The SomethingSomethingCast

Can we discuss Wonka?

Those that know me know that there are a handful of movies that are ‘my thing’ – movies that, back in the day of VHS tapes and stegosaurii, my copies wore through. The original Wonka, Gene Wilder, 70’s perm and all, is probably the first film I can even think of that I wouldn’t stop watching as a kid. Since then, I’ve learned I wasn’t the only one and Wonka fits similarly into many people my age because of our exposure to it at the dawn of cable and the tape.

We are now getting not one, but two Wonka related movies and I am filled with the fury of a middle aged white man on the internet. So lets take a look at the rumors as to what we’re getting in the Wonderful World of Wonka and gauge how angry I’m going to be… to be clear, Depp Wonka gets me a 9 out of 10 on the Hate’Ometer, saved from a 10 solely by the CGI squirrels.

The first is a ‘young Wonka’ story, as portrayed by acting Wunderkind Timothee Chamalet (to be clear, I have no idea if he’s a wunderkind (or how to spell that)) I just know that he’s in a lot of places, and I don’t know anything about him. That said, this is rumored to be the first in a ‘Wonka Cinematic Universe’ which is a phrase that makes me wince so hard I felt my neck pop. The only saving grace to this entire concept is that the writer connected to it is Simon Farnaby who has done some notable work (including Rogue One, The Mighty Boosh) — but as the Depp Wonka taught us, sometimes, telling us too much ruins everything.

The second one is an animated series being created by Netflix and helmed by Taika Waititi of What We Do In Shadows and Ragnarok fame. This, mind you, I have less of a problem with as I have always wondered why there wasn’t a traditional Saturday Morning Cartoon about Wonka. There were cartoons for Back to the Future, Pac-Man, Robocop.. all that came well after the property had seen its golden days, so why not Wonka? A cartoon also feels quite less important in the scheme of the universe and a lot more ability to be playful without living in a green screen.

In the defense of both of these concepts, I do appreciate that they are being done by not-Americans. Waititi from New Zealand and Farnaby from England, Dahl’s humor and sensibility was most certainly not an American one and we’ve already proven we don’t deserve the rights to write a Wonka film… in the end, a cartoon gets only mild grunt from me, but a Cinematic Universe? Please don’t. Oh dot, please oh please do not. No good can come of it and what other books are you going to tie that into?! Maybe a discussion for another blog.

Unless, mind you, these Wonka properties help bring back Wonka candy bars… the ones that had the graham crackers in the blend… then you’ll get a pass as I sit on my couch with a mouth smeared in chocolate that a Gloop would be proud of.

thunder… Thunder… THUNDERCATS…

If, like me, your brain is now screaming ‘Hoooo!’ – you were likely of an era of a particular vintage of cartoons.  WYou are left with questions … is Cheetara naked?  Do Thundercats mate with their relatives or do they just ignore that cat thing?

And most important question of all…. If there was a Thundercats Movie, who should star in it?

So, this week on THE WHEEL, we are going to throw out our own ideas as to what the perfect Thundercats movie is – and we are not doing it alone.  Joining us once again are the greatest Kevins in all the land – Kevin Gootee & Kevin Israel – also known as Gutting The Sacred Cow, a brilliant podcast where you can hear some of your favorite things torn to shreds.  We would like to thank them for taking this trip to Thundera with us and giving us insight beyond insight.

Ready? Well, ok here we snarf snarf…. 

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Hey all, PCR here!

So, I just watched the finale of LEGO Masters Season 2 last night and…I have thoughts.

First, let’s go over the teams…

Caleb and Jacob – Even though they had been in the bottom two more than any other team in the finale, they made their move towards the end, winning Episodes 9 (Land and Sea with their “Chameleobster”) and 11 (Cliffhanger) which gave them some great momentum going in to the final.

Mark & Steven – They held The Golden Brick the longest, and had the most wins going in to the final episode, and though they were only at risk of elimination twice, once was the episode right before the finale, which put them on shaky ground.

Zack and Wayne – They were only ever at risk of elimination once in Episode 10 (Flip My Block) and had more 2nd place finishes than any other team the entire season.

