Another Pass at The Island of Dr. Moreau

Father! Father! Why is there pain? Why is there the pain that is The Island of Dr. Moreau? Micah McCaw asks this of Case and Sam when they reflect on the troubled adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel.

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Transcript

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00:00
Sam Alicea
But somehow trying to think about a timeline for this or if I had to make an outline to explain this to a class, I would be wait, I forgot. Wait. I have to go back. I have to go back towards because Val Kilmer, like, he finds him in the middle of the ocean. But this might have been set up. So I don't know if they shot down the plane, but that's not the point. So anyway, so they find him in the ocean and then there's like this little Pygmy guy, and he plays piano with Marlon Brando. And it just like, forever. Oh, and then there's Marlon Brando's daughter. And I just feel like my brain was mush after was like literally looked at my notes and I was like, they make no sense. Just like this movie. Yeah.

00:43
Micah McCaw
And you describing the plot just now kind of was me going, oh, okay. That was the plot of the movie. Welcome to certain POVs, another Pass podcast.

00:58
Case Aiken
With Case and Sam where we take.

01:00
Micah McCaw
Another look at movies that we find fascinating but flawed. Let's see how we could have fixed them.

01:07
Case Aiken
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another Pass podcast. I'm Case Aiken. And as always, I am joined by my co host, sam Alicea.

01:14
Sam Alicea
Hi.

01:14
Case Aiken
And today we are continuing our trek through so many weird, anthropomorphic animal movies. You thought we would be done after the Planet of the Apes. You thought we'd be done after.

01:27
Sam Alicea
You were wrong. You were wrong.

01:30
Case Aiken
But today we kind of have the father of them all, the Piece of Resistance. Today we are talking about the 1996 adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. And for that conversation, we are joined by Micah McCaw.

01:46
Micah McCaw
Hello. I'm happy to visit the island and potentially come back a little less man and a little more animal and definitely less sane. Absolutely.

01:59
Case Aiken
For anyone involved, either in the movie itself or the production as a whole, a little less sane is definitely the response.

02:07
Sam Alicea
I actually think that the great thing about this movie is that the trivia is almost more fun than the movie. And I was like, wow, there's just so much that happened behind the scenes. And this movie is a train wreck, partially because of all of that bullshit.

02:27
Case Aiken
Obviously, this movie was always going to be on our list of movies to talk about at some point because it's just such a weird f****** movie. But it's also the kind of movie where you're like, well, the fact that a movie actually was made almost makes this a fifth episode kind of movie because it's just like, holy s***, this thing actually got into theaters. And every step of the way you're like, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And then somehow it made it to theaters. I remember seeing commercials. I remember watching, like, behind the scenes featurettes on this movie. I was excited for this movie when it came.

02:59
Sam Alicea
Did you see this movie in theaters?

03:01
Case Aiken
I didn't see it in theaters, but I did see it shortly after on home video, because this was 1996, so I was twelve and I probably could have gotten away with it because it ultimately, I think, did end up with a PG 13 rating. But that doesn't mean that my parents were itching to take me to at the time.

03:22
Sam Alicea
Yeah, my parents had no interest in this film, so we did not see this.

03:27
Micah McCaw
I have to say, of all of the things that I'd heard about this movie, the Marlon Brando of it all, the Val Kilmer of it all, bad weather, all of this stuff, the most surprising thing to me was I was not expecting there to be an orgy scene in this. Mean, it's not really graphic in any way, but I was sort of dumbfounded. I was already dumbfounded. And then when it got to that point, I was just like, what is going on? This is one of the wildest movies maybe ever.

04:01
Case Aiken
Yeah. For people not familiar with this property.

04:09
Micah McCaw
You really should watch it. It's crazy people, I think, just for.

04:13
Case Aiken
The value of being like, well, that was really weird.

04:15
Sam Alicea
That was an experience, for sure.

04:19
Case Aiken
But this is based on an 1896 novel by HG. Wells and is kind of the prototype example of like, mad scientists with a bunch of experiments on an island, as far as I can tell. Yeah, in the way that HG. Wells is kind of the prototype for a lot of specific types of stories that aren't really of themselves truly groundbreaking in terms of like, well, War of the World is like, what if the colonizers were not us? Which is, I know, a huge innovation for the British.

04:51
Sam Alicea
And in this case.

04:54
Case Aiken
What if the subhuman creatures weren't us, just treating real humans as subhuman, but actual animals that were then converting? There's a lot of stuff going on in that book. And what I will say is that it's interesting looking at this movie, because the story itself is actually fairly basic when you get down to it, where it's like, all right, we've got a mad scientist off away. An outsider shows up and is forced to observe the workings of the mad scientist. And then the experiments all go awry and everyone has to flee to survive. That's the basic idea of it. Which is kind of a bog standard Sci-Fi monster movie kind of trope. And in this case here's, a whole island of our beast men who decided to go back to being beasts because we are monsters to them. We have done terrible stuff.

05:43
Case Aiken
But man, the actual way it's like, put on screen here is just a lot the whole thing is just I don't even know what to say.

05:58
Sam Alicea
I'm kind of flabbergasted, honestly, this movie, it has such a feel of like it's not even twisty and turny but it makes your brain feel like you don't even know where to begin. Like, if I had to describe the film to someone, even though the concept is really basic, right? It's, like, super basic, and we've seen it replicated in thousands of other monster movies. I mean, you could even argue that somewhat jurassic park kind of takes same beats, right? Like, experiment. It's a wondrous experiment. Although there it's more wondrous, right. But it's giant beasts, and it's just the scientist that thinks, yeah, we're doing this thing that's amazing, and then everything goes wrong and people have to escape the thing that went wrong. Right. Totally basic. We've seen this over and over again.

06:48
Sam Alicea
But somehow trying to think about a timeline for this or if I had to make an outline to explain this to a class, I would be wait, I forgot. Wait, I have to go back. I have to go back towards because Val Kilmer, like, he finds him in the middle of the ocean, but this might have been set up. So I don't know if they shot down the plane, but that's not the point. So, anyway, so they find them in the ocean, and then there's, like, this little Pygmy guy, and he plays piano with Forever, and then there's Marlon Brando's daughter. And I just feel like my brain was mush. After would, like, literally looked at my notes, and I was like, they make no sense. Just like this movie. Yeah.

07:31
Micah McCaw
And you describing the plot just now kind of was me going, oh, okay. That was the plot of the movie.

07:41
Sam Alicea
Well, I think one of the biggest flaws of this film is that there's never a why of it. Like, having someone who's never read the H. D. Wells version, didn't see the older film. There's never a reason why explained at all by Dr. Moreau why he decided to do these experiments other than pure. Like, usually there's something there. We're used to villains giving us kind of like especially now, we're used to be like, I wanted to cure my wife, or, I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that. Maybe even like the fact that he's got an allergy to the sun. No, there's never anything that is ever fully explained as to why he's conducting these experiments, like, what led him down this path after inventing, as the movie states, velcro seems like a very different science, but sure. Okay.

08:42
Case Aiken
Well, I mean, that's just a flippant joke at that point, because when you actually there's an Easter egg that in Swedish. His Nobel Prize is for genetic experiments. I found out when I was doing research on this, not that I can actually read Swedish because I'm not that talented. I am a hack. But so was everyone involved in this movie, because holy s***. So we've mentioned the Marlon Brando of it all. Marlon Brando is a big reason why this movie both happened and also why it is the way it's fair.

09:16
Sam Alicea
I think that's fair to say for a man who was already wearing an earpiece being fed his lines. Yeah, I think it's fair to say.

09:24
Micah McCaw
Of an earpiece you can see in the movie.

09:27
Sam Alicea
Yeah, right. I mean, sometimes it's hidden by his know.

09:33
Micah McCaw
But yes, you and the thing that I was trying to reconcile with this movie, it's kind of this beautiful poetic thing where you have Marlon Brando being a very famous actor who is only told yes for longer than he's been told no in his life. Okay. I understand that messes with your brain. But on the one hand, you have Apocalypse Now where he shows up on set, he's the wrong weight. He doesn't agree to do anything that he's asked to do, and Francis Ford Coppola is able to turn that into a masterpiece. And then you have this movie on this side where it's all the same things from Marlon Brando, and it's what you expected Apocalypse Now to be. So my thesis is this is the bad Apocalypse now, I guess.

10:26
Case Aiken
Right. Well, and what's interesting to make that comparison, because Apocalypse Now gets brought up a lot in all the behind the scenes stuff. Every article about it, apparently, that was the fact that Moreau is a Kurtz like figure was appealing to Marlon Brando, which you would think you would try to do it better this time instead. And we'll get into some of the reasons why in a minute. But in the case of both Apocalypse Now and in this movie, there is a documentary that is arguably more interesting than the actual movie. And in this case, that documentary is lost souls the doomed journey of Richard Stanley's island of Dr. Moreau, which I watched last night and is also a fever dream.

11:06
Micah McCaw
Yeah, I didn't know it existed till you emailed and said you were watching the doc. And I think I'm going to have to set aside some time this week to watch it.

11:16
Case Aiken
I will warn you that there is a lot of interviews with Richard Stanley, the original director of this movie we'll get into. He is he is also a pretty creepy and weird dude, and he has a strange monotone that will haunt your nightmares.

11:37
Micah McCaw
I got to see what else he directed because I'm not familiar with that name. Really? Beyond.

11:44
Case Aiken
Well, so the thing is, this movie kind of tanked his career, and then he didn't really come back to directing until, like, his next the next movie he directed was 23 years later.

11:57
Micah McCaw
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And is that color out of space?

12:02
Case Aiken
Yes.

12:03
Micah McCaw
Okay.

12:05
Sam Alicea
Yeah.

12:05
Case Aiken
Well, I guess he directed some short films in the interim, but went off the reservation on this movie, literally.

12:18
Sam Alicea
I read in one of the trivia things that there was a rumor that he actually had the makeup artists put him in costume so he could be an extra to watch in the background after he was fired, because it was, like, four days in and he was fired from the set, and then he basically just stuck around in costume. Now, that has not been, like, confirmed.

12:38
Case Aiken
Oh, no, that's the thing. It has been confirmed. It's 100% true. And in fact, they point out which one he is in a bunch of the shots.

12:45
Micah McCaw
You point it out, too.

12:46
Case Aiken
Yeah. No. So in the documentary because the documentary is recent. Ish it's in the last 20 years, as opposed to in the mid 90s. So he actually talks about it where there's so much to talk about. It's, like, hard to even sell just.

13:03
Sam Alicea
The insanity, but we definitely need to talk about this.

13:07
Case Aiken
F***. Christ, there's so many things. This movie was a cavalcade of f*** ups from start to finish. Everything about it is just like, oh, yeah, that was never going to work. We have this indie horror director. He had done a bunch of really small but successful low budget movies that was getting some buzz, and it was like, all right, let's make the jump to a bigger budget because the property is enough of a name, because it's H. G. Wells the studio took the script that Stanley had written, and they liked that script. And then they tried to attach Roman Polanski to direct. Now, that would have been bad. That would have been the wrong choice, just because f*** him. But in the process of that, they tried to attach Marlon Brando to it, and he wasn't sure about it.

14:01
Case Aiken
Richard stanley got a meeting and was able to, through some fuckery, get him one one by way of Marlon Brando constantly cranking up the AC so that the exec from the studio that was with them for the meeting fell asleep, because that was just the thing that happens when it gets too cold. So he convinced Marlon Brando to be like, yeah, I'll back you on this movie. You sound like a weird.

14:27
Sam Alicea
Marlon Brando of it.

14:29
Case Aiken
Exactly. Exactly. So they were like, yeah, f*** it. Sure. Why not? And with Marlon Brando attached, the budget ballooned. And so that's the starting point on it. And this is actually where it's like, this might actually go. Okay, the budget is getting a little too big for what this director probably was capable of without an infrastructure in place. And I think that the ultimate spoiler for my pitch. Ultimately, they should have put a decent assistant director with him because he had a vision, but he was used to being on a tiny set where everyone is doing everything and it's all hands on deck, and everyone has to be passionate about everything. When you're on a small production, it's a labor of love.

15:11
Case Aiken
And if you're on a big production and no one f****** wants to be there, you need people who can bark orders and stay organized and do all the things because your lead actors aren't doing that for you, which they would on a small production where they have as much skin in the know, right? So they get Marlon Brando on board for this. And at that point all of a sudden, all these other actors want to come on board because Marlon Brando is attached to, you know, he's old. He doesn't have much of a career left at this point.

15:40
Sam Alicea
I forget if he has he's still Marlon Brando. I mean, he is the Marlon Brando of it all. And he is kind of crazy. But he's.

