April 17, 2025 • 54 mins
Disaster films are surprisingly tough to define. What makes them different from an action movie or a monster movie? Who cares? They’re great! Escape with us as we cover the the ins and outs and the history of disaster films and recommend some good ones.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us today. And that's okay because
we're just gonna be sitting around rapping about one of
our favorite things to talk about.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
That is movies. Let's go to the movies.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You had a little Katherine Hepburn thing going on there,
ethel Merman, it was Katherine Hepburn singing ethel Murmy. Okay,
that's how I think that. Yeah, we are going to
go to the movies, Chuck, and in particular specific kind
of movie that the more I dug into, the more
I realize is one of my favorite types of movies.
(00:48):
Oh yeah, yeah, disaster movies. I had no idea, but
remember we were talking. This whole thing was kicked off
by me watching The Day After Tomorrow a couple of
weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, And I was like, yeah, it's
one of my favorite movies. And the reason why is
because I love disaster movies. Love them.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, I like a lot of these. It's not my
favorite gen overall, but like I found myself saying like,
oh yeah, that was pretty good. I like that all right,
But generally, if we're in this, this is a subgenre
of action movies, and I think I prefer action movies
overall more than disaster movies.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Okay, all right, well, yeah, we'll get into that because
it is a subgenre of action, and that makes a
lot of sense. Disaster movies are packed with action, and
there are some that are like, Okay, this is definitely
a disaster film, like The Towering Inferno.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Oh yeah, I'd be okay, But then.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
There's also movies like Speed, and Speed checks off a
lot of the boxes.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, not a disaster movie.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
You would not call it a disaster movie, even though
it really could. If you really wedged it in there,
it will qualify. But there's just a couple of little
things that are different that make it definitely an action movie.
And then you have other ones like The Birds. Alfred
Hitchcock's The.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Birds not a disaster movie to me.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
It ends up on lists. It's part of the animal
attack subgenre of disaster films, which is a subgenre of action. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's interesting because I'm sure you did the same thing
when reading off some of these. It's sort of like
it just a gut feeling sometimes and you can't say
exactly what it is that you feel personally like doesn't count,
but someone you know, someone else might think it counts.
It's not like this is something you can say is
very cut and dry, you know, right.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
And because of that, I looked everywhere on the internet
to try to cobble together this list of like basically
the basic defining characteristics of disaster films. Yeah, and it
was hard. Nobody's ever seen sat down and said here
they are right. People have kind of piecemeal but people
don't talk that much about disaster films, which I find sad.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Well, maybe this can be that, and maybe you can,
like I don't know, start a website. Josh defines disaster
dot com.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I'll just put this article on there and that'll do that,
all right?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Should we go through some of these? Because you did
a bang up job, thank you. The first thing you
needed in a disaster movie is a disaster. Sure, but
this can be a lot of different things. A lot
of time it's a human made thing. Then that varies
from climate change movies, which we've seen a lot more
of lately, to like pandemics. And sometimes I get, like
(03:35):
I guess some things like Towering Inferno or a bit
of a mashup, because you can have like the thread
of a structural collapse, so that is a human made thing,
but it might be brought upon by like a fire
or flood or something. Yes, there's overlap.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Nobody said you can pin down disaster movies pretty easily.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
What else there's like, extraterrestrial is a big one. It
can be an alien attack, it can be a comet
or an asteroid headed toward Earth. Yeah, transportation is huge. Yeah,
people love screwing up like cruise ships and trains and
boats and airplanes love it. And then one of the
(04:14):
other things about it too, The disaster is ongoing, right,
so it's not like the people survive a five minute
earthquake and then the rest of the movie they all
like go out to dinner and everything's fine. They spend
the rest of the movie negotiating all the problems that
that disaster created, So they're they're negotiating sub disasters. Or
(04:36):
it can be like an ongoing disaster like a flood
or something like that. Like that can happen the entire movie,
but one way or another, the entire movie takes place
over some sort of disaster and all of its after effects.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yeah, for sure, impending or in in what.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
In Oh that's a good point too. Yeah, sometimes there's
a lot of lead up to.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
It, Yeah exactly. But what am I looking for in process?
In progress? Sure? No, good lord, it's usually a pretty
large disaster, and for me this is like can be
a real big differentiator in my personal opinion. But again
it's a gut check. Like sometimes if it's just a
local thing to me, I'm like, well, that's not really
(05:23):
disaster movie because it has to be more big and
sweeping to truly qualify. But then sometimes it is sort
of a smaller thing, and I feel like it does qualify.
So like in the case of you know, like a
bridge collapse or a collapse tunnel, or like Daylight Stallone's
movie about the when that one of the New York
(05:43):
tunnels was collapsing or collapse, Like, I considered that a
disaster movie. So I'm like contradicting myself. And that's what
makes this all fun.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, one end of the spectrum, the world can actually
be ending then to be the premis or like you said,
a little tunnel collapse, the rest of the world just
going on business as you care. Exactly let them die,
like that guy an airplane.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
I don't remember that. What happened.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There was like a debate TV show, like on the
News or something like that, and one was like, we
need to take better care of people in the FAA
has to step it up, and the other guy was
presenting counterpoint. He was like, I say, let them die.
