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.

BMTAA #7.1 Sly Stallone: Rambo First Blood Part II

Hey everyone. This edition marks the start of an experiment. Once or twice each week, this month, we are going to look at the films of future Assie Hall of Famer, Sly Stallone.

Stallone is a weird example of an actor/writer/director. He can be excellent or down right shitty. He has been involved with films that have been great and then turned into a down right cartoon of the original.

Which brings us to Rambo: First Blood Part 2.

The film opens with Rambo in prison. Now we are to believe this film starts essentially when the film was released (1985). Col Trautman has come with an offer for Rambo which would grant him an early release, after all

"...you can't possibly want to stay here for five years."

Now let's take a look at that.

In Rambo: First Blood, Rambo kills at least three or four cops, blows up a majority of the town and injures a bunch more.

For this, he got a grand total of

8 YEARS!

Now as you, our faithful listeners know, my co-host Adam is a lawyer. While he does not practise criminal law nor does he practice law in the United States and definitely not in 1985, Adam is quiet confident that due to the fact that

1) Rambo was not found insane

2) Those that Rambo killed were peace officers

3) His military background

Rambo should be at bare minimum be looking at somewhere around 60 years.

Anyways Rambo is apparently the best trained for a recon mission to see if there is still POW's in Vietnam. The operation is being run by a CIA like guy named Murdock. He's a smarmy asshole played by veteran character actor Charles Napier.

He parachutes in armed with some weapons and a camera (because he is highly trained with a camera) to take pictures of the POW camp. He hooks up with an anti Communist solider who also happens to be fairly attractive and a woman. The meet with pirates head down the river (if you've seen Rambo 4 you will find this slightly amusing now).

Now Rambo's mission is only to take pictures. He is not to engage the enemy.

Because, you know, when I send a man in who is described numerous times as "the perfect killing machine" and "bred for war", only knowing how to "survive" and "win", I expect him not to kill anyone.

Well you see, Murdoch doesn't think anyone will be there.

Rambo finds out there are POW's and goddamn it he's bringing them home and killing a fuckload of Vietnamese in the process.

Oh and the Russians. Because they are helping Vietnam by...well...um...I'm not sure but it does involve torture, cover up and murder.

And for some reason the main Russian bad guy...sounds very German.

Murdoch is a corporate asshole. He's covering up the fact that there are POW's there because it would be bad business.

But Trautman knows that Rambo is only made for destruction so when Rambo ends up getting captured by the Vietnamese/Russian Evil Doers, SHIT IS ON!

Rambo then:

1) Let's Murdoch know he's coming for him

2) Escapes with the help of the girl (all while killing Russians and Vietnamese)

3) Kisses the girl...awe Rambo's human

4) Watches girl get murdered by a solider

5) Takes a piece of her dress, makes a headband and then takes a neckless

6) Murders pretty much everyone and makes his woman's killer explode via explosive arrow

7) Nearly gets taken out by a bomb dropped by a Russian helicopter. This bomb is awesome as it apparently has the chemical reaction to make rock become explosive causing several rock to erupt into flame.

8) Steals a Russian helicopter

9) Frees the POW's by murder and exploding the camp.

10) Returns the POW's to the camp, shows Murdoch the fear of the God and wanders into the wilderness

Now some of you may be questioning my choice of Rambo 2 as a bad movie but yet still awesome.

This falls into bad for one main reason, which I fully acknowledge you could argue me on and possibly win.

Difference in tone from Part 1 to Part 2

The original Rambo First Blood is a very well written suspense story about a Vietnam vet being disrespected just for being a solider and due to being pushed ends up going post traumatic psycho on the town. The violence is fairly realistic and in some ways so ways the plot especially for the time period.

Rambo 2...not so much.

The script (written by James Cameron and then beaten up by Stallone) is decent and timely but the action in the last half of the movie is both awesome and ridiculous. Rambo uses explosive arrow heads to blow the shit out of everything including a man. The solider blows up in spectacular style that Robocop would be proud of.

And you've got to love a torture device made out of bed springs and some sort of amp switch.

Now instead of a fairly realistic portrait of a messed up veteran we now have super killing machine.

The best way I can describe it is imagine if Elliot Ness in the Untouchables came back in the sequel and started wearing the bat suit.

Sure he's still fighting crime but.... little different.

But still awesome.

Stay tuned for the next part in our Stallone Festival for Rocky's 3,4 and 5.

A Guesthole blogs!

Hey guys.

Well Guesthole #2, Alex Krueger blogs for a living. Yeah I know, how does someone get such a sweet job?

Anyways Alex blogged this week about his adventures at Fan Expo with us.

Take a gander at
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3



Make sure to leave him comments or nasty rumors. Either way, I'm happy
Brent

Brent weighs in on the Mouse/Marvel Deal

Alrighty, I've gotten a bunch of emails, texts, msn conversations and one honest to goodness discussion with real life people about this so I figured I'd weigh in and let everyone know about my feelings on the Disney buying Marvel deal.

This is not the end of the world in fact this could be something awesome.

Now before the accusations start coming out left right and center about how I'm a four fingered glove wearing anti-Semite rodent loving asshole, let me explain.

As a corporation, I am not a fan of Disney. I haven not been for awhile. Many of their policies from everything from film to their parks are out of date. The fact they bullied US law makers to change the rules for public domain just so they can gain profits from the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse just a little while longer is deplorable at it's very least and goddamn scary at it's very most. I base these statements on matters of public record and personal knowledge from a few people who have/are working for The Mouse.

