s a couple thumbs down clicks and I think the hell I mean, talk about you were the lowest the low. If you
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, I mean, and, and I get the whole concept of well, I’m anonymous, so I It doesn’t matter what I say. And I and I struggle with that, because I don’t like that Facebook requires you to produce photo ID and present who you are realistically, I I’m torn because I think if people were not allowed to be anonymous, and they had to take the lumps for their stupid shit that the that they say, I think the world would be a better place. But at the same time, I feel I feel the empathy for the people who don’t feel safe in an online space. Being there themselves, their real, who they are, you know, their actual identity. So I don’t know.
Mike Lorrain
I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard, rough thing. You know, I can go back to the Monroe world forums. I I’ve mentioned this a few times, but you know, you guys were all pretty hard on the Xbox 360. I mean, rash city. Yeah, right. I remember I got one. And I was I liked it. And I remember I started a thread in your forums, I cried. And I was, I was afraid. And I remember I said, Well, I’m gonna start this. And actually, you know, everybody was pretty nice. I mean, other people started talking, but I remember at the time, I was thinking, Man, am I am I going into the lion’s den with doing this? Basically, out there saying, Hey, I like an Xbox 360 Even though you all hate it. But it turned out there were a few others that but and you know, you guys were all fine. But I remember the fear I felt at the time doing it. Because, you know, it was? I mean, well, if it wasn’t,
Shane R. Monroe
Oh, I know. I know. Well, you know, and it’s, it’s funny, there was a lot that was an interesting social experiment all on its own the mineral world forums, you know, we had we had like, you, I wish I do still have the database laying around here somewhere, I still have a copy of it, but it’d be it’d be a pain in the ass to restore somewhere for you know, archival purposes. But you, but you saw, like not only a very great variety of people, but you saw also an incremental technology thing over the course of 10 or 15 years, you saw how things were moving and, and how we all adapted or didn’t adapt to it. So it’s kind of a it’s kind of interesting social experiment, all things considered.
Mike Lorrain
I was I enjoyed being a part of those i At times, I thought I wish I could go read some of the stuff I posted. Because yeah, it’s I don’t have access to anymore, but it was, that was a great time being able to do that. And I’m glad you’ve got the discord forum going, I enjoy that it’s not really the only place I hang out.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, there’s not a lot of traffic there. I mean, I’m on Discord servers, where if you’re gone for five minutes, you better have you better have a long scroll history, dude, because there’s so much going on. But I think that’s part of the whole noise to content ratio that we were sort of talking about earlier. You know, when I find something really interesting, I’ll put it in the discord. But I’m not just there going. What’s going on? Yeah, yeah. If I guess fishing to say or I’ve got something or I want to I want to discuss with somebody something great. I would I mean, I want to be party to that and I think the difference between and that’s where the difference between social media and like bulletin boards or or discussion forums or even read it I mean, they call ready to social media. via platform, but it’s sort of a hybrid, I guess, there’s, there’s so much traffic through it, that it’s almost, it’s almost social media, because you could literally sit there and reload your homepage and read it. And there’ll be 50 new items every minute, depending on, you know, what you’re subscribed to, or whatever. But like on the BBs, or the bulletin boards, or the forums, you’d go in three times a day, you go in, in the morning, answer a couple of things go in at lunchtime, a couple new posts, go in, in the afternoon, go before bed, whatever, you type a couple of messages, whatever. But with social media, there’s so much noise. You know, and with discord in the some of these, the servers are so much noise. I mean, it’s like, how do you find anything worthwhile in there when there’s so much noise. And that’s kind of what social media to me is, is noise, or, you know, or controversy or negativity or whatever. So, and that’s why I like to go plus so much as I thought in Google Plus, you know, I didn’t and now with Twitter, I’ve managed to sort of dial Twitter into a point to where it doesn’t feel like a giant fucking dumpster fire. But I’ve seen other people’s Twitter or I’ve seen other people’s news feeds or their whatever they call them timelines. And if a dumpster fire, you know, and with Facebook, you don’t have a choice that Facebook because it makes it a dumpster fire for you. Twitter, you bring it on yourself, if you want to jump into a political discussion or talk about anti Vax or master or whatever, you’re going to get shit on from one side or the other and your, your timeline is gonna become a cesspool. With Twitter, I’ve managed to kind of, I’ve kind of closed myself off into classic video, gaming movies, you know, Amiga, Commodore, that sort of thing, and it stays clean. Like with Google Plus, I was able to serve, you know, using circles, I could get myself into areas that were that were respectful. They were they were groups of people, like minded, but they weren’t assholes. And I don’t know what the what the difference was. It’s too bad. It’s gone. But I thought that’s sort of what the forums to. With the mineral world forums, we had areas where you could go in and be a shithead. And then there were other every other area was supposed to be a more of a safe space. You know, we can discuss the merits of the 360. And why we don’t like it, but we don’t become assholes. Take that to what was it called flames and fanboys or,
Mike Lorrain
yeah, something like that, right?
Shane R. Monroe
Where you can take your shit and get it out of your system.
Mike Lorrain
Well, you know, the greatest thing about the discord forum, as it is now for all of us and I, this will come to an end is that it’s ad free. And it’s it’s free. I mean, yeah, free. I’m doing it. And there’s no ads. And I’ve read enough to know that once Discord is sold. It’s Oh, they want to sell it. I mean, that’s why they build it up like it is so they can sell it. Once that happens. We’ll have ads. Oh, yeah, it’ll be it’ll be a disgusting pig fest. Which is too bad. You might start thinking about where you’re going to take us.
Shane R. Monroe
We gotta find somewhere else. Yeah, and you know, it’s funny, it’s funny, you know, I and I, on my on my Discord server, I actually use the Nitro I pay five bucks a month for the little nitro upgrades. Just to say, Listen, I’m willing to pay. You know, I don’t have to pay. I mean, let’s be honest, the the bonuses that you get from paying the Nitro subscription is shit. I mean, it’s, it’s it’s even, it’s even worse than dances and costumes and loot boxes. It’s just, it’s nothing. But it’s my way of saying listen, I like what you’re doing. I like that there’s no ads. And if this is the way that I keep this thing ad free, and keep bullshit out of it, I’ll pay the five bucks a month I’m in. But you know how it is nobody wants to pay for anything. Now everything has to be free. Or it’s it’s, it’s a non starter.