So, we’re in the finale, and the teams are tasked with doing a “Day/Night” build.  Caleb and Jacob opt for an hourglass design with a ‘Day City’ on the bottom and a ‘Night Realm’ in the top of the hourglass.  It was bold in design and impressive in construction considering the two halves were built separately and then the top literally flipped upside down to join with the base.  Considering the middle didn’t actually connect and it was only the 4 outer pillars supporting the weight, it was amazing to me that the thing stayed together.

Mark and Steven opted for a “Warden of the Woods” character.  The “Day/Night” shift was accomplished with a number of lights throughout the model, and while the water base they created was very impressive at “night”, the figure overall honestly wasn’t that impressive to me due to the complete brown build with little variations of color except the leaves for the hair and the glowing eyes.

Zack and Wayne went back to the well once more (which they did often this season) and incorporated dragons into their tower build.  It was tall, and each floor of the tower was personalized to their story, but the “Night” shift felt like it was just lights inside each floor that made them brighter.

Overall, I was expecting something different when the Brickmasters said they wanted a build that had a different feel and look in each Day and Night segment.  To my dismay, Caleb and Jacob came in third, leaving Zack and Wayne and Mark and Steven to fight for the top two and… to be fair… both builds left me nonplussed.  Mark and Steven as a team just felt too… cocky?  Too… entitled?  I don’t know… just something about their demeanor and how they came off most of the season made me not a fan, and while Zack and Wayne had many of those same qualities, it was their constant use of things we had seen them do before that left me unimpressed with a lot of their builds.

For me, the REAL winners this season were Natalie and Michelle, and Dave and Richard.  Both teams had that creativity factor in a lot of their builds that felt others were lacking.  They thought outside the box (and the brick) to do builds that were always on theme, but always original.

I won’t spoil who the winner was.

Did the best team win?  Probably.  Did the most creative team win?  Certainly not in my opinion.

Season 2, while I was happy to see it come back, didn’t live up to Season 1 (the highest rated episode of S2 was barely over half of the lowest rated episode of S1), and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes to fruition for a Season 3.

It’s time to head down to Vegas, get 10 of your best men, knock off three of Terry Benedict’s cas— no wait, that’s not right.

We’re going on a Vegas Vacation, and I have a briefcase full of reds, blues, moscat– no, still not right.

Oh, wait – it’s a zombie apocalypse and sin city is about to be nuked, so let’s get the most divisive movie maker in Hollywood right now and have him tell the story of people getting in and out before the big boom booms.

We’re not going on this journey of the dead alone – we’re bringing Dan from Netflix & Swill (Twitter:@netflixnswill) along with us.  So sattle up, roll some 7’s, and let luck be a BRAAAAAAINNZZZ tonight.

Ok, here we go!

Full Episode

Somethings! It’s Hatton!

Since PCR went and ranked his American Horror Story seasons, I thought – especially since our tastes differ pretty severely on a couple ones – that I’d hit it up too. If I really was going to dive in deep here, I’d break them down by half seasons, because it always feels like AHS gives you two stories and notoriously I like one side of it better than the other.

That said, let’s get into it…

9 – 1984
I thought 1984 was a disappointment. It leaned on the ‘Ghost’ rules of AHS heavily, and the latter half felt completely unbalanced to the first half.  I really had wanted this to be a brilliant take on horror slashers and 80s teen horror, and it just fell into its own AHS branded melodrama.

8 – Asylum
PCR and I agree about the weakness of Asylum… with the exception of Lily Rabe as Sister Eunice, it felt like this season just didn’t have a cohesive story to tell, but a handful of separate stories that just didn’t land for me. The twists of aliens and the like just didn’t match the tone of the rest of the show.

7 – Apocalypse
I will admit, this one sits in the middle for me because it is the one season I’ve promised I’ll go back and rewatch sometime in the not far future. I would watch AHS while I was doing other things and I missed a lot of this one. I like bunkers. I like apocalypses. I remember there being one thing about this season I really disliked, but I couldn’t tell you now what it was.

