Episode 130 - Unbreakable with Sophia Ricciardi

What if you had never been hurt? Never been sick? Would you be hero? Sophia Ricciardi joins Case and Jmike for some analysis of this stealth superhero movie.

And make sure you check out the other side of this crossover by checking out Case's appearance on MovieStruck talking about the movie beat by beat: https://moviestruck.transistor.fm/episodes/moviestruck-episode-81-unbreakable-2000-feat-case-aiken

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Overview:

●      In the latest episode of the podcast, the hosts Case Aiken and Jmike Folson, joined by guest Sophia Ricciardi, engage in an insightful discussion of M. Night Shyamalan's 2000 film "Unbreakable," exploring its unique take on superhero themes and tropes, particularly in a time prior to the explosion of superhero films. The conversation delves deep into character analysis, highlighting the complexities of David Dunn as a subdued Superman figure and Elijah Price, also known as Mr. Glass, who embodies the archetype of a supervillain. The hosts examine the depiction of comic book artistry and storytelling, the societal implications of superhero narratives, and the ethical quandaries surrounding vigilantism, drawing parallels with other vigilante tales. They also discuss the film's use of color theory in character representation before wrapping up with comparisons to Shyamalan's later work "Glass" and promoting related podcasts and community engagement opportunities.

Notes:

●      ##### 🎬 Unbreakable Movie Discussion (00:00 - 08:19). Discussing M. Night Shyamalan's 'Unbreakable' (2000). Movie explores superhero concepts before superhero films dominated. Hosts: Case Aiken, Jmike Folson, guest Sophia Ricciardi. Movie set in an era before superhero genre resurgence. Dissection of superhero tropes and characterization

●      ##### 🦸 Character Analysis and Superhero Elements (08:19 - 18:05). David Dunn (Bruce Willis) as a reduced version of Superman. Invulnerability as a key superpower. Super strength and its portrayal in the movie. Introduction of 'superhuman senses' as a power. Discussion of Elijah Price/Mr. Glass as a supervillain archetype

●      ##### 🎨 Comic Book Industry and Artistic Representation (18:05 - 27:47). Movie's approach to comic book art and industry. Discussion of penciling, inking, and coloring processes. Exploration of comic book art as high art. Changes in comic book production over time. Movie's representation of comic book storytelling techniques

●      ##### 💪 Superhero Necessity and Societal Impact (27:47 - 39:00). Questioning the necessity of a superhero in the real world. David Dunn's impact on his immediate surroundings. Comparison to other vigilante stories (e.g., Boondock Saints). Exploration of the ethics of superhero actions. Discussion of the movie's portrayal of crime and societal fears

●      ##### 🦹 Supervillain Analysis and Color Theory (39:00 - 51:44). Mr. Glass as a Lex Luthor-type villain. Use of color in superhero/villain representation. Discussion of the chicken-or-egg question of hero vs. villain. Exploration of Mr. Glass's motivations and actions. Analysis of the movie's use of color in flashback scenes

●      ##### 🎥 Wrap-up and Podcast Promotion (51:44 - 59:47). Comparison between 'Unbreakable' and its sequel 'Glass'. Discussion of naming conventions for superheroes. Promotion of related podcasts and media. Mention of future projects and collaborations. Closing thoughts on the impact of 'Unbreakable' in superhero genre

Action items:

●      ##### unassigned. Check out the Unbreakable episode of Movie Struck podcast (51:57). Listen to the back catalog of Scruffy Nerf Herders podcast (56:27). Check out Another Pass podcast with Case and Sam (57:03). Visit the YouTube channel for Certain POV for Superman analog videos (57:10). Join the Discord server for superhero and video game discussions (57:18). Check out We Have Issues podcast for comic book discussions (57:50)

Transcription

00:00
Sophia
Do we know when about this episode is going to be coming up? Because I've got a couple, like, things in the works. I just want to make sure I don't say anything that isn't actually coming out.

00:06
Case
This is fairly far in production, so it's going to be, like, August.

00:09
Sophia
Okay, cool. Perfect. I'll refer to Shyamalanathon in the past tense then. And I'll.

00:13
Jmike
Shyamalanathon.

00:14
Sophia
Yeah, that Shyamalanathon came before the concept.

00:26
Case
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I'm Case Aiken, and as always, I'm joined by my co host, Jmike Folson.

00:32
Jmike
Hello, everyone. I feel super old today. This has given me lots of flashbacks.

00:38
Case
Yeah. Yeah. We are looking at a thing that came out in our lifetime, but at the same time, feels like from such a bygone era, I was twelve. Because today we are resolutely standing for the movie unbreakable.

00:51
Jmike
Yeah, I was twelve, case. I was twelve years old. This feels like such a long time ago.

00:57
Case
Yes, it totally does. I mean, it feels like an era, a different era of movie making. And to have this conversation about movie making, we are joined by the host of the movie Struck podcast, Sophia Ricciardi.

01:08
Sophia
Hello. Hello. I'm here to represent the youth and the city of Philadelphia today. Big for both of us, I'm told.

01:16
Case
Sophia, you and I were recently on your podcast discussing this movie for your Shyamalana thunder on month.

01:24
Sophia
You gotta let it flow off the tongue. It was Shyamalan.

01:26
Case
I can't do it. Shyamalan a thon.

01:28
Sophia
Shyamalan a thon.

01:28
Case
I always want to put, like, a little extra bit of a syllable in there, and it's not. It's not right. And I screw it up constantly. Except for when I'm not thinking about it, then I can do it right. But whenever I'm like, am I gonna say it right? I'm definitely not going to.

01:40
Sophia
The less you think about it, the better it is. Which is also my experience watching a lot of M. Night Shyamalan's films. I'm not a movie struck. We did a whole month of M. Night Shyamalan movies. And within those so lucky to be joined by case to talk about unbreakable. And we figured, hey, let's get two podcasts out of this movie.

01:55
Case
Yeah. Yeah. Way to watch it. And honestly, like, there, I just wanted to get you over on this show, but, like, we haven't had, like, a good excuse for it because you're more of a movie person than like a superhero person.

02:05
Sophia
Yeah, I'd say, you know, Superman's not a character that I'm super familiar with outside of, you know, the big picture, pop culture associations, you know, big, strong man, symbol of hope, all those critical features. So I'm really happy to have this movie based angle from which to jump on the podcast, because you guys do a great show. I'm very excited to be here.

02:21
Case
Thank you. But, yeah, you also do a great show, and you do great coverage of movies, and it's just been such a blast getting to know you, and I'm excited to actually be able to have, like, a real conversation here. And this is a movie I've always wanted to talk about on this show because it is such a dissection of, like, the superhero genre, but from the perspective of a person existing in the world before superhero movies dominated everything. Like, we just need to be very clear about that. This is not a dissection of the superhero film. This is a dissection of superheroes, just in general and trying to do as I said on the movie struck episode. Let's just do a superhero story where all the sliders are set down to as low as you can, but still a superhero story.

03:00
Sophia
It's creating the benchmark that all other movies will have to meet to qualify as a comic book movie.

03:06
Case
Right. That said, it certainly loves all that. And so we should know just before we get too deep into a movie that does have a twist ending. Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. I don't function well under, like, an umbrella of spoilers, being.

03:24
Sophia
I feel like we're in pretty safe territory, given that this movie did come out in the year 2000. And at this point, if you don't think an M. Night Shyamalan movie is gonna have a twist at the end, I don't know what to tell you.

03:35
Jmike
Right.