Mike Lorrain
Well, your mindset is support. And that’s, I mean, that’s what you’re doing. You’re showing support. And I think that’s, yeah, that’s I mean, like I support you know, I support your Spreaker with you know, my $5 a month donation and I’m happy to do it. You know, you you put out great stuff and you’re fun to listen to and I enjoy Thanks, man. I was thinking about talking about just how how things have changed from the old days I have to put out there when I got your retro gaming radio starving students edition, gave me all the shows and I converted them all to mp3 and for a while I would just have it on in my car when I drive around. It was like listening the radio and there was one show you did where you were trying to talk with others. Like we’re doing now but you were using I don’t know what you were using. But you were saying so I’m sorry out there. So and So. Yeah. I love that moment because I thought I’m listening to a moment in time here before anybody was doing anything like that. You were trying to do break ground to do something that really no one had the power to do any kind of a talk to people through the internet at the time. And that was just a neat moment to listen to a real time capsule
Shane R. Monroe
got that was a real pain in the ass too. I totally remember that. And I think I was using voice chat on IC Q or trillion at that point, to try to make that happen. But, you know, even today, in 2021, December 29, before we started the show, here, you know, it took a little dicking around to actually get a setup for you and I to sit here and talk appropriately. You know, I mean, listen, Discord is great, you hop on Discord, you start chatting with somebody, but if you want to capture both sides of the chat, you want the the quality and the mixing and everything. I mean, there’s there’s a piece of work behind it, it’s still not, it’s still not, you know, one touch, or, you know, easy, easy, the letters easy. You still have to do some work to get there so
Mike Lorrain
well, and there’s a part of me, I always have that small fear that when the show ends that, that you go, Oh,
Shane R. Monroe
yeah, I’ve looked at the words recording like 500 times since we started this, because I’m paranoid and panics owl, that for some reason, it’s not recording, you know, you can’t really recover something like this. It’s a what’s a one shot deal. But I appreciate though, I appreciate the the the forethought, recognition, because I really, really do. I mean, I don’t know if you remember, I tried to make the first video podcast, I tried to make the first interactive podcast with streaming HTML five timelines, I tried all sorts of crazy shit, trying to make my content and make my show something unique, different and worth being engaged with. And I mean, I’m not saying that I deserve to be the founder of the podcast or anything like that. But I mean, in all honesty, I don’t, I can’t think of anybody else that’s done some of these things in the timeframe that I was doing them. So you might be something might be
Mike Lorrain
well, and you know, you love to talk about the Amiga, I’d love to talk about the Video Toaster is the thing I really wanted to never got. But that Video Toaster video, they the words they use are a paradigm shift. paradigm, I feel like you were trying to do some paradigm shifting during those times. They use the technology that you you know, and try to do something with it. That is an idea that you’ve got of a way to take it to another level beyond what anyone you know, is trying to do. And that’s also, you know, a neat, I remember when I was listening to that it was a real moment for me listening to you just trying to talk with people. Back when I because we talked about trying to put yourself back in the time back then. Nobody was doing that. And when he
Shane R. Monroe
right. I’m not some I’m not some big conglomerate in New York or Los Angeles. I’m just I’m nobody and when actually doing this.
Mike Lorrain
You’re already limited to what when he can even offer you when it comes to the technology. And that’s not even I mean different than Seattle. Well, I’d still love to share my subtitle story if that’s
Shane R. Monroe
Oh my god, I’m glad you remembered it. I forgot to scribble that down. Let’s circle back
Mike Lorrain
so well and it’ll have a little more meaning if you’ve seen the movie do you remember the movie the car?
Shane R. Monroe
So kind of firing a neuron at all?
Mike Lorrain
It’s about a basically a car possessed by Satan. That is running people over it’s from the 80s It’s like a kind of a horror ish type movie called the car.
Shane R. Monroe
Do I? Is there anybody in it that I would know Is it is it like super, super indie or what?
Mike Lorrain
It’s, it’s well yeah, you know, look it up, but okay, but along the lines of subtitle it’s a it’s a movie that my frayed buddies norburn Rob let one of the rentals they loved growing up you know where they rented it and Washington it’s it’s definitely you know, indie unique and kind of goofy and you know, a little bit ridiculous but it’s this possess car that’s, you know, that with no driver that’s just run over people, but it’s it’s a cool looking cars. I’ll look up some pictures or something. But there was a moment and this is definitely something you can YouTube. There’s a moment in the movie where the car drives off and this old lady screams at it. And she screams I’m gonna kind of try to imitate Oh, she screams but she goes and it’s it’s so weird. And it’s if you look at on YouTube, it’s it’s kind of one of those ones like wow, that’s just I’ve never seen an old lady yell like that. But she yelling and forever norburn rom had this argument norB thought she was saying tadpole and Rob thought she was saying cat poop And what they, they never really you never could know. And then norB had the movie on the other day with the subtitles and again to that part, and he texted Rob and said I was right. The subtitle says tadpole. And it’s weird because it makes no sense. Why would she yell tadpole? At a car? It’s it’s but so then you wonder what was the person typing up the subtitles? Did they have the script in front of them? Yes. I open it up. But that’s worth looking up on YouTube for a little bit of just fun entertainment. Just look at that part. And there’s lots of discussion on the YouTube on it as people say, What did she say, you know, and a lot of people think it’s cat poo. But apparently the Subtitler said, Nope. He says tadpole.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, I’ve wondered that a lot about about subtitles, because, you know, let’s be honest. I mean, unless you’re unless you’re hard of hearing or deaf, or you watch a lot of foreign films. You know, most of us don’t live in a subtitle world. I mean, occasionally, you’ll turn it on to hear the Russian translation or something, but, but that’s it. And but if every now and then I wonder like, thing with closed captioning, like, nobody knows what closed captioning is anymore. But was the same thing was like, how, where do they get those to somebody? I assume that they always got it from the script. But I’m guessing based on some really shitty subtitles, I’ve seen that there’s literally somebody just watching the movie and giving their interpretation of what these people say, What do you know, from a filmmaker? How that works?
Mike Lorrain
Well, I don’t know. Like, first of all, I don’t think there’s any kind of universal playbook. And second of all, I think you’re right, I think to get the script is too much work. You have to go through too many people to try to get a copy of that script. Because first of all, the scripts are not just floating around. I think it’s probably just interpretation simply out of the fact that it’s too much work to try to do it authentic or do it the right way. You know, everything is money. Money drives everything. And that would cost too much money take too much time to find the script. So I think the subtitlers just doing their interpretation, and their boss is saying we got to deliver tomorrow. Get it done.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, we got 20 More of these sitting on the shelf right now. You got till tomorrow get busy.
Mike Lorrain
Yep. So too bad. I’m guessing cat tadpole was simply interpretation. But it’s hilarious that everyone most everyone seems to think it’s cat poo. But North Pole. So anyway, that’s for anyone listening. It is worth on YouTube, just YouTube the car and and YouTube, the car cat poo or something and it should probably come back back.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, now I’m telling you listen, I was looking it up while you were talking. And this is like, like a legit movie. I mean, we’re talking James rowland’s in it Ronnie Cox, Kim Richards is in it, who had a huge crush on back in the 70s, by the way.
Mike Lorrain
So that was one you missed is like me in Electric Dreams.
Shane R. Monroe
Honestly, though, to be to be to be fair, to be fair, not saying that I have an excuse. But to be fair, it’s 1919 77. Which, you know, that Star Wars era was nobody saw anything in 1977 Other than Star Wars like 100 times. Also to be to be fair, you know, that was, that was the year the shining came out. And my parents traumatized me by taking me to that movie. And I’m pretty sure after seeing the Shining when I was eight, I wasn’t checking out horror movies after that for a while. In fact, I’m trying to think if I saw anything scary after that for a half a decade or more to come after that. I got back into my Renaissance with horror, like in 8382 83 ish. But I think I think I was traumatized from The Shining for a few years. I don’t think I saw anything that even remotely look scary.