6 – Coven
I know not worshipping Coven as a season is sacrilegious for some fans of AHS. I enjoy it, and it does feature one of my favorite subplots in all of AHS in the Axe Man. Coven, to me, feels like a season where AHS discovered what it could be and how it can tell different stories. Not a bad season, and important to AHS lore, but similar to my next entry – it felt like a well they kept coming back to.

5 – Murder House
I love a good sexy latex gimp. Who doesn’t, right? Murder House was an intensely new way to see a serial story and you didn’t know if you were watching a one season journey or if this was chapter one to a much bigger tale. The insert of the Black Dahlia felt very disconnected, but it set the rules we got to know so many times.. even though I think that at times it has been a crutch for AHS to lean on.

4 – Cult
PCR made a point that Cult was uncomfortable. I agree wholly, and it was that uncomfortability that had me glued to what was going on. I’ve seen so many documentaries about cults and group conspiracies and Jim Jones, NXIVM, etc that this was as much a curiosity as to how far they would take it as much as finding the real stories they pulled from to get there. Plus, Billy Lourd was a VIP in brilliance in her AHS debut.

3 – Freak Show
This was the first season I loved. Immensely loved. The addition of Neal Patrick Harris as huckster Chester Creb, Jessica Lange’s black and white over-produced musical numbers, and Dandy. I would have watched a Dandy season – he was brilliant in all of the most horrible of ways.

2 – Roanoke
OK OK OK … Hear me out. I can hear the pitchforks already. I have learned there are people that like what they did with Roanoke… and people that don’t. A documentary style show where the reenactors then go and get sucked into the plot of the story itself.  it is AHS at its most meta and I was all about it.

1 – Hotel
I find Hotel to be -the- perfect story for Horror Story. It brings back something that hadn’t been around since the first and second season, which is this intangible sexiness. The location was this gorgeous gaudy affair that was a character unto itself. Every person feels like a fully lived in character. It doesn’t hurt that Evan Peters’ character was this amazing mix of an out of touch HH Holmes and Howard Hughes. Gaga was just amazing icing on an already packed cake.

Which ones were your favorite?  Tell us where you tell us stuff!

NOTE – Thank you to all of you that reached out due to our first post for this file had a sound error. This one should be better.

Well, it’s been a big rasslin week around the watering hole, which is perfect timing for us, because the Somethings are going back to the ring.. that’s right, we’re All Elite… we’re World Wide… we’re UWA Elite (where you can hear Hatton call the action!) We’re Total Nonstop. We’re… Ring Honoring and we’re Shimmering our way through a DOUBLE WIDE episode of the SomethingSomethingcast.

Joining us to discuss our favorite and least favorite finishing holds is friend of the show, host of the One Piece show the Yayo Talkshow – as well as a contributor to wrestling and nerddom all across the internet, you may have seen him most recently as the reporter in Buddy Matthews mysterious videos after leaving WWE – it’s Mark B Donica! (Twitter, Insta, Twitch)

The Pedigree of this episode has an X-Factor that is simply going to Stun you to Rock Bottom…… Spinarooni

Ok, here we gooOOH MY GOD HE’S BROKEN IN HALF!

Full Episode

NOTE – Thank you to all of you that reached out due to our first post for this file had a sound error. This one should be better.

Well, it’s been a big rasslin week around the watering hole, which is perfect timing for us, because the Somethings are going back to the ring.. that’s right, we’re All Elite… we’re World Wide… we’re UWA Elite (where you can hear Hatton call the action!) We’re Total Nonstop. We’re… Ring Honoring and we’re Shimmering our way through a DOUBLE WIDE episode of the SomethingSomethingcast.

Joining us to discuss our favorite and least favorite finishing holds is friend of the show, host of the One Piece show the Yayo Talkshow – as well as a contributor to wrestling and nerddom all across the internet, you may have seen him most recently as the reporter in Buddy Matthews mysterious videos after leaving WWE – it’s Mark B Donica! (Twitter, Insta, Twitch)

The Pedigree of this episode has an X-Factor that is simply going to Stun you to Rock Bottom…… Spinarooni

Ok, here we gooOOH MY GOD HE’S BROKEN IN HALF!

Full Episode

Hey Somethings, PCR here!

