Congrats to The Explore Music Crew!

Hey guys, just want to send out congratulations to our friends at Explore Music (which includes Explore Music, Ongoing History of New Music and Legends of Classic Rock).

The fine folks over there have set up a deal with a company called FMQB that will help syndicate all of three shows in the United States.

If you've never checked out any of these programs...what the hell is wrong with you?

I first encountered The Ongoing History of New Rock about the first or second year I was in high school.

It was a revelation.

I am a lover of all things that are trivia and knowledge in regards to music. If you talk to me for more then five minutes I usually spew out something about music or comics...or occasionally both.

Ongoing History introduced me to the history of some of my favorite bands and also introduced me to some groups I had never heard of. I honestly don't know how aware of bands like The Smiths or The Stone Roses I would have been if not for this show. I also got to hear information on my favorite bands. Alan's story about meeting Al Jourgeson from Ministry is a particular favorite of mine. Go and download our interview if you haven't already. It was also great to hear radio in a format that wasn't all music and wasn't all talk.

By the way, for those who might question Alan's sincerity, I've seen his office. He had a few stacks of cds, a bunch of vinyl (included a Stone Roses lp that I envied) amongst other small but awesome bits of personal rock mementos in his office. The dude obviously loves his job and loves music.

I think also it's a bit of a testament to Ongoing History that my Dad even found it interesting despite the fact the music was not to his tastes.

And then entered Jeff Woods' show Legends of Classic Rock. Similar format but geared specifically for my Dad's generation and fans of classic rock. Both my Dad and my grade 8 teacher thought it was cool when I appeared on the show with Jeff (who turned out to be a really cool cat).

Both Adam and I are fans of Explore Music on just general principle. Music when it is good, can be one of the greatest things in the universe. The unfortunate thing with the current state of the flux of music industry is it seems we only get the popular vote shoveled at us. Sure you can go through the internet looking for new and good but the one side effect of having all this access to new music is that sometimes it's hard to filter through. Explore Music (both radio and tv versions) gives us a few starting points.

As friends of our show, Alan, Jeff, Nathalia and the rest of the crew there have been extremely kind and patient with these two knuckleheads allowing for us in various capacities appearing on their show, interviewing Alan, and posting up pieces on their website. Nathalia (Explore Music's content coordinator, writer, researcher) especially has to deal with a barrage of half assed ideas from yours truly on a regular basis. And she has done so with a professional attitude when lesser people would have told me to go jump of a high pier into a pit of spikes by now.

If you have yet to check out any iteration of any of these shows go to

www.exploremusic.com and check out the show listings for when they are on in your area. As well the video and audio archives do have Explore Music shows in them.

And for our American friends, more info is on the way but here's the official press release.

Congrats again guys!

What might have been...

Have you ever sat down and wondered about what might have been?

You've probably done it once or twice in your life; thought about a girl you should have asked out or how life would have turned out had you met a different friend in kindergarten, etc, etc.

Myself, I'm a big fan of reading about movies that for one reason or another, didn't come together. There's a book on the subject but I've unfortunately forgotten the title.
What movies you ask? Where is he going with this? (keep on till the end, I promise there's a good laugh in it)

There are four films (or not films I guess) that I love the stories of.

The first is Alejandro Jodorowky's take on Dune.
Had this movie been made it was would have been achievement. Who knows if it would have been watchable (some reports estimate by the size of the script it would have been 14 hours long) but think of it in these terms. It would have been a sci-fi film directed by the same man who directed El Topo, starring David Caradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Wells and Salvador Dali (yes that Dali) with art direction by comic book artist Moebius and H.R. Giger and music by Pink Floyd. And not just any Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd just off of Darkside of the Moon.

I swear I am not making any of this up.

Even if this version of Dune had been a failure, what a failure. But unfortunately someone looked at the budget and the script and the funding dried up.

The little anecdote to this is that you probably thought you had heard about a movie that ahd both Moebius and H.R. Giger work on it. You are correct. You see the head of special effects on Dune was a guy named Dan O'Bannon. Dan's next film project was actually a script he was working on before he left.

That script was called Alien.
Funny how that worked out and even more interesting is to consider maybes in that scenario. Dan met Moebius and Giger while working on Dune. Dan then passed on both of them to director Ridley Scott when he began Alien. Had Dune worked out, would we have gotten Alien? Or for that matter would Pink Floyd gone on to do Wish You Were Here or would the soundtrack that they would have done right before it influenced them in a completely different way?

Next up on the maybe list is Jaws 3....
People 0.

Having just done Jaws 2, the producers thought maybe it was time to pull out the funny. So involving National Lampoon alumni John Hughes to write a script that would spoof the franchise. Studio heads however prevailed and we got Jaws 3d and then Jaws 4 which bought Micheal Caine a very nice house. but in an era of Scary Movie and going back to the classics of Airplane, would this have been a bad idea? And the title alone Jaws 3 People 0 is just great. Backing that up with John Hughes's writing, it may have been something cool.
Gladiator 2 is another one of those surprising sequel projects that weirdly enough got to scripting stages. When you see Gladiator, it's not a movie that screams sequel, especially when the main character from the first film is well...er... dead. But the studio wanted it but luckily director Ridley Scott and star Russell Crowe had a bit of clout and went "Alright, but we get to set the direction of the film."

Enter Nick Cave.

I guess Crowe had seen The Proposition (which Cave ahd written...go rent this movie NOW!) and requested Cave write a script for Gladiator 2.
And what a script it is! Cave stealthily gets around the whole Maximus being dead thing by well...er...keeping him dead. We follow Maximus through the after-life, a little bit of reincarnation, World War 2, as ridiculous as it sounds, it works (google "Gladiator 2 script", it'll pop up quick enough).

