Speaker 1: Wake up, suckers. We're thieves and we're bad guys. Now,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we are. Name that flick, name this show.
Speaker 1: It's our two hundredth episode. What that's right? Too many
Speaker 1: hours of bitching about long dead media. That kind of
Speaker 1: sums up podcasting right there, bitching about long dead media.
Speaker 1: Welcome back, midnight viewers to fond the Malone's weekly round up.
Speaker 1: I am Father Malone. You know Ripley, Jean, my pug,
Speaker 1: my pal, my bestest friend. What's up? Rip? No baby,
Speaker 1: no Rip? Pick this week? Okay, well, I guess Rip
Speaker 1: is done for the day. What about our bantering Rip
Speaker 1: come back? Well, anyway, we are celebrating our longevity and
Speaker 1: Halloween this week. So my initial thought was to do
Speaker 1: my favorite horror movie, which is also my favorite movie,
Speaker 1: and that's Dawn of the Dead. I really shouldn't have
Speaker 1: to say this, but George A. Romero's Dawn of the
Speaker 1: Dead Monroeville, mal Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's where that quote was
Speaker 1: from the Thieves and Bad Guys quote. It's the movie
Speaker 1: that made me want to understand movies. I was young
Speaker 1: enough to feel the emotions. It was pulling me toward,
Speaker 1: but no understanding as to how. And I needed to
Speaker 1: know how. You're hearing my voice right now as a
Speaker 1: direct result of finding myself giggling through the worst living
Speaker 1: nightmare imaginable. Don of the Dead is a topic I
Speaker 1: could easily fill several hours right now with zero research.
Speaker 1: About to rattle off a bunch of obscure facts here
Speaker 1: to prove my bona fides. But I'm sure you trust
Speaker 1: me at this point. Wait, here's one. John Ampliss, who
Speaker 1: starred in Romero's previous film Martin was the casting director
Speaker 1: on Don of the Dead, and he's got the lamentable
Speaker 1: role of the Puerto Rican gang member during the opening
Speaker 1: sequence in Philadelphia. What a great name, Philadelphia. It's fun
Speaker 1: to say Philidelphia. I might be high right now. Gang.
Speaker 1: I kind of felt like I would be cheating to
Speaker 1: just start waxing rhapsodic about Donna the Dead, and quite frankly,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't know where to stop. I'll put a link
Speaker 1: in the show notes to frequent co host Mike White's podcast,
Speaker 1: The Projection Booth. He was kind enough to have me
Speaker 1: on to talk Don of the Dead a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago, and I say, basically everything I needed to
Speaker 1: there in the most general way possible. Trust me, if
Speaker 1: you ever want to have someone join at you for
Speaker 1: an unending amount of time, ask me about Don of
Speaker 1: the Dead. Oh also, if you're listening to this show
Speaker 1: the week it's released, I'm going to invite you over
Speaker 1: to the Projection Booth anyway, because Mike is doing his
Speaker 1: annual schlock Toe and I'm on this week's episode, which
Speaker 1: is another George Romero flake. It's his little scene quasi
Speaker 1: supernatural film season of the Witch, originally titled Jack's Wife.
Speaker 1: I believe that's gonna be my final appearance on the
Speaker 1: Projection Booth, So check that out as well. So what
Speaker 1: do we talk about? You read it in the title
Speaker 1: and it's related. Oh boy, is it related? We're talking
Speaker 1: Marvel zombies.
Speaker 2: Let's go all the Avengers are dead and they're coming
Speaker 2: for us? All right, we got a world to say anymore?
Speaker 2: Ship my god? Whoa let's saw you do that?
Speaker 1: Then let's discuss Robert Kirkman. Shall we not really a
Speaker 1: creator so much as an innovator, kind of like Dave
Speaker 1: Feloni for Lucasfilm. If Dave Feloni handpicked by George Lucas
Speaker 1: to continue the saga and the lore of the universe
Speaker 1: that he created, chose instead to create his own parallel
Speaker 1: universe with techno knights with laser swords battling against enemy
Speaker 1: troops in white armour. Actually, for that metaphor to work,
Speaker 1: Dave Feloni's Techno Knights of the Galaxy would have had
Speaker 1: to surpass Star Wars, making it a qoint forerunner of
Speaker 1: what most people now take as the genuine article. Because
Speaker 1: The Walking Dead is one hundred percent a ripoff of
Speaker 1: the universe created and shepherded over decades by George Andrew Romero.
