The World's Only Podcast™ about bizarre, overlooked, and misbegotten media
Tim and Jen haze Bitter Karella over her inexplicable defense of a Halloween-themed anthology film, Trick ‘r Treat!
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As of 2024, filmmaker Michael Dougherty is threatening a sequel to Trick ‘r Treat. Be still my heart.
See What’s Your Problem? (What is Wrong With You?), one of Jen’s favorite pieces of public television ephemera.
Want a horror anthology that’s actually good? Check out our episode on Ghost Stories!
Tim and Jen host the freakiest guest they know, the lovable Bitter Karella of Midnight Pals fame, to chat about one of the freakiest movies she knows, Dr. Caligari!
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Screen Anarchy has a wonderful gallery of Caligari director Stephen Sayadian’s work, going all the way back to his earliest days as an editorial illustrator. Included are some reminisces about Dr. Caligari!
Read a 2024 interview with Caligari co-writer Jerry Stahl, in which he speaks candidly about sobriety and being an artist in a world ruled by money.
Jen blasts off with Bitter Karella in search of the meaning of an artifact from 2011: the motion-capture kid’s flick Mars Needs Moms.
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We glibly refer to the film as “one of the biggest box office bombs of all time,” as well as THE biggest, but narrowing down the actual Failure of All Failures is tough. Wikipedia has an unranked list of box office disasters.
Bitter Karella guested on the show for three episodes on music producer and grotesque sex criminal Jonathan King. If you’re interested in true outsider art and also have a strong stomach, check them out!
Jen welcomes show regular Bitter Karella and wild card Moodyferret to evangelize a Gore Verbinski flop that didn’t deserve the massive shrug it got from the public: the 2016 psychological thriller A Cure For Wellness.
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Errata: we all say in the episode that this movie came out in 2016, but it actually arrived in theaters on February 17, 2017 before almost immediately disappearing. Oops! That said, the movie was originally slated for an October 2016 release, which seems to indicate that 20th Century Fox lost their nerve and dumped the film in Fuck-You February.
Fox made a last-ditch effort to hype the film with this Super Bowl teaser, mimicking a pharma company ad. This is the one that Jen vaguely described in the episode.
Every previous Bitter Karella appearance on the show may be found in our collection!
An extra-mellow and profoundly aphasic Bitter Karella steps in to help Jen explicate the other, crappier version of The Warriors: Streets of Fire!
Hear the bangin’ soundtrack on YouTube, which includes “Deeper and Deeper” by The Fixx (which you won’t see on the Spotify version of the soundtrack even though “Deeper and Deeper” IS on there. Who knows why).
Yes, there are some tidbits about Streets of Fire in this 2003 interview with the immortal Jim Steinman, but the whole thing is worth a read for the Meat Loaf stories alone.
If you would like to experience what Karella surely considers the sexiest Gumby cartoon, “Grub Grabber Gumby” also may be viewed on YouTube.
Tim and Jen invite their favorite internet crank Bitter Karella to help them analyze a bewildering major release that no one liked, Argylle. It’s so confounding a project, it leads Karella to use the phrase “Brechtian distancing mechanism.”
Listen to our Apple TV+ episode, in which we rend the entire platform to filth. Fuck you, Tim Apple!
Read this Deadline article about the production and marvel at how out of touch these people sound. At the end, director Matthew Vaughn throws in an enthusiastic endorsement of the Apple Vision Pro.
Read the incisive opinion piece Tim invoked when discussing the sexlessness of Argylle, R.S. Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” via Blood Knife.
Tim and Jen invite the world’s greatest Garfield scholar, Bitter Karella, to chat about a TV special inspired by a comic that traumatized a generation, Garfield: His 9 Lives.
Read Misunderstanding Comics, the funniest comic Scott McCloud never wrote, written by Tim and illustrated by Bitter Karella! Make Tim get those copies out of storage!
Have You Seen This…Dirty Cartoon? In case you missed our hilarious riff of Eveready Harton and you’re a patron, you can watch it here!
See some pages from the story Tim enthused about, the 1984 G.I. Joe comic issue #21 “Silent Interlude.”
Tim wisely goes absent with leave as Jen invites Bitter Karella to the necropsy of a dire children’s film from 1998, The Adventures of Ragtime.
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Should you wish to self-harm, you can watch the full movie (with helpful timecode) at Showcase Entertainment’s channel on YouTube.
Is it crass to post this screenshot of Shelley Long from the movie? Yeah, probably. Has that ever stopped us?
See photos of Ragtime at a very Web 1.0 site that his caregivers appear to have left up as a memorial to the tiny stallion.
For some more grown-up yet still juvenile horse content, listen to our Hot to Trot episode!
Tim and Jen enlist the help of Bitter Karella to wade through the 22 minutes of treacle that is the forgotten faux-Peanuts special, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.
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See this slab of gelatinous treacle for yourself at the Internet Archive.
William Conant Church, brother of Francis Church, did indeed help found the NRA in 1871, in an effort to improve marksmanship amongst the broader American militia. He and brother Francis co-founded several news publications, including the New York Sun, and he also co-founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Additionally, Frank Church was not the volcel depicted in the Yes, Virginia special— he was married to a woman named Elizabeth Wickham. In spite of Tim’s joshing, it appears that Church did not have a severe yet shapely assistant who browbeat him into publishing the editorial addressed to Virginia O’Hanlon. The O’Hanlon letter was passed on by Edward Page Mitchell, the real-life editor-in-chief of the Sun.
Karella alluded to the “Season’s Greetings” meme drawn from Douglas Dixon’s Man After Man, a kind of speculative art book about possible evolutions of Homo sapiens. If you want to see more of the weird art, the book is free to browse at the Internet Archive.
Finally, if you want to pretend that it’s 1974 again and you’re spinning some 45s, you can hear the theme song for the special sung by a piercing li’l Jimmy Osmond.
Want more weird cartoons? Check out Tim & Jen’s riff on the animated short “Eveready Harton” from 1975’s Self Service Girls, or one of our other episodes on trauma-inducing animation.
Tim and Jen seek aid from wacky funster Bitter Karella to explain a film series as British as lousy weather and inedible food: the Carry On series! Also, Tim positively bursts with Carry On-related research.
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The Carry On series is so popular that you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to documentaries about them. A Perfect Carry On Documentary is relatively lighthearted, but for more dirt, start with What’s a Carry On? – The Story of the Carry On Films and 40th Anniversary Reunion and finish (ooh-err!) with the incredibly bleak Carry On Darkly. The latter two delve into the financial straits and personal problems of many of the most beloved cast members from the series.
The fittingly-titled Cor, Blimey! telefilm dramatizes the affair between Sid James and Barbara Windsor, set against notable Carry On moments of the ’60s and ’70s.
If you’re not familiar with the canon and want to sample the world of Carry On for yourself, stop by the Internet Archive. Be warned, though: if you’re as susceptible to broad comedy as Tim seems to be, you might end up Carry On-pilled too! Cor blimey!