Subscribe
Subscribe


The Substandard Takes on Power Rangers, CHiPs, and the Best/Worst Hollywood Reboots

By TWS Podcast

On this week’s episode, the Mighty Morphin’ Substandard discusses Hollywood’s need to reboot—from Power Rangers and CHiPs to The Fugitive and Starsky & Hutch and everything in between. Vic eulogizes Chuck Barris, JVL discovers the Popsicle Twins, and Sonny hates “the remix culture people.” All on this week’s Substandard!

(Also, be sure to download, print, and pick a bingo card to play Substandard bingo!)



This podcast can be downloaded here. Subscribe to the SUBSTANDARD on iTunes or on Google Play.

Endnotes and digressions from
the latest show:

* We promised you Substandard bingo and Substandard bingo you shall have.
Here it is. Imo, this is pretty great—a bunch of different sheets you can divvy up among your friends and then play for some sort of small stakes. Like, everyone puts in $5 and the winner gets a pair of Status Audio headphones. Or a copy of the Layer Cake blu-ray. Or the anniversary edition of Axis & Allies.

You should totes download the sheets and play along at home. Or not. I’m not the boss of you.

* We opened the episode talking about The Gong Show and the passing Chuck Barris. If you’re too young to remember The Gong Show,
this is what it looked like. It’s everything you need to know about the 1970s, right there.

And “The Popsicle Twins” act that Vic mentioned? I can’t even. No—really.
Go look at this thing. This ran on daytime network television. THIS WAS AMERICA IN THE ’70s!

(If you want to round out your understanding of the worst decade in American history, you can go read David Frum’s magisterial book on the ’70s, How We Got Here: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life.)

* Also recommended is Vic’s
charming obituary for Barris over at the Free Beacon.

* We got two long, excellent email corrections this week. The first is from Liam Hehir, who thinks I was unfairly critical of Don Bluth, the Disney animator who went rogue:

I love your work, but your criticism of Don Bluth is too harsh. Taken as a whole, his work is pretty mixed. There are more good movies than bad. But some of them are excellent. The Secret of NIMH is gorgeous and spellbinding. The Land Before Time is a touching tale on the theme of purgatory. Even Anastasia, despite being a later work, is a pretty damned good animated movie. Your dismissal of The Rescuers is particularly puzzling. Eva Gabor and Bob Newhart are great in this movie, which was the best Disney movie in over a decade. If nothing else, the animation is beautiful. There is no comparing Bluth in his prime to Disney’s output of the same time and the years before. There is a qualitative difference between that work and The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, and Oliver and Company. Audiences and critics could tell the difference. It is settled history that Disney was coasting after the deaths of the Roy and Walt. Getting their ass kicked by Don Bluth Productions helped get them out of that rut. There may be no accounting for taste, but the facts are too well documented to deny. You are right about The Little Mermaid, however. It is awful.

* The other email is from Steven Filippi about the real Worst Disney Movies Ever:

I just wanted to direct you to the truly awful some of the Disney movies are that you didn’t mention during this week’s episode. A couple of years ago, a few friends and I decided to watch all 53 official Disney animated movies in chronological order. (That was as of our start date; I believe the official number is 56 or 57 now with Moana being the most recent, but due to our increasingly busy post-college lives, we haven’t caught up yet.) Anyway, the five movies made during and just after World War II are all fairly unbearable, and definitely the worst in Disney’s history. There were two Latin American-themed movies made as a part of the U.S.’s Good Neighbor policy with South America, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which were basically a collection of “Look, Donald Duck is grouchy as the Narrator teaches him about Argentina and gauchos” vignettes. Following those two were 3 Fantasia-lite musical movies, Melody Time, Fun and Fancy Free, and Make Mine Music. The quality of all these movies was low because many of Disney’s best animators and writers were serving overseas in the war. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad from 1949 wasn’t that much better than the previous five, but it at least attempted a normal narrative and paved the way for a return to Disney’s pre-war quality with Cinderella in 1950. I thought you might like to know about these, as they’re all a lot worse than Robin Hood or The Little Mermaid, and I would suggest not wasting your time watching them. You’d be better off rewatching Sucker Punch.

* And here’s
that piece arguing that Belle would have been much better off marrying Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. Spoiler alert: If she marries the beast, she’s getting the guillotine in a couple years when the Revolution sweeps over the country. It’s genius.

* As always, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five-star review on iTunes. It completes us.

-JVL

Related Content


Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

NEWS

POLICY

COMMENTARY

RESTORING AMERICA