15:51
Micah McCaw
Who wouldn't try and do it, right?

15:53
Sam Alicea
Ron Perlman said he wanted to work on it. Val kilmer also. And even David Thorales, I always say his name oddly. So sorry if I'm mispronouncing want like Marlon Brando was a huge draw for know, like, oh, we're going to come. We're going to work on this because this is a living legend. Maybe in the Twilight of his well.

16:19
Case Aiken
And that is kind of the key thing. So with Brando attached, bruce Willis becomes attached.

16:26
Micah McCaw
Right?

16:26
Case Aiken
And he's going to be the lead, like the UN explorer who comes in and the name changes from the book to the movie and ultimately is played by David Clevelis. So he's attached for that. And then they're like, OK, cool. We've got this really famous actor here. We've got this other famous actor here. And they get James Woods attached to B. Montgomery. And you know what? We spent a good chunk of time on the Hercules episode just saying f*** James Woods. I echo that sentiment. He would have been better than Val Kilmer because f***, like when talking about people being checked out.

17:05
Micah McCaw
But I recently watched vampires. John Carpenter's vampires for the first time. And James Wood does have some good performances in his career. But I mean, even this time, this is around vampires time, yikes on the acting, Know.

17:24
Sam Alicea
I don't know if it would have been a better choice. Val Kilmer is the perfect jerk for this. I'm going to push back on you Case. I'm going to say I actually like his performance in this do I think.

17:36
Case Aiken
He was you like what made it onto screen. But there's some behind the scenes s***. I'm building it to it because at the moment we haven't gotten to why.

17:44
Sam Alicea
Val Kilmer is even there. I know that he's definitely a pain in the a** behind the screen. I know for sure about it. I did not see what they cut. But I think in general, they got what they needed for him on screen for this film. And the character was an that was it was fine. He was fine. Go on though, because this is an interesting so.

18:08
Case Aiken
So we've got a good lineup. We've got Bruce Willis, we've got Marlon Brando, we've got James Woods. Bruce Willis is in the process of getting a divorce from Demi Moore and drops out because of personal issues. That are going on with the movie. So all of a sudden, it's like, okay, we no longer have our lead, and they're trying to find a person who can replace him. And this is right after Batman forever, and they happen to stumble onto Val Kilmer, who it's like, yeah, that's a fair enough trade from a concept level of like, yeah, all right, val Kilmer, like, swapping in for Bruce Willis. Sure. All right. And he wants to work with Brando. Sure. Okay, cool. Let's make that all work.

18:46
Case Aiken
Val Kilmer apparently also getting divorced at this time, but also just kind of a p****, negotiates down from his still getting paid the same amount to having to shoot 40% less than what he had initially signed on for.

19:02
Sam Alicea
To be fair, he did learn that he was getting divorced by turning on his TV.

19:06
Case Aiken
That is also true.

19:09
Sam Alicea
Might have, umped, the jerk factor there.

19:13
Case Aiken
Yes. Although you could argue that the jerk factor.

19:16
Sam Alicea
Yes, you could argue both ways, but go on.

19:20
Micah McCaw
Well, if I may cut in here. Have you both watched the Val documentary?

19:27
Case Aiken
No.

19:28
Micah McCaw
And are you familiar with oh, okay. So throughout his entire life, he's been filming everything, and so he always has a camera with him. And so there's this documentary on Amazon called Val, and they went through and they edited all the footage. So there's all this crazy behind the scenes at Top Gun and Batman and island of Dr. Moreau and stuff. But it's funny because his son narrates it because of his voice issues and whatnot, but he writes all the stuff, and so the narration is basically him. And hearing his point of view on what happened was very interesting compared to what maybe is the reality of the situation, because he's presenting it like, I was so excited to work on this movie with Marlon Brando, and then John Frankenheimer wouldn't allow Marlon Brando to be the genius he's supposed to.

20:24
Micah McCaw
And so it was a really devastating experience. But then you're saying which is true, of course. That right from the get go, he's like, can I work 40% less time and not be there as much as possible? So I think he's looking at the past with a little rose colored glasses.

20:41
Case Aiken
Right. Because as you just said, it was John Frankenheimer that he's complaining about, who at the time, was not slated to be the director. It was Richard Stanley who wrote the screenplay, who was slated to be the director. So Kilmer is already, like, playing diva on this whole thing, and then we haven't even got to set yet. He negotiates down 40%, and as a result, they're locked into him being in the movie, they're locked into him being on the poster, but they can't use him for nearly enough of enough film time to actually have him be the lead, which is, again, the part he signed up for. They have to move him to the part of Montgomery, which actually pushes out James Woods.

21:23
Micah McCaw
Oh, so he was going to play the Douglas. Oh, I didn't catch that. Okay, right.

21:31
Case Aiken
So he gets pushed over to the Montgomery role, which is kind of a bit like it's Val Kilmer. So he's memorable in that. And he's on the poster and he's in all the trailers because he's Val Kilmer. But it's sort of the henchmen role in this one. Or it's kind of like Nedry in, you know, like, sam, thank you for bringing that one up because that's like a modern, what hath science wrought kind of property that is directly descended from the island of Dr. Moreau. So we move him over to the dragon character for moreau, and then all of a sudden we have a big gaping hole where the lead's supposed to be.

22:08
Case Aiken
So initially it was going to be Rob Morrow who got to set and they got in the first three days of filming and he cried to the or rather not cried to. He called the producers crying and asking to be taken off the shoot out of his contract because it was going so poorly. Like already three days in, he complains about and this is kind of the thing again, it's all of a sudden a big budget movie like this is 1996. So like a $40 million budget is actually pretty big. Working on this movie with lots of special effects, lots of Pyrotechnics, lots of stuff going on. When you're on a small indie movie, you can be like, all right, no, you run over this way. We're going to get a couple of angles. We'll cut it together to look like something good.

22:53
Case Aiken
And in this case, he was terrified of getting hurt because there's explosions going on. I'm actually surprised to not see more stuff about injuries on set just because it sounds like it was a complete clusterfuck those couple of days that Richard Stanley was there. And some of that is him being a novice. But some of that is just like coming at it with not a strong enough crew to really kind of guide the whole thing. Because when you're dealing with something that is that big, you need to have a lot of people who can take charge of the very particular departments that they're in. Anyway, so Morrow leaves the shoot at around this time is when Richard Stanley gets fired. Production has to halt completely. They have to get a new lead. They have to get a new director.

23:37
Case Aiken
And everyone who is there in Australia filming is just waiting. Fortunately, the special effects team is actually still going. Like they're developing more and more characters because they were already under time constraints anyway, because there's a lot of really elaborate stuff that they're trying to build. Which is why when people talk about this movie in a positive light, they are exclusively talking about the Sam Winston special effects, because there's a lot of really cool puppetry going on. A lot of really cool makeup going on. Lots of really cool stuff. Anyway, eventually they get John Frankenheimer to come on. And I forget the name of his ad that he works with all the time, but his ad is on the documentary because Frankenheimer passed away by the time they made the documentary. And he is f****** hilarious. He has no time for anyone's bullshit.

24:24
Case Aiken
They're able to somewhat wrangle everyone because they have to get this movie made. There are a lot of people, so probably especially because they had this break there where everyone was still getting paid because they were being paid to be down in Australia with these fairly extensive per diems. And they're kind of in the middle of nowhere. The shoot is an hour away from where the hotel that everyone is staying at is, which means that every day it's a two hour commute for everyone just to get deep enough into the jungle so that they can get a good angle at this mountain that they want to have focused in every shot. Although it's also at the epicenter of this terrible rainstorm region that is constantly being hit. And so most days you can't actually see it.

25:13
Case Aiken
They were like, oh, we got like three shots where we could actually see the mountain because there were so many clouds and mist in the way. So this entire location, when you mentioned.

25:21
Micah McCaw
The mountain, I had no idea what you were talking about.

25:25
Case Aiken
They were like, oh, it's going to be so symbolic and creepy and cool. It'll look like a volcano kind of thing. No, they couldn't get any of that in. Yeah, the first ad was like, yeah. No, my first thing when I was assigned to this is I brought up a weather map to look at it and I saw everything. Like, if it was red, it was fairly dry. And as it gets in more and more blue colors, it gets wetter and wetter. And then there's this little purple sliver that was supposed to be like the craziest rainfall that Australia was expected to get that year. And that was exactly where our set was. It's like, oh, man, that's just going to be rough right there. And I should also note that a lot of cast didn't like the changeover.

26:03
Case Aiken
Faruza Bulk, who had been signed on to play the doctor's daughter, this cat lady character who's not in the books but has been in subsequent adaptations. So they wanted to keep that kind of a character tried to quit, and by way of forcing this one guy, who at the time was acting as a limo driver for the crew or for the casting crew to drive her to Sydney, which was on the other side of the continent, very cool. And when they got there, the producers got her on the phone and said, or rather her agent got her on the phone and was like, your career will be completely destroyed. Like, they will say that you walked off of a multimillion dollar set and you will never be able to get work again. You have to go back.

26:44
Case Aiken
So she had to turn around and go right back. F****** wild f****** shoot. But they get Frankenheimer on there, and this is when Brando tries to go full. So where to start with some of this weird s*** that he's pulling on this.

27:00
Sam Alicea
I mean, first of all, when David Hurray shows up, he tells him because he's a replacement, he tells him to turn back, that this is not the film he wants to be on because it's cursed. So he's very dramatic.

27:16
Micah McCaw
Thules. Wait, did you say Thules?

27:18
Sam Alicea
Yeah, I always change his name. Thules.

27:22
Micah McCaw
Okay.

27:24
Sam Alicea
Casey Thules. Thuis. He tells him that, like, the first day.

27:28
Micah McCaw
Oh, my gosh.

27:29
Sam Alicea
So, like, David was saying, he was really excited because he's meeting Marlon Brando. And of he's a replacement, right? So he walks on and Marlon Brando says to him, david, this isn't the film for you. This film is cursed. You should walk away.

27:46
Case Aiken
Well, and actually, sorry, I forgot to mention this part. So before they were able to get Brando on set, marlon Brando's daughter committed suicide. And so there was massive delays in him actually even arriving, which I don't want to downplay. Like, yes, that was an intensely sad thing that's going on, but just more of this f****** thing being cursed. Apparently, while all the production team or while the special effects team were doing all these crazy awesome makeup things that they were doing in the break while the movie was shut down, all the cast and crew were just having orgies and just doing shitloads of drugs. And the hotel became just this giant party place. One of the guys who was just on the I think he was an extra was like, yeah, our periums were crazy high. I bought this elaborate radio controlled car.

28:33
Case Aiken
Those car track stuff that used to be really popular in the Guess probably are still for enthusiasts, but it was this hugely elaborate thing that was just, like, set up in his hotel room. And they have all these behind the scenes documentary people filming stuff. So there's just shots of these big party spaces, all the extras, like, yeah, I did so many drugs during this whole thing. It became just a giant, drug filled f*** fest behind the scenes. And the movie is a giant drug filled f*** fest on top of that. So there's a lot of self reinforcing elements going on.

29:10
Micah McCaw
You peel back one layer, and there's five more.

29:13
Case Aiken
Right, well, so I mentioned the guy who was the limo driver. This guy is really interesting because he had three different jobs because he kept getting fired from different ones. And that was job number two. Job number one, I think, was I forget specifically. I think he was just like a. PA. Job two was limo. Job three, I think he came back on as PA. But while he was out in the Australian countryside, he came across a farmer who mentioned that they had a guy who was staying on his land and complaining about how Val Kilmer ruined his life. At which point he was like, oh, I wonder, and went over to this farm and found out that it was, in fact, Richard Stanley, who he then brought back to Set. And they're like, oh, he didn't really sneak in.

30:00
Case Aiken
I just drove through the gates with him on there. But so that he wouldn't be identified and because there was a restraining order preventing him from coming within 40 meters of the actual shoot, richard Stanley had to go in costume. And so they got the costume department to give him a bulldog suit to wear. And apparently the first Ad was able to see that there was something wrong because everyone else, every time a shoot was over, every time they would call cut, everyone would take off their mask, go get some water and everything. And this one f****** guy wouldn't do it.

30:35
Micah McCaw
No way. I'm trying to look up pictures right now because I'm sure I'm not seeing it yet. Is it this like a weird, like, wildebeest looking one?

30:48
Case Aiken
It's a bulldog mask, but they all look really weird, so it's hard to.

30:51
Micah McCaw
Stanley I live of Dr. Moreau movie. I don't know how to search this to find the correct.

30:58
Case Aiken
When I type in Richard Stanley bulldog, there's a picture from the documentary where he's actually holding the mask that he wore on set, but it's like yellowed and a lot of the paint has chipped off.