03:36
Case
And this is the second movie. This is the one that actually cemented the twist kind of setup for Shyamalan. Otherwise, you'd be like, well, there was that one, and then, you know, who's to say? But having back to back freshman and sophomore feature films have twists, and I would argue that the twist to this movie is way less important, but there's still a twist. So it's what this thing is known for. And for us to have a real discussion about it, we need to not have any of those restraints on us. But like I said, I really wanted to talk about this movie because when I saw it in theaters. It was a thing that I was really hungry for. This came out before the first Spider man movie.

04:13
Case
You know, like, we are talking about an era before the superhero genre had its resurgence. I mean, obviously, it comes in waves. Like, you know, there's the serials from, like, the forties. There's the sixties Batman. There's the seventies slash, eighties Wonder Woman series and the Hulk series. And then as far as movies go, there's obviously the Superman series and going into the Batman series. So there's been a place for superhero stuff. And, like, for me, I've always been heavily attuned to it. And this is one of those movies that really is invested in superhero concepts and wants to have, like, kind of a discussion about, like, the tropes of superhero stories, the characterization of things from superhero stuff. It's coming from a person who is as invested in movie making.

04:56
Case
And like I said, there isn't a movie language to superhero stuff at the time as it is for comic books. But I think that there's some really good conversation about, like, the medium of comic books in this movie. Now, it opens with incredibly out of date statistics about comic books, where it's, like, one. Comic books are about 35 pages at this point. You're lucky to get a 20 page comic. Comic books charged, you know, whatever, measly dollar amount. And now they're, like, usually, like, $5 each. The amount of people purchasing them, it's hard to say because now we have subscription models. Like, the world is so different. It's wild looking at this movie and being like, I remember this state of being. Cause I'm the oldest one on the call. Like, I was in high school at this point. Like, I think I might.

05:37
Case
This was November of 2000. Yeah, I had my driver's license at this point, just from a frame of reference, just barely, but I had it, man. It's snapping back to this time where it's just like, oh, yeah, okay. Back when it was kind of a niche thing, that was my thing, and not a lot of other people's thing, especially not in my friend group. Cause I went to uptight private school. But, yeah, let's kind of go around and talk about our experiences. Cause, like, j Mike, you mentioned you saw in theaters. Sophia, did you see this in theaters?

06:05
Sophia
I was a child, so I did not see this in theaters. I did not watch it too much later. I might have been two or three years old when this movie came out.

06:15
Jmike
Yeah. Okay, well, I'm just gonna hide over here again.

06:17
Sophia
I'm here to represent the YouTube.

06:18
Case
My heart is not unbreakable, and you just shattered it.

06:23
Sophia
I did watch it much later in life, and I still found myself enjoying it. I don't think I saw this until after my book. Movies began to have a lot more presence in the cultural consciousness. You know, the Raimi Spider Mans. Yeah, I'm a ride or die for those two thousands X Men's movies. So, you know, there was a lot of things that this was in conversation with me when I saw it for the first time. It wasn't quite so fresh, but I think that enhanced the experience in some ways, going into something that is so much in dialogue with how do we approach comic book storytelling on screen?

06:52
Case
So on that note, were you aware of the twist ending when you approached it, or was that a surprise for you?

06:57
Sophia
I don't think I knew the specifics of the twist, but I don't know that I saw this until at least split had also come out. So I think I was at least a little bit aware that there was going to be some sort of surprise at the end. And I love Samuel L. Jackson. Never has a more suspicious man been on screen.

07:13
Case
Right? Yeah. Even when he's a superhero or a superhero adjacent character, he still has to be the spy guy.

07:20
Sophia
Yeah. Big secret to production design language is if a character is wearing a secondary color, like purple orange, they're probably not the protectionist.

07:28
Case
Right. Well, and that's super true for comic books. And that's a good segue into sort of, like, what the language of this movie is. Like, this movie takes it from the perspective of, like, oh, yeah, comic books are true. They may not be real in the sense that they are talking about real events or anything to that effect, but there's a truth to everything that's behind them, right down to the fact that there are going to be these, like, heroic types and these villainous types that are existing in sort of a space, like, in opposition with one another. And it's debatable with the character of Elijah if he's living up to the supervillain archetype. Consciously or not, he definitely is Casey. I mean, he certainly is being the supervillain.

08:11
Case
He's dressed in purple with a Batman ass car that is completely lined with foam with his glass walking stick.

08:17
Sophia
But what an aesthetic. What a choice.

08:20
Case
It is such an aesthetic. It is such a perfectly tailored look. My only question is, does he realize that he's the bad guy until the end of the movie under noting the fact that he is a terrorist and he is, like, the culprit for multiple horrific terrorist actions. That would be national news.

08:35
Jmike
Individually, I think he has to know that personally, because at the end, spoilers. When he gets the big confrontation scene where they're in, they shake hands. Bruce Willis pans across the wall, and you see all these disasters that have taken place, and you see outlines of graphs and things or bombs that he's made, and you're like, what the hell? Yeah, this dude is super evil.

08:59
Case
God damn it, J Mike. Spoilers.

09:01
Jmike
Hey, I'm sorry. This movie came out in 2000. It's 2024. If you haven't seen this movie by now, I'm sorry.

09:07
Sophia
You've had your time. Yeah.

09:09
Case
And I need to emphasize that I don't think that the twist is actually that important to it. I think that the ride itself is pretty good. Like, knowing that he is ultimately the person responsible for everything, I don't think, really changes anything about the movie in any sort of meaningful way. It's more about the acceptance of the possibility that a person could be destined to be the inspiration for a type of superhero, for lack of a better word. It kind of makes me think of this thing that they actually. At about the same time, in Marvel, they had this book called the Inhumans. The Inhumans are characters that have popped up in, like, Marvel MCU stuff, notably the really bad miniseries, which kind of is based slightly on this mini series that ran in comics.

09:46
Case
But the series that ran in the two thousands, presented this scenario that the Inhumans, which is a secret society of humans that have all been genetically modified and each manifest a different superpower. Specifically, that the manifestation of powers in their setting is based not on genetics, but it's societal, that they manifest abilities based on the needs of the society at the time. So if there's a limited number of flyers and they need them for whatever reasons, defense or, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, you need a certain number to make sure that they can, you know, be scouts or whatever kind of situation that it will manifest. And so if you kill an inhuman, within a generation, someone will come back with that same basic power set.

10:24
Case
And I kind of feel like there's a similar kind of thought process going on here in terms of, like, well, someone's got to be destined to be unbreakable, right? And someone's got to be destined to be super breakable bad.

10:40
Sophia
Yeah. Well, that's the logic that Samuel L. Jackson's character Elijah, uses in the movie. He's like, well, I realize that myself with my brittle bones and one extreme. So surely there is the possibility and the necessity that the world must have the other extreme in it as well, which is the unbreakable of it all. You know, the man whose bones are not brittle and in fact, so not brittle that they cannot be broken.

10:58
Case
Right. I just. It's wild where he goes all the way to, like, completely unbreakable, as opposed to, like, it takes a little bit more to break than a regular guy because, like, Elijah isn't like, he's mister glass, but, like, glass doesn't just shatter, like, on everything. And they do a really convincing job of, like, well, why could it be way worse or anything like that? But, like, the thought that, like, there would be someone who's completely unbreakable, as opposed to, like, in a car accident. And, like, he should have broken all of his ribs and he only broke three. That's a big leap right there. And, like, the circumstances that he creates. We've got the plane. Is it a bombing or does it crash?

11:30
Sophia
All major forms of transportation are affected in some way by, well, in housing.

11:35
Case
Because there's the apartment bomb or apartment fire.