Speaker 1: I don't care that Greg Ncato was in charge of
Speaker 1: effects and eventually became a producer. I don't care if
Speaker 1: there are tips of the hat or homage to the
Speaker 1: original trilogy. I wouldn't care if the ghost of George
Speaker 1: Romero himself appeared to me and told me he was
Speaker 1: cool with it, because I'm not. I'm glad that show
Speaker 1: has employed and continues to employ, hundreds of skilled creatives.
Speaker 1: May bubb a smile benevolently upon you, but fuck that
Speaker 1: guy and fuck his comic book. Even Invincible while not
Speaker 1: being a direct ripoff of anything is an in general
Speaker 1: ripoff of everything. He's like Tarantino, just grab the bits
Speaker 1: you like and now it's yours. I hate read that
Speaker 1: entire run of Walking Dead. I don't even like his artwork.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Back in the eighties, there was another zombie comic. It
Speaker 1: was called Dead World, about a misfit band of young
Speaker 1: adults on the road trying to avoid zombie hordes. And
Speaker 1: it was great and it was respectful because it was cosmic.
Speaker 1: They had fully coherent zombies that were inhabited by this
Speaker 1: lovecrafty and horror from beyond the stars, so on the
Speaker 1: same playground, but not making castles in some other kid's sandbox.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and five, as the entire world
Speaker 1: was waking up to the zombie phenomenon, someone at Marvel
Speaker 1: had the bright idea to do a mini series with
Speaker 1: undead superheroes. So they called Carlos Mincia and he delivered
Speaker 1: two five issue runs that began in an alternate use
Speaker 1: let's just call it the Zombie Universe, where a virus
Speaker 1: has spread throughout the world that turns humans into zombies
Speaker 1: and superheroes into zombified versions of themselves that retain their
Speaker 1: character and consciousness and all of their powers except healing. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the source of the virus is never given, which I admire.
Speaker 1: I said, the humans turn into zombies, Well, there aren't
Speaker 1: a ton of those, because the super zombies have pretty
Speaker 1: much munched their way through the entire population of Earth
Speaker 1: and now spend their days hunting down whichever hero has
Speaker 1: yet to succumb. It was a fairly standard riff on
Speaker 1: the what if comics, with the decidedly darker bent. Admittedly,
Speaker 1: it was difficult watching Captain America eat the Silver Surfer,
Speaker 1: but it had a cool open ending where all the
Speaker 1: remaining zombie heroes attack and devour Galactis and then spread
Speaker 1: out to the stars to find more food. It became
Speaker 1: an erratically released series after that, with the last issues
Speaker 1: back in twenty eighteen. I think that was Zombie's assemble,
Speaker 1: putting Kirkman and my feelings for him aside for a moment.
Speaker 1: After all, he was an independent contractor and only wrote
Speaker 1: the first ten. Since there have been a cavalcade of
Speaker 1: talented writers and artists attached to the series, and they've
Speaker 1: gone in truly interesting directions with it. In fact, the
Speaker 1: comic book series manages to elude the main problem with
Speaker 1: any zombie piece of entertainment Romero included in any empty
Speaker 1: world movie or TV show set here in our world,
Speaker 1: not on some distant galaxy. After the initial crush of
Speaker 1: the zombie outbreak, all hope goes out the window. Maybe
Speaker 1: not right away, you can cheat it for a while,
Speaker 1: but a world where zombies can't be cured or the
Speaker 1: phenomenon can't be stopped is no longer a world for humans,
Speaker 1: and they will never be secure until they're all eaten
Speaker 1: or zombies themselves. It's just a succession of pyrrhic victories.
Speaker 1: It took Romero until Day of the Dead to figure
Speaker 1: out he was on the zombie side all along, but
Speaker 1: he got there. Back in twenty twenty one, Marvel introduced
Speaker 1: an animated season of What If storylines. What better way
Speaker 1: to introduce the idea of a multiverse than an anthology
Speaker 1: of tales set in different day mentions, and one of
Speaker 1: those plots they chose to pontificate upon was our Undead
Speaker 1: Superpowered Pals. But like most translations from Marvel to MCU,
Speaker 1: it is all the way different. In fact, the What
Speaker 1: If animated episodes are based on the films and not
Speaker 1: the comics at all, which is appropriate. So what If
Speaker 1: Zombies had the virus starting in the Quantum Realm and
Speaker 1: released by Hank Pim when Janet van Dyne comes back
Speaker 1: with a penchant for human flesh, and it concerns the
Speaker 1: last living heroes trying to get the Mindstone from Vision
Speaker 1: who's alive, and Wanda who's not, so that they can
Speaker 1: get to Wakanda and reverse the curse. It has a
Speaker 1: great ending, perfectly self contained if you wanted it to be.
