Thomas and Frank return with a new season of "blind" movie recommendations! This time around, the pair looks back at forgotten superhero films, discussing the ups and downs of the genre in the days before cinematic universes dominated at the box office.
First, Frank reviews "Supergirl" (1984). Then, Thomas reviews "Steel" (1997).
It's a superheroic Double Feature, and it starts right now!
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Meet Your Double Feature is a double-blind movie review podcast hosted by brothers Thomas and Frank. Thomas is an event producer and broadcaster from Chicago. Frank is an independent filmmaker living in Los Angeles.
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For full episodes, written reviews and more, visit our website at https://www.MeetYourDoubleFeature.com/
For more information on where to watch "Nate and Moriah in Venice" (which Frank co-produced!), visit https://www.sardonicmp.com/
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Music for tonight's show licensed through Soundstripe
"The Shakedown" by Dresden, The Flamingo
"Soul Tonic" by Cast of Characters
"Sophistikitty" by Cast of Characters
(00:00) Intro
(00:45) Supergirl (1984)
(44:39) Steel (1997)
(01:29:20) Final Scores and Wrap-Up
(01:44:32) Outro
00:00:09
Tonight on Meet Your Double Feature, when the jewel that
00:00:13
protects her home falls into their own hands, Cara Zor El
00:00:16
must travel to Earth to get it back.
00:00:19
Helen Slater stars in Supergirl. Then when robbers begin
00:00:24
terrorizing his neighborhood with high tech weapons, former
00:00:27
soldier John Henry Irons must suit up to bring them down.
00:00:31
Shaquille O'Neal stars in Steal. It's a super heroic double
00:00:35
feature, and it starts right now.
00:00:44
Hello and welcome to Meet Your Double Feature, a double-blind
00:00:48
movie review podcast. My name is Thomas, joined as
00:00:50
always by my brother Frank. Frank, how's it going?
00:00:53
I'm excited. I'm excited for Season 2, brand
00:00:56
new season. Brand new season here on the
00:00:57
pod. If you're just joining us for
00:00:59
the first time, you've picked a great episode to start with.
00:01:01
We are resetting the board and starting a new competition of
00:01:04
blind movie recommendations. And Frank, why don't you let us
00:01:07
know what is our theme for this brand new season here on the
00:01:10
show? We're going to do forgotten
00:01:14
superhero films, I think. I hope that's the theme because
00:01:17
that's what I picked so. That's what he picked, so
00:01:19
imagine if it was something else.
00:01:21
No, yes, we are doing forgotten superhero movies, which came
00:01:24
about because you and I used to watch a lot of superhero films
00:01:28
and TV that predate it becoming like the most mainstream film
00:01:32
content on Earth with all the Marvel stuff in the 20 tens.
00:01:36
And there's just so many weird, interesting films from before
00:01:40
that point that were usually just standalone stories about
00:01:43
either very popular superhero characters or, as we'll get into
00:01:46
today, even very obscure superhero characters.
00:01:49
And I think that it'll be really interesting to go back and look
00:01:52
at whether any of them are frankly any good at all.
00:01:56
I, I think there's, there's hopefully going to be some gems
00:01:59
in there. I, I think some people have a
00:02:03
nostalgia for that like pre MCU, even like Marvel films, 'cause I
00:02:08
think it was the most recent Deadpool film that had that like
00:02:11
montage at the end of like all the Fox studio superhero
00:02:16
franchises. And that was a lot of fun
00:02:18
actually. I I appreciated that that they
00:02:20
did that. I think that the idea of like,
00:02:23
connecting all of your superhero stories to make it reflect how
00:02:27
superhero comics are written is a good idea.
00:02:29
Obviously it's had a huge payoff for Marvel, but when the stories
00:02:34
are stand alone and are put together by different teams of
00:02:37
creatives, it's just more of like a mixed bag of ideas and
00:02:40
concepts. So it's more like you don't know
00:02:42
what you're going to get. Whereas with Marvel now you know
00:02:45
what a Marvel movie is. It doesn't really matter who's
00:02:47
in it. You kind of know what it is and
00:02:49
you've been watching them for like 20 years.
00:02:51
So I'm curious to go back and look at what, you know, mostly
00:02:54
like the 80s, nineties, and like first half of the 2000s has to
00:02:59
offer in order to better explain the premise, just in case this
00:03:03
is anybody's first episode. The way we do things here at
00:03:06
Meet U double Feature is that for each episode, I recommend a
00:03:09
movie to Frank to watch, and he recommends a movie for me to
00:03:11
watch. And we review those two films on
00:03:13
the show and give them each a score out of 10.
00:03:15
The trick is that neither of us has ever seen either of the
00:03:18
movies that we're talking about. So we're sort of giving a blind
00:03:21
pick for a movie that we think the other host will like, but we
00:03:24
don't actually know until they come back and report on what
00:03:26
they saw. Yeah, yeah.
00:03:29
Sometimes I pick movies that I I hope you'll like in an ironic
00:03:32
way, which I think might be the case today.
00:03:35
Yeah, yeah. I'm not saying we always pick
00:03:37
movies with good reviews. I think the average Rotten
00:03:39
Tomatoes between the two for this episode is like 10%.
00:03:44
It's not. It's not looking good, not good.
00:03:46
But I think it'll be fun to talk about.
00:03:48
Frank. I think we'll go ahead and start
00:03:49
with the movie I asked you to watch.
00:03:51
Now, a lot of folks will know that there is a Supergirl movie
00:03:54
coming out, I think later this year, 2026, that is a direct
00:03:58
follow up to the James Gunn Superman film.
00:04:01
But did you know that there's a Supergirl film from the 1980s?
00:04:05
Because I'll be honest, despite seeing a lot of movies like this
00:04:07
in the past, I had no idea that they did a Supergirl spin off at
00:04:10
that time. And it kind of blew my mind.
00:04:12
And so when I saw that heading into this first season, I was
00:04:14
like, well, I got to have somebody watch this, but not me
00:04:17
because it looks like it might not be very good.
00:04:20
Well, you know what? I actually liked this movie.
00:04:24
I'll say right off the bat. I'm going to win Season 2.
00:04:27
For anybody who doesn't know, I won the first season of the show
00:04:29
points wise, overall, I'm back on top.
00:04:32
I can feel it. He did.
00:04:34
He did. Well, we'll see.
00:04:35
We'll see. All right, slow down, buddy.
00:04:38
Sorry, sorry. I'm excited.
00:04:39
It's a new season. Yeah, hey, that's my thing.
00:04:41
I'm excited. So yeah, no.
00:04:45
All right, tell us about Supergirl.
00:04:47
Sorry. No, it's OK.
00:04:48
This is like, like you said, it does have bad reviews.
00:04:53
And I'm not going to go so far as to say those reviews aren't
00:04:57
totally warranted, but I did enjoy it.
00:05:01
Like, yeah, yeah, it's it's fun. And, and kind of like you were
00:05:05
mentioning just a few minutes ago, like this movie feels like
00:05:12
a extremely direct adaptation of a comic book, if if that makes
00:05:16
any sense, like. Yeah, of course.
00:05:19
And I and I, it's it. It is a sort of direct spin off
00:05:23
of the Christopher Reeve Superman films.
00:05:25
Oh, OK. I was wondering that because I
00:05:27
knew that at the time there was like 4 or five of those
00:05:30
Christopher Reeve Superman's, which is where the famous
00:05:32
Superman music comes from that they still use in like every
00:05:35
adaptation since. But yeah, I was curious if
00:05:37
there's a connecting to it there.
00:05:39
Yeah, totally, totally. And they don't play the
00:05:42
traditional. I think there might be a hint of
00:05:44
it in there because Super Girl has has her own theme, but for
00:05:48
anyone who may not be, you know, let's just play.
00:05:50
We're just going to play 5 minutes of.
00:05:52
We're just going to play copyright.
00:05:54
Yeah. John Williams Music.
00:05:56
Mr. Williams, if you're listening, is that OK?
00:05:59
Yeah. So we'll just sit back and and
00:06:01
you guys just listen to that. Tell us what you think.
00:06:03
All right, all right, now we're back and just got off the film
00:06:07
with our lawyers. They said that's a no go.
00:06:10
That's not good. You can't do that.
00:06:12
OK. All right.
00:06:13
So just go and listen to it on your own time and I guess.
00:06:17
Yeah, but come back though, come back.
00:06:18
Come back, tell us what you thought.
00:06:21
No, this was, I think Jerry Goldsmith was the composer for
00:06:24
this one. And Supergirl's theme is fine.
00:06:26
It's it does. It's it's not as iconic as as
00:06:30
the original Superman one. But yeah, like I was saying
00:06:33
this, this ties in directly to those films.
00:06:36
I believe Christopher Reeve was going to have a cameo at some
00:06:41
point in this movie but wasn't able to for like scheduling
00:06:45
reasons. There is a a picture of him as
00:06:49
Superman in the movie and the actor playing Jimmy Olsen is in
00:06:56
this as well as Jimmy Olsen. So I was gonna say as as Lex
00:07:01
Luthor, as Superman. No, you look familiar.
00:07:06
I think I've seen this guy before.
00:07:07
The cast, by the way, we got to get into the cast here.
00:07:10
Like, listen to to some of the people in this movie.
00:07:13
All right? We got Faye Dunaway.
00:07:15
Yeah, you have to. You don't have a choice.
00:07:20
OK. Faye Dunaway, You got Mia
00:07:23
Farrow. Peter O'Toole is in this.
00:07:28
Oh, I love him. I love Peter O'Toole.
00:07:29
That's that's Lawrence of Arabia for film school people.
00:07:33
Yeah, exactly. And all those people irrelevant.
00:07:35
OK, Because the real star here. Irrelevant.
00:07:43
Doesn't matter, right? I was like oh that's nice.
00:07:45
But then I got really excited watching the movie because Super
00:07:49
Girls love interest in this movie is played by I can't
00:07:54
pronounce this. I'm not sure how to pronounce
00:07:55
his last name. It's Hart Bochner, I believe,
00:07:58
who I mean is. I'll just give you a line and
00:08:03
you tell me who it is, OK? OK, a line from Super Girl or a
00:08:07
line from? Just a line from this actor that
00:08:10
you will recognize and you tell me who it.
00:08:13
Is going to make him an offer he can't refuse.
00:08:18
This Hans what am IA method actor?
00:08:23
This is radio, not television. Put the gun away.
00:08:26
Whoa, wait, So the Ellis from Die Hard?
00:08:30
Yes. OK, that's crazy.
00:08:33
That's a poll. I've never seen him in anything
00:08:35
else. Me neither I.
00:08:37
Was so excited. So that was a surprisingly
00:08:39
accurate line. Read of that line of Die Hard.
00:08:41
That would thank you. Perfect.
00:08:43
Thank you. Thank you.
00:08:44
I was, I was preparing it, but yeah, that was like I was
00:08:48
watching it and like, I was like, there's something really
00:08:51
familiar about this guy. He looks a bit different.
00:08:53
He doesn't have that like sleazy Ellis beard and his hair is, and
00:08:56
he's just playing a different type of character.
00:08:58
Yeah, but but then I saw him like take a drink of something
00:09:01
and he opened his mouth all wide and I'm like, that's freaking
00:09:03
Ellis from Die Hard in this movie.
00:09:07
OK, that is also a miraculous pull.
00:09:10
You know, I first knew it was you by the way you drink it.
00:09:13
Just you remember that scene where he's drinking the Coke and
00:09:16
Die Hard and yeah. It's right before he gets shot.
00:09:18
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
00:09:21
OK, that's amazing. I now I understand how you could
00:09:25
have the gall to say that Peter O'Toole is irrelevant.
00:09:27
I'm on board. Exactly.
00:09:28
Get him out of here. We don't need him.
00:09:29
We got Ellis. Get out of here.
00:09:31
Lawrence of Who? Move on.
00:09:34
Peter O'Toole is is actually great in this movie.
00:09:37
He has a very limited appearance, but they make the
00:09:42
most of having Peter O'Toole. He made me laugh right at the
00:09:45
beginning because just to to get into the setup here.
00:09:50
This movie, as I said, is so it's like so comic book
00:09:54
storytelling. It hurts.
00:09:55
It's like just like, but in a way that's like, not bad, you
00:09:59
know, in a way that like, I feel like some modern superhero films
00:10:04
have gotten really far away from, they're almost like afraid
00:10:07
to like make a movie that tells a story in the way that a comic
00:10:12
book originally would have, especially like an older comic
00:10:15
book. And the setup for this movie is
00:10:20
it just kind of jumps right into it doesn't do a lot of
00:10:23
explaining. There's not even like a text
00:10:26
scroll at the beginning to really explain where we are at
00:10:30
the beginning of the film, which is kind of surprising actually.
00:10:33
But I, I was, it was refreshing too, because it just, we're just
00:10:36
on this other planet where like these Kryptonian people are
00:10:40
living. And like, if you're familiar
00:10:42
with like the Superman lore, it's kind of like, I thought
00:10:44
they were all dead, but I guess not.
00:10:46
Superman just has a cousin that lives on this other planet.
00:10:49
I guess that. Is weird.
00:10:50
That's like the one thing we know about Superman.
00:10:52
Like the last Son of Krypton other than your cousin.
00:10:55
Other than your cousin and all those other people she lives
00:10:57
with on this all. Those other people, But Superman
00:10:59
doesn't really talk to them because they're boring.
00:11:02
So he's the last son of Cortana? There's this is jumping ahead a
00:11:06
little bit, but the way that they say that Superman isn't in
00:11:10
this movie is so funny like because it's it's it's like you
00:11:13
hear it over like the radio and they're like, oh, Superman is
00:11:17
away on like a a a peace treaty mission or something.
00:11:22
And they're like it says that the planet he's at is several
00:11:26
100 trillion light years away. So just in case a. 100 trillion
00:11:33
yes in. Case anyone was wondering if
00:11:35
Superman was going to be showing up?
00:11:37
He's really far away, so he won't be.
00:11:39
Here, really, really, they're like, listen, just to put it
00:11:42
into numbers, let's say he starts flying back here at full
00:11:44
speed. He would not get here until at
00:11:46
least the movie is over. Post post credits if you will.
00:11:52
You just post. Credits.
00:11:53
He's at least like 15 parsecs away.
00:11:58
You won't see him. Don't wait around.