11:38
Jmike
Plane slide.

11:38
Case
Yeah. And then the train. Yeah. And I guess he just figures, like, it's fine. I don't need to worry about cars because there's just enough accidents anyway that I'll hear about something.

11:47
Sophia
The statistics were on his side. And if there's one thing I've learned M. Nightdez Shaman loves is a man who knows statistics. And I guess Elijah falls in that category.

11:55
Case
So he creates, like, all these circumstances to find a person that is, as he describes it, unbreakable. Now, let's talk about what we are ultimately presented with in the form of David Dunn. Because I think that this is an interesting attempt at saying, like, well, these are all the tropes of your Superman type. And then really pulled back. I think that's cool. And I think it's like, there's a lot of superheroes that sort of follow this beat. But specifically, Superman, I think, is, like, what we're trying to channel here in that he is a notable thing is the invulnerability. There are a number of characters who are invulnerable in comic books, but most of them are directly homaging Superman in that regard. That was a big deal, that bullets bounced off his chest.

12:34
Case
Most of the other feats of strength and so forth are like, yeah, it's cool. But the fact that he couldn't be hurt was kind of a big deal there. And I think that's worthwhile. Sort of angle to take looking at. Done. So we know that he can't be hurt, or at least he doesn't have any sort of lasting impact from it. We don't know if he has a healing factor or anything. We don't really test the limits of his damage resistance. We don't even really see him get attacked very much. There's the fight at the end, but even that, and we talked about this on the movie Stark episode, the impact to him could have been a lot of injury that then healed.

13:09
Case
Honestly, it's not even outside of the realm of what a person could take because he's just being thrown against a wall and leaving crater marks and drywall. So in terms of, like, his durability, we don't get, like, a good metric for it. But we are informed that he is, in effect, unbreakable. Whether or not it is directly he is resistant to damage or he's able to recover from damage very easily. So there's that. In terms of Superman power type, he's really fucking strong. I love the goddamn scene where we. Where we test out how strong he is.

13:40
Sophia
So charming.

13:42
Case
Yeah. I mean, it's up there in this movie. It's the scene that really stuck with me for this movie. Like, there's a lot that I forgot about between seeing it in theaters and probably a few times over the years and then the last 20 year gap of, oh, God. Oh, God. This may not be an exaggeration.

13:59
Sophia
But, yeah, it's a scene that really sits with you. And I think it's a great turning point in the movie, too, where he kind of where we get David starting to accept that he might actually be superhuman in some way and not just a guy who is a little stronger than he expected, a little heartier than, you know, the average guy might be. And that's kind of the point where the movie allows the audience to also get in on this turn. Because up till now, as something the movie does throughout that's really strong is it puts you in David's shoes of, like, coming to accept that he may actually be a superhero or at least superhuman.

14:26
Sophia
And what that means and what he can do is all not mundane, but, like you're saying, it's the invulnerability and the super strength and things that don't really manifest physically until he's put in a situation where he has to use them. And that scene where he's accepting that maybe he is stronger than he should be, than he expects to be. And he tested out with his son is both incredibly charming and also, I think, a very important point in the movie for where its tone kind of goes and where it goes into more of the super heroics. Even if he's not getting into brawls on the street, he's starting to accept that this might be in his path.

14:58
Case
Yeah, I think that the addressing of how someone could have super strength and not realize it is really important and it's very well handled in this scene. The fact of the matter is, he is pushing himself really hard to lift a weight that is not impossible for a person, let alone as they add more and more weights. He's pushing through it. But what would be sort of his normal mental limit has been hit every single time up until that point. The only reason he's able to work through it the first time is because he doesn't realize how much weight is on there, and then that's when he sort of is forced to kind of take it back.

15:31
Case
Now, that said, and we talked about this on movie struck, it is weird that he used to be a football player because you would think he would have been tested to see how much he could pitch.

15:39
Sophia
Yeah, yeah.

15:42
Case
Now, I do have a headcanon that has come to me since the episode of movie struck in that I could imagine that if he was always, like, setting the record, he didn't necessarily need to, like, push himself further, like, to his upper limit. Because if every time he's done it, he is setting a record, then that's probably the point where it's just like, oh, this is great. Like, I imagine he's going, like, five pounds over what the previous person did, and then someone else, you know, beats him and he has to come back and, like, do a higher one, probably. Like. Cause. Cause people get competitive about weightlifting. So, like, I could imagine that. And then again, it is a lot of work. It's not a thing you do freely. Like, you don't just, like, do your max just while you're, like, working out.

16:22
Case
Like, it's a thing that you do specifically to record what your max is. So, like, it is a possibility that he just never was in that circumstance. And that's my head cannon. That's the only reason that it would make sense for a thing where he's an athlete. You definitely would know what his max is.

16:35
Sophia
Oh, yeah.

16:36
Case
But it's hard.

16:38
Jmike
Well, that, and, like, the accident, which it was like, The car accident thing, that's the only thing that bothered me about this whole situation is that, like, oh, no. Like, I was injured and I can't play football anymore. Everyone was just like, all right, that checks out. And, like, left it alone, and no one checked it out after that point. How about we do some, like, scans on you? No, I'm okay. I'm just really injured. I can't play anymore. Coach.

17:03
Case
Yeah. He never tries to present, like, what the injury was. I mean, that said, like, if you were, like, I was in a car accident, our car flipped. I don't feel like I can play football anymore. Most doctors would be like, that makes sense.

17:16
Jmike
Why aren't you in the hospital?

17:17
Case
I will support you right now.

17:21
Sophia
This gets at a sort of movie logic thing that. So I rewatched Glass as well for this podcast because I thought, you know, let's do the homework. Right? And in that they take an MRI of David Dunn for the first time. And in this movie, unbreakable, he is in an accident. And we know in his past he was in another accident. And I guess at neither point after those accidents when he was getting examined by physicians, that they think, let's take an MRI. And that the choice of when to apply medical practice is incredibly inconsistent to the point where it almost, I almost choose to think that this world is working on different medical rules, like the FDA, you know, whatever the acronym for doctors associations or whatever, is making allocations for superheroics without even knowing.

18:05
Jmike
It's like when you first see him after the train accident, he's kind of like laying by himself without any, like, without any instruments or anything attached to him. And there's kind of like, leaving him alone. They're like, oh, he's awake now. Yeah, I guess somebody should, like, talk to him.

18:20
Case
Yeah, you'd think something would be like, monitoring his heartbeat or something. Like he was unconscious after a terrible accident that everyone else is dead from.

18:27
Jmike
They're just kind of like, oh, we'll just put him over there in one of the side rooms and somebody will check on him eventually.

18:32
Case
Eventually, yeah, they're doing a lot of work and hoping that we're not paying too much attention to some of the details for, like, how you just wouldn't have noticed that you were completely unbreakable. Like, the idea is that, like, you go through your life and you probably don't think too often about the times that you're hurt, aside from the time when you're actively hurting. So it's just like, oh, well, yeah, I mean, I probably got hurt because I can't think about the last time I stuffed my toe, something like that. But they are taking a lot of leaps in terms of making it sort of fit there.

19:03
Case
So checking off powers, we've got invulnerability of some kind, we've got super strength of some kind, and then we've got the sort of approach to senses, which usually comes after the physical powers, in terms of, like, the developing power sets for superheroes. Superman didn't have x ray vision initially. He just had really good vision when he first showed up. And then over time, they added x ray vision. And then from that, they had things like bad science thought that x rays could produce heat. And so Superman's vision blasts were initially that he had x ray vision, and he would say, oh, the heat of my x ray vision set this thing on fire. And then eventually, people were like, you know, x rays don't produce heat, right? And so they had to make it a separate superpower form.