31:11
Micah McCaw
Oh, yeah, that is very bulldog. Maybe he's just in the background or something like that.

31:16
Case Aiken
Yeah, he is a background character in the documentary. They show a close up where it's like, okay, and this one is the bulldog that we're talking about, which I find just amazing.

31:27
Micah McCaw
It's crazy. I know the whole premise of your show, of course, is to see if we can reasonably come up with some solution to making the movie better. And it seems like we're all kind of in agreement that there isn't necessarily a better version of this movie.

31:43
Case Aiken
I don't know if there is.

31:45
Micah McCaw
But if I could be crazy, as crazy as this movie is, there's a part of me that dreams of an alternate reality where probably New Line Cinema goes bankrupt and we don't get Lord of the Rings. So I don't wish for that world. But they go bankrupt and Richard Stanley directs the whole movie. That would be like the most insane movie. It would probably top this, I would imagine, but maybe not. I don't know.

32:15
Case Aiken
I mean, we've come across this before where a movie is infamously bad and as a result it's better known than if it was just mediocre. Yeah, which I think this movie ultimately kind of is we can talk about it. But again, the what hath science rot kind of genre has been very well trodden since the novel was originally written. There both have been lots of adaptations of the novel and lots of knockoff adaptations of the novel. And then you get into stuff that takes that same idea and builds upon it in new ways. So we're kind of stuck in a situation of like, how do you make this still relevant when it was being written about 1890s British imperialism and the way that all sort of plays out.

32:56
Case Aiken
And also fears of vivisections and fears of this new theory of evolution and all these things that were going on at a very particular time that by the time we get to the 1990s is old hat.

33:09
Micah McCaw
Sure, yeah.

33:11
Sam Alicea
I think Brando's clear take on it because he decided to dress as the Pope because he felt that this person was blaspheming against life is probably where he was standing. It's a take on religion for him.

33:29
Case Aiken
Yeah, you get into this whole God thing. But actually so Brando had a whole bunch of weird notes. And Brando is known for weird notes on the original Superman, he wanted what was it? A suitcase. He wanted to be presented know, the Jor El Hologram would be like him appearing as weird s*** and just his voice coming. So like, it's not surprising.

33:50
Sam Alicea
No, this is not surprising coming from.

33:52
Case Aiken
Brando at like a couple of the things. There's all these shots where he insisted on wearing this big tube hat piece that they pour ice into where he's.

34:03
Micah McCaw
Like, oh, it's bucket thing.

34:05
Case Aiken
Right. Well, when he explained it, no one had any idea what the f*** he was talking about. So they had to custom make it because it was like this idea for this character, oh, he's always hot and so forth. And part of the reason why he was like, pushing this idea was he wanted it to be revealed later in the movie. The hat comes off and it reveals that he's actually an evolved dolphin.

34:27
Micah McCaw
Yeah, of course.

34:28
Case Aiken
Right.

34:28
Sam Alicea
That makes total sense.

34:29
Micah McCaw
That's a pretty straight line.

34:32
Sam Alicea
Honestly, it really fits with the movie. I don't know why you're saying, like it's like, hilarious. Because honestly, if it had happened, I'd be like, oh, that's why he's working on theorem. He was experimenting on himself first. It actually might have answered some things for me as to the why. Because I think the biggest issue I have with this movie is I don't understand why this island exists. I mean, I guess I understand why the island exists because of his experiments, but I don't understand what led him down the road to these experiments. What was the first time he was just like, I'm going to mix a cat and a person together, and that's going to be the best thing because I love cats and I sort of like people would only get better as cats. Is that his thinking? I don't know.

35:19
Sam Alicea
We never get that moment, really.

35:23
Case Aiken
I mean, I think it's that once you get this, you start however innocuous, like this approach to breaking what the laws of science or the laws of God were, it becomes infectious and you can't stop. Like, you keep going further and further. So wherever his early phases because in the book, it's all surgery. It's not genetic manipulation, because they had no concept of that. He would take animals and then reconfigure their skeletons and move their organs around so that they could walk on two legs and have vocal cords, that he would reshape through surgery so that they could make words and all. This terrible stuff in the book. The reason he's ousted from London Scientific Communities is that a dog that he was working on gets loose. And that dog was flayed.

36:06
Case Aiken
Like he had removed all of the actual canine dermis and had gotten out and was running around London as this bloody mess. And this horrible thing that he's working on pushes the genteel scientific community to oust him. And he's like, no, I'm going to keep working on this. Because he's so infected with this idea that he can really create something new. And he's still a mysterious figure in the book. As yeah, it's a first person perspective from Edward Pendrick, I think is the.

36:41
Sam Alicea
But I didn't really get that in this telling. Right?

36:44
Case Aiken
Well, no, because he wouldn't f****** come to set most of the time. The reason why he insisted on having the white makeup on is so that and sunglasses with heavy covering was so that a stand in could be used for most of the shots.

36:54
Sam Alicea
Fair enough. I just feel like we just needed a little more of me, let me tell you. I wouldn't take out the piano scene. I loved it. I thought it was wonderful.

37:10
Case Aiken
I also love that shot.

37:12
Sam Alicea
I actually really adore it. And I do think it's a little weird that Marlon Brando became so obsessed with the actor who Nelson de la Rosa, who played that character. He became obsessed with him and wanted to do all his scenes with him. Like he wanted him in everything. But that's a Brando thing, right? That's the Brando of it all. He has moments like that where he just loves things.

37:37
Case Aiken
Thank you for bringing him up because he's all right outside of wow. Honestly, probably the thing that this movie is best known for beyond just like, oh, it was a Marlon Brando movie where he's weird with Val Kilmer is honestly Nelson de la Rosa. He is the smallest recorded person, I think, ever. But certainly at the time when he was alive, he was the smallest person in the world. He was 2ft tall.

38:06
Micah McCaw
I think there was actually a smaller person because were looking this up while were watching the movie. And there was a smaller person at the time?

38:15
Case Aiken
Oh, at the same time?

38:16
Micah McCaw
I believe so. Or maybe now there's it doesn't matter.

38:19
Case Aiken
We're talking about a two foot tall person, like a two foot tall adult. This is a truly insane fluke of nature. And he was this Dominican celebrity who had become just famous as this sort of oddity. Like, he would go on talent shows and have interviews and all that, and Brando caught wind of him and insisted him on being in the movie. So they reached out to this guy completely. It was not part of anyone's idea for this movie beforehand. It was just like, oh, wouldn't that be crazy if we got this tiny little person? And he became obsessed with him and effectively changed the actual cast importance to make this character Maijai, who is his little clone of himself, the focus character for his favorite son kind of character.

39:09
Micah McCaw
And you know what? I'm giving him MVP of the movie. Performance wise, I think he is locked in, and I think he's the best performance in the movie.

39:19
Sam Alicea
He should have won an Oscar. Best supporting character. It was amazing. That piano scene was so great. The tiny piano on top of the bigger piano. Them playing together sounded so perfect. I don't even care if it was all acting. It was wonderful.

39:34
Micah McCaw
His strange tale in that one scene was very disturbing in a way that was like, that's the kind of stuff that I think this movie should lean more into.

39:43
Sam Alicea
I will say I was a little taken aback and kind of slightly offended by Edward's reaction to Dr. Moreau's children in the like, edward, you are being very rude right now. He was like, look at these people. I'm like, D***, guy. They are right there. They are right like, I felt like that scene very much like, I was just like, OOH, I am not feeling that at like, I feel like he really there are nicer ways that David could have you did you experiment on all of them? That's even mean. I don't know. There's just no nice way to say those people are like, what is wrong with you?

40:26
Case Aiken
Well, I'll start with noting that I think that David Lulus was not a great choice for the character that they were trying to present. Like, you could have made him work, but I think that he does not work as a romantic lead. He comes off as so he comes off as such a sex pest. When he first approaches Farusa bulk, he's like, oh, I'm just here. And he's, like, leaning up and trying to be kind of, like, hot. She's clearly supposed to be young. She's clearly supposed to be naive. He is extremely creepy. He just is watching her dance and kind of just creeps up on her and never stops being creepy in this movie.

41:02
Micah McCaw
Very 1996, right?

41:05
Case Aiken
Oh, my God.

41:05
Sam Alicea
Yes.

41:06
Micah McCaw
Treating of women, for sure, unfortunately.

41:09
Case Aiken
So he's not necessarily a great lead either, in this capacity. And to be fair, he's at best, their fourth choice.

41:20
Micah McCaw
I'm sure they say this in the doc, but I believe he had to improvise most of the scenes that we see.

41:27
Case Aiken
Well, there are lots of constant rewrites and then yeah, because Brando wouldn't learn his script, and I don't think Kilmer either learned his lines at any like, he probably had a little bit more like Brando. We talked about the earpiece, which was also picking up police radio periodically, and he wouldn't distinguish between what the types of things he was hearing was. So he would just sometimes report about a robbery and he would mutter it out because whatever it was, Marlon Brando.

41:54
Sam Alicea
It was actually said that he actually once said, there's a robbery at Woolworths happening right now. And David was like, what? Because it just threw him right off. Yes.

42:07
Micah McCaw
Could you imagine how devastating that would being David? And you're working with Marlon Brando, and then he is telling you about a robbery through an you know, you're David, you're not as big of an actor as he is now. I mean, I think he's close to a list, if not a list, at this point in his career, like current day. But back then, this has got to be like a huge break for him, is what he's thinking. And then he gets to the set and he's like, oh, man, this might set me back ten years.

42:40
Case Aiken
I mean, it probably did, frankly. Yeah.

42:45
Micah McCaw
I mean, I haven't seen him in anything this young. This is like the youngest I've seen him. And then it's probably Harry Potter, like, ten years later that I start seeing him again.

42:57
Case Aiken
Yeah, pretty much. He was oftentimes a that guy actor. He's in stuff. And I constantly will see a movie from the 90s where I'm like, oh, s***. Including this one, where I'm like, oh, I totally forgot that David Thulis was the lead. And by forgot, I mean I didn't really know who he was when I saw this movie initially and hadn't rewatched it since 1998. I would say it slowed his career a bit, being in this infamous train wreck of a movie.

43:26
Micah McCaw
Of course, maybe this gives him and his team the ability to go, hey, don't go for lead. Be a great character actor. Because now he's like, one of our most cherished, wonderful character actor, and he just kills it every time.

43:43
Sam Alicea
I remember reading, he's the one who didn't go to see it at all. Right. He didn't go to the premiere because he thought his experience was so terrible that he never showed.

43:53
Case Aiken
Yeah, supposedly he's never watched it.

43:56
Sam Alicea
He was so traumatized, apparently, by being on this set and experiencing this film that he couldn't bring himself to actually watch this film.

44:05
Case Aiken
Yeah, that all checks, know, like I said, the story is fairly basic. You just need a viewpoint character, and somehow he's not even the best choice for that viewpoint character. Like, can you imagine the world where we got Bruce Willis and he's not really a realistic candidate for this part anymore because we know that he dropped out for personal reasons. That would have happened no matter. So what can we say? But can you imagine a Bruce Willis led the island of Dr. Moreau?

44:32
Sam Alicea
It would have definitely been oh, I.

44:35
Micah McCaw
Just think what's was I was looking through letterbox the people that I follow who had seen this movie, and there's the film critic, Matt Singer, who I just always like to cite the people I'm talking about. And he mentions how Brando is so bad for this movie, but imagining someone else playing it would probably be a little less fun to watch. And I kind of feel like that's the whole cast of this movie where it is like, there's a better version of this movie with a different cast, but it is probably like, you're a I almost like that the movie's so bad. Then it's just kind of mediocre and boring.

45:14
Sam Alicea
Well, and also, I agree with you on some level because I feel like, yes, behind the scenes, there's the Brando of it all. And it's not like Brando is know himself when he was older, but there is something about him being a mad scientist, about being this person who's such a narcissist that he would run to a deserted island to create cat people and animal people and experiment on them and be called father. And it just kind of fits. I understand wanting to cast. I I get like I understand when the casting director was like, oh, you know who we should get? Marlon Brando. Oh, that would be perfect. And everyone calls him like, yes. Oh, my God. It'd be amazing.

46:04
Sam Alicea
Because there's just something about the way that he is that you almost feel like he shouldn't have to actually do that much heavy lifting actually, he doesn't have to do that much heavy lifting to make this character. Like, is this movie a train wreck because Marlon Brando was in it? Yes, but is this a movie because Marlon Brando was in it? Yes. I would argue that his performance is spot on. Is it weird? Yes, it should be weird. Is it incoherent at times? Yes. That's okay. His person doesn't have to be coherent. The rest of the cast just had to pick up where he left off and we would have had a slightly better movie. Because the thing is, it's just like, who else would we have casted for this very eccentric, weird guy that has all of this? I don't know, man.