Mike Lorrain
That makes sense. When I have learned, Oh, good. I just say I avoided horror movies as a kid. Just because they scared me.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, well, I remember seeing either a trailer or the actual movie of The Exorcist. And that, that that that put me out of commission to I think that was roughly the same time frame I think I think I was done with that I was I didn’t want to be scared shitless anymore. Carry when when that frickin hand came out of the grave at the end, I almost shit my pants. And I’ll tell you right now, even though I know it’s coming, and I’m 50 something years old. That movie still sets me on edge the whole time. I mean, knowing that knowing that Laurie Piper is going to be you know, hamstrung in the hall the doorway and knowing that carries arms gonna come out at the end. I’m in anxiety the whole time I watch them knowing that those things are coming.
Mike Lorrain
And is there anything that your son Brian, do you think kind of has a similar kind of take on I feel like the kids aren’t getting back to the kids today. Do they have? Do they have any of that? Like we did? I don’t think so. I don’t
Shane R. Monroe
think so, you know, my, my daughters who are you know, they’re, they’re, you know, Gen Y, I guess my son would be Gen Z. So there’s really even though they’re all my kids, they’re still a decent generation apart. So you have to kind of take that into consideration. But like, at least one of my daughters still has things that she that really like that she’s traumatized. I mean, let’s be honest, the word traumatized is appropriate. Like my older daughter, if I make that, that that noise from the predator, and I don’t think I don’t know if I could do it on demand, I usually just snuck up behind her and did it. It’s sort of that I don’t even know if I get the phlegm in the back of my throat to make that noise right now, because my mouth is really dry from talking. But it’s like that cry like that. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t get the phlegm in the back of my throat. But there’s that, that little that almost purring growling noise that the predator makes. That freaks the living shit out of my older daughter. I mean, if I come up behind her, she will like almost smack me if I make that noise, because it freaks her out. So yeah, I guess there’s something my son’s fearless. You know, he’s a boy boys aren’t afraid of anything. They can’t show any fear or emotion. But he is he is vested. And I guess that’s I think that’s what you’re asking? Is he vested in anything? Is there anything that he’s going to take from watching a film in 2021? Is he going to have this 20 years later? 30, you’re going to be on a podcast with one of his buddies in 50 years, 40 years talking about something he saw when he was 14? I think the answer is yeah. And I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s His disposition, or if it’s just because he, it’s important to me. So it’s important to him. He’s trying to, you know, Please, dad, by by finding, finding something worthwhile and all of this. But the fact that you know, that he’s, you know, that he spews out these lines, and that there are things that are now 567 years old to him, that still hold meaning to him that he will still bring up and he will still quote or reference. Yeah, I think so. I think so. What about your son? What about you feel like he’s got that going on, too?
Mike Lorrain
I, I don’t know what he’s gonna take with him. Beyond just, you know, movies I showed them. I think what I go for now, is if I can show him a movie that I think is, you know, good in one way or another, whether it’s from the 80s, or today, and if at the end, I said, Well, what do you think? And he says, that just jumped into the top, my top five all time favorites. That makes me feel good. And that’s awesome. In fact, I just got that comment from him. About a month ago, I showed him and I think it was a good call, because it’s just a weird movie. But it’s it’s cool and weird. It’s called Snowpiercer. I don’t know if you’ve seen that up. Chris Evans. It’s
Shane R. Monroe
been it’s been kicking around. I’ve heard good things about it. It’s supposed to be Hang on a second, let me think for a second. It’s supposed to be like a spiritual successor to some other franchise or some other story, right?
Mike Lorrain
Well, it’s actually based on a on a graphic novel. We watched the behind the scenes of it and the director. He’s the same director, I think the director won an Oscar a couple years ago, I don’t remember off top my head, but a foreign director, but he was inspired by the graphic novel he saw in a comic shop, and he read it and he said, I want to make this movie and ask and it’s, it’s really bizarre, you know, it’s this train. That’s the future. And it’s a train that’s just traveling forever amongst the globe. Because there’s the whole world is turned into, you know, an ice age. So the Okay, the train is all that’s left. And the train is separated by classes. And so you’ve got a poor on the back and the roots in the front. And worse, those stories about a guy from the back, who wants to get to the front and find out what the heck’s going on and end this class struggle. And so it’s fascinating that it just covers all the aspects of how people treat others, but it’s just also just bizarre. It’s got these these moments where you’re just like, whoa, and I don’t want to I don’t want to say much because it is worth seeing and maybe some to watch with Brian. Because at the end of that movie, read turn him he said he had a big grin. And he goes that is in my top five and I realized I think it worked for him because the kids today they watch so much crazy stuff on YouTube. I’m like crazy off. And I think this movie work because this just got crazy stuff.
Shane R. Monroe
Okay, so I was looking this up by it. We’re talking. And according and this is what I heard, this is what I read. And this might blow you away standby hope you’re sitting down still. Apparently the the fan the fan perception is that Snowpiercer is a sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where are they getting that from? Because it’s not it’s not like one Reddit post with 15 people on it. This is like all over the internet. What am I? Can you Can I make any sense
Mike Lorrain
kind of see that? I mean, yeah, you know the hope? Yeah, I guess I don’t want to say I don’t know. Yeah, I’m guessing you’ll try to watch and watch with Brian. And I you know, you’re at the end. You’ll I’m sure. Yeah, you could definitely. I didn’t think that when I saw it, but I can see.
Shane R. Monroe
I can see people got that. Yeah, yeah, basically what I was reading about the movie, and then I got sucked into this whole vortex thing. And I’m going I don’t want to read too much about this. But it seems like a very, very common perception about this. And that might be why I never saw it because you don’t you don’t fuck around with Willy Wonka. You don’t say anything is like it or, you know, try to extend upon it. Anytime somebody wants to do that I immediately shut down. That’s probably why I never saw it. So now
Mike Lorrain
tell you, it’s not Willy Wonka. I mean, there’s no candy factory in the snow. No,
Shane R. Monroe
no, no, no, but I mean, like, you know, you know, I’m very prudish about certain IPs. And I don’t like when anybody messes with any of it. And if that was an intention, that probably would have strayed me away. I’m surprised. So this seems there must be something other that you can’t talk about regarding it. Because this feels very trope ish. This doesn’t seem like a unique concept. This seems to be like, a very common concept. So there must be something in the execution of it that’s standing out for you. Now there’s an even more interesting
Mike Lorrain
runaway train. That’s even a movie about a runaway train. And I mean, that was awesome thinks
Shane R. Monroe
of another one.
Mike Lorrain
But not this, you know, it takes place on a train, you know, but it’s different. I mean, it’s it’s, it’s it’s not runaway train, it’s just a train that is holding the last people in human civilization. So it’s, you know, it’s a post a post apocalyptic fantasy story, so to speak, but it’s just really bizarre. And I think that’s what makes it good, because it’s kind of like watching the last Mad Max movie, you know, they’ve got dude swinging on poles on cars, and, you know, my wife and I would say, this is some just some crazy shit. And, and it’s one of those movies where you go, this is just crazy shit. And, but it’s cool. And again, you know, when it came to Brett, yeah, he had a big grin on his face at the end. Gone. Yeah, that was cool. And so yeah, that’s a that’s definitely a I think a shame Brian, you know, experienced to do some time.