Now then, creatively, Disney has been making strides the past few years, much in part to this guy:



Kind of recognise him? That's John Lasseter who is the current chief creative officer for Pixar animation and Disney animation. He got his job when Pixar was bought by Disney when they had the good sense to realise they had been churning out a ton of crap and the only good films Disney had "produced" in the past ten years + were Pixar films.

John has been a great creative force at Pixar. He was the director and writer on Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Cars. He served as executive producer on all of Pixar's offerings from Toy Story up.

Now why am I using him as an example of where the Marvel deal might turn out great?

When John got his job at Disney he made numerous changes. He reopened the idea of Disney ANIMATION which had been shut down in favor of Disney CG animation. He got rid of those crappy straight to video sequels that Disney had been turning out (without much imagination I might add. One particular sequel, the Little Mermaid 2 or 3 features Ariel's daughter wanting to be a mermaid... essentially the Little Mermaid in rewind) just to make a buck.

John also brought back something I love. Animated shorts before Disney (or Disney company) films. Give me Goofy trying to hook up his home theater instead of a preview any day!

But what Disney had given John's position when he brought in was almost complete creative control. John Lasseter reports to Disney President and CEO Bob Iger. Greenlighting wise, John goes through Roy Disney for consent.

And why did Disney even allow this to happen?

Because someone there realised that their name used to mean creativity and now it only meant crap. Say what you might about Walt but he and his imagineers and the original animators turned out QUALITY product and at the time, innovative.

Which brings us to Marvel.

Marvel was bought for two reasons.

1) Instant Male Demographic.
Disney has been having a hard time grabbing the male audience especially of the older variety. Beyond Pirates of the Caribbean, there isn't much ass kicking at The Mouse. The Marvel characters instantly lend themselves to a male demographic that Disney wants.

2) Intellectual Properties
Ever wondered why Time Warner bought DC in the first place? Shitloads of characters and stories that they wouldn't have to pay for. Same deal with Disney and Marvel. Disney must have took a look at Marvel's back catalogue of stuff and crapped themselves. Even taking away properties like Spider-Man, Daredevil, Fantastic Four and the X-Men (which are all locked into film deals somewhere else) that still leaves you with a wealth of well known characters to choose from for movies, cartoons and lord knows what else. And lets not forget the example Blade set out. Blade was not a recognisable or well remembered character when his film came along and the film did really well. If Disney put together the right amount of money and the right creative minds together, many of the B and C level characters (Power Man and Iron Fist, I'm looking in your general direction) might make awesome films.

Now why would Marvel even be considering this deal? Like they've been doing great, opened up their own film studio, why don't they just keep on their own?

In a word, money.

The deal is for 4 BILLION dollars.

Besides that, marvel has been self financing their latest round of movies. Iron Man and Iron Man 2 not to mention a bunch that are in pre-production.

These movies are expensive. Really expensive.

Like look at Thor for instance. While no one is quiet sure about the film, we know a lot of it is going to take place in Asgard which is a lot of money in sets or cgi or however they figure on doing it.

Disney has the money to get that stuff accomplished without going broke.

That is assuming the deal goes through. Marvel's stockholders still have to vote.

Now I'm going to state a set of predictions, we'll take a look at this post over the next few years and see how I did.

1) Marvel Publishing will not change. Really the amount of money the publishing arm brings is very small compared to the rest of the company. Do not expect any major changes anytime soon aside from the possibility of when the rights to Disney properties in the comics come up, expect to see them head into Marvel under an all ages line.

2) Thor is going to be delayed or canceled. I don't like saying that due to the fact I have faith in that film project but to be completely honest, if I was Disney, that is the one in pre-production film I would have the least faith in. Thor doesn't have a huge built in audience like Spider-man or the X-Men and the amount of money needed to drive this feature may cause some backtracking or out right cancellation.

3) Better Marvel animated stuff. You see it's been kind of a weird trade off. Marvel's movies in the past few years have been solid where as DC has failed to launch with the exception of Batman. But Marvel's animation has been craptacular and DC's straight to video animation has been really solid. Expect a stop to Marvel's run of straight to video dvd's and expect them to come back in a few years with better quality and hopefully better creative productions.

4) Marvel characters in a future Kingdom Hearts game... okay I may be stretching on that one just due to the fact that the Hulk could whupp anyone from Final Fantasy.

And one last thing.

No, in our interview with Joe Quesada he didn't even hint that this was going on. I imagine he was unable to due to business restrictions.

BUT

That being said, our good friend Pete DeCourcy over at Comic Book Daily mentioned that on Sunday, Joe had to excuse himself from a panel early for a "very important" business meeting.

And nobody followed it up at the con later.

Oh and for the two of you who mentioned to me about the possibility of Fox's reboot of the Fantastic Four and how this could help it:

1) The Fantastic Four is locked with Fox unless they give it up. The Disney buy out will not effect the current franchise or any up-coming reboot.

2) Nothing can help the Fantastic Four not suck...I'm sorry, it's true.

Fan Expo Update

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to let you all know a few things.

The Fan Expo episode is now in post production as Adam will do his damnedest to get it out sooner rather then later. We think you'll like it but it's definitely a different show then Anime North. You get to follow us through interviews, our trials, our blunders and our triumphs.

In the meantime, if you are on Facebook, join our facebook group:

Two A$$holes talking about Nerd Stuff

If you do, you will get a sneak peak into the episode by getting a chance to check out all of our pictures from the weekend.

Speaking of which a mighty thanks goes out to Pete DeCourcy for doing all the photos during our interview with Joe Quesada.

Pete's currently a writer and editor and all around superman at www.comicbookdaily.com

Check it out, it's pretty awesome.