00:11:59
Don't wait up. You're.
00:12:00
Not. Comic So anyway, he's that far
00:12:06
away. He's also, he's still not
00:12:07
talking to his cousin though, because they're on this other
00:12:09
planet with Peter O'Toole. And I guess what you gather from
00:12:15
the dialogue is that Peter O'Toole is like a scientist of
00:12:17
some kind or magician or something and some combination
00:12:23
of those things. And he like made this planet
00:12:27
that they're on habitable for them because he has this like,
00:12:31
special orb. And it's like a small orb that
00:12:34
like fits in the palm of your head.
00:12:36
And he's talking to Supergirl. Her name is Cara.
00:12:40
And he's kind of explaining to her what this thing is.
00:12:44
And then he gives it to her and she's like playing with it.
00:12:47
And it like, somehow like, flies out into space by like ripping
00:12:55
through this like, plastic sheet almost that covers their whole
00:12:59
planet. And that's like the only thing
00:13:02
protecting them from the vacuum of space.
00:13:04
I guess. It's this like thin plastic
00:13:07
sheet? It broke the ozone.
00:13:10
I guess so. The ozone is very visible and
00:13:13
within reach, but she breaks it and she's like, oh, oh, darn,
00:13:20
we're all going to die now. They're like, this planet is
00:13:24
doomed actually. And this where Peter O'Toole
00:13:27
made me laugh because it's just like his dialogue is he's like,
00:13:30
well, I guess I got to go to the Phantom Zone now.
00:13:32
He just like sentences himself to the Phantom Zone.
00:13:37
Like nobody says like, you got to go do this.
00:13:40
He's like, no, I, I, I'm, I'm going to go.
00:13:43
I'm just he. Just goes straight for the like,
00:13:45
all right, I'm a head out because he doesn't want to fix
00:13:46
the other. 1. Yeah, they're like, Are you sure
00:13:48
you don't want to stick with me? Like no, Phantom Phantom.
00:13:51
I think Phantom Zone for this one.
00:13:53
Phantom Zone's calling to me, Which I I, I guess maybe if
00:13:57
people haven't seen the old Superman's.
00:13:59
Phantom Zone is like, just like purgatory.
00:14:02
It's where they sentence criminals sometimes.
00:14:04
On Krypton, yes. Yes, exactly.
00:14:06
It's where you get put into like a spinning glass plate is how
00:14:11
it's visualized in the movies. But then you're in like, some
00:14:13
other world. So, like, you sure you don't
00:14:15
want to stick around and help you?
00:14:16
Sorry, I can't hear you. Phantom Zone got to go.
00:14:19
Phantom Zone is culling. I have a three o'clock in the
00:14:22
phantom zone so that's my reaction to problems too.
00:14:28
When you just are like, I'm on break.
00:14:31
Breaking the Phantom Zone. So then Supergirl takes it upon
00:14:36
herself. She's like, all right, well, I
00:14:38
guess I got to go get that orb that flew out into space and she
00:14:43
gets into like they call it something else, but I'm going to
00:14:47
call it a boom tube. It's basically a boom tube that
00:14:50
which is a that. Is proper DC lore.
00:14:52
Yeah, that's just like their teleporters in a lot of the TV
00:14:54
shows. Yeah, so she just like boom
00:14:57
tubes to Earth to to because that's where it lands.
00:14:59
It goes coincidentally. There's a lot, a lot of
00:15:02
coincidences in this movie, but it coincidentally flew to Earth,
00:15:07
where her cousin lives. But it's not there.
00:15:10
He's several 100 trillion light years away.
00:15:12
Several 100 trillion Farther than any man could travel in the
00:15:16
length of a film. And yeah, you, what do you got
00:15:18
like 2 hours? There's no way.
00:15:20
There's no way. This could be a Snyder Cut
00:15:23
Supergirl and you couldn't make it back.
00:15:25
It's that far. Yeah, yeah, there there was
00:15:30
actually I, I was looking at the trivia.
00:15:32
Apparently there was like some footage found from this film,
00:15:36
like way later at the studio is filmed at, there was just like
00:15:41
in a film canister that just was labeled do not use and nice.
00:15:48
And yeah. And so I don't know if that's
00:15:50
the version I saw, 'cause I guess they restored that footage
00:15:53
and then included it in like an anniversary Blu-ray release of
00:15:56
the movie. So I don't know.
00:15:58
I watched this on HBO streaming service 'cause you know this is
00:16:02
a this is ADC Warner Brothers property which by the time this
00:16:07
recording comes out will probably be called Net Warner
00:16:12
Paramount flicks or something. But nailed it, really nailed
00:16:17
that band. People will get it.
00:16:22
Watch the news. People will get it.
00:16:23
Watch the news. The right news.
00:16:30
The Krypton news. Yeah, it's Krypton news leading
00:16:34
scientist exile self to Phantom. Question mark so anyway, the
00:16:42
coincidences of this movie The orb thing, magic science orb
00:16:47
thing goes to earth and this is where we're introduced to our
00:16:50
bad guy characters who is our main villain is is Faye Dunaway.
00:16:57
She's like a witch, which again, this is just, you just discover
00:17:01
this through the dialogue, which is fun.
00:17:03
She's just like talking about like one of the first things she
00:17:07
says is like, basically, I'm a witch and I want to take over
00:17:10
the world. And they're just like.
00:17:13
Manifest that. Exactly, exactly.
00:17:17
And they're just out having a picnic and the orb thing just
00:17:19
like lands in her soup and she's like, oh, OK, well this is good.
00:17:23
I'll. Just do this.
00:17:25
The fission board thing really works, huh?
00:17:29
Yeah. Exactly.
00:17:31
Just puts that away. Wow, very cartoony.
00:17:36
Exactly. It's super cartoony.
00:17:38
This felt very like Saturday morning cartoon or just like
00:17:42
like old campy comic book storytelling, which I was fine
00:17:45
with. You know, it was almost like
00:17:48
played intentionally, comedically, and that's
00:17:51
essentially the tone of the whole film.
00:17:53
Good. That's fairly in line with the
00:17:55
80s Superman as well. There's a lot of like campiness
00:17:58
to the whole thing. Yeah, exactly.
00:18:01
This is almost more so I would say like I appreciate
00:18:06
Christopher Reeve's performance as Superman.
00:18:08
I, I, I, I think if we're talking Superman actors, he's
00:18:12
one of the better, if not the best ones in terms of on screen.
00:18:17
Yeah, as always, the best Superman portrayal is is from
00:18:20
the DC animated universe. That's that's the best Superman,
00:18:23
but. Oh, OK, welcome back to our show
00:18:25
where we rank Superman. Well, I'm just if you were
00:18:28
talking like portrayal of DC characters, my favorite thing
00:18:32
just in all of comic books even is everything that's come out of
00:18:36
the the DC animated universe that like.
00:18:39
That's true. Especially that run in like the
00:18:41
2000s where it was like the Justice League show and then the
00:18:43
Justice League Unlimited show. That was good stuff.
00:18:45
It was amazing, yeah. And like I said, genuinely
00:18:48
probably one of the best on screen portrayals of all of
00:18:51
those characters. Yeah, no, he's great.
00:18:53
But I will also give you that. Yeah, Christopher Reeve.
00:18:55
As far as like live action movie Superman, I think he's far and
00:18:58
away the best one. Yes, but that being said, those
00:19:01
those films are are pretty boring They.
00:19:04
Hold on. They, I mean, it's telling.
00:19:07
Me that when he throws nuclear bombs into the sun in order to
00:19:11
solve war and makes nuclear man and fights nuclear man on the
00:19:14
moon that you were not. Entertained.
00:19:17
That was when I was the most entertained.
00:19:18
You can't just. Jump to the to the.
00:19:20
Peak all right, that's Superman 4 Quest for peace all right I'm
00:19:22
talking to like Superman's one and two here like.
00:19:25
Well, like Quest for Peak, yeah. Yeah, there you go.
00:19:29
We're back. Season 2, everybody.
00:19:33
We're back. Comedy on this show a little a
00:19:37
little. Nobody said it had to be funny,
00:19:38
but we do do it. No, we do it anyway, Supergirl.
00:19:42
Supergirl I would say maybe this is a recency bias, but I'm like,
00:19:46
I think I like this more than than those Christopher Reeve
00:19:48
Superman movies. Oh shoot, that's like actual
00:19:51
praise. Hold on.
00:19:53
Yeah, it's just because, like I, I have to give a lot of credit.
00:19:57
It's the actress's name. Playing Supergirl is Helen
00:20:01
Slater, and I think this was her first feature film performance
00:20:06
and she's great. It's a very different take on
00:20:09
the character than. What people are going to see
00:20:12
from this new version of Supergirl in in the the new
00:20:16
movie that's coming out where she's sort of a drunk party girl
00:20:20
almost is the vibe you're going for it.
00:20:23
This portrayal of Supergirl is just like this wide eyed,
00:20:27
innocent character, but it's fun because she's just kind of
00:20:32
different from the the, you know, origin story of, of
00:20:36
Superman that you got, you know, where he was like raised on
00:20:40
Earth to like live among humans. She's just, she was, she's from
00:20:45
space, you know, and she just like has all of this like
00:20:51
knowledge of things outside of Earth, you know, So she's not
00:20:55
like discovering things in the same way that that he was.
00:20:59
And she also has this sort of like narrative momentum of she
00:21:05
has to find this orb, which I don't.
00:21:06
I feel like those other Superman films, that was something that
00:21:09
they kind of lacked almost as like, oh, Superman's got to
00:21:12
stop. Lex Luthor is very like reactive
00:21:15
almost. And so those sometimes lacks
00:21:18
that narrative momentum, momentum.
00:21:20
Excuse me? That's true.
00:21:21
I feel like he he was more of a standby superhero.
00:21:25
He was like, you come to me and it's like, all right, what was
00:21:28
that quest for peace then, Superman?
00:21:30
You didn't go anywhere. Yeah.
00:21:33
Again, Quest for Peace is the best one.
00:21:35
That's the Canon fast one I. Think yeah.
00:21:40
But yeah, so I like that. I like that she has like, and
00:21:43
the, and the villain in this, you know, Faye Dunaway's
00:21:47
characters is also extremely campy.
00:21:49
She like, lives in like an abandoned amusement park that
00:21:54
they've, like, dressed up to look like this, like witchy
00:21:57
lair. And I'm like, this is fun.
00:22:00
This is like goofy fun and her fake Dunaway's like love
00:22:07
interest slash sidekick slash nemesis character that she's
00:22:11
with is just this guy who like really wants to be with her.
00:22:16
And she's seemingly using him because he knows more about
00:22:21
magic than she does. And she's trying to like use her
00:22:24
like magic powers to take over the world.
00:22:26
It's never said why. She just, you know, like you
00:22:29
said, vision board. She just wants to.
00:22:31
Just really want that. She just, she just does.
00:22:34
She just really wants that she. Wants a Nissan Altima and she
00:22:38
wants to take over the world, Right?
00:22:41
Exactly. And they're like Miss Dunaway,
00:22:44
the Altima was not on the road yet at this time.
00:22:46
It's 1984. And she's like, that's why I
00:22:48
want it. That's why I you're not getting
00:22:51
this, pay attention. OK, this is good.
00:22:55
I feel like there's, like you said, narrative momentum.
00:22:58
Immediately differentiate Super Girl from Superman and send
00:23:02
Superman at least several movies away from here.
00:23:05
Several movies. He'll be back by Superman 4,
00:23:07
don't worry. But not this movie.
00:23:11
OK, well that's fun. Yeah, exactly.
00:23:13
So we got a good set up again, the the coincidences of the
00:23:17
story continue because that character that's hanging out
00:23:21
with Faye Dunaway. Well, I guess I guess I'll get
00:23:24
I'll I'll rewind a little bit and and get to where Super go
00:23:27
When she lands on Earth, she lands like near a softball
00:23:32
field. She sees these girls playing
00:23:34
softball at some kind of like all girls school and she decides
00:23:39
to try and fit in by like attending the school.
00:23:43
And that villain character that's hanging out with Faye
00:23:47
Dunaway just happens to also be a teacher at that school.
00:23:50
So I'm just like, OK, so it's just we're all, we're all looped
00:23:54
in here. Just a series of like narrative
00:23:56
coincidences keeping all of these characters together.
00:23:59
If you lean into it then it's not, then it's fine.
00:24:02
Exactly, it's like it's not just one thing, it's just like this
00:24:05
is just the the world of the film that we're inhabiting.
00:24:08
Also fun fact. So Superman, right?
00:24:12
Lives in Metropolis. I'm.
00:24:15
Sorry, I thought that was the end of that thing.
00:24:17
They're like Superman, right? Right, crazy you.
00:24:23
Can fly? I don't think so.
00:24:26
What's the real news? Watch the real news.
00:24:29
I'm not the Daily Planet. Yeah, he just jumps really far.
00:24:32
OK. There's strings or something.
00:24:34
There's got to be daily. Planet, those hacks at the Daily
00:24:39
Planet like they're loser reporters like Shmark, Ken or
00:24:42
whatever. So it's a Daily Planet,
00:24:46
Metropolis, fake city, Batman lives in Gotham City, whatever,
00:24:49
right? Where do you think Supergirl
00:24:51
lives? Just off the.
00:24:52
Top of your head. Oh, what's like the fake city
00:24:54
where Supergirl's from Wichita? Yeah, exactly.
00:25:00
It's Chicago. So Supergirl lives in Chicago.
00:25:03
Nice Windy City superhero, the only one.
00:25:07
Yes, yeah. I was like, wait a minute, she
00:25:09
doesn't get a made-up city. She just lives in a real city.
00:25:12
She. Lives in the real city that is
00:25:14
like the main inspiration for Gotham City, but is not Gotham
00:25:18
City. Yeah, yeah.
00:25:21
So anyways so Super Girl goes to this school where the bad guy
00:25:25
also happens to be the teacher and then she meets her roommate
00:25:29
who is Lucy Lane which is a a a new Lane sister or cousin I'm
00:25:38
not familiar with. Probably cousin, given the theme
00:25:41
of the movie. Yeah, 'cause there's Lois Lane.
00:25:43
That's Superman's friend. OK.
00:25:50
Yep, like he doesn't want to define the relationship anyway.