Shane R. Monroe
Well, speaking of the backlog, we’ve got a lot of stuff to watch though. So I will add it to this growing keep list that Oh, sure. of stuff that that he needs to see. He see he’s so my wife took the lock off of sexual content for my son. So we are now able to watch coming of age movies. So you know, I’m not saying that certainly Porky’s but Porky’s ish movies, where, you know, there’s a little bit of raunch factor to it, but it’s really coming of age. So I’ve got I got a boatload of backlog for that. Because, you know, that’s a topic of interest. I totally remember, I don’t remember breakfast yesterday, but I remember being 14 and 15. And what I wanted to see and you know, what I found interesting to consume, you know, as as that age group, as a male, I wanted to see X, Y, and Z and so I’m trying to be cognizant of the like, like everyone else, I’m trying not to waste his time, and nothing makes me more shaky than showing my kid a movie where at the end, he’s gonna tell me what fucking wasted RAM he won’t say that exact words. But, you know, I’ve had movies that he’s been a little wishy washy with. But for the most part, I’ve done okay, so I’m really afraid of that moment where it’s like, Dude, we think that wasn’t that wasn’t even worth my time. It’s like, damn it. That’s gonna ruin some of the
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, I get it. I mean, you and I probably did the same thing. Didn’t we just comb through the Showtime catalog I did at my friend’s house and I just looked for whatever said you know, whatever was rated our
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah are rated first and then violence and nudity were the next step. Because they don’t call it they actually they used very plain words then it wasn’t like they have they have like phrases now to describe that, you know, intense adult situations. Right? Yeah. Easy. It used to be easy. Violence, nudity. I don’t even think they said sex. It was very simple. I mean, it was like three or four words and you were good. Now it’s like, Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Intense. Sexual. What does that mean? What am I gonna get to see if I if I watched
Mike Lorrain
my favorite his use of tobacco?
Shane R. Monroe
Oh, that I’ve totally forgot about that one. Yeah.
Mike Lorrain
That’s they gotta call that out. Smoking?
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then they build they have like different levels of drug use. Because at one time, it was like, drug use. I think I even saw like, intravenous drug use as one of the descriptors at one point. I’m like, Whoa, we’re getting a little we’re getting really, really are breaking this down. We’re breaking the stereo descriptors, very distressed.
Mike Lorrain
I guess they’re trying to really let parents know, as best they can, you know, from the MPAA. You know what it might have just in case they want to just hit the stop button.
Shane R. Monroe
Right. Right, right. I mean, I guess I guess I’m okay. I mean, I’m totally fine with like, information. I’m, you know, that’s one thing I bet a lot of people don’t know about that IMDb actually has a parental advisory section for every film, and not all of them. Not all of them are filled out, of course, because you know, it’s, it’s kind of crowdfunded, if you will. But I’ve used it. I mean, my son has said, hey, I want to watch this movie. And I have no interested in pre watching it first. So I will hop up on IMDb. And for any movie, that’s, that’s so far that I would not want him to see, without at least parental context. There’s a parental advisory piece of it, and they go into great detail. Right? So if you it’s like, how many? How many times did they say fuck, there’s a count on most of these f4 does use this many times s words use this many times. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen if you’ve ever looked at I’m probably just telling you shit you already knew. But I bet a lot of people don’t know that that exists.
Mike Lorrain
Well, actually, I know if a movies PG 13 You’re allowed to use the F word. I think once. And isn’t that? I think more than once, then it it starts approaching our rating is for some reason, you’d have an F bomb 10 times rated R you have it once you’re getting.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, I guess you know, listen, I guess that. I mean, I’ve heard the same stories you probably heard or you probably know more about the MPAA than I do. But you always hear stories about you know them hard lining something because they don’t know, you know, there seemed to be something personal involved in it. They didn’t like the content type. So you know, they had to cut frame by frame in order to get it down to PG or PG 13. You’re a lot of horror story. So I always wonder like, is there a fixed set of criteria? I mean, I guess you said it right yourself that, you know, the number of F bombs can only be done X amount of times, which kind of doesn’t make sense to me, because I would be fine. Even if my kid was young hearing a properly contested F bomb versus a gratuitous F bomb, if that makes sense. Right? Yeah. Like if you if you watch your your kid get hit by an Aramco truck, you’re allowed to say fuck. And I don’t I mean, I don’t care who you are. I mean, if you see your kid struck down by a speeding truck, you should be able to say fuck all you want. And it should not affect the writing of the show. You don’t mean the first ever getting a kid hit by a truck and should be ready to or anyway. But you see what I’m you know what I mean, though? Yeah, like context, its context and to say, Well, if you use more than one, you’re going to have to get an R rating. I think that’s sort of I think that’s sort of a cheap cop out. But you know, again, I don’t know all the inner workings. I just think it’s funny that, that there are parameters like that that don’t involve context. Right? How many times can you see a set of Dockers in a movie? Right? How does that work out? I mean, is this a movie about about childbirth and breastfeeding? I bet tits could be on the screen. Two and a half hours. Nobody has any problem with it. Make it a teen slasher flick. And the second time a set of boobs comes up radar.
Mike Lorrain
Well, the thing is nudity is really changed over the years when it comes to the amount of it when we were growing up. You know, it was all over the place. But now it’s you rarely see it. It’s just I mean, Halloween kills no nudity. I mean,
Shane R. Monroe
really? It’s like, yeah, I was gonna say isn’t like at least one boob rack flash at least, like required. I.
Mike Lorrain
Nope. I can’t remember a single one. Wow. Oh,
Shane R. Monroe
it’s there’s your testament right there.
Mike Lorrain
You’re talking about just the amount of F bombs and the ratings. This is actually where I think the MPA is has failed miserably is. And I’ve gone through this with my own. I’ve two boys. I’ve gone through with both of them. Is that okay? My youngest son Kyle is about 12. And so I will occasionally take him to some PG 13 movies, depending on what it is. And so the problem is, if you go to a PG 13 movie around September, they’re showing trailers for all the horror movies. And some of those trailers are freaky for a 12 year old. I mean, you know, every works villain now at some point always has to do a contorted body with snapping noises that seems to be Yeah. Guaranteed, and everyone and so. And I remember my other son Brett, when he was about seven, I took him to see the new Muppets movie. And they showed us a scary trailer that traumatized him to the point where half a movie, he was crying, and he asked me said Can we please leave? I said, Okay. And, and I mean, so trailers can mess up a kid, even more than the movie itself.
Shane R. Monroe
Hmm. That’s a that’s an interesting perspective. But yeah, yeah, I know what you mean, though. I mean, and they do have, you know, red band and green band, but I’m assuming that if you’re going to the Muppet Movie, they’re not showing red band trailers there. Yeah, they show green.