46:58
Sam Alicea
I don't know if anyone at that time would have been as wonderful.

47:03
Case Aiken
So I will say that the original designs, like the storyboards, when they were working on it and developing it that Stanley was putting out there, had this sort of like Jesus type figure for moreau, like very much so. Like long beard, he's messianic to everyone and actively a doctor. So they had all these images. There was this description of the plot being like a Stations of the Cross type situation. Although I think that they are not as familiar with what the Stations of the Cross are because it was like, oh, it will start with birth. And then it's like, no, that's not right. But it was going to start with a shot of him when thou goes into the operating room and they see that one goat lady, I think I forget specifically.

47:54
Sam Alicea
She's got those weird hooved feet.

47:56
Case Aiken
Yeah. So she gives birth. And that was supposed to have a shot of moreau holding the baby and turning and having the operating lights behind him creating this halo behind him.

48:08
Micah McCaw
That have been pretty cool.

48:09
Case Aiken
Yeah, there's some really cool shots that they put in there. And also we should note that the movie was intended initially to be an R rated movie with way more orgies going on throughout it all because they're all just like rudding animals that are constantly on drugs to keep them pacified. So there was supposed to be a lot more sexual depravity and it was cut both because they wanted it to get to more audience members and also because it's bad. There was a lot more assault and just terrible s*** going on. It wasn't all just like, oh, free love fun. It was supposed to be a bit more violent and creepy and gory, but maybe not.

48:50
Micah McCaw
We're exploring what this means kind of way. Just more in a flippant way. Is that what you mean?

48:56
Sam Alicea
Yeah, just more like there.

48:59
Case Aiken
The animal part of them can't hold back and so it's much more aggressive and all that stuff. That probably is good to cut. Although we still get enough that it's still fairly disturbing. But I do think having a more active actor on set for the part would have allowed some of those scenes to actually occur even after Stanley's gone to actually sell this active participant, which he's not because Brando doesn't want to come out of his trailer ever. It's hot. Well, it is hot. But there's also this recurring thing about how he and Val Kilmer are both play this game of chicken throughout where they refuse to come to set before the other one because they're competing about who has the biggest d*** or who's the biggest celebrity right here. And as a result, neither of them are playing ball for anything.

49:51
Case Aiken
And so as few scenes as possible that can involve them are shot as possible. That's what they do. They just don't want either one in any given scene. Even though one is the main person on the island, the other person is sort of his right hand man.

50:05
Micah McCaw
So wild. And again, like referencing that Val doc, he kind of presents it like this was my opportunity to work with brando. And I know that's what everyone thought. But then when you hear the reality of it seems like right from the get go, val maybe wasn't as interested in that. 20 years later, he looks back and he's like, wow, that was my chance to work with Brando.

50:28
Case Aiken
I'm sure he was at the time. And then they got to it and he was just like, well, no, I'm a star. But I would bet you that Brando is the one who started it. And it doesn't matter. Probably because they both were being divas.

50:39
Sam Alicea
This whole mean Brando made people hold cue cards for him during so, like, he's got a track record.

50:49
Micah McCaw
The other there's this kind of haunting moment in the Val doc where, well, first of all, he gets in a fight with Frankenheimer, who is just like, please turn off your camera. You keep filming everything that we're doing. And Val is like, I am in an emotional state. I'm in an emotional state. I'm in an emotional state. I want to keep this camera on because you say you're going to leave the set. So that's kind of wild. But then he walks around the set. It's in night and you see Marlon Brando. They're not filming. And he's on the hammock that he, I think, dies in the movie. But he's in that hammock. And Val walks up to him and he goes he just is like, very flippantly going, hey, what's your earliest childhood memory? And he's filming him.

51:36
Micah McCaw
And then Brando's smoking this huge stogie, and he is not responding to him at all. And then he just says, give me a little push. Give me a little push. And then Val Kilmer pushes him on the hammock and he starts swinging. And he goes, that's good. That's good. And it's kind of a haunting portrait of a it's a good reminder that maybe fame is not really good. I think it does a lot of bad things to people.

52:08
Case Aiken
Yeah. And this is a movie where being adored by your fans or things you created yeah. Can go to your head. And so in that sense, yeah, brando is an interesting choice here. Like the whole the Kurt's style take on Moreau. Right. And that's interesting. I like that. I just wish he could have been more of an active participant in it all. And then the way that Montgomery kind of descends into the same sort of role is also kind of insane. It happens really fast because just can't shoot scenes with him going nuts either. But it does lead to some of the cringy parts of this movie. Did either of you get like a Real House slave versus field slave kind of vibe with the children of Dr. Moreau versus the broader my children?

53:04
Sam Alicea
Yeah. I actually at one point remember, especially when they were like, sitting down to dinner, and I was like, oh, this feels really uncomfortable. I get it. But it feels really uncomfortable because everyone on this island are his children. But only these that look the most normal ish or the most human ish are here in this.

53:32
Micah McCaw
Yeah, yeah.

53:33
Case Aiken
Well, and then particularly like the speech patterns for some of them. And in particular, I'm thinking of Zaslo, which is played by Tamora Morrison, who people would know as Boba Fett or Aquaman's dad, all of the clone, like wonderful moment of just like, oh, s***. Yeah, he goes on for cool stuff.

53:56
Micah McCaw
He's always a treat.

53:58
Case Aiken
Yes, but f*** that character, though. Because he is like, oh, my god. His entire job is to be the hound that chases down and kills anyone who defects from the island of Dr. Moreau.

54:10
Sam Alicea
Yeah, terrible.

54:11
Case Aiken
And then he's the turncoat later. Again, this is the big example of the houseboy versus field boy. And I'm like, oh, god, I don't like that. No, here. And his speech pattern echoes that as well because he says Master, not father.

54:27
Sam Alicea
He does. He does say Master a lot. And everyone else, they can have a little bit of a broken kind of syntax with their speech or that kind of thing. But his accent is just very clear and very proper and always like, master. Thank you. Oh, I like a hunt. And it's very uncomfortable. It's very cringe. It's very and Val Kilmer is like, oh, yeah, you like to hunt. Right? He just totally encourages the worst parts of very uncomfortable.

55:07
Micah McCaw
Val Kilmer in this think. I think, you know, from all that we know about the production of this movie, he was like, I'm a hired gun. I'm going to deliver a product that can be released in theaters. That is all I care about. And to some degree, I kind of think he's taking the right approach because I don't know if there's a way to wrangle this movie in. So it's kind of like just get the job done, get it released. And then Newline can again start working on Lord of the Rings and everything will be fine. Again for New Line. But it feels like in all of the scenes that Val Kilmer is in, he is actively like, all right, let's see if you can edit this into the movie. John Frankenheimer. Watch this.

55:53
Micah McCaw
I'm going to put part of a radio on my head and pop up out of a window and go, hey, you'd need this for your radio. And they're like, can we do it again maybe without that? And he's like, no, that was my take. Sorry.

56:06
Sam Alicea
I have to say that maybe, like halfway through the movie, there's a moment where he pops up and he's in a lab. And I was like, oh, right, he's a doctor. Because I forgot that he was also a doctor. That he is like someone who works with Dr. Monroe. That he is part of these experiments. That he has a degree to do experiments because he just comes off so much like a hired gun. Like the person who just basically watches the compound. Oh, my God. Like an overseer. That's what he comes off as. And I forgot that he's also a true believer who is a scientist, too, that came here with a degree to help Dr. Murray with his crazy experiments. He's like a kindred spirit. You don't get that at all. And I was like, oh, yeah, he's got a degree.

57:13
Sam Alicea
He's not just the guy who shoots stuff, but for most of the movie, he's just the guy that shoots stuff.

57:18
Micah McCaw
Well, from what they edit to this movie, I do actually think you could edit out Val Kilmer. And it wouldn't really change any element of the movie except for him getting to the island.

57:31
Case Aiken
But even then, that's nothing like he's caught at sea. I guess him walking onto the island itself because Val Kilmer is in all those shots you couldn't really cut out. But story wise, you certainly could cut him out. He does almost nothing. And all the boat stuff before they arrive at the island, you could easily cut because it was just like he was lost at sea. Oh, they found and next thing I know, I was on the shores. They had dropped me off there or something to that effect could have made that work if not if they didn't have Kilmer. And that's where it's like he just negotiated himself out of the movie effectively. And if you only care about money and your face being on the poster, that's cool.

58:11
Case Aiken
But if you care about a potential performance or a stepping stone in your career of having a hit, which obviously by the time they're really in production, no one thought it was going to be like, oh, yeah, this is going to be a huge work for us. But there's no reason to think that beforehand. And other movies have been huge successes that people at the time thought were going to be a giant train wreck. I'm looking at you, star wars.

58:39
Sam Alicea
Star wars. Waves back. Hi. Buy some action figures.

58:44
Case Aiken
Like, Harrison Ford was pretty convinced that was going to tank his career. But he just needed the and like, it didn't it did really good for but like he had no assurance at the time because it looked like just a weird, silly movie. And looking at this movie, you could imagine someone convincing themselves that this might be a big stepping stone for their career.

59:02
Sam Alicea
Yeah, you're in a movie with Marlon Brando, and then you get on set and Marlon Brando has an earpiece in his head and is wearing ice on his head from a plastic hat that he had specially commissioned. And then you realize, yeah, well, and.

59:16
Case Aiken
Also you start filming the scenes and then all of a sudden characters who have lines are suddenly no longer being given. Those lines are being moved. Mean, we haven't talked. About marco Hoschneider, who plays another one of the doctor's sons whose entire part was shifted, was basically ousted because he was supposed to be the favorite son assistant. And in creating the Mini Me character, who, yes, was the inspiration for Mini Me, literally. In Austin Powers. They moved this part from being in a lot of stuff with Brando to being, like the bare minimum number of scenes that you could have for these. All these actors are being signed on for roles that, because of just the diva ness of Brando and Kilmer, are being shifted around or downsized or whatever into basically, oblivion.

01:00:04
Sam Alicea
Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting, too, because going back to it, you can tell that Kilmer's role is diminished because there are things in the text that almost make you feel as if he's like the driving force in some of the things that are breaking down on the island. But then it stops short of out and out accusing him and also even explaining why that would be his motivation. So there's just like a couple of moments I was like, oh, wait, was it him? And then there was nothing. And I was like, oh, never mind. It's fine, whatever. It doesn't matter. So I just think that it's really interesting because there could have been more. There like even a rivalry or something. And the dynamic between father and him is a lot less interesting.

01:00:59
Sam Alicea
I mean, you've got these two scientists that went to an island for whatever reason to pursue whatever extent in science. And one is called the father and rules everything, and the other is just an assistant and not even like a favorite son. And that dynamic would have been more interesting and somewhere to explore, but that's not there. I don't know. I think that the script presents a lot of stuff, but then there's like a lot of ideas, but it's never really fleshed out fully other than a lot of really great costumes. And Ron perlman as another monster. Like, there's not a lot going for it.

01:01:39
Case Aiken
Yeah. Oh, God. All right, so let's mention Ron Perlman because I f****** love him in this. Like, I love him in just about everything, but I really like him in this movie, as this law sayer to all of them. He's just giving a really good performance every time he's on screen talking, I'm like, oh, yeah, I believe that this movie could be good. Yeah, it is a really good.

01:02:09
Micah McCaw
There'S two really good performances in this. And I forget the character name, so I'll say Mini Me, but not as.

01:02:16
Sam Alicea
A nessander or anything with a J.

01:02:24
Case Aiken
But I'm not sure if it's yeah.

01:02:25
Sam Alicea
I think he Magi.

01:02:27
Micah McCaw
Yeah. And Ron perlman. Those are the two good performances. And, of course, the CG rats. They really bringing this thing home.

01:02:34
Sam Alicea
Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. No, Ron Perlman adds something that's really lovely to this film, which is like this element of like because the one thing that this film does set up that it doesn't do well about anything, it's setting up this kind of civil war within the creatures that Dr. Moreau has created, right? And so Ron Perlman is this kind of like a priest like figure in it, and he's a leader, but he follows the Father anyway, right? So it's just like it's his job to follow the law of the Father, right? So it's his job as a priest to have faith in the rules that are set for them in their hybrid. We have to learn to walk on two legs, not on four kind of thing. Don't give in to those temptations like the Father tells us.