00:25:53
And then there's Lana. Lana Lane is usually I think in
00:25:58
these 80s movies. She just went to high school
00:26:01
with Superman. She was like in Smallville.
00:26:04
Yes, she was the main character in the TV show Smallville,
00:26:06
right? You said this is Lucy.
00:26:08
This is Lucy Lane. And for some reason Supergirl
00:26:11
herself, despite her real name being Cara, which is a normal
00:26:16
human Earth name, she her alter ego that she takes on is Linda
00:26:22
Lee. So if they're just they have
00:26:25
this whole like word play conversation with like all these
00:26:29
like illiterate L names where it's like Linda Lee talking to
00:26:32
Lucy Lane about Lois Lane. Like I'm like, all right,
00:26:36
whatever. Yeah, go nuts.
00:26:39
Good. Good for her.
00:26:41
Good for you. But that was yeah, that was that
00:26:44
was a new Lane character. I was maybe the comic book nerds
00:26:48
out there will be like, of course, OK, Chicago, Lucy Lane,
00:26:51
you don't know this the. Comic book the comic book nerds
00:26:54
are going to be screeching at this entire conversation because
00:26:57
we're like we know comic books who's super girl right right
00:27:02
exactly and speak speaking. Of comic books.
00:27:05
When she meets Lucy Lane, she's reading a comic book, but it's
00:27:10
an Incredible Hulk comic book. And I'm like, wait a minute,
00:27:13
that's not right. You can't do that.
00:27:15
You. Can't do that.
00:27:17
That's illegal. Yeah, but I mean, whatever I
00:27:22
guess. That's a fun nod.
00:27:24
Yes, and then to keep the connections going, Lucy Lane is
00:27:27
dating Jimmy Olsen. So that's how he becomes part of
00:27:32
the story. OK, how do we get Ellis from Die
00:27:35
Hard in here? So he is a gardener.
00:27:42
What else do you need to know? Yeah.
00:27:44
That's fine. I just feel like I'm I'm
00:27:46
intrigued that theoretically A Supergirl movie is people in
00:27:51
some marketing room who are like girls don't want to watch
00:27:54
Superman. They want to see Supergirl.
00:27:56
And so this one was the classic case of taking like what they
00:28:00
thought was a quote like boy product and trying to make like
00:28:03
a girl version. And it seems like part of the
00:28:05
way they did that was they gave everybody like a love interest.
00:28:08
The fact that even the villain has one.
00:28:10
Yeah, no, exactly. And well, and that's the thing.
00:28:12
It becomes sort of a love triangle because Faye Dunaway is
00:28:16
just using the other guy like he wants to be with her, but she's
00:28:22
just using him for his knowledge of, like, dark magic, basically,
00:28:27
which, again, is not explained. They're just like, this is just
00:28:29
a thing that exists in this world.
00:28:31
Deal with it. Yeah, of course I'm like that's
00:28:34
great. Don't like Yeah, I don't need
00:28:36
you to I. Don't need I The last thing I
00:28:38
need is lore. I'm sick of lore.
00:28:40
I don't need it. I need contextual information.
00:28:43
Yeah. Yeah, I'm like, yes, I'm with
00:28:46
it, thank you. But she Faye Dunaway, that is
00:28:52
her character's name is Selena, but we just keep calling her
00:28:55
Faye not. Going to remember that it's Faye
00:28:56
Dunaway. She sees Ellis and like, it's
00:29:02
just like, well, I have to have him.
00:29:04
And she puts like an evil spell on him so that he will fall in
00:29:12
love with the first person he sees at which she intends to be
00:29:16
her. And you can of course guess this
00:29:19
goes wrong and he winds up seeing Supergirl first and falls
00:29:23
in love with her immediately. And then that kind of becomes
00:29:30
the conflict. That's really what gets
00:29:33
Supergirl involved with Faye Dunaway's character at all.
00:29:36
Is 0. Like, so.
00:29:40
OK, so Supergirl is a superhero and Faye Dunaway is here to take
00:29:44
over the world, but the thing that actually puts them at odds
00:29:47
with each other is a man. Yeah, Yeah, duh.
00:29:54
Of course. That's fine.
00:29:56
That's good. Yes.
00:29:59
Yes. Yeah.
00:30:01
And the whole thing is like Ellis's character.
00:30:05
He's, you know, he's under a spell, so he immediately meets
00:30:07
Supergirl and he's like, yeah, I'm in love with you.
00:30:09
And she's like, what? That's crazy.
00:30:11
But OK, I guess that's fine. Yeah, we can do.
00:30:13
That yeah like that works for me.
00:30:19
So. But then again, coincidentally,
00:30:20
Faye Dunaway has the orb that the Supergirl is looking for
00:30:24
that she presumably needs to boom to back to her planet so
00:30:28
they don't all die. I don't know.
00:30:29
We never see them again. We.
00:30:31
Never see them again. Wait what?
00:30:33
Does she ever go back and fix it?
00:30:35
She does spoilers, that's the end of the movie.
00:30:38
Is she? Just.
00:30:39
Yeah, like Super Girl does in fact save the day.
00:30:42
We do see Peter O'Toole again, which is great because he he
00:30:47
banished himself out of 90% of the movie.
00:30:50
But then he is there near the end when Faye Dunaway sends
00:30:56
Supergirl to the Phantom Zone and then he has to help her get
00:31:00
out and she finds him there. He's mostly been getting drunk
00:31:04
the whole time, which I think is maybe why he wanted to go there
00:31:06
in the first place. I knew this Phantom Zone thing
00:31:08
was a cramp. He's like, no, it's so bad, so
00:31:11
bad in here. You can't.
00:31:12
It's the worst Phantoms ever. Ever you've seen the scene with
00:31:17
the match or whatever is pretty? Good, I ended World War One.
00:31:21
They're like, all right, time to go to bed, Peter O'doul.
00:31:26
And the crazy thing is, he improved all of that.
00:31:30
He did. He made it all up on the spot.
00:31:33
He showed up to set one day with script notes that said, I go to
00:31:36
the Phantom Zone and they're like, you're supposed to be in
00:31:38
the movie Mr. O'doul. And he's like.
00:31:40
You were supposed to be in the movie.
00:31:44
I'm Peter O'doul. This is my first movie.
00:31:47
And they're like, no, it's not. It's.
00:31:49
Not buddy, you're wrong, actually.
00:31:53
He puts a of every movie he's ever been in his introducing
00:31:59
because he thinks it'll get people to be like, wow, that's
00:32:01
pretty good for his. That's pretty good for his first
00:32:03
time in the Phantom. Zone introducing Academy Award
00:32:09
nominee. How does he do it?
00:32:14
How? Does he do that?
00:32:15
Phantom Zone? Probably.
00:32:16
Yeah. Oh, man, I'm I had man.
00:32:19
I was worried that this movie would be like super
00:32:22
uninteresting. I picked it because I was like
00:32:25
hoping it would be something like this and because it was
00:32:27
trendy because there's a new Supergirl.
00:32:29
But I'm on board. I want to see this one now.
00:32:32
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not fantastic, but
00:32:36
if you just go in and accept that, it's like, especially
00:32:42
because you and I are not super into comic books.
00:32:45
I think there was a time where at least I read some older comic
00:32:50
books, you know, pick them up from the local library.
00:32:52
That's exactly what. I was going to say, we used to
00:32:54
get the like big anthology collections of like 90s Spider
00:32:58
Man or X-Men or something. Even earlier I remember reading
00:33:01
like 60s like original run Oh. Shit, Yeah, no, you're right.
00:33:05
It was like really old a lot of the time.
00:33:07
Yeah. And so this feels like if you
00:33:10
took that and translated it so not X-Men, if you took Supergirl
00:33:15
or Superman and and translated it directly to screen.
00:33:19
And I liked it for that reason. Like it wasn't trying to like
00:33:26
take this and make it like a dark, gritty, real world version
00:33:30
of that, which I feel like is the trend that a lot of
00:33:33
superhero films have gone down and it mostly in an attempt to
00:33:36
imitate like Batman projects. Yeah, Batman's the one case
00:33:40
where that worked. And I think everything else has
00:33:42
been varying degrees of like. Yeah, but even if even like the
00:33:47
way like the film depicts her, like using her heat vision or
00:33:51
her like super hearing or X-ray vision, it's like the same way
00:33:55
that they would, like, animate it in the comic strips.
00:33:57
And I'm like, this is good. Actually.
00:33:59
This is like for the time this film was made for the material
00:34:02
it was adapting, this is a fun live action adaptation honestly.
00:34:09
And so it was it was fun it was it was campy fun honestly.
00:34:13
Again, not amazing but like there was other cool stuff in
00:34:16
there like cool like I said cool set design cool like creature
00:34:20
effects like you know cuz Faye Dunaway is using this magic to
00:34:24
like summon monsters and stuff sometimes and.
00:34:28
Oh, OK, that's fun. What are we?
00:34:30
What are some creatures that we get to see?
00:34:32
Well, there's there's one funny scene where like the first
00:34:37
creature that she sends after Supergirl is like invisible.
00:34:42
So the first half of the action sequence is like Supergirl
00:34:47
getting like hit around by this creature you don't see.
00:34:49
So it's just like them like pulling her on like stunt wires,
00:34:52
like into things, which is fun. But then her solution to that
00:34:59
conflict is she like, rips like a like a lamppost out of the
00:35:03
ground and like, flies up into a thunderstorm and like charges it
00:35:07
with lightning and then like comes back down and like blasts
00:35:10
the invisible creature with lightning.
00:35:12
And then you see him 'cause he's like this, like Demogorgon
00:35:16
looking monster. And.
00:35:19
He gets like electrocuted and that's how she defeats him.
00:35:22
And I'm like, oh, that was fun. Like that's.
00:35:24
Very comic booky. Yeah, Yeah.
00:35:26
Exactly. And then there's a similar thing
00:35:28
at the end where when Faye Dunaway is, you know, sort of in
00:35:32
control in the third act, and she has the full power of this
00:35:36
orb, and she summons like a giant creature that kind of
00:35:39
looks like the thing from Ghostbusters.
00:35:42
Wait, which thing from Ghostbusters?
00:35:44
I can't remember what it's called actually the.
00:35:47
Is it the the thing on the roof? Not not the stay puff Marshall
00:35:51
mellow man. Yes, the thing on the roof
00:35:53
Gozer. Yes, Gozer.
00:35:55
Thank you. Yeah, it's a Gozer looking
00:35:57
creature. And I just honestly thought that
00:36:00
was, again, in terms of making this interesting, I thought that
00:36:04
like making Faye Dunaway's character be a witch and have
00:36:09
like magic powers actually made her an interesting foil for
00:36:12
Supergirl. Because I think that's a common
00:36:15
thing in stories about like Superman and related characters
00:36:20
is that he's just like, they're just invincible.
00:36:23
You know, they're it's like, how do you create stakes for this
00:36:26
character other than Kryptonite, which is really boring.
00:36:29
But I think I don't know how long this has been around in the
00:36:31
comics, but I've I've heard that that another weakness for like
00:36:35
Superman and Supergirl is, is magic.
00:36:37
And so it actually gives them something to contend with, you
00:36:41
know? Yeah.
00:36:42
So I thought that was a good choice because then it it put
00:36:44
her in these situations where she was actually able to use her
00:36:49
powers, you know, in order to to and not just like stop people,
00:36:54
like catch people falling out of buildings.
00:36:56
You know, which I'm trying to think about it now, like the
00:36:59
first two Superman movies, he's not really fighting like the 80s
00:37:04
Superman movies. He's he's just fighting like an
00:37:07
evil scheming man. And then I think he fights like
00:37:10
evil Superman and then he fights Nuclear man, who's everybody's
00:37:14
favorite. But for the most part, it was
00:37:17
not like Superman fighting monsters, which I feel like this
00:37:22
immediately gives a fun angle to Supergirl that it's a little bit
00:37:25
more just straightforward. Like it's gives her something to
00:37:27
punch or electrocute at least, right?
00:37:30
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, totally.
00:37:32
Like, So that's why, I mean, I know it's maybe sounds like a
00:37:36
bold claim, but I, I was like, I kind of like this more.
00:37:40
And it it was just like, I liked it more for a few reasons.
00:37:42
Because she was different from Superman.
00:37:45
They were telling a Superman story, but with a new character
00:37:49
and the things that made her different made her more
00:37:51
interesting. Watching this because there's
00:37:53
been so much Superman, you know, there's been tons of films and
00:37:58
and adaptations of that character.
00:38:00
So it was just fun that it was just like somebody was like,
00:38:04
hey, you know, like Super Superman, right?
00:38:07
Like, what if there was like the other one, a girl, a Supergirl?
00:38:12
What's the opposite of that? Yeah, no, that totally makes
00:38:16
sense. I think that sometimes when
00:38:17
you're doing spin offs of something, it can feel very like
00:38:22
unnecessary or derivative. But a good spinoff can be
00:38:26
successful just by being intentionally different from the
00:38:29
original thing in as many ways as possible.
00:38:31
Like without the existence of the Superman movies, this one
00:38:35
might not stand out as much. But when you've seen Clark Kent
00:38:38
Superman in a very set formula and then you intentionally
00:38:40
disrupt that formula with a similar, but, you know, new
00:38:43
enough character, that's interesting.
00:38:46
Like I'm sure if you went back and watched the original 80s
00:38:48
Superman, you'd be like, all right, this is more sound as a
00:38:51
film overall. But for someone who's seen
00:38:53
those, this is like a fun one. It's like a good just way to
00:38:56
kind of mix things up. Yeah, exactly.
00:38:58
And I mean, she still does. You know, there's still, there's
00:39:00
a sequence that's kind of fun, actually, where like, at one
00:39:04
point when so after Ellis has been given the love potion, he's
00:39:07
kind of like, stumbling around and Faye Dunaway is trying to
00:39:10
get him back. She like like takes control like
00:39:14
remotely with her magic of like a not a bulldozer.
00:39:19
What's the one that like has like the crane arm that like
00:39:23
grabs stuff and picks it up? Oh, a bulldozer.
00:39:28
Yeah, sure. So a bulldozer.
00:39:32
I don't know Crane if you just call it a crane.
00:39:34
Yeah, whatever. Crane, bulldozer, heavy
00:39:37
machinery, she scoops him up and has him trapped in there and
00:39:40
she's like driving it through the city and like knocking stuff
00:39:43
over and hitting cars and stuff. And, you know, Supergirl has to
00:39:47
like save him and like fix that situation.