Mike Lorrain
I remember it was a dinosaur type movie. It wasn’t like Jurassic Park. But it was a dinosaur movie that very scary dinosaurs. And, you know, the Muppet Movie, I believe was BG might have been G. But nonetheless, they showed one that, you know, he was pretty little and but it? I could tell right. I mean, when they were showing the tree, you know, your kids? Yes. And oh, boy. Oh, this is not. This is not what he was ready for. And, you know, and I remember specifically in the Muppet Movie itself, there was a dark scene on an alley where they went to recruit, I think it was Fozzie Bear, and there was a big fist fight between two Muppets going on. It was dark and had a lot of heavy punches. And it was not, you know, Fonzie was kind of in this rundown bar, because that’s the whole Muppet Movie. They’re trying to get everybody together again. And I remember, I could see Brett de steam doing the punches. He was he was just he was like, he was like jolting. His body was like, Wow, just it was too much. And, you know, but he asked if we could leave. And I said, Okay, so we left, you know, and I tried to talk to him outside about kind of what he saw, but he couldn’t articulate. I said, What’s bothering you? And he couldn’t really articulate it. He just, you know, that’s kids. I mean, you know, when we were kids, too, sometimes we could not articulate those emotions or fear.
Shane R. Monroe
Well, yeah. And it’s pretty, it’s pretty fresh and new. And you don’t have context, right to say it’s like this, or it’s like that. So, yeah. Oh, hey, you know, you’d ask me if there was anything that stuck with my kids with movies and the alien, or that the alien, the predator thing was one of them. But I just remembered while you were talking. And this is weird, because my younger daughter could handle anything but my older daughter, who didn’t like the predator, growling noise. She also had a severe reaction. I can’t blame her for this one. This is like, I still sit still freaks me out. Remember An American Werewolf in London. He’s having that dream while he’s in the hospital. And he’s out like hunting a deer or something. And, and it shows him like in a hospital bed, but it’s in the middle of the forest. And the yummy Jenny agwa or whatever name is, is tending him and then he pops his eyes open and he opens his mouth and his eyes are all like, red, yellow, and it’s got big old giant teeth. I think that gave my kid nightmares for like a week. Not the rest of the movie. Just that one part.
Mike Lorrain
So yeah, I haven’t seen that movie. That’s when I Wait, wait,
Shane R. Monroe
wait. Never have seen American Werewolf in London at all? Nope. And well, that’s that’s kind of criminal. Honestly.
Mike Lorrain
I know.
Shane R. Monroe
I mean, it’s a landisville it’s like Halloween. That’s okay. I’m with you.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, again, to describe myself as a child of the late 70s and 80s horror movies scared me first of all, I gotcha. And occasionally, my friends would subject me to forcing me to watch one so to speak. So you know, I saw some just because I go to my friend’s house and they want me to watch this and I want I didn’t want to be you know, a scaredy cat. So I, I watched it even thoughts. I was scared shitless but I avoided them. And as I got a little older, I really started reading Stephen King books all the time. I just really got into King So I would I would watch Stephen King movies, because I’d already read the book. And in a way, then I wasn’t afraid and scared because I already knew the story. I just wanted to see the visual world version of it. So that’s really why Stephen King movies like children in the corn. I mean, I saw that and, and, Christine, you know, Carrie, I saw I saw all those, but like an American Werewolf in London. I just, I never, my parents wouldn’t let me rent a movie like that. Right? Right, right. Sure. They wouldn’t have let me watch it. So what happened in some of those movies? They just came and went. And then you know how it is? Yeah. It’s replaced
Shane R. Monroe
with more movies. Never got to go back and revisit it. I didn’t. Yeah, it’s great. It’s great filmmaking, man. I mean, it just is, it’s so great. I mean, that’s, that’s one of those ones that every time it comes out in a new format, I know I’m buying it again. So just take my damn money. I’ve got like 17 copies of labyrinth kicking around here. And I know I’ll buy it again, those sons of bitches.
Mike Lorrain
Well, you are you’re a gentleman and a scholar. For all the support you put on labyrinth, I mean, even more than me, and I like labyrinth just as much as you and I got a 4k labyrinth. But I got it from a couple years ago, I’m
Shane R. Monroe
going to tell you right now, I have two different 4k labyrinth copies. That’s how bad it is. And honestly, though, there’s not just my blind buying, though, I was informed that the latest 4k release of labyrinth was 35th or 40th, whatever, is not as good as the previous 4k. This is by the snobs on the BLU ray.com forums, so I never bought it on 4k. Oddly enough, I never bought the first 4k release. Because I sort of suspected we would see it again in some sort of an anniversary edition with even more stuff. And so I held out and sure enough, here comes the next release in 4k. ambode. Sweet, I’ll pick it up. And I picked it up and the and you will you and I talked about just how terrible the print is or the transfer or whatever. And so I’m like, Well, God is the other one’s better than this. I got I own that one. So I bought the other one. And honestly, it didn’t really make much difference. So I don’t know what the hell is going on. They got that off a VHS tape or something I don’t know.
Mike Lorrain
And see, here’s what’s irritating to me is at this time where physical media is going away, and we’re you know, fans like us are still trying to support it. What I want to know is, you know, why aren’t the people talking? Who did the work? I mean, these are filmmakers do these are intelligent people that understand transfer, and understand contrast and understand Understand? Don’t grain? Why aren’t they getting involved? And my answer would probably be because if they got involved, what they would say is we wanted to do more, but the people paying us wouldn’t pay us any more money. That’s probably
Shane R. Monroe
true. Right? I mean, you’ve got Cameron supervising the True Lies transfer for what the last five years. Yeah, we still are. And what’s
Mike Lorrain
even Ryan Reynolds is asking James Cameron through Twitter, you know, can you please get us the best and truly got him to respond. He said, I’m working on it. I hear you. I’m working on it. That was like a year ago.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah. Isn’t that nutty? I mean, it’s just, it’s crazy. But I mean, I don’t know. It’s, it’s like you and I talking about music videos the other day, it’s like, where are these things? Why are we why? Why do we get this once a year for came music video release like that wham Christmas video or we get like, once a year, we get one 4k music video from the 80s released. And that, of course led us talking about film versus tape and, and all that other stuff. But it’s like somebody, somebody’s got this shit somewhere. We need somebody to break open archives and turn it over to somebody who gives a rat’s ass so we can get this stuff documented and done.
Mike Lorrain
And here’s the hard part about it is that it’s there. But it will cost money to get it out and transfer it and it comes down to Will someone pay? And then you come out to well who owns it. And it’s usually a big studio or a big conglomerate. And when it’s a big conglomerate, they’re just looking at what’s going to make them money. They don’t care about their reservation. No. You know, I mean, I’m going through that right now with my own company. I have a storage unit full of beta SP tapes, the often the 90s of all our corporate stuff, you know, interviews with people, I mean stuff that’s precious to someone, and some clients we still work with and I’ve reached out to him. And I’ve said I got this two boxes of tapes. There are three options. Option one, I throw them in the dump option two, you take them, option three, you pay us to transfer them for you to digital. And every time guess which option they pick option on the trash.