So, in our Free For All episode (which you can listen to here…) we touched on ‘American Horror Stories’ and, tangentially, AHS in general.  Long time listeners of the show know both Hatton and I have varied opinions of the AHS seasons… but here, for the first time, I’m giving you my rankings of them…

9 – Roanoke –  I know they tried something a bit different this season with the ‘real vs re-enactment’ and the second half feeling like a different story until it wasn’t… but the whole thing fell super flat for me.  When I first saw the title, I wanted a season ABOUT Roanoke not.. this convoluted mess that we got.

8 – Asylum – I know I’m stepping on toes here, there are a BUNCH of people who like Asylum.  There were PARTS I liked, not not nearly enough to override the fact that I feel like I got scammed in a story that was teased and never shown.

7 – Cult  – Cult was… uncomfortable.  I know AHS stories aren’t supposed to be all ‘light and fuzzy’, but “Cult” for me felt ‘too soon’ with what was going on in the world at the time.

Week one – you get SomethingClassic 
Week two – you get Something In Review 
Week three – you get The Wheel 
Week four – you get The End 

What about Week five!? Don’t the Somethings plan for Week five!? It happens every year — and the answer is, aww hell no they don’t. It’s a free for all! The Somethings settle in and talk about what’s up, what’s going on, what they’re watching – and in this episode, quite a bit about American Horror Stories… so that’s a spoiler warning on that. 

So settle in and hang out with the Somethings…

Ok, here we go!

Full Episode

How often are you skimming through your streaming options and all of a sudden you see a documentary and go, ‘I do want to know more about that?’ – For me, there are a lot of docu’s I just don’t get into. I’m not one to sit and dive into a 10 part World War I retrospective with all new footage or, with exceptions coming, anything political, and lastly.. anything brutal about animals.  There have been a lot of award winning documentaries that fit in those three spots, but the first two put me to sleep and the last one makes me never want to sleep again.  More than one person has said to me I should watch ‘Don’t F**k With Cats’ – and I am certain I would love everything about it except, you know, someone fucking with a cat.

All that said – here’s a few of the documentaries I’ve watched in the last year or so that may have slid by your radar – or are just so damned good they deserve to be praised over and over again.

The Defiant Ones – Featured on HBO, Emmy nominations abound, the story of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre was so shockingly good, I was late to work the next morning because I couldn’t stop binging it. Two men who come from very different backgrounds who climbed up the music world away from each other, but ultimately became music mavens in the same eras and ultimately met up in the middle to create beautiful harmonious business together. By far one of the most slickly produced and well thought out documentaries I’ve ever seen. Part 3 (out of 4) features a comparison between the rock & metal love affair with edgy Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson’s problems with the violent problems of the East Coast/West Coast rap battle that makes you realize that the culture of music is the same, no matter the genre.

Q: Into The Storm – Ok, so I said I don’t get political, but the story of the rise and fall of the conspiratorially minded political landscape of the last 5+ years and how it has a direct lineage to the old internet is an astounding journey. Centering on the ‘Who is…’ question that has never fully been answered, it paints a very full picture about, not the politics themselves, but the people that built the theaters those politics have lived in.

My Octopus Teacher – Ugly cried… I ugly cried at this damn film.  It is a tale about a man looking to reboot his life and finding an octopus that he becomes remarkably attached to – and the octopus to him. It is poignant, and sad, and wonderful, and you will inevitably find yourself invested in their lives that when it comes to its end you can’t help but feel things.

Circus of Books – A journey through queer culture of the 80’s and 90’s as told from the remarkably unexpected perspective of an older couple who ran one of the most famous gay pornography stores in Hollywood. The story is this amazing set piece to not just hear about the journey of gay culture, but also tell the story of this young woman who grew up with this as her home and her two unassuming simple parents, as the protectors of it all.

SpeedCubers – Have you ever wanted to feel deeply invested into the tale of Rubix Cube speedrunners?  Yeah, I didn’t expect it either.. but Speedcubers is exactly that. It explains the people in the community of speed-completing Rubix Cubes – their rises and falls – and the friendships for a whole world of people that may have a harder time finding community elsewhere.

So these are just a few of the real stories that I’ve fallen into recently – what are some documentaries that you have seen or we have missed?  Let us know in all the usual places!