00:39:50
And that's all very classic. Like especially like Christopher
00:39:53
Reeve style Superman stuff where like there's a fire, so she like
00:39:56
flies through like a water tower to like put the fire out.
00:39:59
And then she has to like, catch the crane and like use her super
00:40:02
strength to like, you know, take the arm off and.
00:40:04
So it has. All that too.
00:40:05
So it has all those things you're familiar with and would
00:40:08
be expecting from a Superman movie.
00:40:12
I feel like that's actually a really key part of what makes
00:40:15
classic superhero action fun is it's like taking recognizable
00:40:22
adult spaces in the world and then using them as like a
00:40:25
child's playset. Like what could you do?
00:40:29
Like I there's a lot of times as a kid where you'll be like in
00:40:32
the back of a car and you'll be like looking over the roof.
00:40:33
I feel like it's like a common thing where people like imagine
00:40:36
someone like running along the roof like a superhero or a
00:40:40
Captain Falcon or something. Just kind of like like that's a
00:40:43
common thing. It's like just kids imagining
00:40:46
stuff while they're bored and like looking out at this world
00:40:48
that's like not for them yet. And just kind of imagining all
00:40:51
the different fun things you could do if it didn't have any
00:40:53
consequence in which just to like, play with the structure of
00:40:57
it all. And I feel like that's what a
00:40:58
lot of the most interesting, like, superhero action stuff is.
00:41:01
And that's what that sounds like to me.
00:41:03
Like I can imagine a kid seeing a bulldozer and not knowing what
00:41:07
it's called and just kind of imagining a sequence like that.
00:41:10
And then to put that on screen, I imagine it's just like good,
00:41:14
good for you. Yeah, That's good for you.
00:41:16
Yeah. So that's that's a really good
00:41:19
way to put it, actually. I mean, I still do that now.
00:41:20
I think that's why it's fun for adults and kids, honestly.
00:41:23
Like that's. Why?
00:41:23
I know like you said, it's like. Yeah, it's like, well, this is,
00:41:27
you know, a playground. It's like even as an adult, you
00:41:29
want to go out and play. And that's kind of what this
00:41:32
film is, you know, vicariously giving the opportunity to do so.
00:41:36
Yeah. So it's like it's fun that it
00:41:38
that it had that stuff in there as well.
00:41:40
And honestly, yeah, that's, I just, I, I appreciated it for
00:41:45
what it was like. And you know, like I said, I
00:41:48
give big props to Helen Slater, who's, who's playing Supergirl.
00:41:52
I looked up her filmography. She's appeared in, in other DC
00:41:55
projects since then too. She, she was a, a guest
00:41:59
character on a few episodes of Smallville, which I thought was
00:42:01
cool. Oh, that's awesome.
00:42:02
Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:03
And she's like voiced other DC characters in like animated
00:42:06
projects. So I'm glad that she's also kind
00:42:08
of 'cause, you know, again, this film, I never hear anybody talk
00:42:12
about it. It's a very, that's what I mean.
00:42:14
How is nobody brought up that there's an 80s Supergirl movie
00:42:18
even now when there's a new one coming out, I've just, it has
00:42:21
not been mentioned to my knowledge.
00:42:23
Once and again there's people who are like, I've been talking
00:42:25
about Supergirl 8460 years, yeah.
00:42:29
Wait a minute. Ever since it introduced us to
00:42:34
Peter O'Toole. Who but yeah, but yeah, I, I did
00:42:43
see I read that it was supposed to launch a more of a film
00:42:47
franchise. It was supposed to be a film
00:42:49
spin off franchise. There was going to be more
00:42:51
Supergirl movies, but it just did really poorly at the box
00:42:54
office and critically, which I honestly wholeheartedly disagree
00:42:58
with the with the critical reception to this movie.
00:43:00
I, I don't know like what people were even expecting.
00:43:05
I mean, honestly, I was watching this and there's a clearly a lot
00:43:10
of things you could fault it for.
00:43:11
I mean, a lot of the effects look extremely hokey and dated
00:43:15
and and the performances are cheesy, whatever.
00:43:17
But those are the things I like about it.
00:43:18
But it was the weirdness of it, you know, like the weird things
00:43:22
that it did where I was like modern movies, could never
00:43:25
current Supergirl that's about to come out, could never do this
00:43:28
weird stuff that this movie is doing.
00:43:31
Yeah, it'll be limited by people's expectations for these
00:43:36
tentpole superhero movies to kind of just be everything for
00:43:39
everyone instead of 1 specific thing done well.
00:43:44
Yes, exactly. Somebody had ideas that they
00:43:48
wanted to put in here and they did.
00:43:51
Well, that's hype. Yeah, Yeah, it is.
00:43:53
Go Supergirl. Go Supergirl, girls.
00:43:57
Get it done. It's just first cut that.
00:44:00
Cut that all out. Cut that all out.
00:44:02
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So our first forgotten superhero
00:44:06
movie for the season. Generally positive thoughts.
00:44:09
I'm happy to hear that. Wow, who'd who'd have thought?
00:44:13
OK, great. Well, we're going to head into
00:44:14
our intermission, and then when we come back, Frank, we'll talk
00:44:17
about the movie you asked me to watch, 1997's Steel.
00:44:21
And in the meantime, I, I I got to go to the Phantom Zone.
00:44:24
I don't know about you. Yeah, we'll just play the
00:44:26
Superman music while you're gone.
00:44:28
We'll play the. Superman music for a few more
00:44:29
minutes and then when we get back I'm sure the lawyers will
00:44:31
have nothing but good, good news.
00:44:42
OK, and we're back on the other side of the break.
00:44:45
Frank just heard back from the lawyers.
00:44:46
They still do not want us playing the entire John Williams
00:44:49
Superman song, turns out. Why not I?
00:44:52
Don't know. You know, it's like they're
00:44:54
being really weird about it and frankly, a little mean.
00:44:57
Yeah. We're back, all right.
00:45:06
We're moving now into Frank, the first forgotten superhero film
00:45:09
that you asked me to watch. This one I've never heard of in
00:45:14
my life either. The.
00:45:15
Or. The character it's based on this
00:45:18
is 1997's Steel, starring NBA legend Shaquille O'Neal.
00:45:24
What, what, what? What is this?
00:45:29
You tell me. That was all I knew and that was
00:45:31
all I needed to know to recommend it.
00:45:32
I was like Shaq steel. Let's go.
00:45:35
It's like, OK, when did Space Jam come out?
00:45:38
That was Michael Jordan making a movie in the midst of his
00:45:40
basketball career. But wasn't that like not long
00:45:42
before this? I could be wrong.
00:45:44
I want to say Space Jam was 95. OK, so theoretically somebody
00:45:48
saw that Space Jam was like a box office success, I imagine
00:45:52
and was like, let's do Shaquille O'Neal.
00:45:55
Like I even in reading about the production history behind this
00:45:58
movie, it's not completely clear why they started talking to him
00:46:01
in the 1st place. A lot of the notes were more so
00:46:03
just like what they approached him with initially and like the
00:46:06
kind of negotiations for getting Shaq to be able to do this movie
00:46:10
because at the time in the NBA was in the offseason when the
00:46:14
movie was being filmed, but he was competing on the Team USA at
00:46:16
the 1996 Olympics. So like.
00:46:19
Shaq was busy. Yeah, yeah.
00:46:22
I mean, it makes sense though. Like, you sell a movie OnStar
00:46:27
power and Shaq, especially at that time, was a huge star.
00:46:31
I mean, he was on the 96 Olympics team.
00:46:34
Exactly. Also unbelievably tall man.
00:46:38
I don't think I'd ever really like contextualized it.
00:46:41
The man's like 7 feet tall. He looks absurd in this movie,
00:46:44
next to every other character in the movie, to the point where
00:46:50
there's people in the story who are like, who's this masked man
00:46:52
that's 7 feet tall? There's only one guy in town
00:46:56
that's 7 feet tall. I mean, I get, but that also
00:47:02
makes sense as as to why you're like, OK, we need somebody who's
00:47:06
a star and is also enormous to play our superhero.
00:47:09
Like it's just who else could it be?
00:47:11
Butt Shack. It's interesting.
00:47:13
It's definitely the main selling point for the movie.
00:47:16
The thing that I got into and trying to like organize my
00:47:19
thoughts is by the time the movie was done, I was like, OK,
00:47:22
I need to figure out who this comic book character is.
00:47:25
And also other context about the character because there's just
00:47:28
things in here that are not fully explained and I don't
00:47:30
understand without like looking it up.
00:47:32
So the character Steel is once again ADC comics superhero, and
00:47:37
he's actually a direct associate of Superman to the point where
00:47:41
in this movie they're calling Shaq the Man of Steel.
00:47:44
Whoa. OK, we did a very unintentional
00:47:47
Superman double feature then this.
00:47:49
Yeah, this is like a Superman Friends double feature, because
00:47:53
in the comic series, this is not what the movie does.
00:47:56
But in the comic books, there's a very famous story arc called
00:47:59
The Death of Superman, which was adapted multiple times.
00:48:02
I think it is part of that, like Justice League movie that Zack
00:48:06
Snyder made. Superman dies, he comes back to
00:48:08
life. He Jesus, you get it, You get
00:48:11
it, you get it. Three days or something.
00:48:13
Easter. That's Superman, Laura.
00:48:17
Yeah, that's. Superman.
00:48:18
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the comic books, one
00:48:22
Superman Is Dead. This guy, just a human man who
00:48:26
used to work for Lex Luthor as an engineer, decides that Lex
00:48:29
Luthor is bad, good for him, and makes himself like a suit of
00:48:33
armor that gives him superhuman like strength and the ability to
00:48:37
fly. And he basically becomes a stand
00:48:39
in for Superman because he, Superman at that point is dead.
00:48:42
And so Steel is like taking over as like a protector for
00:48:46
Metropolis. And so he even has in his
00:48:48
original design the Superman S like on his chest and he has
00:48:52
like a Cape. So he's very much replacement
00:48:54
Superman. And then Superman comes back
00:48:56
Easter Sunday, Easter Bunny. And then Steel, I don't know
00:49:00
what he does after that. What?
00:49:03
And is this all seen in this movie?
00:49:06
Or is this the original interpretation of the character?
00:49:09
So. That's the comic book iteration
00:49:11
of the character. He then make sparse appearances
00:49:14
in other DC media for a superhero character.
00:49:17
The fact that his Wikipedia page is not like 40 football
00:49:21
fields long is very telling. Like he does not have a long
00:49:24
history of appearances, although he does show up in the DC
00:49:28
animated universe. I think he was in like the 90s
00:49:32
animated Superman show Steel was, and in that one he was
00:49:35
voiced by Michael Dorn who is Wharf from Star Trek.
00:49:39
Yes, I love whenever we can get a Star Trek connection in here.
00:49:42
I know you would like the Star Trek connection, so that was one
00:49:44
of the earlier versions of Steel in the film context in the 90s.
00:49:49
Again, I did not have time to find out the full context here
00:49:52
because I would have had to pick up a book and read about it,
00:49:54
which never we don't. Do that on this show, yeah.
00:49:57
We do not read things. You can't make me.
00:49:59
Essentially, it is heavily rumored or maybe confirmed that
00:50:03
when this movie with Shaq was being originally developed, it
00:50:06
was supposed to be a spinoff from a movie about Superman that
00:50:10
covered the death of Superman storyline.
00:50:12
So they were going to make a film in the 90s about that and
00:50:16
then have Steele maybe appear in it and then have his own spinoff
00:50:19
movie that like tied into it somehow.
00:50:21
And I think based on the timing, that later canned Superman
00:50:25
project might have been the one where it was going to be Nicolas
00:50:27
Cage at Superman. Whoa, so they were going to kill
00:50:31
Nick Cage Superman. I think maybe at some point that
00:50:35
was like the storyline they were going to cover in this movie and
00:50:38
then Steel's production was going to have some ties to it.
00:50:41
But because that Superman project fell through even before
00:50:45
Shaquille O'Neal got involved, this Steel movie became like a
00:50:47
stand alone project that has no in universe connection to any
00:50:53
other DC stuff. In fact, in the movie Steel that
00:50:56
you have me watch, they actually make several jokes about DC
00:50:59
superheroes as like comic book characters.
00:51:02
Like they're not real people in the context of Steel.
00:51:05
I see. OK, well, that's fine.
00:51:08
I'm cool with that. Yeah.
00:51:09
So instead we get like kind of that thing we were joking about
00:51:12
before where it's like a somewhat more grounded iteration
00:51:15
of that story. So Steel in this movie is Shaq.
00:51:17
He doesn't have a Cape. He doesn't have the Superman S
00:51:20
He does get the Superman S tattooed on his arm and they say
00:51:23
like hey look at you, you're the Man of Steel.
00:51:25
And they think they even at one point say something about like a
00:51:27
bat cave. But it's all like super lame
00:51:30
tongue in cheek jokes. So in the movie he's just a Man
00:51:33
of Steel and Superman exists but is a fictional character.
00:51:39
Yeah, that's so interesting. I I'm trying to like rationalize
00:51:45
why so many superhero projects kind of went that route where
00:51:50
they would, it was all very tongue in cheek, like they were
00:51:52
almost making fun of the material they were adapting.
00:51:55
Like, like look at what we're doing.
00:51:57
But like comics are for nerds though, am I right?
00:51:59
Like. Yes, that was the whole tone of
00:52:01
superhero movies for the longest time was like the people who
00:52:05
would get assigned to write them and direct them seemed like
00:52:08
agitated to be tied to a superhero product because they
00:52:11
were like, that's for babies. I'm not doing that.
00:52:13
But then it was like, will you want money?
00:52:15
And they're like, all right, fine, I'll do it.
00:52:16
But I'm going to have to tell you that I don't like it.
00:52:20
And now we've we're on the completely opposite side of that
00:52:22
spectrum, where it's like, if you mess up one tiny detail in a
00:52:26
modern superhero film, the Internet will just be like,
00:52:28
well, you shouldn't be allowed to live anymore, obviously.
00:52:31
Like that guy, believe it or not, straight to the Phantom
00:52:34
Zone. Get him in there, Peter.