19:40
Case
So in terms of the progression, again, sliders all the way down, having some kind of sensory thing, that's a hunch. It's kind of like a spider sense in terms of just assessing, oh, there's danger to be had or danger to be dealt with out there. So we get this one. And I rather enjoy the initial untrained version of it just being like, oh, yeah, I have a gut feeling that this guy has a gun. I think that's a really cool way of handling a version of the super senses.

20:09
Sophia
Yeah. I think one of my favorite things in this movie is how they handle his intuition, as he'll call it, because I think they really do. And again, leaning into the whole, we accept that he is a superhero or superhuman, as David Dunn accepts it in the beginning, when he still thinks he's a regular guy who just hasn't gotten sick in a while. It's this very realistic explanation. He's just got a sort of a hunch. We see a brief camera flash, and then he gets some sort of confirmation for his hunch of all these pieces of information that he, as a security guard, might just have the background for. It's almost like Sherlock Holmesian and how he's putting together these little pieces, but not quite that extreme. But then by the end of the movie, he bumps into someone on the street.

20:46
Sophia
He can fully see a crime they've committed in, like, a that's so maven style, like vision flashback. But I love that, like, escalation, because it really does. Like, every time we see this happen, it gets more and more like that full vision effect at the very end. And I think that's a great representation of, like, sure, this could just be good instincts. Or this could be something more. Or this could be something more is kind of the whole hook of unbreakable.

21:13
Case
Yeah. And I like it also, because there is a tradition for this kind of. I think it's called psychometry or psychometry. I'm not sure where the emphasis is. The emphasis on that's allowable. The idea that you can touch an object and sort of see its history. And it's possible that there's some sort of, like, thing like that going on. And like I said, there's precedent in, like, the spiritualist movements of, like, the early 19 hundreds. And, like, other periods, like, where you could see how, like, this sort of hunch sense thing could be just around and people wouldn't talk that much about it. Or when they do, it would be sort of focused on in a different way than the way that it is being interpreted here as, like, a superpower. Again, like spiritualist psychic powers, mediums and whatnot.

21:53
Case
Like, you could make an argument for something like that, being like, a similar type of person in a different era, especially if all of these are things that you have to kind of train his sense powers. He definitely doesn't have it as good at the beginning. It's possible that his strength is not limitless, that he does have to train it. He does work out a lot. So it's entirely possible that his limits, when he was younger or something, were not so superhuman. But he's been pushing himself and happens to be in that area. One that he did actually train. And we joked about this on movie struck. David Dunn is a man who just accumulates traumas. He was a football player. He was in car accidents. It could be that, like, he just.

22:30
Sophia
Drowned as a child.

22:31
Case
Yeah. We are talking about a person who has gone through both emotional and physical abuse to the point where maybe it just toughened him up to the point where he's unbreakable. We don't know how it all works because we don't really have this whole history for the character beyond just a few selective moments on there. In fact, his inability to recall history is one of the things that allows him to get to the point where he's, like, 40 and realizing that, oh, fuck, I've been Superman this whole time.

22:55
Jmike
I was always watching. I was like, this is really cool. And the more I watched it, I was like, wait. You know, he reminds me of. He reminds me of, like, kind of like a watered down Johns, whereas, like, he has, like, the inverse of it where his weakness is water instead of fire.

23:11
Case
Okay.

23:12
Jmike
And he can, like, touch people and, like, see their past and everything. And I was like, oh, that kind of fits. That works.

23:19
Case
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, the drowning threat as a thing that could bring a person down. I mean, like, you think about, like, all the strongmen in mythology, like, your Hercules, who has to die by way of, like, his skin being poisoned and lift flame, or, like, Samson has to bring the whole, like, temple down on them. Yeah, they're generally speaking, like, these big efforts that take it down. Like, Beowulf has to fight a dragon, you know?

23:44
Jmike
Also, did he have to drown in order for his abilities to kick in?

23:49
Sophia
That is maybe one of the things I think is left most open ended by the film as to when he truly became unbreakable. I always interpreted it as he was born that way. And it's just that in the same way that, okay, you can't really hurt him by punching him, but, like any other person, being very physically strong does not make you better at being able to breathe underwater. So he runs very quickly into the problem of, this is a weakness that I could have. It's something that is interesting that they kind of describe it as his weaknesses. Water. And everyone's going to need to just real quick glide right past the Philadelphia accent on this one. We are. This movie is from my hometown, baby. This is a love letter to the city of Philadelphia.

24:25
Sophia
We're talking about water all day up in here.

24:26
Case
But I almost cracked a joke, and I was like, I cracked a joke on the movie struck episode, and I like you too much to keep making fun of you the same way.

24:34
Sophia
Oh, good. I knew exactly what I was walking into when I did Shyamalan a thon. And this movie in particular, set up a plot point that would necessitate the water coming out. But, yeah, water is his weakness, is how Mister Glass describes it. And in the movie glass, I guess, also spoilers for the movie glass, if you have not seen that, it's more recent. But still, I think we're well within the bounds of this movie's been out for a while territory. He drowns, and so water is his weakness. And in this movie, I feel like it's very much interpreted as you could drown. That's how you could be defeated. But it does reign throughout the entire third act, so it doesn't really seem like wooder dampens his abilities at all. It just sort of is a thing that could hurt him.

25:14
Sophia
And I think that builds in more to the question of, like, is he really unbreakable or not? Is he actually weak to Wooder? Does this make him more breakable, or is he just, like most people on earth, able to drown? I would go to safar and say, like, all people on earth, able to drown.

25:28
Case
Well, we don't know. There might be someone who's undrownable. And it's the Aquaman themed spin off.

25:34
Sophia
Movie to this being undrownable as being enough to make you Aquaman in the M. Night Shyamalan like, glass verse is an incredibly funny concept that I would love to see expended.

25:44
Case
Wait, didn't Shyamalan do a water movie? Was that lady in the water?

25:47
Jmike
I didn't watch that one.

25:48
Sophia
Lady in the water sounds right, but that was not in the Shyamalanathon rosters.

25:52
Case
Yeah. So I also sort of side with it not being that, like, it's his direct weakness so much he's just susceptible to drowning. Possibly more so, because, like, presumably he has a higher muscle mass than a normal person would, and maybe his bones are denser and would it make him impossibly heavy? Possibly, yeah, maybe. But, like, I think we're hand waving that. But I think he certainly doesn't have the buoyancy of someone who has a lot of fat. Like, he's very explicitly in really good shape. So, like, he actually might have a very low body fat ratio on that one. And so maybe he just doesn't float as much as a normal person would. And it could be a scenario of, like, the reason his muscles are, like, really strong but not necessarily bigger than a normal person's.

26:29
Case
It might be that, like, it's like, the twitch fibers. Like, the reason why, like, chimpanzees are smaller than us but are stronger kind of thing. It might just be, like, really efficient muscles, but as a result, like, particularly heavy ones. And so maybe he's rocking, like, a 300 pound weight or something like that. You know, he's on the high end and it's just. It's like, no, I'm just in really good shape.

26:48
Jmike
All I need is a giant super soaker or to have him look up in the middle of a rainstorm.

26:52
Case
Right? I'm saying. I'm saying that doesn't make sense. I'm saying I lean towards it because, like, the thing in the movie where he almost drowns, like, you know, obviously when he's a kid, we don't see the scene, but in the scene in the third act, like, that's a terrifying sequence for anyone. Like, he's on an unsecured pool cover that starts to pull in like, there's a reason why there's laws against that. Like, you have to have fences and stuff like that because it's considered an attractive nuisance that, like, someone might die. Like, pools can be deadly for. For people, especially if you're wrapped up in a plastic tarp.