So what happened?

Well studio heads happened. In fact here's what Cave told me a few weeks ago:

"Ridley Scott told me, the script is great. No one will ever make this."

Straight from the horse's mouth.

The final film on the list is Superman Lives. Not to be confused with Superman Returns but the film that was in the works long before Bryan Singer made Superman more boring then I figured possible.
Superman Lives is one of those projects where everyone has a story about it. The most famous of these is Kevin Smith's.

Kevin is the fanboy made good. A fellow who loves film and comics and has done both. After Mallrats was in the can, Warner Brothers gave Smith a crack at Superman. Here, let's have Kevin tell his version (warning, this is about 20 mins long and not work friendly but funny as hell. Those of you who want to skip the video, I'll have a brief summary below):

Funny eh? To sum it up for those who didn't want to watch the whole thing, Smith wrote a treatment and then later, a script, the producer of the film Jon Peters is a little whacky and Tim Burton comes in with his own people, no Smith Superman movie.

The next part of that is the fact that Tim Burton's version never got filmed.

Why? Given the time period, Burton makes a decent choice for the re ignition of the Superman franchise. Batman and Batman Returns made Warner's a lot of money. So sure some of Tim's script choices might be odd. Okay his casting ideas were a little out there but hey, everyone laughed at his choice of Micheal Keaton as Batman and everyone turned out wrong in those regards.

So why did this fall apart?

Well the largest rumor of how the film started to fall apart was people (now sometimes this changes between average people and studio execs, I tend to believe it would be the latter) were given an image of Nicholas Cage in the tights (a costume fitting) and this picture was surrounded by laughter.

People could not take Nic Cage seriously as Superman.
Then Burton started arguing with Peters about the film and it just fell apart. Burton regards the whole thing as follows:
"I basically wasted a year. A year is a long time to be working with somebody that you don't really want to be working with."

What are we left with?

$30 million dollars (on a combination of scripts, set pieces, actors, crew and Burton's 5 million pay or play deal) was spent and the WB has only the following to show for it:

DVD Review: The Hillarious House of Frightenstein: Bats, Bones and Creepy Poems

Hey boys and ghouls.
Back when I was a young lad, I got up at around 6am every Saturday morning for a hat-trick of awesome. From 6 until 7:30 was Voltron and Robotech but what opened up my morning was the slightly scary visage of Vincent Price opening The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.

This somewhat low-budget comedy show based out of Hamilton's CHCH was really interesting and well written, especially for a kid's show.

The 130 episodes (apparently all film within a nine month period) were all opened and held vignettes with Vincent Price which Anchor Bay has now collected some of the best bits into Bats, Bones and Creepy Poems.

Man this not only took me back but I was surprised out well written these pieces are. Kid's live action television could learn a lot from this dvd alone. It's witty, funny and does not talk down to it's audience. Sure some of the references are now dated like their version of The Wolfman (not sure how many kids would know who Wolfman Jack is let alone a parody of Wolfman Jack) but it still seems to hold up.

The disc itself appears to have cleaned up the footage a bit or at least I assume it has because the image is quite good for television footage froma small television station from 1971. But I must admit I was a little dissapointed that there was no extras on the disc. This might be due to Anchor Bay also putting out box sets of entire episodes or in part to the lack of actors now available due to passing away.

If you get a chance and walk a little down nostaligia lane, take a gander at this disc when it hits stores on October 13th.

Patrick Swayze RIP

Well despite the threat of Kanye Douchebag overshadowing everything in the world of pop culture news, I couldn't completely sit back and let the death of Patrick Swayze go unmentioned.

While the Swayzedog didn't make many movies that really fall into the realm or demographic of our show he did make three that stand out.

Red Dawn
Point Break
And Road House

As far as action movies went, Swayze proved that he could do supporting, hero and villain roles, a feat that not many can accomplish.

And come on...FUCKING ROAD HOUSE!

For those who may have missed it the first time, I present to you my review of Road House as a tribute to the late Dalton.

Patrick Swayze RIP

ROAD HOUSE REVIEW

Episode 13 (High Quality)

It was an exhausting weekend at FanExpo 2009, and we're glad to be finished with it. We had a grand old time, with numerous interviews (all of which you will see throughout the interview), and a fair quantity of downtime on the mics as well.

We've hyped up this episode just about as much as we possibly can, so without further ado, please enjoy the Two Assholes at FanExpo.

Download Episode 13 (High Quality) - iPod Enhanced Version

Episode 13

It was an exhausting weekend at FanExpo 2009, and we're glad to be finished with it. We had a grand old time, with numerous interviews (all of which you will see throughout the interview), and a fair quantity of downtime on the mics as well.

We've hyped up this episode just about as much as we possibly can, so without further ado, please enjoy the Two Assholes at FanExpo.

Download Episode 13 - iPod Enhanced Version

Joe Quesada interview in amazing TEXT!

Hey guys!

Well the sneak previews of our Fan Expo episode keep rolling in. Now up at Comic Book Daily is part one of our interview with Joe Quesada in amazing TEXT!

Transcribed by our buddy Pete DeCourcy, the text version is a very stripped down version of the interview due in part to

1) Pete's time constraints
2) Their site is more all ages friendly... our site and interview...well...not so much.

So if you want to get a sneak peek, check it out and I promise, it won't make the audio any less awesome.

Click on the link and show Pete some love.