00:52:39
Peter Yep. Mr. O'Toole You got room for
00:52:42
Zack Snyder in there. So yeah, Steele is weird in that
00:52:47
regard. It's still mid 90s were well
00:52:50
before the like modern crop of superhero films, but it sort of
00:52:53
fits right in and that it tells like a basic superhero origin
00:52:56
story that's completely grounded in vaguely real world context.
00:53:00
In the movie, we get a whole new origin for the character.
00:53:04
The guy that Shaquille O'Neal is playing is named John Henry
00:53:08
Irons, which itself actually has, I don't want to say lower
00:53:12
implications because it's more so just history.
00:53:16
The name John Henry is a reference to like an American
00:53:19
folk tale hero and itself is based on a real guy.
00:53:22
You might have vaguely heard of this.
00:53:23
I know it kind of rung a bell for me.
00:53:25
It was a guy who in these, like, famous songs and stuff, kind of
00:53:30
competed in this like man versus machine race where he was using
00:53:34
a hammer to like, chisel into a mountain.
00:53:36
And he was trying to race against like a steam powered
00:53:39
machine. Oh yeah, yes, right.
00:53:42
And so John Henry wins the race, but he dies from exhaustion,
00:53:46
like still holding the hammer in his hand.
00:53:49
And it was like a whole thing where there is some real
00:53:52
historical person who they think is John Henry.
00:53:54
But the whole thing is just mythos that has been used in a
00:53:57
lot of like stuff since then. It was used in like World War
00:54:01
2US propagandas like Go America. It was used during like, the
00:54:04
civil rights movement because the character has a lot of ties
00:54:07
to both human endurance, but also like the history of like,
00:54:10
labor and exploitation in America.
00:54:14
So like, it's a very loaded bit of folk history that in both the
00:54:18
comic book and in this movie is like the inspiration behind
00:54:22
Steel having a hammer. Oh, you know what?
00:54:25
I'm on board. That's great, right?
00:54:27
There's. A lot going for this already.
00:54:29
I was like this movie started and like we talked about both
00:54:32
our movies today have very, very bad critical receptions.
00:54:35
But Steel kicks off and I'm like, OK, Steel is a cheap
00:54:38
looking movie, but it's not like a giant mess or anything.
00:54:42
It's a fairly competent superhero origin movie that just
00:54:46
strips away the more direct like comic book inspirations and goes
00:54:49
for just kind of like what if a guy in a metal suit.
00:54:52
Fought crime. Yeah.
00:54:54
Yeah, exactly. I mean, Supergirl is kind of the
00:54:56
same way where it didn't look, you know, especially by today's
00:54:59
standards, a lot of it looked cheesy, but that's like what you
00:55:03
want almost. It's like you can see the the
00:55:06
seams of the filmmaking going on there.
00:55:09
Exactly. So I was on board with that
00:55:11
right away. Some of those details don't come
00:55:12
out until later in the story where they start making direct
00:55:14
reference. And it caused me to go back and
00:55:16
Google like what is this John Henry thing?
00:55:18
I know that's familiar, but I did like those elements behind
00:55:22
the actual DC character. The movie itself retells the
00:55:27
origin story as Shaq, who I know is named John Henry Irons, but
00:55:31
I'm probably just going to keep calling him Shaquille O'Neal.
00:55:35
Shaq is in the military and he develops advanced weaponry for
00:55:40
the US military. And there's a scene at the
00:55:42
beginning that very appropriately opens with a shot
00:55:44
of like, nature, just like the woods.
00:55:47
And then like a tank, like a rolls over into frame and like
00:55:50
crushes all the plants and stuff.
00:55:52
And it's like, OK, natural world versus the, you know, dangerous
00:55:56
man made machines and weapons of war.
00:55:58
I get it. And then we go to the scene
00:56:00
that's them testing out new weaponry on like, a testing
00:56:02
range. And Shaq built all this stuff
00:56:05
with his best friend Sparky, who's this lady in the Navy, and
00:56:07
they're good buds, and they make weapons together because it's
00:56:09
fun, I guess. But during the weapons test, the
00:56:14
villain, played by Judd Nelson, shows up.
00:56:17
Oh, OK. Mr. Bender from The Breakfast
00:56:21
Club comes in, and we find out on this intro scene that he has
00:56:24
been toying with all of the weapons that they're making to
00:56:28
make them more powerful and more destructive.
00:56:31
So like the first thing they're testing out, which is used a lot
00:56:34
throughout the movie, it's like a Sonic wave gun that shoots
00:56:39
like, you know, it can like, push stuff around.
00:56:41
It's not like a gun that would shoot something, but it can be
00:56:43
used to, like, knock things over or move them.
00:56:46
And Shaquille O'Neal built a very nice pacifistic shockwave
00:56:49
gun. But Judd Nelson is like, I
00:56:52
modified your design and I'm going to turn it up to 11, and
00:56:55
now it's going to blow up a building.
00:56:57
And believe it or not, he tries to show them how that works and
00:56:59
it blows up a building and it gets several people killed.
00:57:03
You see, it did work. Which I understand, it's very
00:57:07
like childlike storytelling, just like this bad man made the
00:57:11
notch go up too high. But the whole time I'm like, you
00:57:14
literally have one of this. This isn't like a blueprint you
00:57:18
made to make a weapon. You made, like one test weapon.
00:57:20
And Shaquille O'Neal, I guess, left it somewhere.
00:57:22
The Jed Nelson walked over and, like, fiddled with it.
00:57:25
It's so sparse on detail that it comes across really funny.
00:57:28
Like there's no context for what he did.
00:57:32
He's just like, I made the power notch go higher.
00:57:35
And then he's like, you can't do that.
00:57:36
And he's like, I just did. And then it's like, OK, come on,
00:57:38
guys, Is this the first try I just did?
00:57:43
It's so like it's so egregiously simple in its in its
00:57:48
explanation, even though it's supposed to be about like
00:57:50
futuristic high-powered weapons, that that part is very silly.
00:57:54
But it's very effective for what they're going for because it
00:57:57
helps explain the foil for Shaquille O'Neal.
00:58:00
He uses advanced weaponry for good I guess, but the bad guy
00:58:06
makes them too dangerous. And Shaquille O'Neal wants all
00:58:08
these to be non lethal weapons and the other guy doesn't
00:58:10
because of the accident that Judd Nelson causes, Shaquille
00:58:13
O'Neal testifies against him and gets him like, thrown out of the
00:58:16
army. And Joe Nelson vows revenge and
00:58:18
he's just like, I'll get you Gadget or whatever.
00:58:21
And then because of that same event, Shaquille O'Neal becomes
00:58:25
disillusioned because his best friend Sparky gets severely
00:58:28
injured in that accident and loses the ability to walk.
00:58:31
And he's so devastated about all of this and his role in it that
00:58:34
he also quits the army. Oh, so Sparky becomes like his
00:58:38
Oracle like was back. Is literally just Oracle.
00:58:42
Yeah. She is the brains of the
00:58:45
operation alongside Shaq. She has to, you know, use a
00:58:48
wheelchair because she injured her spine in the accident.
00:58:51
And there's a whole secondary narrative for her throughout the
00:58:54
story of the movie of her coming to terms with her disability and
00:58:57
kind of like, regaining her confidence, which is both kind
00:59:01
of, like, tenderly shown but also at times really, really
00:59:05
unintentionally funny. Like, uh oh.
00:59:10
Like, OK, let's focus in on Sparky because she comes in and
00:59:12
out of the movie throughout the first half, but the overall
00:59:16
story for her character is insane.
00:59:18
She's in the army. She gets injured in the
00:59:20
accident, right? She can no longer walk.
00:59:22
Shaquille O'Neal goes to visit her in the hospital.
00:59:25
And I guess, like, nobody's told her yet that it's, like, not
00:59:27
something she can recover from. So at first, she's like, I'm
00:59:30
going to get back on my feet. And Shaq knows that she's not,
00:59:32
but he, like, placates her about it.
00:59:35
And then later in the story, he goes to visit her at, like, the
00:59:37
VA hospital. And at this point, she's, like,
00:59:40
understands now that she can't walk anymore and is just super
00:59:44
miserable about it. And there's a scene where Shaq
00:59:47
is trying to motivate her. And it's really, really strange.
00:59:51
What does he do? So he goes over to her and, you
00:59:55
know, it's Shaquille O'Neal. He's not a trained actor, so
00:59:57
he's not really showing a lot of range without any of this.
00:59:59
And he's enormous, just comically large man delivering
01:00:01
these lines. And he's just talking to her.
01:00:03
Like, come on, Sparky. Like you still still have a lot
01:00:06
to offer. You can do it.
01:00:08
And she's just miserable. And so he in order to, like,
01:00:12
wind her up, he just, like, slams open a window that she's
01:00:17
sitting behind to try to, you know, kind of be this imagery of
01:00:20
like, let the fresh air in like, it's a new day.
01:00:23
But he, like, slams the windows so hard that they just, like,
01:00:26
break. And so the windows are off the
01:00:28
hinges. And he's like, look outside.
01:00:31
And then I guess that kind of works.
01:00:33
And she's like, ah, Shaq, I don't know what I'm going to do.
01:00:35
And then he scoops her up out of the wheelchair and just walks
01:00:39
her out of this VA hospital where she's still being treated.
01:00:42
And all of the other patients at the hospital applaud this.
01:00:45
I knew they were going to clap, just knew that's where it was
01:00:49
going. What?
01:00:51
This man just kidnapped some lady from the hospital.
01:00:54
And and this is. Not a cloudy Yeah, he broke the
01:00:57
building and then left and everyone's just like, good for
01:01:00
you. Oh, that's great.
01:01:04
No. Yeah.
01:01:05
What What were you expecting? I mean, what else?
01:01:06
What are you? So that part weird.
01:01:09
The next thing you get with them because she becomes like, I
01:01:12
think a, a trope that people have now identified is like guy
01:01:14
in the chair, you know, like person behind the wheel who's
01:01:17
like giving him information while they go out on their
01:01:19
missions. But there's a scene where she
01:01:20
like is kind of in that like preparatory phase where they're
01:01:23
making the steel suit for Shaq and she like falls out of the
01:01:27
chair and somebody goes to help her and Shaq's like, no.
01:01:29
And it's all done without words. He's like clearly intimating,
01:01:33
like, let her do this herself. And that's so she has a moment
01:01:35
where she feels helpless, but then she like struggles and she
01:01:37
gets herself back up into the chair and they kind of get like
01:01:41
a nice moment. And I was like, you know what?
01:01:43
That's good. That is some very sound 90s like
01:01:46
after school special storytelling about disability
01:01:49
narratives and I'm surprised they handled that part as well
01:01:52
as they did. Well, and also that part does it
01:01:55
in a way that covers up Shaq's lack of acting ability too.
01:02:00
If they if they're just visually showing that scene instead of
01:02:05
him trying to give his motivational speech as a giant
01:02:09
and. Then.
01:02:09
Like carrying her out of the building.
01:02:11
While everybody claps, it's a, it's, it's sounds like that's
01:02:14
his retelling of the story. And he's like, and then
01:02:16
everybody clapped and they're like, no, they didn't check.
01:02:17
That's what people say when they're making up a fake story.
01:02:21
So that part was good. But then later, even later in
01:02:25
the story, there's a montage of them like finishing the steel
01:02:30
suit. And it's this, it's like this
01:02:32
choir music. It sounds almost like gospel
01:02:35
music, just kind of like very clap heavy.
01:02:37
And it's kind of got this like churchy quality to it.
01:02:40
But the main lyric in the song, which is mostly supposed to be
01:02:43
about Shaq at this point, is the singer just keeps going stand
01:02:46
up. And we're just looking at all
01:02:48
these shots of this woman bound to a wheelchair while the while
01:02:51
the song in the background just keeps yelling stand up.
01:02:54
And it's like she can't. That's no.
01:02:56
No, no, no, no. That's the point.
01:03:01
You've got to pick a different song.
01:03:05
She's sparky just like, turn that off, Shaq.
01:03:08
That was really, really unintentionally funny because
01:03:10
it's supposed to be about Shaq, like standing up for what's
01:03:12
ripe. You can't cut to someone whose
01:03:15
whole narrative is that they used to be able to do that, now
01:03:17
they can't and just be yelling it at them like that.
01:03:20
That's so rude. That's so rude.
01:03:23
Extremely rude. The only real pay off you get is
01:03:25
that at the end of the movie, because she's so high tech, she
01:03:28
does modify her wheelchair so it can turn into one of those like
01:03:32
standing versions, you know, where like it kind of moves like
01:03:36
a transformer, like pushes her upright so she can kind of wheel
01:03:39
around from a standing posture. And in that moment it actually
01:03:42
does play the stand up song again.
01:03:44
So I was like, oh, OK, so it. Was it was intentional?
01:03:48
There was some intentionality behind it.
01:03:50
It just feels a lot more like it felt like different people
01:03:53
handled every scene was sparky in it because like the first
01:03:56
one, it's like, that's not very good storytelling for this.
01:03:58
And then the second one was like, no, that's great.
01:04:00
That's exactly what you want to depict.
01:04:01
And then somebody came in and was like, you know, that new
01:04:04
sound you'd be looking for? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel
01:04:08
like it almost doesn't need that part at the like you could have
01:04:11
stopped at the second one. It's like, OK, now like you've
01:04:14
told a good story. That's that's a disability
01:04:18
narrative that, you know, puts the power back in this
01:04:21
character's hands. You don't need to then have her
01:04:24
make a robot suit that she can walk in.
01:04:26
You know, like that almost undercuts what you're trying to
01:04:29
say it. Wasn't like a full like
01:04:30
exoskeleton suit. It was just like a chair that
01:04:34
could be like kind of transform into being more like a backboard
01:04:38
so that she could just be upright and like wheel around
01:04:40
instead. Very, very strange.
01:04:42
There's also a bit in the third act where she shoots missiles
01:04:44
out of the chair, but we're not going to talk about that yet.
01:04:46
I mean, you need that, you need the missiles.
01:04:50
So that's the, that's the like Sparky side of the story.
01:04:54
She's like a supporting cast member.
01:04:56
Shaq's story, obviously there's more to it.
01:04:58
He leaves the Army and he goes back home to California, to his
01:05:03
like home neighborhood. And he's got a little brother
01:05:06
who still lives in town. And then there's a woman that
01:05:08
they both call Grandma, who I guess that's who they live with.