Shane R. Monroe
I don’t care. Yeah, that’s so that’s so weird. That’s so weird, you know, and even what makes it even more weird, it’s you know that these artifacts are there, that was okay. In some cases, they’re gone, right. But you know, in a lot of cases, when the money is right when the time is right when they make some remake of some, some shitty remake of some really good movie, and then all of a sudden, they want the special edition blu ray of the original, and then they then they start digging, and the shit they pull out of the archives. It’s like, number one who even knew that they shot that or they captured that at all? Right? And to who the hell realize that that stuff was still around, and they got a hold of it and cleaned it up, or in some cases didn’t clean it up and provide it to you, right? It’s like, so the shits out there, it’s there. You know? But like, like you said, how do you? How do you get it out? And, you know, I say to myself, you know, there’s gotta be, there’s gotta be a way, there’s got to be, you know, it’s sort of like, I don’t know, if it was you I spoke with her was just on the show, right? I think I talked about this, like, probably 10 years ago on here. But like, a crowd sourced cleanup effort. Right, because we know we’ve got these prints and they’re dirty as hell. And there’s a lot of there’s a lot of work to clean them, either digitally, or whatever they do with film to actually clean it before they rescan it. But if if they would just throw the reels on and scan them. Dump the frames into a big community type website where you could go in and say, I will take minute to have of this film. And I will, I will, you don’t have to provide to us, we’ll provide the tools, we’ll go in and we’ll clean the frames one by one, line by line because we’re willing to do that. We’ll go in and do scratch removal, we’ll go I mean, obviously, you’re not going to do color compensation or, but if you just want somebody to clean the clean the print up or clean the scanner. I think you could crowdsource that I think people would do it for free, just to be part of that restoration project. But I understand takes money to even get it to that point.
Mike Lorrain
Here’s the problem though with with that I’m with you. And I can give you another example of something I read about that you’ll probably find interesting. But first of all, there’s this psychology behind the thing that goes on when you have a either a conglomerate a company or just people that own a property. They own the property. It’s sitting somewhere just dying. And they don’t care because they can’t make money off it. But then when someone comes to them and says, hey, we’ll take this and we’ll clean it up. We’ll do it for free. Would you just let us have it so we can share with people? To them. It’s like, Oh, someone’s interested in this. Well, no, you can’t. I’m not gonna give it to you because it’s mine. Well, then will you do something with it? No. And then there it sits and dies. And a story that I read about recently about something similar was related to a video game that I think you played, as well as me. Do you remember the video game no one lives forever, Kate Archer. Or the shoe Navy first person shooter. It was made by Monolith who made Tron 2.0 But no one lives forever. It’s a great FPS Kate Archer is kind of this female James Bond just spy from the 70s. They made. It’s known as nolf. And oh, LF and then oil upto. But a great, great game. And you know, with our time of remastering well through through many purchases and shifting around nolf is now under the property of Disney. Oh, and, and this, this company wanted to do remaster and they asked Disney, could you just let us you’re not interested? Couldn’t we have it? And do it for the fans? And of course, it just goes to the attorneys, right? Did the attorneys and you know what they’re gonna say? No, no. So nothing happens, and nothing ever will. So that’s so
Shane R. Monroe
sad that it’s so it’s so sad.
Mike Lorrain
It is and it’s frustrating. And,
Shane R. Monroe
you know, something interesting, you know, what, what if there was just spitballing here? What if there was an organization? Not? I don’t want to say advocacy because that seems that seems kind of animal rescue ish. But what if the concept here is there’s an organization that doesn’t I’m pretty sure this doesn’t exist now. So here’s our chance to do something big with the rest of our lives. This group becomes an advocacy for that. Those indie developers those those fans or whoever that wanted access to a property, we know the property’s locked up. We know who owns it. We know that, you know, if you ask the answer is going to be no. But what if there was an organization that said in between, that you could petition and say, Listen, here is Electric Dreams, it’s it’s not being it’s not being, they’re not doing anything with it, they don’t seem to want to release it on Blu Ray, no 4k, we know that we know the prints are sitting around somewhere, we’ll do all the work, we’ll take all the risk. We just need permission to do it. And we need to we need the original, you know, enter positive or whatever. And so that advocacy group, advocacy group is the ones that approached them with the with that legal knowledge with the industry knowledge, understanding what drives both sides, right? Disney wants money, these guys want the property, right. And the advocacy group advocacy groups role would be how to translate for both sides, how to make that win. I don’t know how you’d make any money doing that. But it seems like a logical thing that if you could get a group that could speak the legalese, and they could convince these people sitting on the properties, hey, listen, their intent is to not sell it not make money, it’s a fan thing. Here’s how you get to make money on it. You can cross promote it with this you can, you will be able to stick your name all over it you will get you will get to look like the good guys, for releasing this, you can spin this into a PR release that coincides with this, Hey, you just got shit on because you didn’t let him and said go to DVD, these guys are gonna give you a way that you could put a positive spin on whatever it takes, you know what I’m saying? I think that’s kind of an interesting idea. What do you think?
Mike Lorrain
I guess it’s kind of done a little bit like when some of the the physical media copies that you and I purchase of movies, they’re done through that company arrow. Yeah. And that’s, I think, an example of what you’re talking about, right? Because arrow is not universal, or Fox or Warner Brothers, their arrow and they make these deals with them to where they’ll take the property and transfer it and try to make a really nice physical release. Okay, so
Shane R. Monroe
this already sort of exists at least on a movie level, but like for a video game, or, or music videos, or, like off, you know, off, I don’t know what you’d even call that off formats.
Mike Lorrain
Well, with music videos, I think the reason we have decent copies of half of what we do is due to a company called promo only, and they were I became aware of them about 10 years ago, that they they took content, music, video content and some music content and handle the transfer between the content owners, and DJs. So promo only was a company that grew out of being supplying DJs with content, and whether it was music videos or songs. And so promo only would they started putting all these add music videos on DVDs, and they made them with track information and actually would even separate if there was an intro before the song, or the song start, they would make a separate track. So a DJ could just go right to the song if they wanted to skip the you know, the two minute just kind of acting intro part. And so I found a friend of mine was a former DJ and he had some of these and he led them to me so I ripped them and I was Tom these this is the quality I’ve been looking for forever. And he said yeah, you have to be a DJ to have a subscription promo only and even buy their stuff. And remember I spent a lot of time thinking how can I how can I make it sound like I’m a DJ and I couldn’t come up with a way to do it so but then what I found is if you just go on eBay everybody was selling promo only DVDs and so that’s how I collected a lot of my music videos was just buying
Shane R. Monroe
the right sorry that is that’s not promo
Mike Lorrain
only is still still around but now they’ve they’ve transferred to digital so if you want to buy 80s music videos, you can go to promo only and sign up for an account and it’s just digital downloads they don’t do DVDs anymore because you know, physical media is over but I still have a lot of the promo only DVDs and you know they’d sell on eBay for you know 8090 bucks a disc and a disc would have maybe 25 videos but that’s how I got my hands on some really great videos from the 80s are my collection that I could not find.