27:22
Sophia
I generally case. I honestly completely agree with you. I think it's so much more impactful if this is just like, maybe he's a little denser, but just, he can drown like anyone else. It's not that water is his weakness. Unfortunately, the movie glass does decide to clarify this point. And they're like, no, no. Water makes him weak because when he's in the asylum, they set up his room with a bunch of jets that are motion activated and will just pour gallons of water on him if he tries to go for the door at any point.

27:47
Case
God dammit.

27:48
Sophia
It is exhibited where they show the drowning when he was a kid and he's fully being actively drowned by other children who are holding him under the water. This man really has been collecting traumas that we didn't even know about in the movie unbreakable.

28:01
Case
Jesus Christ. Yeah, well, okay, so on the one hand, I feel weird about the following. I'm glad that the scene shows that the trauma of being drowned as a child is even worse than we thought. On the other hand, God damn it. Like, that's so annoying. Like, it would make sense if it was like, jets that, like, knock him back or something and he's just not able to fight it because no one can really fight it.

28:22
Sophia
But it's just ambiguous enough where I'm like, I guess maybe you haven't explicitly said it, but it's a, it's pretty clear. They're like, what is his weakness? And I think that takes some of the impact away from what the movie Unbreakable is doing with this, where it is kind of treated as another check on the box in Elijah's theories of, like, this is your superhero. Here's my proof. They go so far as refer to it as his kryptonite in the movie, which is notably the only word that they've just co opted from existing comics because they have to make it active comics instead of action comics. But kryptonite. Kryptonite snuck in there telling him about our boy supes up in here.

28:55
Case
Yeah, I do love that part because that's just one of those scenarios where, like, the idiom has become so strong in the zeitgeist that you just can't get rid of it. Like, like, kryptonite is just a thing that people know. Like, you don't have to be a Superman fan to understand that. Like, oh, it's his kryptonite. Oh, okay. Yeah. People just know it and gets ripped off like crazy. Like, both he man and Lion O from Thundercats had, like, an equivalent of kryptonite just because, like, you could think of something better. But pretty much every series now has some bullshit version of. Of that. Or, I shouldn't say every series now, but every series in the eighties did longer.

29:29
Jmike
Oh, God.

29:31
Sophia
Series that this movie was probably drawing inspiration from.

29:34
Case
Yes. Yeah. So let's talk about glass for a.

29:37
Sophia
Minute, because if you want.

29:39
Case
Well, on my. Not. Not the movie glass. Sorry. Like, the character glass.

29:43
Sophia
Mister glass. Okay. Much better.

29:45
Case
Sorry. Because I still haven't seen the movie glass. So, like, aside from me being like, sophia, just spoil it all.

29:50
Sophia
I mean, I will happily spoil the movie glass, but let's talk about the character, because I feel like there's a lot more interesting things to say about.

29:56
Case
Him on this rewatch. I was looking specifically for him from the lens of a Lex Luthor type because I had already formed the opinion that, well, we're doing a Superman type thing here. So what is going on with the reverse? Now? As we noted, he wears a lot of purple, so that's a good start right there. That's a very Lex Luthor type thing. He's got a Batman villain esque vehicle, which is, like we said, like, super villain kind of tier on that one. But then him being, like, the smart villain, like, the way his mom describes the big threat for the hero, him being the smart villain who sets up bombs and arranges for fires and all these things. He is a genius. He is a criminal mastermind. And so he does actually kind of fit that bill.

30:38
Case
Like, I don't think he would be able to make, like, a super suit or some shit like that. And please pray to God.

30:43
Jmike
I don't know.

30:44
Case
It's not in glass.

30:45
Sophia
He has a snazzy suit, but I don't think it'll be described as a super suit. I think he just knows a good tailor.

30:50
Case
Okay. I was like, please don't tell me that there's, like, a mech suit he uses that's made of glass or something.

30:57
Sophia
They had at least that much restraint, thank God.

31:01
Case
Also, they only had so much budget because I know that class was not a particularly. Like, a particularly expensive movie to make, but, like, he is in the same scenario. This, like, sort of, like, all sliders down version of, like, well, what is a Lex Luthor type villain? Oh, he's someone who is, like, capable of setting off some explosives. He's a Ted Kaczynski type, you know, and I think that is an interesting aspect there as well. I mean, he's also got a weird haircut that also plays into Alex loser type if we really want to, you know, goes very well for your mad scientist type character. I just mean, like, the choice to have something distinct with the hairstyle, like, in Lex's case, being bald, but, like, the direct knockoff of Lex Luthor from Marvel Comics.

31:42
Case
Master Menace has hair that just won't fucking stop growing. So, you know, you can go with the reverse of.

31:48
Sophia
Mm. No, I think he's a good analogy to the Lex Luthor type. Again, not to bring the movie glass into this, but in glass, he's explicitly confirmed to be super intelligent. Like, that's his superpower. And I think I like the Unbreakable. Like, with everything. I prefer Unbreakable's take on the character, where he's just a guy who has consumed so much of this particular type of storytelling of comics, has chosen to shape his worldview around the way that they present the world, and is using his higher than average intellect to shape the world that he wants to see out of that, and as a result, forms himself into the supervillain, into Mister Glass, in opposition to unbreakable. And I think that's a very, like, interesting stance to take, but also, it's a little scary.

32:30
Jmike
Right.

32:30
Sophia
It's the part of the mastermind villain of the Lex Luthor type where you kind of can't tell what their plan is going to be until the big reveal at the end. You know, their scheming is two or three steps ahead, and so when they finally do catch up to them, you get to see it all unravel and unfold and see how clever it was all along. And I think Mister Glass is a great version of that, particularly for this movie, where he has to not only become the supervillain, but create the hero that will oppose him all in one fell swoop.

32:56
Case
Yeah, I think that the character just, like, works very well in terms of selling you on this world and being an evangelist for comics, that you could see how he has molded himself in the form of the supervillain. And I, you know, then gets to sort of blanket talk about the medium while at the same time creating it in the real world. So there's two other areas I want to talk about with this movie. One of which is specifically the archetype that they are putting forth in terms of, like, well, how necessary is it? And then the other one is the actual, like, meta conversation about comic books, and I feel like I want to end on the archetypal stuff. Okay, so let's talk quickly about their approach to the comic book industry, which I think is rather cool.

33:38
Case
It's a little bit limited, but that's me being able to view it from hindsight, like, where we exist in 2024, looking back, where most of the comic books I consume are on my iPad, the art form of comic books, I think that this movie has an interesting conversation with the attempt at selling individual panels as high art, I think, is an interesting one. Like, I think there's certainly a place for something like that. Yeah, I know a lot of people who are big collectors of originals, like the original pencil work from artists. When we go to Comic Con, they will specifically go and try to buy works and stuff like that. So I think that there's certainly a place for it.

34:16
Case
I find it interesting that it does appear to be still blown up reconstructions of it all because comics are drawn at a larger size. I think it's a four to one ratio, but maybe it's an eight to one ratio, or at least that was the traditional way before digital sort of came in, that you would pencil it at a much larger size and then it would be shrunk down so you could get more detail in without having to have tiny hands. And this one does get some stuff right. I think that one thing that's really interesting is they talk about how they show one piece that's way more detailed before it made it to the COVID itself, and they talk a little bit about that.