01:03:25
Sam Alicea
And so it's very interesting because then you have him and he's like this coming force while there's these other animals on the island, like hyena, who are going crazy with the question of why am I? Who am I? And just dealing with their own personal pain of not understanding where they actually fit in the grand scheme of things, which is actually like it's actually like a nice point, right? Because I think good Sci-Fi always has parallels to actual human feelings. And this is something that people feel, right? This is a real thing. It gets lost. But Ron Perlman's there to give us that sage wisdom at the end and kind of be that counterbalance to those characters.

01:04:15
Sam Alicea
And that's why his performance I mean, he always gives a good performance, but it anchors the movie, even though the movie is just it doesn't even have a rudder, to be honest. But it keeps it. But at least at the end, you feel like, oh, there was kind of a message. Thank you. We're going to accept who we are. No more outside interference. We'll deal with our own. And it's cool. Cool. Thanks, Ron Perlman. Thanks for anchoring this.

01:04:48
Case Aiken
Yeah, that line at the end for him where he says maybe four is better, it almost actually puts a nice bow on this movie. You almost get there with this reverse Animal Farm moment where it's like, oh, yeah, well, no society was going to make us worse. Or maybe it's the same point, but they end at the opposite end, where now they're descending into four legged form. And I think that's cool because the fundamental conversation about the island of Dr. Moreau is like, well, nature versus nurture is their animal instincts, like, pushing back on us, trying to impose a civilized structure upon these things that we're not ready for them. And that's why it's important that the animals are all originally animals that have been changed, as opposed to, while we do see one being born, they're not really genetic experiments.

01:05:39
Case Aiken
Or rather, they're not genetic experiments that are grown. And then children that rise up. In the book especially. And in the movie, it still is that way. Although we don't know enough about the process for it all. They're always animals that have been turned into sapiens. They are always mutated animals as opposed to a hybrid animal, human or animal that's been genetically modified to rise up in that way. That's why they all have the danger of reverting. It's not just that they were like some sort of test tube baby grown up and then they are going to start turning back. They're all animals first, then has this artifice of humanity thrust upon them and they're being told that it's a good thing and that all their base instincts that they're fighting against is a bad thing that they should reject.

01:06:32
Case Aiken
And then ultimately, they all give in to their base or animal needs and become more animalistic and devolve back into that form. And it's nice that we have an attempt at trying to be like, well, but that's because that's what they actually are.

01:06:47
Sam Alicea
Yeah. We're going to embrace what we are. Maybe four is better than two. I thought it was nice because it was just it. But again, anchor, but no rudder. Like this movie goes. He. But Ron Perlman sticks the landing on that. At least in my humble no.

01:07:10
Micah McCaw
I think you're right.

01:07:11
Case Aiken
Yeah. And also, I do actually want to shout out the performance of the hyena character, which was Daniel Rigny. Pardon me. I have an objection that this is the 90s. We're aware that hyenas are a matriarchal society and that it, by all right, should have been a female character. We'll come back to that one later. But I actually thought that the structure of the character I thought he looked great. I thought that the way that they integrated like hyena kind of sounds into his dialogue was really good. I thought that the fact that he's not the initial antagonist, that it's the leopard character who is also surprising cast here where it's Mark Dacoscos, who is like a stuntman and action actor. He was in Double Dragon. He's been in a bunch of stuff since then.

01:07:57
Case Aiken
But Double Dragon is the last time we talked about him on this show. But just like, oh, it's fun. The cool actors in this all. But that leopard role is the one that was the initial one that's violating the rules and eating meat and running on all four and appreciating the animal instincts. And that hyena is galvanized by the death of his friend to start exploring that. In fact, he finds out about the implants by way of inspecting the body of his friend and weeping openly. I think that there is a lot of relatable pathos for this villain who then leads this rebellion against what he sees as a monster who is just torturing them for fun.

01:08:36
Sam Alicea
Yeah. Someone who's controlling them. And I think also it's lovely because he asks, what? What am I doing? The confrontation in Marlon Brando's living room where actually I actually like when he plays the animals, like the music and does I thought that was a great like, I think it's such a great scene. He plays Dissonance and they hate it and then he plays Gershwin and they all love it and they're like, oh, it's really nice. But he uses a Stalling method to go back to then again get the device that allows him to shock them and control them. And that's when Hyena leads everyone else to basically hurt the father and kill the father. And I think that it's because he's betrayed. So you feel for Hyena, right? Because it's like he was asking a question, a real question. What am I?

01:09:36
Sam Alicea
What did you do to me? Why father? And the father just turned around to control, not to answer. I think that was actually really good.

01:09:44
Case Aiken
That element I thought was really good, especially because it then ties back to the earlier time where we're seeing Moreau and Majai playing the piano on top of each other. It was like, oh, that made that scene. Which I thought was like a beautiful shot with this nice camera track that looked really good and was cool. It then comes back here and I thought that was nice. I thought the confrontation with Moreau was a solid point. And the fact that Moreau's response to them once the second he can get a hold of the little buzzer that they use to activate the implants is to try to shock them into submission again shows that he is not a true father to them. He is merely an experimenter who wants to use them and has conditioned them to think that pain is an aspect of love.

01:10:30
Case Aiken
And these are all really good elements here. There's so many things you can talk about in this movie that are like, this is good, it should be good. And then the actual finished product is.

01:10:41
Micah McCaw
Not well, it's just lack like these themes and stuff are good, but it lacks that special sauce. It just doesn't have that because even the scene, maybe the best scene of the movie and I did not think it just wasn't a good scene because of the buildup wasn't good. And I think even though it's like the best that we it's, I still don't think Brando's very plugged into that know, and it's like, that's the best we got. It's almost like we're giving the movie too much.

01:11:20
Case Aiken
From start to finish. It opens and ends with a voiceover that doesn't continue throughout the rest of the movie and is either it should have been there the whole time or it shouldn't have been there at all. Pick one, but don't use it just as a bookend. And I know you're doing that because you don't have the footage to really put it all like, cool. I get that as like Val Kilmer has some great f****** one liners when he's like more of a vet, like really good line later when he's less good. But I get what they're trying to do where it's like, yeah, she's a pussycat. Like, when talking about like, at least they're like trying to be cheeky and fun in all the spots. Although I did go, yes, it's specifically there. That's why I'm like, yeah, less fun.

01:12:04
Case Aiken
But the vet line I laughed when we got to that point. I was like, oh, yeah, that's clever. Setting up like oh, yeah. The weird world that I know that we're about to go to that thou list is not aware of. Cool. The makeup is so good. And then we get into the CG stuff and that's less good. But it was great for the time. The CG rats don't look good. Sure, Jurassic Park came a couple of years before. Way better use of it. Way more judicious use of it. Like, it wasn't in broad daylight. But I remember when this movie came out, there were featurettes talking about, look at the innovative ways we're using CG to do stunts that a human couldn't do.

01:12:43
Case Aiken
So specifically, when the leopard man escapes from them, there was this whole breakdown showing how a wireframe would jump from rock to rock. And then they filled it out with polygons and then they filled it out with the textures. And so you actually saw this whole process because this is the early days of not just CG being a thing for objects, but actually being used to replace actors in a shot so you could do stunts that were impossible for an actor. Yeah, so that's interesting experiments that they're doing at the time combined with really good puppetry. Sure, the shots could have been better. Or in Shade in Darkness, so that you can a little bit better, but they're making their jumps.

01:13:26
Sam Alicea
I kind of wish that actually more of the beginning of the movie was a little darker. I feel like there was too much full on with some of the stuff when he first discovered the island that I kind of longed for the mystery of just of other different kind of monster movies where I feel like they could have and the thing is that the practical effects in this film are really good. So I'm not taking anything away from that. I just wanted a little more surprise so that I could be as shocked as Edward. Those first few scenes when he's on the island, when he starts walking around and he starts seeing stuff, it's just so full on. And I think it was like this obsession was like, oh, look how good these prosthetics look.

01:14:13
Sam Alicea
But I wish that it was a little more peekaboo on those moments and then like a full reveal for more scary. I needed a little more tension built up before he accepted. Because, honestly, when you get to the moment, even the birthing scene, it looks really cool, but it might be too much scene at once. I don't know. It just didn't build tension there.

01:14:38
Micah McCaw
Well, yeah, that birthing scene, I'm right there with you, where it's like, oh, this is genuinely disturbing. This is gross. This is weird. It's like a minute and a half. Yeah, that should be like a five minute scene, probably, where you're barely seeing stuff and then you have this big moment where you see this insane looking goat woman giving birth. And it's just like so visceral and disgusting, which it was. But since it happens in under a minute, it doesn't really.

01:15:10
Sam Alicea
I think it would have been so much cooler to kind of have the scream still go and him behind vials of chemicals kind of thing. Old scientists, old beakers. When we think about mad scientists and kind of like shadows and light and that kind of thing. And then you can get the full on. I just needed a little more tension in that first part because you are all of a sudden witnessing something really gruesome. And the shot in the baby's face screaming is still good. But it felt like compared to the whole birthing scene, which we only saw what felt like maybe 5 seconds of like a full like I don't know. Again, well, production issues, I get it.

01:15:57
Case Aiken
Well, the person turning out should have been the like that also would have been his first time seeing moreau. Yeah, if it wasn't Marlon Brando, that would have been great because I think, honestly, the mother is the more shocking part of that scene than the baby. And sure, you see the others and there was this whole thing about how the dog doctors that were going to be working with Moreau would be like licking up the blood in that shot as well. Like really crazy visual stuff that would have been very cool. But to talk about, well, how do you hide it better?

01:16:28
Case Aiken
We could think of so many ways to do it because they have all these cages, have him trying to see through a cage and then it pulls focus to the jaguar leopard or whatever that was in there that hisses at him. You could have done all this stuff to make it really dynamic and interesting. But ultimately, what happened for this movie across the board is that a Journeyman director came in to fill in after the initial director who had a vision, was fired and had to just get the shots in the can.

01:16:54
Micah McCaw
Now, speaking of Mr. Frankenheimer, are either of you familiar? Have you watched a lot of Frankenheimer movies?

01:17:02
Case Aiken
I'm pulling up his resume. Not off the top of my head.

01:17:05
Micah McCaw
So let me actually take yeah, because I've only seen two of his other movies, which is the Frank Sinatra Manchurian Candidate and then the movie Seconds, which won The Palm Door, which I did not know. But those movies are very twisty, very weird. As much as I know he was saddled with a production that was already underway and he's also getting later in his life because the movies I mentioned are the 60s. So he's been working for a while. It seems pretty odd that he doesn't have at least something interesting to say when comparing it with those other two movies. But I don't know. I'm not familiar with any of his movies after 1966. So I don't know if you guys have any.

01:17:52
Case Aiken
Yeah, well, I'm shocked that he was the director for Reindeer Games, where I'm like, okay, yeah, I remember that movie, at least. And I saw Ronan. He continued to work.

01:18:04
Sam Alicea
Yeah.

01:18:04
Micah McCaw
Probably just became kind of a studio guy in the honestly, I think also.

01:18:09
Sam Alicea
It'S just like, honestly, I think if you were on this set with the way that these actors were acting, you're probably like, let me just get the shot and get the heck out of here.

01:18:20
Case Aiken
Well, yeah. Also at this time, he was doing a lot of TV and he was doing a lot of TV movies. And I don't mean to bash any of that, but a lot of that is like, you're coming in, you're working for a studio, you're doing work for hire, and you're trying to get the stuff in the can so an editor can chop it together into a real movie. Which is what happened here, too. Yeah, that's coming in late to a production. It's not just that he's coming in and doesn't have a chance to set all the stuff the way he wants. He also doesn't have a chance to really feel the storyboards. Oh, also, side note, we didn't talk about this one. When Richard Stanley was fired, he destroyed all the production notes.

01:18:55
Sam Alicea
Oh, yeah.

01:18:55
Case Aiken
So he's coming in very blind on this one. He has the script, he has the cast, he has the location. He doesn't have anything else going into it. He probably had some storyboards because it probably wasn't all in Richard Stanley's possession. But all the production notes that Stanley had were destroyed. So if there were any thoughts of like, okay, we're going to shoot it this way, we're going to light it this way, he didn't have any of those. And so when it's coming into an already behind schedule film, he's probably doing his best just to kind of assemble the whole thing and not really worrying about the meson send too often. It's like, oh, will that be a cool angle? Yes. But not necessarily getting as many elaborate camera moves as many elaborate focus shifts or anything to that effect.

01:19:34
Case Aiken
It's just doing what he can to get it together and deal with these f****** actors.

01:19:39
Sam Alicea
Yeah. Oh, actors.

01:19:44
Micah McCaw
Funny enough, I do think the more we talk about it, I do think another pass of it is just get the shots and get them in the can and edit the movie, kind of.