Shane R. Monroe
That’s crazy what a great story man that’s that’s interesting promo only. I wonder if that’s the same group. I don’t know if you remember I’ve know I’ve told the story on this show before like ages ago, but back in the early days of mp3 Like when mp3 was given birth by Fraunhofer over in Germany. So mp3 had just begun. And so the software to encode an mp3 was like $10,000 Nobody, nobody like could afford that shit. You could get a player for free. But if you wanted to encode your own mp3, it was like 10 grand or something. Now remember that. And so of course, everybody pirated the software, and they handed it around, and everybody began ripping their CDs. And this was all handled in IRC in a Relay Chat. This is long before the internet proper, so to speak, but this was early 90s. And that’s when there were there were there were gaps in music, right? Like your Spotify right now. 95% of music is probably on there, maybe a little less. But back in mp3 lands, right, you were you were limited to the the music of the hackers that were pirating the software and that were part of the IRC process. A lot of heavy metal you know, a lot of classic rock but if you wanted if you wanted Rod Stewart’s I don’t know there was a song that they were I was looking for of his I can’t remember which one it was. But some guys have all the luck if you want it that song. Forget about it, nobody had it. Right. And this, it’s absolutely batshit crazy that this was there was a time when you could not get a digital copy of Rod Stewart’s song, right? But nobody had it. And so you would actually you would actually run bots on IRC that would have all of your music attached to it. And somebody could list through your bot, all the songs that you had, and request to download one of them. But you could set your bot up to say, you get three of my songs if you upload a song to me. And everybody’s bought had a list of these are the ones that I’m looking for. And you can always cheat, you could upload some piece of shit that nobody really wanted. And then download three songs. It was sort of an unfiltered thing. But the idea was you were a real hero, if you could come up with some I mean, there were there were there were class, there was a caste system, right? There were the guys that were that were attached to the music industry that ran, you know, music shops or something like that they had access to music. And they would rip it if you had something for them. Right? They weren’t gonna rip Rod Stewart song. But if you were to provide something they wanted, they would go out of their way and go pull the record of the album and do it for you. But there were some things you just couldn’t get. And the this is this is crazy. This is my weird 15 minutes of fame in the weird seedy underworld of mp3 is the number one song that was desired at that moment. And like if you went into any mp3 channel on IRC, looking for Will Smith’s men and black. That was it that that was the golden chalice of mp3. And for some reason, nobody had it. Nobody had access to it wasn’t that the soundtrack wasn’t out. You could have played on the radio. But the soundtrack wasn’t available. I don’t even the movie wasn’t in home release yet. If I’m remembering the timeframe, right. That was it if you could produce that the world was your oyster. And I was like God dammit, I gotta find that songs. But unless I was, I was I was fooling myself, right? How could I get it these these guys, they’re people plugged into the music world that couldn’t get this shit. So I was working at computer land at the time. And I was building websites, shitty little websites for shitty little companies. And we did business with almost every large company in town. That was what computer land wasn’t when he was they were the IT department of every local business. And we were an IT. We were the IT people for it doesn’t matter, but it’s gonna bug me if I can’t remember kW three or
one of the KPK one of those anyway. And so one of the guys was coming over and we were talking websites stuff. And I’m like, we started talking tech. And I’m like, I’m like, Yeah, well, you’re in the music business. Right? What do you think about this whole mp3 thing? And he’s like, I’m not sure I follow you. And like, and that’s why I gave him the background. It’s like, yeah, so this is like the seedy underworld of people trading music. And, and he’s like, wow, that’s, that’s pretty impressive. Um, he was really legitimately interested. He wasn’t going to be a dick about it. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. Like, if you want to get song X, you need to provide song Why? He’s like, really? About Yeah, in fact, the one that everyone’s wanting right now get this Will Smith’s men and black. He’s like, really? I’m like, what does that mean? He’s like, Well, oddly enough, do you know about pocket? Yeah, pretty much. It’s like my friend bringing an ice pick out of his robe. He’s like, he’s like, you know that radio stations have a subscription into a disk of the week club type thing. I’m like, go on. And he’s like, every week, we get what the industry thinks is gonna be the next hot music. They send it to us on a disk. And then we suck it into our system. I can’t remember the name of the system was good. You probably recognize if you heard it, it wasn’t profit, but it was something else. And, and he’s like, we’ve got that disk, and get the fuck out of here. And he’s like, No. I said, can I borrow it? Yeah, and I’m like, You’re gonna let me borrow. This is like the most wanted mp3 on the planet. And I’m gonna get access to it and be the source of the Most Wanted music file in the planet, America at least. And he’s like, yeah, he’s got it, you know, just don’t tell anybody where you got it and give it back to me, like in a day or so. And so he comes by the next day, and he drops this disc off and fucking a dude. It’s got men and black on it. I ran it through my 900 hour. mp3 compressor, right? Because, you know, it took like, 10 times longer than the song to compress it back then. And that was my claim to fame. I brought men and black to the mp3 CD underworld of piracy. Wow, that is a story. And now I’m starting to wonder if this promo only group was the group that provided these discs to the to the DJs. Because when you said that it’s like, oh my god, this sounds really familiar. So wouldn’t that be fun?
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, I mean that. Yeah, you should look that up.
Shane R. Monroe
i Yes. That’s a nutty
Mike Lorrain
story that, you know, the best stories are treasure hunt stories, and that it’s true is a great one.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, I mean, I had like unlimited access to everybody’s bots for a period of time. It was it was pretty amazing. But you know, that sort of shit short lived man, you’re a star for literally about 15 minutes, then it’s like, what else you got? This, can you get that I’m like, Dude, this is a one time thing. I’m not gonna go I’m not gonna go ask my friend, quote, friend to go out on a limb and give me every disc that he’s got. I do think I tapped one or two more from him over time. But for the most part, you know that that was a that was a mass. That was a mass event that eventually it became, it became where it wasn’t a treasure hunt anymore. Everything was available if you knew the right place and the right person, certain people specialized in easy listening certain ones, you know, dealt with comedy albums. I remember that was a big one. Comedy albums were like a niche that can be fulfilled. So everybody’s sort of got their got their cadence, and it was kind of it. It was really, really interesting to be alive. And part of what a lot of people I mean, people think that mp3 began with Napster. And that was way late in the game. You know, this was this was years before. And it’s crazy to have been part of that. That evolution of music. So
Mike Lorrain
I think you were you were definitely a part of that before I was and I mean, Napster was a godsend to me, because I like to collect 80s remixes and dance versions of songs, which I would gladly have paid for, but Right, exactly. They couldn’t find them. And Napster came along and I would search you know, dance mix. And I get all these, I think oh my god, that one that one that one and I would download them. And I mean, it was it was glorious. That I because I kind of along the lines of your story. I remember I you know, back in the 80s We’d go to high school dances and I remember, they played you know, there was You spin me around like a record from Dead or Alive, which on the radio was one version. But in the dances, they played an extended version. And I noticed right away I was like, Oh, this is different. This has more stuff. Yeah, I want to hear that. And I went to the DJ himself. He was like a senior in high school. And I said, Is there any chance you could? You could give me a copy. They says Yeah, bring me a cassette tape, school man, a copy for you. And he did and I Oh, it was like a gold mine. Getting that song that I could play at home. How
Shane R. Monroe
great is that? Yeah, the only other time I use that. I think they use that guy. Suddenly it sprang to me when you talked about versions that had stuff that other versions didn’t. That, that Bruce Springsteen Secret Garden Jerry Maguire mix was one of those. They played it on the radio all the time and it was the secret garden song with all the little clips of the Jerry Maguire movie in it and do not possible to purchase you can’t buy it anywhere. Oh, you could buy a secret garden. But you couldn’t get the one that had the Jerry Maguire stuff mixed in it.