34:52
Case
And that's an issue that a lot of pencilers have dealt with, both from the standpoint of just like, well, the inker just sort of, like, picks out the details that are really important when converting it into an inked format that can then be colored. But also, sometimes inkers are not particularly scrupulous and will be lazy sometimes and will actually omit details or remove details so as to not make it difficult for them to do their job. And sometimes that's because they are doing these things on incredibly tight deadlines. The penciler is the one who can slow down the process by putting too much detail in a work and then have to, like, get it to an inker who has to, like, turn it around in a weekend kind of thing. And so that has happened.

35:32
Case
But it's also pretty infamous that guys like Jack Kirby have had some of their best works butchered. When you look at the difference between the penciled and the inked reconstructions of it, at least it was interesting to bring up. So I wanted to talk about that one, because I do think that it's fascinating to think that for years, people looked at comics, especially older comics, as being for kids, and oftentimes thinking that, oh, the art is so simple, there's so little detail. They have to do all this, like, primary color stuff, but there's all these restrictions on it. And part of that is the printing process that require these, like, very strong lines for anything to really, like, shine through, because we're dealing with, like, this low quality printing method.

36:11
Case
And thus, artists were probably getting short shift in terms of, like, the public perception of the quality of their work. Obviously, that has changed as, like, digital has become a thing. Like, inkers is a thing that doesn't really need to exist anymore, because even if you're nothing doing the original in a digital format, like, if you're a penciler and then you scan it, the ability to scan it and, like, recreate those details are so much more pronounced than they used to be. Like, the copying methods are just better. And so you can get a lot of this detail now in a way that didn't used to exist. And this movie comes before that big shift. And so that there is a bit of a, like, oh, man.

36:46
Case
Like, look at how much, like, cool stuff is being put into these, like, panels that then the public aren't seeing, because, like, it's just too much to, like, shrink down and, like, make stand out in a way that would be, you know, visible. I just wanted to, like, spend a minute talking about that one because, like, there's a lot of really great pencilers out there who died in poverty because they were seen as working in a medium for kids, and they poured their heart and soul into the work that they did.

37:12
Sophia
Yeah, I mean, it's a great point to. Unbreakable is really, in many ways, like a love letter to comics and comic storytelling. And that's just a great example of the real care and appreciation for the art form that is present throughout the movie. You really get the sense not just through Mister Glass, but through the scene that you're talking about and just kind of throughout that, everyone working on this project, or particularly m night, at the very least, had a lot of care for the work that goes into creating a comic book and that carries through that scene.

37:39
Case
Yeah. So before my last point that I wanted us to talk about Jmite. Did you have anything that you wanted to bring to our conversation about Unbreakable?

37:47
Jmike
I feel like this happened a long time ago, and I don't appreciate that it happened so long ago. And I was laughing before we started talking. Like, I was like, man, going back and looking back on this movie I hadn't seen in a long time, and I was like, holy crap, this has been forever. And I was looking at all the different, like, pieces of technology that happened that were in the movie that don't exist anymore. You know, it was like, oh, my gosh, this is heartbreaking. But also the fact that the last big movie, I think, that came out before that was Batman and Robin. So there was a huge shift in, like, storytelling between that movie and this movie.

38:27
Case
Well, we got Blade before this.

38:30
Sophia
That's true.

38:31
Jmike
Oh, yeah, it was. Right? Blade. I always forget about Blade, but, like.

38:34
Sophia
The biggest boys come out and around.

38:37
Case
The same time as X Men, actually.

38:40
Jmike
But 2000, or is it 2000?

38:43
Case
I want to say 2000 was X Men, but that's not going to influence this movie's production because of just the way movie production tables work.

38:51
Sophia
X Men was 2000, so this would have been. These would have come out in the same year on Brick Bull and X Men.

38:56
Jmike
I still feel old. I appreciate this movie. Makes me feel so old.

39:00
Case
Here's the counterbalance on the feeling old part, which is look at the trailers for Deadpool and Wolverine and look at Hugh Jackmande and just be like, oh, immortal. Yeah, he's doing great. It hasn't been 24 years of playing the same part. Like, come on now.

39:14
Jmike
It's been 23 years.

39:18
Case
So here's the thing I wanted to bring up, which is that when the sliders are brought all the way down and the superhero thing is taken to as small of a character as this, in the world that, you know, in as big a world as we exist in, is it necessary to have a superhero? What is he bringing to the table that society itself shouldn't like? Is a vigilante character like this actually helpful to the world that he exists in?

39:45
Jmike
I mean, not really, but then again, he wouldn't have known he was a hero unless he was, like, brought out into the open by Mister Glass. Pretty sure he would have gone on living his normal, very boring life the rest of his life. Mister Glass kind of, like, brought him to the forefront against his own will.

40:03
Sophia
Yeah, I think it also comes less of a question of, like, would the world really need a vigilante? And more so now that one has been created for us. Like, is this particular universe going to fundamentally change in any way? Another question answered by the movie glass with that one, I will leave as a surprise. But I think that you see his impact on a very small scale in the same way that we see him become a very kind of mundane superhero. His final big act at the end, while it is a net good, he saves these two children's lives, may or may not save the mom, we don't know, but he solves a very small scale crime, and I think on that level, he's providing hope to these kids.

40:44
Sophia
And we see in the article written afterwards about him in newspaper that it does seem to be that people are mostly inspired to hope or feel safer by his presence. But I don't know that the movie gives us enough information to go so far as to say that in the future and in perpetuity, he's going to continue to be this symbol. But I do think that's kind of thesis that it takes. I think a lot of my impact in that, though, is influenced by how it seems to be a net positive for David Dunne, that he becomes a superhero rather than us seeing how it impacts the world around him. David, definitively, his life is better when he decides, I am a superhero and I am going to do the job.

41:17
Case
Oh, yeah, 100%.

41:18
Sophia
Yeah, yeah. And I think that I'm extrapolating that out to the wider world, but I think that's also the kind of the stance the movie takes is like, well, when David's life is better, the whole world is better, because now he's interacting with it in a more positive way.

41:29
Case
That's totally fair. And, like, I would argue ultimately that, yes, David is providing a net positive, but the reason why I had this question is because it comes out around the same time as Boondock Saints. And Boondock Saints is a movie that I loved at the time, and I am scared to rewatch. But the people who have rewatched it in recent times and have shared, like, their thoughts about it, particularly. Let's rewatch. It's the infamous episode of the podcast, because the entire crowd going into the rewatch of the episode starts the episode so jazzed to do the rewatch, and then they cut to go watch the movie, and when they come back, all of them are so defeated, because that's the thing.

42:05
Case
Like, it's a very similar concept, but it's one where ordinary people decide to go and do, like, real violence in the name of good. And I think that this movie, you know, threads the needle in an appropriate way so that it doesn't go too far and allows for the fact that he is actually super powered and so forth. So it is kind of a Batman versus Superman type situation, just really reined in. And I think that he ultimately does it in the right way. It's the small victories that he's sort of stepping in. He's being a figure that can inspire people, but it's as much that, oh, well, there's so much evil in the world, but at least the really terrible ones are being reined in by way of David going out and doing this thing.

42:47
Case
I think that is overall a net good, but it's one that is still impossible to do. It requires that supernatural level to push it over the edge from being what would be much more likely just kind of a gross vigilante story in the long run. It would be very easy for him to go too far to hurt people in real ways and to not necessarily know the full story of a thing. But because he has a preternatural ability to suss out the evil in the world, it's not as big a deal. He's able to strike the right targets. I would argue that his senses are honestly the most important part in terms of making this whole process not feel gross.