Speaker 1: But then again, Marvel cried more so now, and by
Speaker 1: that I mean last year because this was supposed to
Speaker 1: come out last Halloween, but they double booked and we
Speaker 1: got Agatha all along. Boy, that was one of my
Speaker 1: first weekly roundups, and instead the Marvel Zombies had to
Speaker 1: wait till the end of September of this year, when
Speaker 1: all four episodes of the show were released. They're using
Speaker 1: the Evil Dead two fun for the title in case
Speaker 1: it seemed familiar, and the story picks up five years
Speaker 1: after the end of that what If episode. We follow
Speaker 1: the last groups of living superpowered folk as they draw
Speaker 1: together in an attempt to simply survive. So we get
Speaker 1: a young Avengers group with Miss Marvel and Ironheart and Hawkeye.
Speaker 1: That's Kate Pierce Hawkeye Undead Clint Barton is here too,
Speaker 1: but that's her mantle now. And we get a mini
Speaker 1: West Coast Avengers with Agent Wu and Katie and Death
Speaker 1: Dealer and shang Chi who's been bitten but the power
Speaker 1: of the Ten Rings is staving off the infection. And
Speaker 1: along the way we get barren Zimo and US Agent
Speaker 1: and Valkyrie and the Abomination, and yeah, Thor and Rocket
Speaker 1: and Groot and Spider Man show up, as well as
Speaker 1: Captain America and the return of recent go to Boogeyman
Speaker 1: the Scarlet Witch. But what strupped me over all was
Speaker 1: how goddamn capable this so called b team of Marvel
Speaker 1: heroes is and how fucking watchable they all are interacting
Speaker 1: with one another, And given how long it's been since
Speaker 1: we've seen some of these characters, it was a welcome
Speaker 1: reminder how much I do like them. Who the fuck
Speaker 1: is the next shang Chi flick? We've had Trevor Slattery
Speaker 1: return before we had shang Chi show back up. Speaking
Speaker 1: of waiting fucking endlessly, we get Blade in this show
Speaker 1: so far we've only had his voice at the end
Speaker 1: of the eternals that was mahershela Ali's voice, and since
Speaker 1: this is an all vocal performance, they got an actor
Speaker 1: named Todd Williams to play Blade way to keep everything
Speaker 1: simple and easy to follow, Kevin, because of those endless
Speaker 1: delays on Blade's feature debut, I don't think they've nailed
Speaker 1: down his character design yet because we don't really get
Speaker 1: Blade here at all. We get Blade Night, remember Moonnight, Well,
Speaker 1: Mark Spector's dead here, and Conchu has bonded with Blade,
Speaker 1: so he's a day walker Egyptian deity. That's some pretty
Speaker 1: fucking high concept shit right there. But it also shrouds
Speaker 1: him to him and Moonnight's white cloaks, which is pretty
Speaker 1: badass on him. Each of the episodes, while dealing with
Speaker 1: the main plot overall, are wildly different in tone and approach,
Speaker 1: with the first the most overt horror. Maybe I was
Speaker 1: watching it alone at two am, but there's some creepy
Speaker 1: fucking stuff they do in it, and I legitimately jumped once.