01:19:55
Case Aiken
Because I don't know if you could edit a better movie here. There are a few things about this movie that are like just 90s as f*** that I don't think they would have been able to fix at the time. But in retrospect, I would have loved to change, like, the opening credits look just like f****** the opening credits to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show, not the movie, I should clarify. Or like Charmed or honestly, they also look a lot like the opening credits to the Angley Hulk movie, which just shows where, oh, yeah, things are kind.

01:20:23
Micah McCaw
Of rewatched that the other day.

01:20:24
Case Aiken
Yeah, they're kind of just like catching superhero movies are often catching up on things from a couple of years earlier in terms of what genre that they're doing. So that's like, okay, we're doing what? Hath science sci-fi monster movie. This movie is in the same lineage of that all, where it's just like, look, we've got blood and cells in close up under a microscope for opening credits. But then the opening sequence of Thulus on that raft and the other guys fighting because we're setting up the whole theme that humanity is the real is just animal, too, that society is barely containing. Man that shot needed color correction. And that's just not a thing that was going to happen in that era because it's this bright orange orange red raft that they're on.

01:21:09
Case Aiken
And all of it just doesn't it pops in a way that I'm like, oh, but that doesn't feel like the right point. And then they've got this terrible stock footage that they're using for it all for the shark that attacks them. The movie continues with lots of editing, tropes, and lots of lines we mentioned. The subjugation of women in this all is very much there. This is still an era where they made a video game about, ironically, Stanley finding Dr. Livingston for the NES, like just a couple of years earlier, where we hadn't really started to be like, oh, man, all the terrible stuff that happened in Africa was really bad. We're still kind of putting heroic mythology and iconography on British colonialism at this point. And it's all over this movie because this movie is about British colonialism.

01:21:55
Sam Alicea
Pretty much, yeah.

01:21:57
Case Aiken
Or rather the book is about British colonialism. And you can't fully separate that here because it's just like a white man came to a primitive island, and in this case, it's animals instead of like, quote unquote, savages. I feel gross talking about that. But that's what the ideas that they're playing with, it's also very, again, Apocalypse Now, like a Heart of Darkness kind of stuff right there. It's like, we're going to come and we're going to impose civility on this barbarous people. And actually, oh, well, they've infected us with their barbarism. And the movie hasn't moved enough away from those more outdated ideas.

01:22:38
Micah McCaw
Yeah, you said it. You put the button on it there.

01:22:43
Case Aiken
This whole f****** production is just a nightmare from start to finish.

01:22:47
Micah McCaw
Yeah.

01:22:48
Case Aiken
People are getting fired. Everyone has terrible commutes. They're getting rained on like crazy. There's pyrotechnics all over the place that are just burning s*** down at one point. This is actually one of the funny ones. So Richard Stanley, when he was in his dog makeup, was like one of the actors who had to have, like, a torch when they were going to be setting s*** on fire, and they just gave it to him. But then because when they found out that it was Richard Stanley, they're like, did he come back to burn down the set? No, they just put him there. But, man, f****** wild movie.

01:23:21
Sam Alicea
Where.

01:23:23
Case Aiken
The visionary? And I don't mean to say that in the sort of holier than that. Stanley had an idea for the property. He wrote the script. He had like, I want to make this movie. I have an idea for it. They ballooned the budget way too much for what he was capable of handling at that point in his career. And they didn't provide enough structure. Say what you will about modern Marvel movies, an tour director coming from Small Productions is given the team to make sure the movie still happens.

01:23:54
Sam Alicea
Right?

01:23:55
Micah McCaw
Yeah.

01:23:55
Case Aiken
And that was not happening here. And so, pretty much from start to finish, everyone was aware that this movie was going to crash and burn. And it proceeded to be a self fulfilling prophecy every step of the way.

01:24:09
Sam Alicea
Yeah. On that note yeah.

01:24:15
Case Aiken
So why don't we pause for a moment, take our medicine so that we don't devolve into ravenous animals discussing this movie. Shout out one of the awesome shows on our network. And when we come back, let's see if we could actually speculate on how this movie could have been saved. Video games are a unique medium. They can tell stories, immerse us in strange, fantastic worlds, blur the very boundaries of our reality. But at the end of the day, video games are fun. Whatever fun is to you. I'm Jeff Moonan. And I am Matt, aka Stormageddon.

01:24:46
Micah McCaw
And on Fun and Games, we talk.

01:24:48
Case Aiken
About the history, trends and community of video games. It's a celebration of all the games we play and all the fun we find within them.

01:24:56
Micah McCaw
And there's so many more games out there, so we hope you'll share in.

01:25:00
Case Aiken
That conversation with us. Fun and Games podcast with Matt and Jeff. Find us on certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And happy gaming. And we're back. All right, so, Micah, there's one rule, and then there's one practice that we have when we talk about the I.

01:25:19
Sam Alicea
Feel like they're both rules. I think that the father has decided that these are the rules.

01:25:23
Case Aiken
They are laws.

01:25:24
Sam Alicea
Yeah. They are laws. These are the laws.

01:25:26
Case Aiken
Yes. So law number one on the stone tablet that I have, that I etched with my own hoof is that I am not allowed to go before Sam. Sam has made it a firm rule that I cannot come before her, since oftentimes it'll be like, here's all of my notes. Not necessarily this time, but oftentimes that is the way. And law number two. But the more common, just the practice of the conversation is that as we are being hypothetical about what could be done at the time of production, we are trying not to do things that would have been completely outside of the realm of possibilities. So things like, well, Marlon Brando probably wasn't going to get recast once he was put on the movie because that's kind of why the movie was getting made. He's kind of locked in there.

01:26:14
Case Aiken
Val Kilmer is more of a subjective one. Like, we could talk about that one, but trying to be somewhat realistic in terms of where things could have been done to make this movie better without just fully like, here's pie in the sky. I'm making my own Dr. Moreau movie with no one attached to this thing because that's not this movie. That would be just a different movie.

01:26:36
Micah McCaw
And I'd assume that we have to kick Richard Stanley off.

01:26:40
Case Aiken
We could have a conversation about we I think we have to have a conversation about that, frankly, because I'm a.

01:26:47
Micah McCaw
Little dumbfounded on how to approach mean. So does this mean I go first?

01:26:53
Case Aiken
You are our guest. So you can either go first or you can have Sam go first. And if Sam goes first, I can then follow up and you could take third or you could take second.

01:27:02
Micah McCaw
Let me throw a few ideas out because I think you two will probably have a better approach.

01:27:10
Sam Alicea
I love because I feel that way about us. The belief really makes me feel good right now. Thank you. Go on.

01:27:19
Micah McCaw
Yeah, I have hope in you, but.

01:27:23
Sam Alicea
Go.

01:27:25
Micah McCaw
I just this movie is so strange and like we've been talking about this whole time, it kind of feels like under these very specific circumstances, this is the best outcome. But something you said, sam stuck out to me and gave me a bit of a light bulb. Richard Stanley has this inflated budget and goes a little too ambitious. And you mentioned know, it's like he's out of his element. And this is a big change. So this might be too pie in the sky here, but I feel as though this movie would actually work if it was way smaller, lower budget, and Richard Stanley is maybe they're working on sets or something like that. But if you changed it to where you have less of a cast and you can spend more time building tension in smaller scenes with less people, that is more manageable.

01:28:26
Micah McCaw
I think that would be the most ideal outcome to this movie because I think about the surgery scene and you don't need 100 people on set to make that scene incredible. You need the actors, a couple of people lighting, a good cinematographer, and you can make a killer scene that's more of, like indie horror kind of. A thing. But that's also such a different approach from the possibility. So I don't know if that counts. Does that count? I think it does.

01:28:55
Case Aiken
I think in terms of them getting too big for their Britches is a fair concept there. Like, if this movie was like $25 million instead of 40, they could have reined it in a little bit. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that kind of gets into where we'd be thinking if Richard Stanley was still going to be doing this movie.

01:29:15
Micah McCaw
And that's what I'm thinking on this know, actually, maybe this brings a little more realism into this pitch. We're talking about New Line cinema. This is the house that Freddie built. So they know how to put out horror movies that have low budgets that look incredible and have incredible set pieces. Because the Nightmare on Elm Street series, whether those movies are good or bad, some of them, they always have at least one incredible sequence in them. And so I do think if Robert Che sitting over there does not okay this to make it this grand epic that they're trying to make and instead focuses on making it smaller, I think you'd have one of those movies that would pop up on Twitter and people would be like, how come no one talks about this wonderful relic from the 90s?

01:30:08
Sam Alicea
Yeah, I think that's possible. It is if it's smaller and there was better use of Shadow. I think there's too much full on everything all of the time, so that there is not really too much suspense. And I think that when you're dealing with a smaller budget and I think I don't watch a lot of horror movies because I'm a scaredy cat, which has been established on this podcast. But the few that I've been forced to watch for this podcast, a lot of the ones that are smaller budget, one of the things that works in their favor is Shadow and Light. And I think that this movie doesn't utilize that ever, practically. No, it's all very well lit. This is a very well lit island.

01:30:56
Micah McCaw
Yeah. And I just think that I'm a firm believer that constraint in art can breed brilliance. And sometimes there's people who have no constraints and can still make something. You know, I look at someone like Tim Burton, and for the most part, if he's not given constraints, his work suffers, in my opinion. So I think if this movie had been given more constraints from the get go, I think it would have been helpful. So that's maybe another pass at it. Yeah, I think you guys will do better.

01:31:32
Case Aiken
Well, but I fully agree with you, and we talk about this all the time by having constraints that can really allow for art to flourish. I think that innovation and creativity are the things that we really want to celebrate on the show. That's why when we do fifth episodes, we talk about the movies that had constraints and that they were able to work around them. And when we're talking about these kind of movies, it's usually like, where our constraint would have been good. And so I think, yeah, I fully agree.

01:31:57
Sam Alicea
Sam okay. That's right, because you can't go before me. I was like, It's my turn. And of course it is, because Case has to go last. So, yeah, I do agree with you on the budget. I'm going to go from a different point of view. I'm going to go in as if I've come in after the first director has been fired. Cool. And I'm going to say that there's a couple of things that I need in rewrites that I'm just going to demand of my cast. And I need a scene, whether it's an expansion in the greeting scene, explaining the why of it, why these is what does Dr. Moreau gain by turning these animals into humans, and the fact that he's obsessed with his daughter. Right. He's obsessed with her because she's the most human looking of all of them.

01:33:01
Sam Alicea
She's the one that has the least regression. And we learn later on in the movie that he's brought this man that was out to sea to the island to use his DNA, which is like something that's thrown out there at the very end, which because just any man would do. Because why didn't you take one of the sailors from the nearby town? Like, it had to be someone adrift because you thought they were dead. There's never answer as to why he's, like, the perfect person.

01:33:29
Case Aiken
It's that superior English stock.

01:33:32
Sam Alicea
Yeah, I needed a white man.

01:33:36
Case Aiken
It is their burden.

01:33:42
Sam Alicea
Because I feel like this movie has a lot of great narcissistic moments, but I feel like I need the real villain patting myself on the back moment. That I don't really get. I don't really get that. And I need that. I need that for this to make a little more sense. The movie doesn't have to make sense, but I have to understand Dr. Moreau's point of view, and I don't actually understand what his obsession like, is. He trying to build a better race? Because intrinsically, he thinks animals are better than people, but he feels like we couldn't communicate with them before, so he wants to make them more human like, because somehow that'll make the human race better, too. Like, we're creating a new race, a far superior race.

01:34:37
Sam Alicea
Fast as a cheetah, but with the intelligence of Know, he can operate, but he can also run to the scene very quickly. And I don't know, I would have just liked that, even if that comes if Brando's not Game, even if that comes from Zal Kilmer, because I also feel like the problem with his character is that he just feels like someone who's like he just he feels like cato. He's cato caitlin. He's just living in this guy's not. And so he does say something when he brings Edward first on the island where he basically tells him that he came here for Haven after animal rights activists were know, chew in his face. And that would have been like a really great moment for Val Kilmer to talk about what the doctor was trying to do, but say it with Reverence.

01:35:39
Sam Alicea
So it sounds like he's a true believer. Right? Because we need to establish that between them, there's a reason why this other doctor wants to be here, that he believes in this science as much as the father does. Right. He actually says, before he dies, I want to go to doggy heaven. Right? So there must be he does say.

01:36:07
Micah McCaw
That'S a line in the movie.

01:36:08
Sam Alicea
That's a real line. Maybe he also shares this idea that if animals and humans, if certain breeds were able to combine genetically, we would be more superior. And we hear that Reverence in him. We don't need Brando to do that. We can have him do that. We can have them do that in the thing that's maybe like five, two, three extra lines. And then you establish something about their relationship which we don't see. And I assume that's partially because there is tension between them. And oftentimes when there is tension, you cannot get two actors to be in the same scene together. And so that's fine in some ways, but that would kind of fix it.