01:05:11
And this, again, is where the story starts to add interesting
01:05:14
context for me because they go out of their way to explain that
01:05:17
there's like, a lot of gang activity in this neighborhood.
01:05:20
And even Shaq's little brother, who's just this cute little kid
01:05:23
that grandma says very flatly, like, I'm trying my best, but
01:05:26
it's hard to keep him from joining one of these gangs.
01:05:29
Like, which is a very, like, real thing to say in the middle
01:05:32
of this very hokey kids movie. Like, you know, these people
01:05:36
live in poverty and gang activity is everywhere.
01:05:39
And it's like a really kind of sad reflection on like, the kind
01:05:42
of areas that a lot of people genuinely grow up in.
01:05:45
And I was like, whoa, pretty real, Pretty real here, Mr.
01:05:48
Steele. Yeah, yeah.
01:05:51
And I also liked that part because it knowing that the John
01:05:55
Henry folk hero story is used in many cases in relation to like
01:05:59
civil rights and like just stuff about like black history in
01:06:02
America. I was like, OK, this is like an
01:06:04
interesting angle. We have this like white militant
01:06:07
bad guy. And then we have Shaq trying to
01:06:09
like protect the neighborhood using his his own ingenuity and
01:06:13
the stuff that he can make. But they don't really like
01:06:15
capitalize on that in any way. I think they just throw it in in
01:06:18
the first act to like ground things a bit and then kind of
01:06:20
just like fade that idea as it goes on.
01:06:22
So that was a missed opportunity that could have really like
01:06:24
grounded the rest of the story. Whereas once he's in the steel
01:06:28
suit, he's just like, ah, I'm fighting crime.
01:06:30
Oh yeah, See, that's, I wonder if that's comes from the origin
01:06:34
of the character or if that was something that was introduced in
01:06:37
this movie. But yeah, that seems like a
01:06:40
pretty big thing thematically that would guide the story from
01:06:45
that point forward. Not something you just kind of
01:06:47
sprinkle in there. I know and that's what made me
01:06:50
bummed out because overall Steele has pretty solid like
01:06:54
story structure and pacing. Like it hits all of the usual
01:06:57
beats of a superhero origin movie.
01:06:59
You even get like after he builds the steel suit in the
01:07:03
second act, you have the, like, first day on the job scene where
01:07:06
he goes out for the first time and tries to just prevent some
01:07:08
petty crimes. And he's still getting used to
01:07:10
how his, like, equipment works and some of it malfunctions.
01:07:13
Just classic 90s superhero stuff.
01:07:16
And then that part of it felt like the biggest dropped thread
01:07:20
because there's a follow up in that Shaq's little brother gets
01:07:23
enticed to go work for the bad guy who is fronting as the owner
01:07:28
of like a company in town. And that bad guy, Jed Nelson, is
01:07:32
employing a lot of the gangs in the area.
01:07:34
And so one of those kids, like, gets Shaq's brother involved
01:07:36
unknowingly. And even there, I'm like, OK, we
01:07:39
have something. Shaq's little brother is going
01:07:41
to have to, like, go against the grain and make a choice at some
01:07:44
point to, like, escape this cycle of bad decisions.
01:07:48
And then he doesn't. He just becomes like, a hostage
01:07:50
at the end. And then Shaq saves him.
01:07:52
Oh, and then they don't circle back around on that at all.
01:07:55
No, it just Peters out. The story gets too focused on
01:07:58
the like just the combat and like the the scheming and
01:08:02
fighting John Nelson and and never properly pays off that
01:08:06
dynamic about the literal ex military man moving into this
01:08:11
predominantly black neighborhood and taking advantage of all
01:08:13
these people to like build weapons and rob banks.
01:08:17
It feels so pointed. And then the movie is so like
01:08:21
hokey and cheesy overall that I think they were like, that's too
01:08:25
serious. You know, like, you know, let's,
01:08:27
let's not, let's let that speak for itself instead of actually
01:08:29
making it part of the conclusion of the story.
01:08:32
That's interesting. I almost feel like this is the
01:08:36
type of character and type of movie that actually might
01:08:39
benefit from being like rebooted and and the story told in a
01:08:43
different way. You know, like I feel like
01:08:45
that's not, obviously we have a lot of that and it's not often
01:08:50
necessary and you see a lot of the same stuff, but this feels
01:08:53
like a different character which has an interesting story
01:08:57
underneath and you could tell interesting stories through the
01:09:01
lens of this world. And it's a story that the movie
01:09:04
sort of invented. Like that's not the background
01:09:06
of the comic book character. So it felt like they had
01:09:10
something and they just didn't commit to it.
01:09:12
Or just didn't know how to execute on it.
01:09:14
Or, you know, where they were just trying to make a different
01:09:16
movie and they wanted to throw those elements in there 'cause,
01:09:19
you know, it kind of had to be this like kids sci-fi action
01:09:23
movie based on a comic book character.
01:09:25
You know, I don't know. But that that's all very
01:09:27
interesting. And the fact that it is such a
01:09:30
lesser known character, I feel like is what actually gives it
01:09:33
that opportunity where if you were to like revisit this, you
01:09:36
could tell almost any new version of the story that you
01:09:41
want because there's not a lot of established lore for this
01:09:43
character. Yeah, seemingly not.
01:09:45
At least not like very visible stuff.
01:09:48
I think the most recent appearance of Steel was the 2021
01:09:53
like Superman and Lois TV show, which I've never seen.
01:09:57
I've never seen a frame of that, so I don't know what it is.
01:09:59
Me neither. Wow, how does that show exist
01:10:01
and nobody's ever seen it? It's weird.
01:10:02
No, right. It was on the air for like, it
01:10:04
might still be going. I think it's had several
01:10:06
seasons, but Steele appears in that show.
01:10:10
Oh, he does. Yeah.
01:10:13
I was going to say we got a show on the air in the Phantom Zone.
01:10:16
Yeah. I think a lot of the movies
01:10:20
we're going to cover this season are from the Phantom Zone and
01:10:22
that people don't know what they are and they didn't do anything
01:10:27
wrong and they're just there for some reason.
01:10:30
So that was like the biggest thing for Steele, where I want
01:10:33
to give it credit for what it introduced from it, like,
01:10:36
storytelling perspective, but also note that, like, it didn't
01:10:38
pay that off. And that makes the ending of the
01:10:40
movie feel very weak. What if probably not properly
01:10:43
underscored yet, is how hokey and cheesy this whole thing is.
01:10:47
Like, those elements stand out in part because Shaquille O'Neal
01:10:50
is just a big dumb doofus as Steele.
01:10:52
Like, I can't even properly put it into words.
01:10:57
But he's just not a good actor. And they don't really ask him to
01:11:01
show a lot of range. But even when they do, like, you
01:11:06
know, have you ever seen someone who's, like, not a trained
01:11:08
actor? And you can kind of see them
01:11:12
with, like, their next line on the tip of their mouth?
01:11:14
And they're just like waiting to blurt it out when as soon as
01:11:17
it's their turn to speak instead of waiting even a half a second
01:11:21
as if they're processing what someone else said.
01:11:23
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I feel like you see this
01:11:25
the most with athletes turned actors because again, from a,
01:11:32
from a production marketing standpoint, it's like people
01:11:36
obviously know who who these guys are, you know, and, and,
01:11:40
and often times it's people who are very charismatic in real
01:11:42
life, like Shaquille, Shaquille O'Neal is very charismatic.
01:11:46
But when you put them in front of a camera and they have to
01:11:50
read specific lines, it's like all of that immediately goes out
01:11:54
the window and they look like a scared robot trying.
01:11:58
To like. Recite these things that's.
01:12:01
Exactly what it is like Shaq is giving Michael Jordan in Space
01:12:06
Jam, in that he's charming but not even remotely convincing.
01:12:10
And my favorite iteration of that is that I don't know if
01:12:13
it's the same scene where Sparky falls down and has to get
01:12:15
herself back up. But around that point in the
01:12:18
movie, they're hanging out with this character they just call,
01:12:20
like, Uncle Joe, who owns like, a junkyard that they use as
01:12:23
their base of operations to build the suit because it's, you
01:12:26
know, remote and people won't see what they're doing.
01:12:28
And Uncle Joe goes up to Shaq, and he's just like, so what's
01:12:31
the story with the lady? And Shaq just a millisecond
01:12:35
later, just goes, her father's dead.
01:12:36
It just made me laugh so hard. It's like, that's not.
01:12:41
You don't just have that on the tip of your tongue when someone
01:12:44
says so who's she? He was ready, he had his script
01:12:48
in his hand and he knew what he had to say.
01:12:51
My. Favorite scene in the movie?
01:12:52
Because it's so awkward and abrupt.
01:12:54
It's like that is the proper response of like, does she have
01:12:57
any family? He's like, no, her parents both
01:12:59
died and like, she joined the army, yadda yadda.
01:13:02
But the rhythm of like, so what's her story?
01:13:04
Her father's dead. It's really funny.
01:13:08
Yeah, this reminded me of like, have you seen those, like
01:13:11
Gronkowski commercials? Like he's doing some like
01:13:15
insurance company, I think it's like AARP or something.
01:13:19
And I mean, again, it's a similar thing where that guy,
01:13:22
he's really charismatic in interviews and just in real
01:13:25
life, but he is abysmally bad at acting and just reading these
01:13:29
even like commercial lines. And that's all that's coming to
01:13:32
mind with this Like Shaq performance.
01:13:36
Yeah, it's not irritating. It's not like it slows the movie
01:13:40
down because the movie kind of like slows itself down to meet
01:13:43
his speed instead, but it is still pretty funny that he just
01:13:46
cannot get any of these lines out.
01:13:48
He doesn't even show. He's just pleasant throughout
01:13:51
the whole story. Like he undergoes some sad
01:13:53
things, but he never really gets mad or sad or even all that
01:13:57
happy. He's just check.
01:14:00
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned Space Jam too, because I feel
01:14:02
like I obviously never thought this as a kid, but I've never
01:14:06
really thought of like Michael Jordan giving a bad performance
01:14:10
per SE in Space Jam. I mean, I'm sure he definitely.
01:14:13
Does but like it's he. Has a natural charisma that I
01:14:17
think does carry through in that film, especially when you
01:14:21
compare the original Space Jam to the LeBron Space Jam, which
01:14:25
was just a just an awful movie all around.
01:14:27
I did not see the LeBron Space Jam.
01:14:29
I bet that's much, much worse. Jack is serviceable for the kind
01:14:34
of movie that they wanted to make for Steel.
01:14:37
I imagine LeBron James is abysmal.
01:14:39
It's not even just him, it's like that whole movie is
01:14:42
basically just like a commercial, like more so than
01:14:44
any other movie I've ever seen. It just felt like a 2 hour ad
01:14:48
for like any Warner Brothers property they could shove in
01:14:51
there. I think that was one of my notes
01:14:53
in watching Steel in general. It's like it's kind of just a
01:14:57
bad movie. Like it's not doing anything
01:15:00
egregiously bad in anyone area, but it suffers from being fairly
01:15:04
dull. But I feel like a bad movie in
01:15:07
the 90s or a bad movie in like the analog filmmaking age is so
01:15:12
much easier to follow than a bad movie made now.
01:15:15
Because we we talk a lot about how nowadays with filmmaking,
01:15:18
there's so many decisions creatively that are made after
01:15:20
the movie has been shot. Where like you could be in post
01:15:24
production still deciding whether a scene that you already
01:15:26
filmed happens in the middle of the day or the middle of the
01:15:29
night. And it leads to all of these
01:15:31
like strange disjointed final products.
01:15:33
Whereas for Steel, it's a fairly slow, kind of boring superhero
01:15:38
movie. But every shot is intentional
01:15:40
and the scenes connect in a very obvious way.
01:15:42
It feels like they actually adapted the script that they
01:15:45
wrote. So it's very easy to watch in a
01:15:48
way that a lot of newer bad movies are not.
01:15:49
Oh. IA 100% agree that I mean,
01:15:51
that's that's the point I was trying to bring up about
01:15:53
Supergirl earlier too. It's like modern films could
01:15:57
never do what this movie does and what Steele is doing too,
01:16:01
where it's it is its own thing. It's a unique piece of media
01:16:06
that, even if it's bad, has intentionality behind it.
01:16:09
And also visually to like, they make it.
01:16:14
Somebody makes a joke in Supergirl, you know, 'cause they
01:16:16
don't know that she's Superman's cousin.
01:16:18
They're like, oh, why are you wearing that, like costume?
01:16:21
And that line stood out to me, 'cause I watch like, I think
01:16:25
this is just the first thing that comes to mind, but I see it
01:16:27
all the time. I saw like the teaser for the
01:16:29
new Street Fighter movie. Yep.
01:16:31
And Oh my gosh, I'm like, those costumes look like bad cosplay.
01:16:37
Like I've seen cosplayers at conventions with more convincing
01:16:41
versions of those characters than what we're putting on
01:16:44
these. Like, and I'm sure that's a very
01:16:46
expensive movie, and I'm sure a lot of work went into that
01:16:48
costuming for it to look awful. But then you look at like this
01:16:52
movie, like Steel and Supergirl, and it's just like they're
01:16:56
costuming just looks visually consistent with the world that
01:16:59
they're in. It doesn't look like they're
01:17:01
like playing dress up, you know? And, and I feel like that's
01:17:04
something that'll probably come up a lot in in this season with
01:17:06
these movies we're going to talk about.
01:17:08
That's a great way to put it. They tried to blend the thing
01:17:13
they were adapting with whatever environment they were placing
01:17:17
them in. You do sometimes get the
01:17:20
opposite, which I find very annoying.
01:17:22
It's probably my least favorite trope in modern superhero
01:17:25
storytelling is the gag where through some arbitrary
01:17:29
circumstance, the character ends up dressed in a much more
01:17:32
literal way, like their original comic book design, and somebody
01:17:35
makes a joke about how it looks stupid.
01:17:37
Like, that's in everything, every show or movie where it's
01:17:40
like, oh, look, he put on the original Loki helmet.
01:17:43
And then somebody went, that's dumb, you know what I mean?
01:17:46
Just like, yeah. But now I feel like.
01:17:49
Now we are veering more in that direction where it's like people
01:17:53
are like, no, now they have to actually wear it or we won't
01:17:56
accept this. Or the fanboys will get mad and
01:17:59
we can't disappoint the fanboys who will come see the movie
01:18:01
regardless. You're right.