Speaker 1: The second episode is more action a la Matt Max
Speaker 1: with the West Coast team, and it all ends with
Speaker 1: an undead, cosmic, mystical reboot of Endgame that sounds potentially awful,
Speaker 1: it's not. I found a lot of the same excitement
Speaker 1: present here. Look, the dialogue is tenured at best, but
Speaker 1: the images are so goddamn strong, and a lot of
Speaker 1: where this plot goes and where it ends up are
Speaker 1: fairly innovative for a zombie flick. Oh yeah, four episodes,
Speaker 1: four half hours. That's what you call a movie, And
Speaker 1: evidently that's how it began its life. At some point
Speaker 1: they got cold feet. But if you're gonna release all
Speaker 1: four episodes telling the whole story on the same night anyway,
Speaker 1: just make it a feature. But the fuck I'd be
Speaker 1: down for more of this. Like the run of comics,
Speaker 1: this take on zombies isn't entirely without hope, and that's
Speaker 1: fucking refreshing. The animation style that two and a half
Speaker 1: d is a holdover from What If. It is especially
Speaker 1: effective with their villainous characters, and this series is a
Speaker 1: wall to wall villains. There is not an eye that
Speaker 1: isn't red and glowing. This is a pretty good entertainment
Speaker 1: for Halloween three in a row from Marvel after Werewolf
Speaker 1: by Night. I am an ardent defender of that flick,
Speaker 1: but only the color version. Then there was Agatha all
Speaker 1: Along and now Marvel Zombies kudos. Now let's get that
Speaker 1: Midnight Sun's movie going Suckers whoa sneak attack? Rippick k Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you. HP. You know the number one horror movie
Speaker 1: playing in Times Square for Halloween nineteen ninety six Poltergeist
Speaker 1: in My Pants? Okay, ripspick is them damned Muppets. The
Speaker 1: felt I mentioned on last week's roundup. I wanted to
Speaker 1: give you a comprehensive guide of all the Muppet terror
Speaker 1: out there, but as it turns out, there isn't a
Speaker 1: whole ton of it, which I'm not sure why I
Speaker 1: was surprised by, other than the fact that I seem
Speaker 1: to remember kermit vampires and annoying bats and ghosts singing
Speaker 1: the Beatles and Uncle Deadly that aerodite looking dragon. And
Speaker 1: then I went back and I realized that's all in
Speaker 1: the Vincent Price episode. So I guess I'm recommending the
Speaker 1: Vincent Price episode. The other and actually way more appropriate
Speaker 1: for Halloween is when Alice Cooper hosted in season three.
Speaker 1: That's not only got two performances by Cooper, Welcome to
Speaker 1: My Nightmare and schools Out, a tune that a lot
Speaker 1: of radio stations wouldn't play thanks to pressure from PTA groups.
Speaker 1: But it also has the German Larger at Muppet Labs
Speaker 1: and Sam the Eagle debating the Freako Alice Cooper, and
Speaker 1: it's got a fucking genuinely creepy pigs in space. The
Speaker 1: laugh track for it only makes it worse. So those
Speaker 1: are the beginning to end guaranteed spooky Muppet episodes, but
Speaker 1: throughout the show they had a few other disturbing moments,
Speaker 1: like season two episode four, Rich Little was the host.
Speaker 1: There's a musical number called Glowworm, which features a mirror
Speaker 1: universe version of Kermit humming to himself and then eating
Speaker 1: inchworms as they try to pass by. It's all very off,
Speaker 1: and at the end we get a goddamned purple monster
Speaker 1: from hell. Or how about the entire moment Chance up
Speaker 1: episode Clay Faces Yikes. The signor Wenz's episode has a
Speaker 1: traditional Japanese ghost story that is haunting pun intended, I
Speaker 1: guess not really, but it's appropriate. There are others, but
Speaker 1: the one I'd like to highlight and we'll probably go
Speaker 1: out on. This is an episode hosted by Marissa Berenson.
Speaker 1: The song is You're Always Welcome, at our House, which
Speaker 1: she sings while dressed in a baby doll dress and
Speaker 1: skipping around the room, where everything she's describing is acted
Speaker 1: out by some fucking odd balls from the Muppet Workshop. Basically,
Speaker 1: she tells the tale of everyone who stops my her
Speaker 1: home and what her demented family of cannibals do to
Speaker 1: their guests. Boy, they don't make children's entertainment quite like
Speaker 1: they used to. But I think I'm gonna go out
Speaker 1: now and find some more. Okay, listen up. This Friday,
Speaker 1: Yaouchifest continues with Predator Killer of Killers. Next Friday, Yauchi
Speaker 1: Fest concludes for now with Predator Badlands. With that shift
Speaker 1: in the schedule, that means next week at this time
Speaker 1: will have the latest episode of Tales from the Dark Side,
Speaker 1: and we might actually have the following episode of Tales
Speaker 1: the following Monday after if that makes sense. Basically, we'll
Speaker 1: still have shows Monday and Friday for the next two weeks,
Speaker 1: but Ripley and I are taking a brief hiatus to sleep.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna lie. I'm totally fucking exhausted, and we've
Speaker 1: got even more changes coming later in the year and
Speaker 1: definitely in the new year. Exciting doings will be transpiring.
Speaker 1: Thank you all for two hundred episodes. The next two
Speaker 1: hundred will be even better.
Speaker 2: So when you come to a house a house, when
Speaker 2: you come to our house, we will have some life.
Speaker 1: We will ask you to be coming and we will
Speaker 1: take you in the kitchen.
Speaker 2: We will put you in the other to.
Speaker 1: You my jobs.
Speaker 2: Well, come out.
Speaker 1: Time of the day, yes, sure always walk coming house.
Speaker 2: You start and we know you will star.