01:37:00
Sam Alicea
And then you could have a later scene where the doctor dismisses him in a way and then you can actually put in him kind of wanting to go to the baser because he wants to be animal and him encouraging, at least I was going to say Boba Fett because my brain is like, whatever. Because he does azazzlo to kind of embrace this more animalistic feeling, right? The two of them kind of branch off together. And I think that would create a more interesting dynamic. Like the two children that were kind of pushed aside for his perfect children, like his daughter and De la Rosa because they're loved so much by him. But these two people, like this man who is more man than animal and this animal who doesn't always measure up even though he's worked so hard.

01:38:01
Sam Alicea
And I think then that makes a more interesting situation because it's like colonization, but also because I'm trying to create a perfect race of both of these things. So you kind of get that whole ugly eugenics in there and just have an indictment on all of those things and the creation of that and where things go wrong. And I feel like, listen, this movie, no matter what, is probably going to be a trash fire. But I feel like adding that will at least add some much needed grounding that I don't think that this movie has. I feel like other than Ron Perlman, I don't feel like because I don't understand why it's just like an exercise in futility. We're just doing this to f*** with the laws of nature, which, if that's the case, fine. But I'd like it stated.

01:39:04
Sam Alicea
I'd like him to be, like a full out. If we're going to go full animated maleficent, like, I'm destroying things for the sake of destroying things. Well, she did it because she wasn't invited to a party. And I totally respect that about her. No, I do. Some people let people be evil for just being evil. She's just, like the pettiest villain ever. I get it. And if he just wants to be the biggest narcissist ever, like, I can control things. I want to feel like, fine, but I just need a little more direction.

01:39:39
Sam Alicea
And I think if Val Kilmer explains it and it sounds reverent, that kind of sort of fixes his character without having to cut him and being able to still keep him on the posters for my stuff to try to get back any of my money, which I'm not going to do. That's my another pass.

01:39:59
Micah McCaw
That's good. That's more reasonable than mine.

01:40:02
Sam Alicea
Well, because I feel like with the actors, you're kind of f*****.

01:40:07
Case Aiken
Yeah. Sam, one thing I think you bring up that I think would have been good if it was in the spoken word of the movie, even if it is in the base text of the movie, is that the hybridization that is going on with these creatures are not, strictly speaking, animals and human combined to create the entity. There is additional stuff that's going on, and that owes to the book being set in the time of Taxidermy becoming a real big thing and Vivisectionists becoming really big and doing these weird art pieces using animal bodies and reconfiguring different parts to create things like jackalopes kind of s***. So when we talk about the hyena, it's actually a hyena pig hybrid. The pig part almost doesn't come into play.

01:40:52
Case Aiken
So if there was more of an emphasis on actually discussing, like, we are taking bits of all types of different things to put it together, to create this sort of, like, superior race, that would have been a more interesting conversation going on as well. It's not just I'm trying to give sapiens to these things, but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a better stock in general.

01:41:10
Sam Alicea
Yeah, because you've got an island. Right. So you're basically creating it. You had someone give birth. You're clearly breeding this. It's not just like I'm mixing up genetics. You're basically doing what farmers do when they take two different types of corn and put it together. Right. Like, I'm germinating these people. That's what you're doing with your hybrids that you've already created. You could make a case for eugenics or against eugenics. Definitely against, please. In this movie.

01:41:47
Case Aiken
So what we're getting at is that this movie should have been the tobacco episode of the simpsons.

01:41:52
Sam Alicea
Yes. All I'm saying is that it would have updated the material for the because we've been through from when the book was first written to now all the material and everything that we've been through and talking about genes and going through the Holocaust, going through the brunt of genetics and eugenics and things like that, and facing all those things. That would have been a much more interesting conversation with all of the other interesting conversation. Because I don't want to drop any of the other themes like the father betraying them or anything like that. But I think that would have given a little more gravitas and also created more horror. Right. Because I was almost offended at Edwards and I've already said this, at Edward's reaction to the people in the room, because I just was like, that's f****** rude.

01:42:49
Sam Alicea
There are people just that have physical sir. Like, you can't just look at people and be like, oh, they're hideous. They're missing an arm. Shut up. That's not cool. But how much better would have been if Edward just kind of was weirded out by these weird people, but was just kind of like, Where am I? What am I doing? But then later on found out that they're actually animals that are shaped to look like humans. Or there's something that when you realize that something was so transformed from the state that they should be, that you're changing what they should be. Like, their very nature of them, that you're playing with that nature that's more horrifying than someone being disfigured. And honestly, I'm still offended that he was so horrified by their faces.

01:43:48
Case Aiken
Yeah. I think that the uncanny valley is a place that this movie should live more in. And not to say the special effects, I think are great, but it is interesting that in the book, there's a lot of points where he can't identify what he's talking to, he can't put his finger on it, like there's just something wrong. And then he finds out that there are animal hybrids, so that there could be an element of that would have been much stronger to integrate into this work.

01:44:13
Sam Alicea
Oh, yeah, I agree.

01:44:15
Case Aiken
Yeah. Kind of piggybacking off of that one comment I made while I was watching this movie, which is that if you were adamant about having a cat person in your movie and you needed to have an actress play the part and have no special effects going into it and still sell the fact that it's a cat person. Farissa Volk was a perfect choice for that part. To be Alyssa, a cat human hybrid, and to sell yep. No, that's she's definitely half cat or partially cat or started off as a cat and was turned into a human. She sells it pretty well without anything else going on. She's got some witch eyes that are fantastic for that part and big white teeth. That when she's, like, making hissing faces looks just right even before we get into them. Like adding fake canines.

01:45:01
Sam Alicea
I agree.

01:45:01
Case Aiken
Yeah. So one thing I meant to bring up earlier that I thought would have been fun for conversation, that it's not my pitch, but I would like to mention it. That I think would sort of solve your issue. It's obviously someone else. A different creative's approach to the island of Dr. Moreau. But in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume Two So in the comic, they actually do travel to the island of Dr. Moreau because they are told by the British government they have to pick up a special hybrid to use as a weapon against the Martians from War of the Worlds, because that's the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It's all about like, let's have all the properties of British fiction coming together in one world.

01:45:44
Case Aiken
In it, they're like, well, what could any of these weird hybrids possibly do against these Martians? And the British government takes the package that they bring back. It's like, what the f***'s in it? It's in a box. Like, all the other things we saw were, like, walking around animals. And it's like, oh, yeah, those hybrid things, we let him play with that. So, wait, what did we get? Oh, it is a hybrid. And it's like anthrax and I forget what else. And it reveals that he was actually being tasked by the government to create biological warfare and that the larger experiments that he was doing was, like his side project, his fun time stuff, but that what he was actually doing was creating, like I said, chemical weapons. And that I thought was such a f****** cool thing.

01:46:24
Case Aiken
It's a great element of that because then it also explains why the Martians all die from the base bacteria of Earth. It's actually that the British government used a biological agent to kill them all, which is just, like, wonderfully cynical, but would explain why he's there, particularly in secret, if this was actually, like, a British test location.

01:46:42
Micah McCaw
But then that would make Alan more mad about another property also.

01:46:46
Case Aiken
Yes.

01:46:48
Micah McCaw
And be like, they adapted another one of my things.

01:46:51
Case Aiken
Yeah. Again, I think it is an element that would have been a lot of fun to do here and would solve some of our questions. But it isn't a thing that we would have conceived of at the time. No, that was just a little too clever by half because this movie is a little too obsessed with moments of the 90s. There's a spot in there where it was just like, they're afraid you'll sue us. I'm like that's. The litigious aspects of the 90s running wild right now as opposed to the modern era. Looking back on some of these things, for me, I think I agree that this movie should have had a smaller budget.

01:47:27
Case Aiken
I think that you could have gotten away with just having brando as your big star and had more no names in the other roles there, because that caused the budget to continue to balloon. It would have been great if you didn't even get Brando attached to it all, and you didn't have Roman Polanski making this movie and it was Richard Stanley working on. Like, that would be a lot of fun if the studio was like, here and also here's a team to get your s*** organized on set. Because we believe in your vision, but we don't believe in your ability to run a set because you've never done anything on this scale before. That would have been amazing. And so I agree, a lighter kind of structure would have been really good.

01:48:01
Case Aiken
I think that we could have had less expenses in terms of makeup, which I think would allow this movie to still be made. Because while the makeup is incredible, I think that we are losing some stuff. We're losing some value at the end by overloading the front with how many great prosthetics they're putting on people. And like I said in the book, a lot of times the character can't tell that he's talking to animal thing until he's aware that's what's going on. So I think that we could have had a lot more actors in the level of Azazzlo who has minor prosthetics on his face. It's like basically Halloween store makeup that's done in kind of a purposeful way. And I think that as the movie goes on, the ones who are rebelling should be regressing more.

01:48:47
Case Aiken
So I think you could have some particular weird, freak shows earlier on, especially for the birthing scene. And then once his eyes are open, he starts to see it everywhere. But we should front load the movie with a lot of people who just look a little off, and it's makeup stuff that they're doing to make them look a little bit off and a little bit animalistic. But the movie really opens our eyes to it as things start to go wrong and people stop taking their medicine and they regress. Like, there was this idea that Stanley talks about a lot that the poster for the 70s version of The Island of Dr. Moreau had a woman transforming into a cat as this abstract image framing the central image of the movie.

01:49:35
Case Aiken
And he was upset that never happens in the movie itself, and he wanted to have something like that. That's why Farusa Balk later on alyssa but it's farza Balk why Alyssa later in the movie fights back and scratches at them and climbs up a wall in all kitty cat fashion. They wanted to have her go full cat at that moment and then confront a dog and then die. So I think that if the movie opens with everyone being way more human and then only get into the more animalistic aspects later, that sells this devolution of the characters. I couldn't tell when we got to hyena at the end of the movie if he had a different facial structure than when we first see him, because I think he does.

01:50:13
Case Aiken
But like I said, I just couldn't tell for like when he first pops up and he's worried about his friend the leopard who's like going feral and he's afraid of it all going bad. He certainly is not covered in blood and less like freaky looking, but I think he's supposed to look a little more human at that moment and a snout becomes more pronounced towards the end of the movie. And if it's not that way in the movie that we got, it should be as they are rebelling against the doctor and they are transformed like they are becoming these atavistic things by way, at least mentally. They should be regressing physically as well. They should be taking on more animalistic identity to themselves. And also, I think the hyena should be female.

01:50:55
Case Aiken
And here's why I think beyond just like the whole like, oh, but in hyenas, the sexual dimorphism lends to larger females versus males. And the males are all small little runts that are only there to impregnate the females and then be like the bottom totem pole of their pack. I think that the hyena's objection and the sticking point is that I think hyena should be a female character being forced to exist in an artificially patriarchal society that rubs against her inner nature. That I think that as she sort of devolves into her more base hyena form, that is when her desires to conquer and to command those around and to have these sort of like aggressive alpha traits. The whole alpha male thing is kind of a bullshit thing anyway, just to mention that part.

01:51:43
Case Aiken
The whole idea came from putting wolves in captivity who were completely unfamiliar with each other and seeing how they would react and it was basically like a prison kind of scenario. It doesn't really clock when you apply it to real animals. But hyenas do have a matriarchal society where there is like a top female that is very strong and like her offspring usually rank higher but like if their mother dies then they get demoted to lower ranks. So there is something of that structure going on with hyenas that actually isn't real for wolves. And I think that would be really interesting there to have a character who grates on being forced to see father as this lord and having a pseudo patriarchal kind of structure in the town like all the other animals.

01:52:32
Case Aiken
Are sort of like being taught to behave this way by the human male that is warping them and manipulating them and that her desire and her own ambitions are innate to her nature and that they don't gel with each other. It's not just taking the bad parts about humanity and ramping it up to eleven. It's actually having friction with that humanity and how those structures are in play and have that be a thing that kind of drives her into trying to ascend to this leadership position violently. And I think that could be pretty cool. It'd also be fun. One of the ways that she starts devolving is like she is fascinated by the skeleton of her friend and is playing sort of like a sympathetic female role there.

01:53:21
Case Aiken
And then maybe some of her nature kind of gets her into bones because hyenas like to eat bone or like crack bones for marrow and stuff. It would be fun just to sort of like, play with animal facts.

01:53:33
Micah McCaw
I mean, that's a way cooler movie. That pitch is like, oh, heck, why he goes, Last tickets sold. Yeah, like, Burn the patriarchy should be.