43:27
Sophia
I think his job as a security guard has a lot to do with that, too, because even highlighted in the movie, well, you've chosen to protect people as a career. It's a smaller scale. You're working at a college football stadium or whatever, but you're still, you are buying the nature of your job there to keep people safe. And I think that basis of starting from that for him and leading into his eventual vigilantism kind of sets us up to assume that he's still doing it for the right reasons or he's going through it for the purpose of protecting people. Who knows? I mean, the movie glass knows, but who knows really how whatever the future would take. David Dunn, he does not.

44:00
Sophia
From what I was able to gleam from the movie glass, which I don't want to constantly harp on this too much, but he does spoilers. But he has continued to do vigilante things. And it seems like he doesn't really graduate from that small scale, like stopping a mugging, stopping this home invader, that level of crime. And he does go out of his way to do no harm to the police officers who show up on the scene later. And he's sort of bystander who arrives. So it seems like it's a net positive. But I think in the movie unbreakable, it's kind of left to us to interpret. And I think that the tone that the movie has is definitely leaning towards this is still net positive.

44:38
Case
Yeah. And I mean, like, this is coming off the nineties, which was a decade where, like, the news didn't have the cold war to really feed into in terms of its hysteria. And so it had to, like, lean into crime. Like, I distinctly remember, like, when New Year's of 1991 came around and like, all the news reports would be like, 1990s, officially the worst crime in human history. All of which was bullshit, by the way, but. But the news was like, built around this kind of thing. And, you know, were in an era that, like, some had dubbed the end of history, like a period between, like, the conflict of great superpowers. And thus it seemed like, oh, well, everything's just gonna be a okay forever. A year after this movie, that changed.

45:16
Jmike
Boy, were they wrong.

45:17
Case
But at the time, it seemed like if there was gonna be any sort of, like, failure in our society, it was gonna be on that, like, direct personal level. It was gonna be a breakdown of crime and so forth. It wouldn't be an invader from an outside threat or anything like that. It wouldn't be a foreign superpower all of a sudden, like, if things were going to go bad, it would be from within. And this is a movie that is in response to that, where it's like, okay, well, if that is the case, well, what about having a hero rise up and sort of stop those kind of problems, at least the worst of them, and then make people feel better about the world and, like, move away from feeling so bad about it? I don't know.

45:54
Case
I find, like I said, I think that it ultimately positions David as a good force in the universe. And I think that it makes an argument that it's at the very least, doing damage control for the worst and possibly pushing us in the right direction. But it is also kind of impossible for this being to exist, at least the way we understand the world, assuming that there isn't, like, some even more reduced version that exists in the real world of a person who's just like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to go.

46:20
Sophia
Like, you're like Casey Joneses, you know, your guy was out there with a hockey stick and a mask just being like, I'm going to do some vigilante justice. Like, that level of person is like, I think the step below David. Dunno. Like, no, you really do not have any superpowers but you are just going out there. You're like, what can we do better by punching a guy in the face?

46:34
Case
But that crosses the line so easily.

46:37
Jmike
You want Batman to have these powers case? Is that what you're saying?

46:40
Case
You know what? I'd be fine with that. Yeah.

46:42
Jmike
Really? You could be fine with, like, Batman, like, rubbing up against you one day and then seeing that you stole a piece of chocolate and then him putting you in the hospital.

46:50
Case
I mean, like, that's the thing. Like, David is not able to act on all of these. And so, like, if. If I'm the worst person that Batman has to deal with in a day, sure, I guess, technically, like, how dare you?

47:04
Sophia
If the chocolate thief is the worst thing that Batman's dealing with in the day, then Batman has become the single most effective deterrent in all. God, I'm sitting.

47:12
Case
I mean, I think it's important to, like, look back that, like, one of the things that, like, preceded, like, the superhero wave was, like, the pulp fiction wave, and, like, what was the catchphrase for the shadow? Who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of men? The sensory component of it is really important in terms of societal justice, part of it, because you can do superheroes that are, like, big action and people exploring lost ruins and stuff like that. The science explorers are its own thing. But for it to be in a society dealing with that level of problem, yeah, you kind of need to know what's wrong.

47:43
Sophia
Something else to consider, too. With unbreakable, is that the question of, well, great, that superhero exists, but in creating superhero, we have also created the supervillain. And would he even exist if there wasn't this guy running around doing vigilante justice? Or in this particular instance, would he even exist if he had never found the sole survivor of the train crashes that he orchestrated? And I think you have to ask yourself, if we're treating this with a grain of realism, is it worth having one guy stopping muggings if it means that there's a madman causing train developments on the regular also running around? And that is a question that I don't know that comics need to get into too often, but I feel it pops up from time to time.

48:20
Case
Yeah.

48:20
Sophia
Which one came first, the superhero or the supervillain is more of the question. I think unbreakable deals with.

48:26
Case
Yeah, yeah. And, like, fundamentally, most often in comics, the superhero comes first just by virtue of the fact that they have to introduce the character. And usually they have a rogues gallery. But in terms of, like, the larger history of comics, like, the supervillain came first. Like, Superman was supposed to be a villain in his original appearance and then became a hero for the purpose of being able to be a story that they could publish multiple issues of. Instead of just like, here's a one shot about a villainous, because you either have a villain that rises up and is able to be so omnipresent, and then he just wins, or he doesn't win.

49:01
Case
You know, in the original Superman story, his powers run out at a certain point, and then he's stuck in these, like, poverty lines because it's the Great Depression, and this guy is just left down in his luck and regrets the fact that he didn't make the world a better place. So in this movie, we've got a character who is definitely the supervillain, but he's unknown until the hero shows up, and then the villain is brought into light. And I think that is an interesting poetic stance on it all.

49:26
Sophia
Yeah, absolutely.

49:27
Jmike
So what you're saying is avoid purples and purple and green combinations at all costs.

49:34
Case
Yeah, well, that's. Yeah, I mean, that's both movie and comic book shorthand. Like, the idea is that the main characters, particularly in comics, because of the limitations of printing, you would put them in primary colors as a way of indicating that they're supposed to be the heroes in the story. That's why Superman is red, yellow, and blue.

49:51
Jmike
I appreciate the fact that they did that in the flashback. Like, everything's grayed out and glass is in all purple, and he stands out as, like, a singular person in all the evil shenanigans that he was up to. That's really cool.

50:05
Case
Well, I mean, they do that for all the flashbacks, and they choose a color to be, like, the focus color for each of them. So that one's not really, like, going with the color theory so much as just that there is color. But I'm just saying that in comics, this is why the Hulk is green, but most marvel superheroes are not green, because green is a secondary color. Even the original green Lantern didn't have a green costume because of how the shorthand worked on that one. And so then you get villains like the Joker or Lex Luthor or Green Goblin, who are all in various shades of green and purple as their basic outfits. So that's the basic idea there.

50:37
Case
So either you're morally ambiguous and you're getting secondary colors, or you're an actual villain, and then the heroes are all in the red, blue, and yellows for that. But I would agree that the use of those colored pops in those flashback sequences are very much in keeping. I mean, think about Sin City, where those colored pops are there specifically for the characters that we need to pay attention to. Yeah, and I'm talking about the comics which were out at the time and not the movie which wasn't out.

51:04
Sophia
It's another good example of the movie Unbreakable, really paying homage to the craft of making a comic in just a less verbalized way than with the pencil drawing earlier. It's like, oh, yeah. You know, this is kind of an homage to how comics are colored. And you know what? The shorthand people already know who are familiar with comics might catch on to when they're watching this movie.