01:18:03
Exactly. Like I just who are we even
01:18:06
catering to anymore? Fanboy word of mouth is so
01:18:10
ethereal. Like if the fanboys say it
01:18:12
stinks everyone will go watch it anyway to be like oh I wonder
01:18:15
how bad it is. Or if they say it's good,
01:18:16
they're like, OK, I was going to go see it anyway because nothing
01:18:18
else hits theaters anymore. Yeah, it's pointless.
01:18:23
It doesn't matter. It's just to generate this,
01:18:26
which is which. I mean, I think that ties into
01:18:28
the point that you're making, which is why I think this season
01:18:31
will be interesting too, 'cause it's like modern, this was
01:18:35
always the case, but especially so with like modern superhero
01:18:39
films. They're way more.
01:18:41
They're just like, like I said, that's Space Jam movie too.
01:18:43
They're products more than films.
01:18:46
Like we've tipped the scale way too far in that direction where
01:18:50
like you said, it doesn't even matter.
01:18:52
Just throw the name Supergirl on there and then people will go
01:18:55
see it. It doesn't matter what the film
01:18:57
actually is, the content of it, as long as it you can cut enough
01:19:01
into a trailer to make it look like a real movie.
01:19:04
And yet for some reason there's people working night and day to
01:19:07
add 100 Easter eggs that people can draw red circles
01:19:11
around in YouTube video thumbnails and it's like who is
01:19:14
this for? Is it for the most die hard
01:19:16
people or is it for like everyone at once?
01:19:19
That's, I mean, that's the sadly ironic thing about it is I
01:19:22
personally know several people who work on those types of films
01:19:26
and they're working very hard. There are tons of people who are
01:19:30
putting a lot of effort in and working very hard on those films
01:19:34
in, you know, every department. But it's just the overall final
01:19:39
product is just like you mentioned earlier, it's very
01:19:43
it's so non committal. They start filming before they
01:19:47
even have a finished script. There's just it just lacks that
01:19:50
intentionality off jump so that you have no idea even what
01:19:55
you've made by the end. Yeah, which is upsetting,
01:19:59
especially, you know, for the people that did put years of
01:20:01
their life into trying to make this the best version of it.
01:20:04
It could be. It's not like there's not people
01:20:06
who aren't putting effort and creativity in, but it's just it
01:20:12
in these older movies. Especially if this genre, even
01:20:16
if they were bad quote, UN quote, it didn't feel that way
01:20:19
that it it's, you know, it was just they were the production
01:20:23
pipeline was very different. Yeah, it's just a forgotten
01:20:27
aspect of a lot of movies you would watch around this time and
01:20:30
say like, wow, this is awful. Where if you showed somebody's
01:20:33
steal now I think they just, like, rate it higher because it
01:20:36
makes sense. Like this story has the
01:20:38
beginning, middle and end and the characters stay the same
01:20:41
throughout and they don't bog it down with scenes of somebody
01:20:45
rolling out next to the steel sidekick suit and going next
01:20:48
time baby and then running away. Like right, right.
01:20:52
There's no sequel baiting and steel.
01:20:53
There's no post credit scenes. There's no Steel will return in
01:20:57
Superman and Lois 30 years from now.
01:21:00
When it's still on the air. Yeah, it's competent.
01:21:04
It's boring, it's bad, hard to watch, and it made the movie for
01:21:10
me going back, a lot more charming than probably anything
01:21:13
on the air right now. That's like a superhero show or
01:21:16
movie. Yeah, which is, yeah, which is
01:21:18
true and upsetting, but. It's true.
01:21:22
I do want to make sure to mention going into Steel I was
01:21:25
like, OK, stunt casting Shaquille O'Neal still active
01:21:29
NBA guy. At the time I assumed there'd be
01:21:31
tongue in cheek superhero references.
01:21:33
How far do you think they went with referencing Shaquille
01:21:36
O'Neal himself? Oh, I'm going to say no less
01:21:41
than two or three references to him being a basketball player of
01:21:45
some kind. That's exactly right.
01:21:48
It is crucial to the plot. When he gets to LA, he leaves
01:21:53
the army. After the opening sequence where
01:21:55
the big explosion happens and some people die, he leaves the
01:21:57
army. He goes back home and he walks
01:21:59
past a group of kids playing basketball on like a street side
01:22:02
court. And the ball rolls over to his
01:22:05
foot and he stops and picks it up.
01:22:07
And the kid kind of gestures like, why don't you take the
01:22:08
shot? And he misses because the
01:22:11
character in the movie is not good at basketball.
01:22:15
And then there's a second instance of this later where
01:22:18
they're just in their like, junkyard cave and he tries to
01:22:20
throw something in a basket from like, vaguely free throw
01:22:23
distance and misses and then says, like, I could never make
01:22:26
those. Which, if you don't know, that's
01:22:30
the joke about Shaquille O'Neal is that he was a very good
01:22:32
basketball player, but people say he can't make free throws.
01:22:36
Yep, and he's laughing at himself.
01:22:38
Yep. And then in the climax of the
01:22:41
film, there's like a shootout inside of a warehouse because
01:22:45
Judd Nelson has made all these super weapons and Steele is
01:22:48
there to stop him. And Steele gets trapped inside a
01:22:51
small room with his little brother and Judd Nelson throws a
01:22:54
grenade in there, a live grenade.
01:22:56
And the brother is like, Shaq, look, there's a hole in the
01:23:00
grate in the ceiling. You just need to throw the
01:23:02
grenade through the opening and we won't die.
01:23:06
And he's like, but I never make these.
01:23:08
And he's like, but you can make a free throw, Shaq.
01:23:11
You can do it. It's weird that he called him
01:23:13
Shaq in the scene, but yeah. Leave it in.
01:23:17
Leave it in, yeah. And then he does.
01:23:20
He makes a free throw with a live grenade and he saves
01:23:24
himself. I hate it now.
01:23:26
Just leave. I like the second one.
01:23:28
Leave the second one in there. Like he he tries to throw
01:23:30
something in the trash can, says he can't make free throws.
01:23:32
That's funny. Leave it in the other ones, cut
01:23:36
them, take them out. Don't need that.
01:23:37
That stuff stinks. All the references to the DC
01:23:39
characters are lame. Like, by the time they leave at
01:23:42
the end, the little brothers, like, oh, I could go out on the
01:23:44
street with you. I could be your Robin.
01:23:46
And like, what does that mean? Like, what are superheroes in a
01:23:50
world where there's a real one? Like, it doesn't make sense.
01:23:52
You should just pretend they don't exist.
01:23:54
Yeah. Otherwise, it's too odd.
01:23:57
It's like, why are you dressed up as a guy from a comic book
01:24:00
and not like, who is this Man of Steel?
01:24:02
I don't know. I don't like it.
01:24:03
I thought those references were lame and none of them were
01:24:05
funny. The one about the bat cave was
01:24:07
super lame. Like the he's driving away from
01:24:09
the police because he's a vigilante and he escapes into
01:24:12
his junkyard hideout through a very like bat cave style
01:24:15
sequence of returning home. And the cops are like, where'd
01:24:18
he go? And the other one kind of like
01:24:19
smirks and is like the bat cave. And it's like, what the heck?
01:24:23
Yes, literally, in this case, he went to a giant.
01:24:27
It doesn't make sense. I don't know.
01:24:29
That's where we were in the 90s. That's the level we have.
01:24:34
Well, I mean, it continues because I was like Shaq, you
01:24:37
know, doing the basketball in the movie.
01:24:39
It reminds me of when the Rock like literally did a rock bottom
01:24:44
in one of the Fast and Furious movies.
01:24:46
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. After spending years being like,
01:24:48
I'm not the wrestler guy anymore, I'm an actor.
01:24:50
Then he comes back around and it's just like he might as well
01:24:52
just start cutting promos as The Rock in the middle of the movie.
01:24:55
Yeah, well, and that's what like changed the trajectory of his
01:24:58
career, honestly, was when he went back to like what if he
01:25:02
should have done from the first place.
01:25:03
Is is just leaning into that persona?
01:25:06
It's. It's a concept in wrestling, the
01:25:08
idea of like cheap pops, like things that will make the crowd
01:25:11
cheer but are very like vapid and have a low return on
01:25:14
investment because eventually people get sick of it.
01:25:16
And that's what Steele is unfortunately chock full of.
01:25:19
And I think if they had leaned just a bit harder into the,
01:25:22
like, real world context that they tried to place this
01:25:25
character in, you'd have a much better version of this movie.
01:25:30
I don't need to go through the whole story.
01:25:32
It's a superhero movie. You get it.
01:25:34
I think the only other point I wanted to make is that the
01:25:36
action is not very good. Like he has a giant hammer, but
01:25:40
he mostly uses the hammer as a gun.
01:25:44
It's a gun also. Yeah, I actually wrote down a
01:25:47
list of all of Steele's powers in the context of the movie
01:25:51
because as a comic book character, he mostly is designed
01:25:54
to model Superman. So like he flies and he has like
01:25:57
super strength. But in the movie Steel, he's
01:26:00
just a guy in a metal suit who has like advanced weaponry.
01:26:03
He's more like, this is maybe a deeper cut.
01:26:06
But in Batman Beyond, the sci-fi future Batman, there's a
01:26:10
character called Armory who just had like every weapon ever made
01:26:15
at his disposal. He just had a giant arsenal of
01:26:17
like, complicated guns and grenades and rocket launchers
01:26:20
and stuff, and he, Steele, felt more like that in this movie
01:26:22
than he did like steel. Oh well I mean that's honestly
01:26:26
fine. Like I I think that's this is
01:26:29
their interpretation which is fine by me.
01:26:32
I think the basic premise is guy puts on high tech suit.
01:26:37
It's a high tech suit movie and he's got a lady in the chair
01:26:41
reading, you know, directions and instructions.
01:26:43
It's just a way to create a rhythm when he's out on his
01:26:45
missions. He does have, in addition to a
01:26:48
hammer, that is a gun. Let's just look at his powers
01:26:51
real quick while we're here. He's got the Sonic blaster gun,
01:26:54
which knocks things over. He's got a laser gun, which
01:26:57
fires a very, very tiny, unimpressive laser beam.
01:27:01
He can turn his entire body into a powerful magnet, which comes
01:27:05
up more than you would expect. It's.
01:27:08
Useful I guess. Yep, he has front and rear view
01:27:13
cameras in his head. In his head, is he?
01:27:18
Wearing a helmet, Yeah, yeah, he's got a helmet on, kind of
01:27:22
because. None.
01:27:23
None of the posters has the oh actually never mind I I see one
01:27:26
image where he has a helmet on. It's just a funny beat in his,
01:27:29
like, first night out as a superhero where these guys try
01:27:32
to sneak up behind him and Sparky in the chair is like
01:27:35
behind you because there's a camera that they have hooked up
01:27:37
to show what's behind his head. And then he turns around and the
01:27:40
guy, in order to sell this very poorly executed bit, goes like
01:27:43
it's like he's got eyes in the back of his head.
01:27:45
It's like that's one of his powers.
01:27:48
He's got a rear view camera. Is 4 wheel drive on this list
01:27:51
too? What is it?
01:27:54
Yeah, he's got traction. Traction.
01:27:56
Control and then that's pretty much it.
01:27:58
He does have a motorcycle and I'd say the most complicated
01:28:02
thing he does is he mounts the hammer gun on the front of the
01:28:05
motorcycle and then can shoot the lasers off of the off of the
01:28:08
bike. These all seem like things to
01:28:10
limit just like visually how much they would have to ask Shaq
01:28:15
to do like physically like all you got to do is stand there
01:28:19
point your laser gun like you don't need to go around and like
01:28:23
move. He just.
01:28:25
Lightly kind of butts people away with the hammer, but
01:28:28
there's very little like swing the hammer kind of motion.
01:28:32
And it's like, given the John Henry connection, I'm surprised
01:28:34
that's not part of it. If anything, it's like, what if
01:28:38
you're going to invoke that character, which they do by
01:28:40
name. They reference the John Henry
01:28:42
myth in the story of this movie. And yet, even though the bad
01:28:45
guys are represented as having, like, advanced technology, Shaq
01:28:50
is battling them with advanced technology.
01:28:52
Like, you know, you see how there's like not really clear
01:28:55
allegory there. Yeah, there's supposed to be an
01:28:58
irony to it. And like, or is he supposed to,
01:29:01
I don't know, like feel bad about using this technology.
01:29:06
I, I there's something there maybe, but there's.
01:29:09
Something there. That's my review of steel.
01:29:11
There's something there. That's it.
01:29:15
There is something there that is correct, yeah.
01:29:22
Right, Frank? That brings us into wrap up and
01:29:25
final scores here on the first episode of Season 2 of the pod.
01:29:29
How do you think this went? I think I'm excited.
01:29:31
I didn't know how forgotten superhero season would feel.
01:29:34
It's pretty fun. Stop stealing my line.
01:29:37
I'm sorry I had to score Scott. We had to score these movies.
01:29:43
Yeah. We don't.
01:29:44
We never did scores before the podcast started, but it's kind
01:29:47
of like the comedic conceit of the whole thing is like, how
01:29:51
did. If you want to know our
01:29:52
thoughts, listen to the last hour and a half.
01:29:54
If you want to score out of 10, skip to the end.
01:29:58
Yeah, yeah. So am I.
01:30:00
Am I going first with my score for Supergirl?
01:30:03
Yes, yes, because you did the first review, I will let you
01:30:06
give your final thoughts on Supergirl and then I'll talk
01:30:07
about Steel again. I, like I said, I really enjoyed
01:30:13
Supergirl. It surprised me.
01:30:17
Like I I went in with low expectations and I got something
01:30:23
I wasn't looking for in the sense of like I said, it was the
01:30:29
most like literal 1 to 1 screen adaptation of a comic book I
01:30:36
think I've ever seen. You know, like it felt like this
01:30:38
is the in a way, like the purest way to translate this material.
01:30:43
And I liked for that. I liked the cast.