01:53:41
Case Aiken
Part of it and she goes too far. But the thing is that she's not entirely wrong because it is these human structures that are pushing them there. And that's why we can come back around to this whole, like, well, maybe four legs is better moment at the end because I don't think that the movie actually sells the four legs better through the actual text of the no.

01:54:01
Sam Alicea
It's just that Ron Perlman is very convincing and we're like, yes, you are right. Whatever you say, sir. Also great.

01:54:07
Case Aiken
Horn yeah, but I think that should go for a lot of the characters who are like azazzlo doesn't become more doglike by the end of the movie. And I think that's a disservice to him. I think he should be kind of regressing into whatever form and that would give you more ground for some of these really cool special effects things. And I realize that there is difficulty having multiple models because then you can't shoot sequences or like, you can't shoot out of sequences easily if they are wildly changing from form to form and you would need more continuity tracking. I get it. I do admit that would be a problem.

01:54:40
Case Aiken
But really, what I'm saying is that you just have more shots where they have less makeup on earlier in the movie and that would probably make it easier to film it in the first place.

01:54:49
Micah McCaw
Yeah, totally. Dang. See, I'm glad I went first. I was right.

01:54:54
Case Aiken
Well, but we're all kind of agreeing like the movie was and that it's this weird thing. And again, the special effects look great and there are a couple of good performances in there. But it lost control well before they even started filming. And once they started filming, they had no control. Stanley had no control. When he's gone, the whole thing doesn't necessarily come together and it's just a miracle that the movie got made in the first place. I just wish it wasn't I wish that it was less of a surprise that this movie got finished.

01:55:29
Sam Alicea
Yeah, look, I think the main thing and I think what we've said over and over is it needed direction. It needed a point of view. A certain point of view. Any point of view, actually. Any point of view. And then it would have been a better movie.

01:55:49
Micah McCaw
But for my last thing to say on this movie is for you listeners that are film buffs and film historians, I think it's totally worth watching. And it's mercifully short.

01:56:01
Sam Alicea
Yeah, it's actually not that long, which, yes, that was merciful.

01:56:05
Micah McCaw
It's an hour 34.

01:56:07
Sam Alicea
It is quite merciful. And honestly, there is some fun stuff in it. Although, again, the trivia facts are more fun than this movie.

01:56:19
Case Aiken
And the documentary, I should note, is an hour 37. So it is just slightly wow.

01:56:26
Micah McCaw
I got to check that out. I am so excited to watch that now.

01:56:29
Case Aiken
Yeah. I would say the thing that ultimately resulted from this movie is a really interesting documentary about how much of a train wreck making this movie was. And unfortunately, to watch that really interesting documentary, you kind of need to know what the movie they're talking about is. You can't come in fully blind. But that said, the documentary is on freebie right now.

01:56:50
Sam Alicea
There's two very good piano scenes in this, guys.

01:56:52
Micah McCaw
That's true.

01:56:53
Sam Alicea
I'm selling that to you all you Steinway heads. You're going to love this. And when Hyena ultimately decides to walk into the house and fire, that's actually pretty it's a pretty moving moment. Watch the movie. Watch the movie. Do your laundry. Have it next to you for folding and watch this movie. Or if you have a project like crochet or knitting or just anything, I'm going to go with Micah. I'm going to recommend yeah, go ahead.

01:57:30
Case Aiken
Yeah. When this movie came out, I was so excited for it because I am such a mark for anthropomorphic animals.

01:57:38
Sam Alicea
That's a shocker to everyone who no.

01:57:41
Case Aiken
Surprise to anyone listening to this series at this point. Like superhero stuff and animal people. Those are where I'm going to go on all of this. But we've mentioned Jurassic Park a few times, and I think that the reason why it's hard, not to mention, aside from just the special effects breakthroughs that are going on, is that it's doing the same story, but adding a 20th century or particularly a late 20th century sort of pressure on the characters. Like the thing that is driving everything in that movie are these commercial ventures, are the interest in paleontology, which was nascent at the time that this movie or the book The Island of Dr. Moreau was written. And the book The Island of Dr. Moreau, is dealing with a lot of pressures that we are no longer experiencing in the same way.

01:58:28
Case Aiken
Like, the science that we're concerned about has changed. The things that we are afraid of have changed. Now, some of that have scars that have not healed and maybe that would be interesting, but they're not happening in the same fresh way that is happening in this movie. By way of being. A modern thing. It feels like this movie is an atavistic regression towards an earlier colonial period that it doesn't really have any commentary about. And that's sort of the disappointing part. Like a more modern movie, we would want it to kind of deal with more modern issues. And aside from it being like, well, now it's genes instead of surgery, but the surgery still is happening, and all that stuff is still happening. They're just like new buzzwords that they're throwing in there.

01:59:12
Case Aiken
It hasn't really refined its point of view, and it would just be nice if it had a point of view to go on.

01:59:19
Sam Alicea
Yeah.

01:59:20
Case Aiken
So no voiceovers and f****** have a thesis statement. Christ, man. Yeah, but yeah, go check out the documentary based on this one. If you listen to this and you have seen the movie but never saw the documentary, go check that out. If you haven't seen the movie and you're like, what the f*** is this thing? It's real. You can watch it.

01:59:39
Micah McCaw
It's real.

01:59:40
Case Aiken
It's a real thing. Should you spend a lot of money? No, I bought it because I have a habit of buying these things when the price difference between renting and buying is pretty low. And it was like, I think, like $9 to rent and $3 to rent, or probably $3 to rent and like $9 to buy. Will I be questioning myself in the future when I'm like, well, why did I buy this thing? Yes, absolutely.

02:00:01
Sam Alicea
But you should have just watched this once and just taken really good notes, friend.

02:00:06
Case Aiken
Right, but the documentary is out there. That one is free to watch. Go check that. Then, you know, check out stuff that our guest is doing. Micah, you have stuff to plug?

02:00:17
Micah McCaw
I do, yes. The first thing I want to plug is I want to go to dog heaven.

02:00:23
Case Aiken
Run with a pack, man.

02:00:26
Micah McCaw
No. So I really have two things that I'd like to plug. Number one is I came out with an album. It's indie alternative rock in November, and it's called A Beautiful Divorce. And it is about how the evangelical American church needs to divorce their patriotism from their faith and put the teachings of Christ above their love of a political party. So that is an album that I made, and I'm very proud of it. And wherever you're at, faith or not, I think there's stuff to enjoy on the album. So check it out on any platforms. And it's just my name Micah McCaw. And then number two is I host a podcast with my wife, the Macaw Podcast Universe. And we exist to prove people wrong when they say sequels are never better than the originals.

02:01:23
Micah McCaw
And we go through film franchises and just one at a time, and it's a lot of fun. I think this is coming out relatively soon. Is that correct?

02:01:35
Case Aiken
Yeah, it'll be like two months after we record.

02:01:38
Micah McCaw
Oh, two months after okay. So we'll probably be in the throes of X Men at the time, which we have put off for many years, but now we're finally covering all 13 X Men movies.

02:01:51
Sam Alicea
Oh, my gosh, what a feat.

02:01:53
Micah McCaw
Yes. But, yeah, we recently did, like, the Sergio Leone Man with no Name trilogy, which was a lot of fun. And, yeah, this year we got a lot of good series to cover. So that's always fun.

02:02:07
Case Aiken
Yeah, that's really fun when you do those bigger series because there are going to be those really stellar entries into it all. Currently, when this episode is being recorded, we are in the midst of our Planet of the Apes retrospective. So right before this, the Escape from the Planet of the Apes movie or episode dropped. And that movie, I think, is amazing and does a fantastic job of flipping the script of the original Planet of the Apes movie. So it's fun when you can see, like, well, we tried one thing. What if we tried this other thing? And if the series keeps on going, eventually you'll get to some truly incredible kind of things. You mentioned X Men, like, man, like, they got to Logan eventually, right?

02:02:48
Micah McCaw
Yeah, no, it's I i fell off the X Men movie, so I'm kind of excited to finally watch the newer team. I only watched first class, and then I stopped watching them.

02:03:01
Sam Alicea
Yeah, that's what I did.

02:03:02
Micah McCaw
And of course, I've seen but so that's going to be fun. Especially because we've covered the MCU, and I'm sure soon ish the X Men will join, so we'll both be prepared by the time they so and you two are both to we'd both love to have you on the show, either together or separate to talk know. I'll give you a list of movies and you can come on when you want.

02:03:29
Case Aiken
Absolutely. Always happy to have crossovers between our franchise and other people's universe of podcasts. So, yeah, awesome. We'll talk about that off mic, but everyone should go check that out. That sounds like a fantastic series. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to check it out already, but I swear I will come. Then they should check out. Sam. Sam, what are you doing?

02:03:57
Sam Alicea
I'm trying to figure out how I can get to dog heaven. So other than finding me here and on our discord, which I sometimes remember exists, I will be very busy figuring that out because I want to pet all the dogs in dog heaven because I'm sure dog heaven is the best heaven. And if you have any complaints about anything that I said today, whether you were insulted by me being insulted by Edward or you happen to think that case is right and we should have had Jared Leto as Dr. Moreau or in a future one, please don't put that in. Yes, he did. I heard you say it.

02:04:41
Micah McCaw
I'm like what you're like.

02:04:43
Sam Alicea
I want a narcissist that looks like Jesus, I heard. You know, if you agree with the case, that's fine. You can find him at well, if.

02:04:52
Case Aiken
You want to come at me about my take, that Jared Leto would be a better Dr. Moreau because it's Morbid Time. You can find me on Twitter or wherever. We all decide the social media landscape is going to go to at case Aiken, because that's my brand on all things except for Instagram, where I go at Ketzel Coat of Five, because I am holding on to that Aim screen name from High School for Dear Life. So check that out there. You can find the show on Twitter at another pass. You can find more episodes on our website. You can also find a link to our Discord server at that Discord server that Sam sometimes remember is there. You can get sneak peeks for upcoming episodes. You can engage in great conversations with what's going on.

02:05:36
Case Aiken
We've got a lot of great shows on our podcast network that are very good at setting up wonderful conversations about the things that they've got going on. I'm going to give a shout out to Fun and Games with Matt and Jeff for a couple of reasons. One, Matt is the person who introduced us to Micah. But also coming up and by the time this drops, their 100th episode of the Side Quest series will have come out, which is a wonderful project where people come on and just gush for five to 15 minutes about a video game that really meant something to them. So check that out. It's part of the Fun and Games feed. And that feed has gotten really strong. They've done some wonderful stuff. They have a patreon now that you should check out. That's a good old time. Check that out.

02:06:17
Case Aiken
And they do wonderful conversations on our Discord about video games. There's what people have just finished. There's lots of video game news discussion going on our Discord server. So check all that out. If you like video games, if you like movie stuff, we also have conversations about that comic stuff. Also that, again, great place to come and just sort of celebrate. But then you should head back over to certainpov.com where you can see what's coming on with this show. Right now, just before this episode drop, we have started our retrospective series looking at the early era of this podcast, which is, I admit, a bit navel gazey, but also a good way for us to say, hey, we've changed our mind. Or give Sam a chance to weigh in on some of the early movies that we covered before she came on board.

02:07:01
Case Aiken
So check out those another past episodes that are going to be dropping in the off weeks on this feed. But in the meantime, once you have caught up on all of those, Sam, what have we got coming up next time?

02:07:14
Sam Alicea
Well, next time we'll be talking about Highlander Two, the quickening. But until then, if you enjoyed this, pass it on.

02:07:25
Micah McCaw
Thanks for listening to certain point of view's. Another Pass podcast. Don't miss an episode, just subscribe and review the show on itunes. Just go to certainpov.com.

02:07:39
Sam Alicea
Another Pass is a certain POV production. Our hosts are Sam Alessia and Case Aiken. The show is edited by Matt Storm. Our logo and episode art is by Case Aiken. Our intro theme is by Vin Macrie and our outro theme is by Matt Brogan.

02:07:55
Case Aiken
And we'll do a clap so that when Matt, who is also our editor, is actually looking at this.

02:08:00
Sam Alicea
Hi, Matt.

02:08:01
Micah McCaw
Hey, Matt.

02:08:03
Case Aiken
We all love you, Matt.

02:08:04
Sam Alicea
We all love you.

02:08:06
Case Aiken
Me? More than Sam?

02:08:07
Sam Alicea
Not at all. That is a bold faced lie. You know it, Matt. I mean, I think previous recordings are all the proof you need. Case is just trying to get in on the action while he, you know, just not going to facts. Are there recordings? Are there recordings in progress?

02:08:27
Case Aiken
CPOV certainpov.com?