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, the in the radio stations played that over and over
Shane R. Monroe
that dude, that song got back in the top. I want to say 20 I wrote an article about it. I don’t know if you ever read it. I wrote an article about the whole craziness of Secret Garden and And, and how we were kind of fucked by Sony because they own the rights of the time. Everybody on the planet would have bought that version as a single. If they would have released the quote Jerry Maguire mix as a commercial, I don’t know if tape or disk at the time, if they would have released that they would have made a ton of cash. But they didn’t, even though everybody wanted it, and that song got back. Three years later, whatever the number was, after it was released, nobody cared about that song. When it came out. I don’t think you hit the top 40 it nobody cared. But as soon as that Jerry Maguire mix hit the air, everybody wanted that song. And it got back in the top two, I wanted to say top 20 and Sony rereleased like a remastered version of that album. For Bruce Springsteen, if I remember my facts, right, but it have that version on it. And that version was never commercially available ever. But it did come as part of that potentially promo only disk of the week club. And that’s how I got my that’s cool. What a crazy shit. This is just companies that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing with the properties they have and the people that want it. So I’m kind of an interesting circle back to
Mike Lorrain
that. Well, and I think about how you and I have these stories of trying to find those elusive things. And I think once again, nowadays, is it hard to find stuff anymore?
Shane R. Monroe
Sometimes? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Sometimes it’s hard to I’m trying to think of I know, there was just something I was looking for recently. For me, with you and me a lot of it’s we’re chasing something better than what we have. You know, yeah, I’ve got a 320 by 200 music video of some song. And I’ve never seen it again, I’ve never seen a better copy. I’m dying to have a better copy. Like, like there’s a there’s an OMD, or orchestral maneuvers in the dark video from one of their later albums. That meant a lot to me in the 90s, they sort of had a resurgence with this album called sugar tax. And there’s a song on there called speed of light. And it impacted me a lot. And there’s a whole giant story behind that one. But want to save that for another time. But I always thought God, that’d be I want to see what they would do with a music video because this is kind of a powerful song. You know, it’s about infidelity and all this other stuff they could they could make a really cool video about this. Nope, never made a video, couldn’t find a video anywhere. And then on YouTube one time, I found what looked like a pseudo live performance of it. But it’s absolute shit. I mean, it is the worst quality, like 10 FPS frame rate. And that’s my, that’s my golden goose. That’s what I’m searching for now is a version of that, that isn’t a complete piece of shit. Cuz I’d love to well,
Mike Lorrain
you know what my holy grail is? And it’s something I’ve talked to you about, which I know would be maybe not your holy grail, but something you’d love to have. Get your hands on to would be the 3d version of Michael Jackson. Don’t
Shane R. Monroe
Don’t tease me like that. I am dying to get my hands on that. But no, no. Now, here’s another case where they gave it to us. And then they pulled it away. And I would pay. I mean, I came in. I would pay for this. I don’t, I would probably pay 100 bucks. If they said, listen, we’re gonna release 1000 copies of this. We’re gonna charge 100 bucks a piece. Who’s in? Sign me up? I will take it right now. Just give it
Mike Lorrain
Yeah, you and I both did the same thing. We both went and found the showing of a house with the clock and as walls just so we could see the 3d thriller that they were going to show. We love it.
Shane R. Monroe
We didn’t snake like Brian at night with that. And we left. I don’t need to see the movie. Yeah. Oh, my God was amazing. Why can’t I have it? You bastards. I should go back out and look again, say some eventually somebody is going to have to get a hold of it and leak it to somebody.
Mike Lorrain
You would think that and it’s one of the things i I know I start to wonder that we may never get it. It’s just it’s under lock and key. And then pretty soon. What was lock and key is then just thrown in the dumpster. Ah. It’s sleep. Well. You know, 3d con in itself is I mean, I collect I tried to get my hands on 3d blu rays anywhere I can. Yeah, where their waste. And you know, they’re not a waste. And I know it because even though 3d TVs are long gone. VR is the perfect way to watch a 3d movie.
Shane R. Monroe
Yep, it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I started I went through a phase. I mean, the truth behind it is, is I won’t collect anything 3d. I’ll collect what I want this 3d. And so I went on the Mad tear. And I bought the Blu Ray 3ds of what I was interested in, and I’ve got rips of a bunch of other 3d movies. And I’m just kind of curious to see how they approached the tech and, you know, did they use the blatant 3d effects or is it just, you know, atmospheric 3d I guess? The better word for it is. It’s not shoving, shoving a pipe in your face. But it’s, look, you’re part of the world. Yeah. But yeah, I’m with you. Hey, well, well, we wrap this up. I mean, we’re closing in on three hours here and my sprint,
Mike Lorrain
you know, actually times out at three hours. When people start to watch the show, they’re going to look at the timeline and go, I’m out.
Shane R. Monroe
I’m not in it. I got a 15 minute level of attention span. But you know what, here’s what I found out about my audience. A lot of my audience uses us as captive audience filler. Like if they’re on a long car drive, right? Yep. And they’ve got nothing else to do, right? They can’t they can’t play a game or they don’t want to listen to ebooks or something. Or they’re on a flight. We’re good, apparently good traveling content. So there will be people that will see three hours ago. Oh, my God, thank God, I’ve got my whole drive covered. I don’t have to find any more filler.
Mike Lorrain
Well, this was a ton of fun, Shane, I, I always find. I like when we talk that we don’t really know half of what we’re going to talk about. And it’s fun how the conversations just drift. I know. It’s great.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, we did like no preparation for this at all. I mean, we talked like about Halloween kills and frayed a little bit but I was like, then off we go. Yep. Benefits being old. We have a lot of experience to talk about how we talked about vision today upgrade is that
Mike Lorrain
no, yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a lot of fun. So always happy if if the others enjoy it. I’m always happy to chat with you. So it’s been great.
Shane R. Monroe
It was it was a good time, sir. And enjoy the world of pinball or whatever that whatever it is, you’re over there doing?
Mike Lorrain
I will. And until next time, happy Halloween.
Shane R. Monroe
And to you, sir. Bring out bring out more goodies more horror movies, more stuff. And maybe maybe you celebrate Halloween by watching American Werewolf in London. Who knows? That could be a tasty Halloween movie. And you give me Snowpiercer to go look at That’s right. So we exchange it check out the maybe check out kill chain to see if it rubs you right. I’d be curious. I could be making a mountain out of a molehill but I guess my expectations are low these days.
Mike Lorrain
Well, I’m halfway there. I have the American Werewolf in London blu ray collector’s edition on my shelf I know it’s an important Oh my dismay that we have gotten to it.
Shane R. Monroe
So yeah, well that’s it that’s that’s really what it is these days haven’t gotten to it and and you and I are on the back the back nine my friend so we have to be a little more careful with what we allocate our time. We got less of Alright, well thanks again for showing up and spending all this time with me and, and my listeners. I’m sure they will enjoy. And I guess we’ll close it up. This is Shane R Monroe. You’ve been here with me and Mike Lorraine of afraid fame. I’ve talked about the movie like every Halloween season. So you haven’t seen that. Check that out. And I guess we’ll wrap it up. Thanks again, Mike. And we’ll talk to everybody later. Take care peace, peace and love, peace and love.