01:30:47
I liked the on screen special effects, the visual effects
01:30:53
where where it got a little, you know, hokey, but there's, you
01:30:57
know, even her flying around, which I didn't mention in the
01:31:00
review. There's a lot of like stunt wire
01:31:03
work that actually looked really good because the lead actress
01:31:07
like practiced for like a long time, like leading up to the
01:31:11
filming of the movie to kind of do this like stunt work
01:31:16
essentially herself. And so there's a scene early on
01:31:19
where she's, like, learning about her powers when she first
01:31:22
lands on Earth. And she's kind of like flying
01:31:25
through the trees. And I'm like, this actually
01:31:27
looks really good, You know, like, this looks like
01:31:29
convincing. And then it goes from there to
01:31:32
the classic Christopher Reeve, like flying in front of a blue
01:31:34
screen, you know? Which is fine.
01:31:36
That's like iconography for the series at that point.
01:31:39
Totally, totally. So, yeah.
01:31:42
And of course, Ellis being there was a huge.
01:31:45
Pop Die Hard bubby. We're going to sound insane to
01:31:52
someone who has not seen Die Hard.
01:31:55
Yeah, which go watch that if you haven't.
01:31:59
Yeah. So I don't know.
01:32:00
I mean kind of like you just said with with steel.
01:32:04
It's not good in most senses of the word.
01:32:09
It's not a good in the in the way of being good versus bad.
01:32:13
Yeah, so hard to score. I'm going to score it based on
01:32:18
just like my appreciation for it.
01:32:21
It feels like a six. I'm going to say 6 out of 10
01:32:24
feels. Sort of for Supergirl, I think
01:32:26
that's important to restate since we're kicking off a new
01:32:29
competition here. We generally use the ratings out
01:32:32
of 10 to be like, is this the best version of this movie?
01:32:36
We could have gotten some things on paper, like there's no
01:32:40
version of Supergirl 1984 that's going to crack the AFI Top 100.
01:32:45
That doesn't mean it can't get a high score if it, like, hits its
01:32:49
target. And so I think it sticks out.
01:32:51
Its head is totally fair. It was aiming to be a fun
01:32:54
superhero romp in the style of Christopher Reeve Superman and
01:32:58
somewhat succeeded. You know, it's nothing crazy.
01:33:00
You're not going to go out of your way to see it, but it
01:33:03
sounds like it was a fun time. Yeah.
01:33:05
But that being said, I would recommend it.
01:33:06
I mean, honestly, if you're interested, especially with that
01:33:09
new superhero movie coming out, like I think you specifically
01:33:12
would like it if you watched it. So I like Supergirl.
01:33:15
I think that you're going to see, if not already, a lot of
01:33:19
like attention on this movie because the new ones coming out,
01:33:22
I'm sure we are not the first or only people to think like let's
01:33:25
talk about the old Supergirl, but we're just going to assume
01:33:28
we did it the best. Yeah, probably.
01:33:31
I mean, probably. Arguably, yeah, because.
01:33:33
We're not nerds about it. Don't be weird.
01:33:37
But like, yeah, no, we're the best, yeah.
01:33:39
Yeah, yeah, because we're cool, you know, so cool.
01:33:42
Don't you want to hear what too cool guys think about Supergirl?
01:33:45
Just a couple of cool guys talking about movies.
01:33:50
All right. 6 out of 10 any anything else as part of that
01:33:53
wrap up or do you feel good about it?
01:33:55
No, yeah, I feel good about it. I I it was a positive
01:33:58
experience. It was a good one for the first
01:34:00
episode of this new season, I think.
01:34:02
I think it feels feels right. Yeah, absolutely.
01:34:05
I think it's very funny that we never know what the other person
01:34:08
is going to pick and yet we often find like an odd, oddly
01:34:12
obvious connecting threat. Like the fact that we both
01:34:14
picked Superman adjacent characters for episode one.
01:34:17
Who is the most like well known superhero of all?
01:34:20
That's awesome. I don't know.
01:34:21
I'm just that's kind of serendipitous how that turned
01:34:23
out. Yeah, yeah, it is cool.
01:34:25
Just a couple of cool guys, man. Just a couple.
01:34:27
Of cool guys watching movies, etcetera.
01:34:34
Anyway, over to Steel. Steel was fine.
01:34:38
Steel is probably based on how you've described it, not as good
01:34:42
as Supergirl, not as much of A like.
01:34:45
Definitely watch Steel because in the end it is kind of slow.
01:34:48
I didn't get into it a lot, but like the action scenes are very
01:34:52
long and drawn out and nothing really happens.
01:34:54
There's like a 10 minute scene of Steel chasing a guy through
01:34:59
like a train yard while the like trains are like kind of coming
01:35:03
in to be like reconnected. So there's just these like
01:35:06
really slow moving train cars and they keep trying to like
01:35:10
ramp up the tension by being like look out.
01:35:12
And then he just like, gently gets out of the way.
01:35:16
That's the pace. That's the pace of steel overall
01:35:19
is like, what could we physically get Shaq to do?
01:35:22
That's the that's the ceiling for the movie.
01:35:25
And the man was training for the Olympics.
01:35:27
So on one hand he's like a superhuman athlete, and on the
01:35:30
other he can barely dodge a train.
01:35:33
Oh, that was probably part of it, though.
01:35:35
Like why they specifically like gave him those gadgets and
01:35:39
filmed it in a way to limit his mobility.
01:35:41
They're like, we can't endanger this man.
01:35:43
We can't let him. Like no possibility of him
01:35:45
getting hurt while he's making this movie because he has to go
01:35:47
perform in the Olympics. That's.
01:35:48
True, I know that the USA dream team for basketball was the 92
01:35:53
Olympics. I want to say I don't know how
01:35:54
USA did in 96 but if they lost I think we can blame Shaq and
01:35:58
therefore steal. Yeah, yeah, I already did.
01:36:01
Honestly already did it back. Then I blamed them.
01:36:05
Yeah. I was 5 and I was like Nah.
01:36:06
Nah, that's not good. Try again, buddy.
01:36:11
That's what I said, yeah. It was pretty cool back then.
01:36:14
Too. Yeah, just a cool guy watching
01:36:18
Steel in theaters going not my style.
01:36:21
Not for me, don't like it? Yeah.
01:36:24
So steel is aggressively OK. And for that reason, I think I
01:36:27
would rate it like a four out of 10.
01:36:29
It had potential to be better than that, but it kind of
01:36:33
whiffed it in the third act by just having a really uninspired
01:36:37
conclusion. I mean, even the way he beats
01:36:39
Judd Nelson at the end is so boring.
01:36:43
Like Judd Nelson's whole thing is he's like, I'm making these
01:36:46
dangerous weapons that are more powerful because they're like,
01:36:49
unsafe to use. And so he points a gun at check
01:36:53
that's like another Sonic Boom gun or something.
01:36:55
And he's like, not even you can stand up to this.
01:36:57
And then he fires it at him and it ricochets off of Shaq and
01:37:00
just hits him and he dies. And it's like Shaq didn't do
01:37:03
anything. Shaq's just very lucky that Jed
01:37:06
Nelson was wrong about that. Yeah, yeah, that's the best kind
01:37:10
of victory where you just don't even try really your.
01:37:12
Opponent just ring outs themselves and you're like, I
01:37:14
guess I won. Cool, cool.
01:37:18
Just make another boring Batman reference and then we'll close
01:37:20
out the movie. Took that.
01:37:23
Off the list, so yeah. Steele almost just called the
01:37:26
movie Shaq Steele starring Shaq as a four out of 10.
01:37:29
Nothing wrong with it. I think if you're interested in
01:37:31
that character and are really in the weeds and wanting to watch
01:37:34
some older superhero stuff, I wouldn't say like you're going
01:37:36
to have a bad time, but it's very skippable.
01:37:38
Or Supergirl sounds like a little bit more of a little bit
01:37:41
more of a jab between the two. Yeah, sure.
01:37:44
I would agree to that. OK, well that brings us to the
01:37:47
end of first episode of our Forgotten Superheroes season.
01:37:50
The way things work is that we have banked those scores.
01:37:53
So I recommended Supergirl. So I get 6 points because that's
01:37:56
what Frank gave it as a score. Frank, you get 4 points for
01:37:59
recommending steal. So I win today's episode.
01:38:02
Hooray. But also we're going to keep
01:38:08
track of cumulative point totals across this entire season, which
01:38:12
will be shorter than our last one.
01:38:13
I think we're eyeing maybe a six episode season, so by the end
01:38:16
whoever's movies have gotten a cumulative higher ranking,
01:38:19
they'll be like the season 2 champion, which I'll be honest,
01:38:23
I'm envisioning a A2 peat. What do they call it when you
01:38:26
win twice? A repeat?
01:38:27
I guess they. Call it not not going to happen
01:38:30
is what they. Call it Mr. Repeat.
01:38:32
Yeah. So we'll see if I can win Season
01:38:34
2 or if Frank is going to is going to pull it back.
01:38:36
It's very close and all of season 1 is very close as well.
01:38:39
So still a lot of time. The only other thing we have
01:38:41
left to do for today, Frank, is we have to pick our two movies
01:38:44
for into the next episode. I guess because I went first or
01:38:47
no sorry because I won episode 1.
01:38:49
I will give the first recommendation for next time and
01:38:51
then you can pick one for me. Yeah, right.
01:38:53
Fine. My list on my phone, it closed
01:38:57
on me. I got to pull it back up.
01:39:01
Pick one at random. Iron Man 2 No, you are going to
01:39:06
watch for next time, 1992's The Shadow starring Alec Baldwin.
01:39:14
Oh, you know what? I think I had this written down
01:39:16
on my list too. The.
01:39:18
Shadow is in the story tradition of like hope, action heroes.
01:39:23
These were people who were part of like 1930s serial films and
01:39:29
TV spots and stuff like shorthand kind of Lone Ranger
01:39:33
type characters. And there was a several movies
01:39:36
in the 90s that brought back these guys.
01:39:38
But we've seen a couple of them. Like, I know you and I both saw
01:39:42
The Rocketeer. That's a good one.
01:39:44
That's a fun movie, yeah. The Shadow, I think, is in the
01:39:47
same vague category as something like the Phantom or the
01:39:50
Rocketeer, if you've seen those, but I don't think either of us
01:39:52
have seen it, right? No, I I've not seen it.
01:39:55
Awesome, 1992 is the shadow. That'll be your movie to review
01:39:59
next time. Cool.
01:40:00
Alec Baldwin? Nothing contentious there at
01:40:02
all. Nothing.
01:40:03
Contentious about Mr. Baldwin. Great guy, I guess.
01:40:08
Yeah. Looking forward to it.
01:40:13
No, that'll be fine. I I am interested.
01:40:15
Like I said, I had I had that one jotted down too.
01:40:17
So that's a that's a good pick. Thank you.
01:40:20
And it looks like we're what is this season 1?
01:40:23
I also have a 90s movie. So what is this, season 1?
01:40:30
That's a joke for the long time fans.
01:40:34
Remember the last episode? Yeah, that one.
01:40:35
Remember the one right before? This Yeah, I have for you 1993's
01:40:43
The Meteor Man, which is a film that is produced, written,
01:40:51
directed and starring Robert Townsend, who, fun fact, I've
01:40:57
met, actually. OK, I worked on his documentary
01:41:05
film a few years ago, The Making of the Five Heartbeats, which
01:41:10
was a documentary about the making of the Five Heartbeats,
01:41:13
which is the previous. Stand up actress, what's the
01:41:22
deal? Heartbeat.
01:41:29
But yeah, I just thought that was interesting.
01:41:30
This is this is like a sort of like cult superhero comedy film,
01:41:36
I believe. I've of course never seen it,
01:41:39
but it's maybe the thing he's most well known for.
01:41:43
And I know he briefly had a sitcom series as well.
01:41:48
So he just seems like just a a cool filmmaker.
01:41:53
And this was like a passion project of his that I think has
01:41:57
since fallen under ownership of Marvel.
01:41:59
So I think Meteor Man is like officially a Marvel character
01:42:01
now too. Oh interesting.
01:42:03
I don't know about the shadow. They might also be under DC or
01:42:07
Marvel. Or maybe it's independent.
01:42:08
But that sounds interesting. I like the idea of changing up
01:42:11
genres, going more like comedy. Yeah.
01:42:14
No, I think this will be hopefully good.
01:42:16
I don't know. Hopefully good.
01:42:18
That's the point of the show. It's called double feature.
01:42:22
I get it now. Well, that about does it for
01:42:38
episode 1, Frank, I guess before we go, we can quickly plug
01:42:42
socials and if any, any updates about your movie if we have
01:42:46
them. So if you want to follow Meet
01:42:48
Your double feature, we release episodes every two weeks on
01:42:51
alternating Thursdays on all major podcast platforms as well
01:42:54
as on YouTube. You can follow our socials on
01:42:56
Instagram at Meet Your Double feature Blue Sky at mydf pod, or
01:43:03
you can visit our website meetyourdoublefeature.com, which
01:43:06
has all of our episodes as well as a couple of like written blog
01:43:10
reviews and additional content that we're uploading over time.
01:43:13
So that's where you can find us. Really just search Meet Your
01:43:16
Double Feature anywhere and you'll find it.
01:43:18
But Frank, I don't know if there is any news right now, but
01:43:20
Frank's actually in the process of releasing his first
01:43:23
independent film himself. It's called Meteor Man.
01:43:26
It's pretty good. Pretty good.
01:43:30
But no, just Frank, just in case we have any new listeners, do
01:43:32
you want to just generally plug the movie that you're working
01:43:34
on? Yeah, so if you want to check
01:43:37
out the feature film that I produced and was also the
01:43:42
cinematographer for called Nate Mariah in Venice.
01:43:46
It just finished its festival run late last year and is going
01:43:50
to be available for streaming online early this year.
01:43:53
So if you want to keep up to date with that, you can find us
01:43:56
on Instagram at Sardonic Motion Pictures and on our website at
01:44:01
Sardonic mp.com. Yeah, absolutely.
01:44:04
Once we have more firm details about the streaming release for
01:44:07
Nate and Mariah and Venice, you can be sure we'll be telling you
01:44:10
about that as often as we can. But for now, just stay tuned and
01:44:13
please rejoin us in two weeks for the next episode of Meet
01:44:16
Your Double Feature. Bye.
01:44:19
I knew he was bringing it back. He's doing it again.
01:44:22
We're back. We're back.
01:44:34
Coming up next. It's.
01:44:36
The Meteor Man followed by the Shadow on Meet Your double
01:44:40
feature.