51:26
Case
Yeah. Yeah. So I feel like as far as, like, basically a special features, like, add on to your episode of movie's truck, I feel like we did a pretty good job kind of discussing a lot of themes of unbreakable and the things that are going on.

51:39
Sophia
I like to think that this stands alone. I think it was a pretty good podcast episode.

51:42
Case
I think it's a pretty good podcast episode. But I'm going to encourage everyone if they listen through this episode and haven't checked out movie struck. We're recording this mere weeks after we recorded the unbreakable episode of movie struck, but by the time this comes out, it's going to have been months since it dropped. So go back and check out the unbreakable episode of movie struck, and then check out the other the back catalog for movies that you like. And then I, once you decide, because it's obvious that Sophia is awesome, you should check out all the other episodes. But just check out moviestruck. And then you should tune into Sophia for all the other stuff you've got going on. So please give your plugs. What have you got going on?

52:16
Sophia
Yeah, I mean, movie struck is the big one. I try to convince every single person I come in contact with the start of podcasts. So I am the producer or a host on a number of other shows, the big hits. I'm also on a Dungeons the Dragon podcast called rolling with difficulty, available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. And I'm also the producer and one of the hosts on the overly sarcastic podcast, which is a show that is an after show for the channel. Overly sarcastic productions. I believe you guys have encountered red and blue on the show before.

52:41
Case
Yep.

52:41
Sophia
We hang out every other week. Is super fun. We talk about videos. It's so great. We answer listener questions. Also available in all podcast platforms, as is movie struck. And everything else I do, you can find me on socials. I'm usually at Sophie underscore k underscore, or some variation of that. Just check out the podcast. It's all linked there. But, yeah, this is a delight. I really encourage you guys. There's a couple great case episodes of movie struck sitting there in the backlog. If you're like, I want more of that. I want more. That good movie discussion, Shyamalan a Thon will have happened and be done, and there will be four m night related movies waiting for you guys.

53:13
Sophia
If you do choose to check out movie struck there in the backlog, I would love to leave people with my greatest complaint about the continuity between unbreakable and glass.

53:22
Case
Oh, yes, please.

53:22
Sophia
Back in the movie class. So unbreakable. This is the title of the movie. Bruce Willis is unbreakable. They don't really give him a superhero name in the movie Unbreakable. And so you can make the assumption that maybe it is unbreakable, which is pretty tight, right?

53:35
Case
Or, like, the Unbreakable man or something like that.

53:37
Sophia
Yeah, it gets into that, like, the one word titled, like, invincible. You know, it's a rockin name. And then in glass, he's not unbreakable. He is not named unbreakable. He's the overseer. And I just think that's so dumb.

53:52
Case
That's so lame. That's so lame.

53:54
Sophia
It was a great name. It was so good.

53:58
Jmike
Why would you do that? Oh, my. That's awful.

54:01
Sophia
Why would you do this to yourself? It was on a so platter.

54:06
Jmike
Who are you? I am the overseer.

54:09
Case
Right.

54:10
Jmike
Villain looks at you like, oh, really?

54:13
Sophia
The most minor of qualms. But it has been haunting me all day, and I just needed to get that out before we closed out this podcast. Thank you so much for having me on and giving me both an outlet to continue to talk about the movie unbreakable and to air my greatest complaint with the movie glass.

54:30
Case
No. I'm so glad that were able to get you on. Also, spoilers for glass. God damn it.

54:37
Sophia
That one's in, like, the first ten minutes, so you can really set yourself up for disappointment.

54:42
Jmike
No, but that movie sounds like it's such a disappointment already.

54:45
Case
I know. I need to check it out still, though, I don't know if you do. No. Because I loved unbreakable so much, and, like, I just haven't yet. But. But I should. But no. So, Sophia, it's been so great having you on, and I really appreciate us finally getting you over here. Because another pass was an easy sell. But, like, for men of steel, it was like, all right, well, what's going to be the way? And having it be a tag team with your own show, I think, is, like, really great because, like, what are comics if not crossovers? Baby?

55:15
Sophia
This has been my pleasure. I'm so jazzed that we got to do this.

55:19
Case
Yeah, j Mike, where can people find you and follow you and what have you got going on?

55:23
Jmike
Oh, my gosh. What do I have? Twitter. I'm on Twitter 101. I post funny things occasionally. I'm also here with case Min of Steel. Also, shout out to our hopefully soon returning d and d podcast. Eventually, case, I see that smirk on your face.

55:43
Case
It is hard to start the momentum of doing a live play d and d podcast, especially now that I have a one year old. But fine. But I'm not saying no. I'm not saying no. I would love to finish it out because we did 50 episodes of a complete campaign, and then we did 25 episodes of half a campaign. And I have stuff that I want to do it, but scruffy Nerf Herders is a show that I want to finish, but it is not a show that we will be finishing anytime soon. We'll say it that way. But who knows? Like, there's no one who's worked on it who hasn't wanted to come back. So we definitely could make that happen. But, yeah, no, people should check out the back catalog of scruffy Nerf herders.

56:26
Case
Like, it was a great run that J Mike and I were on, along with our friends Ben, Addie, Sean, Corey. It was such a, like, just a great trip in general. But the first 50 episodes are one complete campaign, so you can check that out and have a complete story. And then we got through 25 episodes that didn't end on a stinger for a sequel, but it does have a little bit of sequel baitiness going on to it. And, yeah, we do need to finish that up at some point. But in the meantime, you got those 50 episodes. You also, if you enjoyed listening to the sound of my voice, you can find me over at another pass where we talk about movies with Sam Alasea.

57:02
Case
You can check out the YouTube channel for certain POV where these episodes are going up, as well as my men of Steel Superman analog videos. So check out certain POV media on YouTube. That's been a really fun way to interact with people recently, but you can also come interact with us on our discord server. There's a link in the show notes or@certainpov.com and just come chat. We're, we're nice. We don't bite. It's a really fun time. Come interact. Our superhero conversations have been going really strong. Our video game conversations have been going really strong. It's just a really fun time. So check out that and then check out some of the other great podcasts at certain pov. I'm going to give a shout out to a non certain pov show that isn't movie struck, but you should check out movie struck.

57:43
Case
I'm going to shout out we have issues at the time of us recording this, we just did our live recording with Keith from. We have issues doing the Superman board game from the sixties, and that was a good goddamn time at least doing it in person, whether or not it ended up being a good episode, because I haven't actually, like, figured out how we're going to cut that bad boy together.

58:03
Jmike
But the champion had a great time, you know?

58:06
Case
That is true. So check out we have issues. It's a weekly show where Keith does a rundown of all the comic books that have been coming out and does a very thorough job going through all the publishers that I could think of in a very impressive way. So check that one out and then circle back over here for our next episode. But until then, stay super Mandev.

58:38
Jmike
Men of Steel is a certain pov production. Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and case Aiken. The show is scored and edited by Jeff Moonen. And our logo and episode art is by case Aiken.

59:00
Case
Hey, Nerf Herders, you sure you want.

59:03
Sophia
To go with that?

59:03
Case
Hey, everyone. There we go. More inviting. Have you ever had a movie that you really wanted to love, but something holds you back, or one that you did love in spite of a flaw? Well, I'm case Aiker. And I'm Sam Alisea. And on another pass, we sit down with cool guests to look at movies that we find fascinating but flawed, and we try to imagine what could have been done when they were made to give them that little push. We're not experts. We just believe in criticism. Constructive criticism, sure. So come take another pass at some movies with us, and every now and then we can celebrate movies that did it on their own, too. You can find us@certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts, pass it on.