It's way funnier in the movie.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, obviously, surviving the disaster is a big part of
the plot point. We know some people won't make it
out alive, but usually, like most of the A list cast,
will make it out alive unless they're really trying to
pull one over on you in a scream sort of way.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yes, and you tease something just now. Some people will
definitely not survive. And one of the things about disaster
movies is all you have to do is basically see
one and the next one. Maybe you don't even need
to see a second one. You can pick out very
quickly who's going to die, yeah, who's going to live?
(07:06):
And the reason why is because the stereotypes are pervasive
in disaster movies, like you have like the dumb, brawny
guy or you know, a smart scientist damsels in distress.
Like to this day, disaster movies are sexist. I could
not come up with a single disaster movie where the
(07:28):
hero was a woman, not a single one. In all
the decades of disaster movies. It's men. Most of the
main characters and leads are men. Yeah, and the woman
is basically there to essentially be saved and maybe help
out some Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I mean, I guess more recently they may throw your
bone with like a woman as president, but then she's
like commissioning the team of men to usually solve the problem.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Good point, right, So you know very quickly who the
hero is, But there's also plenty of other people who
you're like, I think they're going to live, and you
can really kind of cut them into three moral categories good, bad,
and redeemable. Yeah, and redeemable can be like the guy's
ex wife's new boyfriend who you hate, but really he
actually turns out to be a good guy. He probably dies,
(08:16):
but he'll die a good, noble death. He could also
not die and become like a sidekick. And then there's
like the shady rich people, often the people who are
responsible for the disaster through like their greed or something
like that.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
MM hmm.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
You know they're going to die a very bad death.
And the point is like it's a really simplistic way
of looking at humans, and I think that's one of
the reassuring things about it that make them enjoyable.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, for sure. And I think we would be remiss
if we didn't bring up a little bit of a
prickly topic for our African American listeners. It has long
been a movie trope in horror movies, disaster movies or whatever,
where the black characters will die almost certainly and usually first,
and that has such a trope it's become a joke
(09:05):
and lampooned in like you know, the parody movies and stuff.
But we have to mention that and what I'm curious about,
and hopefully we'll hear from some of our listeners if
that has now become so ridiculous and crossed over to
where it's now just sort of funny and expected and
a movie thing and not like truly upsetting. Right, So
(09:26):
I'm curious how our African American listeners feel about this
at this point in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, there's usually about as many black characters as there
are women characters in disaster movies. Yeah, but like you said, similarly,
they're often the president, like Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I'd vote for Morgan Freeman, yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
For sure. But I heard the reason. You know he
wears those diamond studs in his ears all the time.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, he's been rocking those for a while.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I heard the reason why. This is an old pirates
thing where you wear some sort of jewelry or whatever
so that if you die away from home, you have
enough currency or value or something on you to pay
for your funeral.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
That's why he does that.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
That's what I heard.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
That's incredible.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yeah, it makes you want to vote for him even more. Huh.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I just want to hear that State of the Union.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, whatever speech he's delivering, it would be really smooth.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
I was going to try and bust out of Morgan Freeman,
but I just I think I would embarrass myself. I've
never tried, so it's never good to launch into your
first attempt live on the air.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well, maybe we'll workshop it off air.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Well, we have to talk about the hero. The hero
most times is not like a typical hero. It's usually
in every man kind of character who just like Armageddon
for instance. You know, they put together a rough and
tumble team, you know, Dirty dozen style. It wasn't a
bunch of like elite problem solvers. It's they were like
(11:00):
oil rig guys, right, like drillers.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, they weren't even astronauts for Pete's sake.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, they had to train them. I only saw armagedon once,
so I'm pulling a lot of this from distant memory.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, I'm more a deep impact dude.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Oh yeah, that's what I heard.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
As a matter of fact, I'm not entirely certain I've
ever seen Armageddon.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Uh, you know, it was okay, it was fairly you know, schlocky,
big budget sort of stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
You just described almost every single disaster movie you ever made,
and the response too, your judgment of it, almost every
single disaster movie you ever made. Like, they don't get
you to jump off off the couch at the end
and scream Bravo or Encore. You know what I mean.
You just kind of like them. They're just kind of fun.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, it's it's summer movie popcorn. Fair. I still love
these kind of movies. I think there's a place for
all kinds of movies, and I still love going to
the theater and seeing these sort of big budget like
it probably isn't a great film, but it might be
a fun movie. Right.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
So within these the structure, these constrictions, people have learned
over the years how to kind of play with them
and make new forms of disaster films. And a really
good example, I think so we said that either a
big disaster affects tons of people or a small disaster
affects a little amount of people. Something that kind of
(12:21):
combines the two is Leave the World Behind Ethan Hawk movie.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
I don't know that one.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Oh it's great. It was on Netflix, Ethan Hawk and
Julia Roberts. So basically there's a cyber attack that just
causes civilization to essentially collapse, but we're just following like
two families who are kind of having to figure out
what to do and what's.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Going on and all of that approach.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, it was it was definitely worth seeing. And then
other ones, rather than having kind of a schlocky humor
that really started to develop in the late seventies and
then it kind of turned in to like quips, I
guess in the nineties. Yeah, there's some very very serious
ones too, like the impossible, not a schlocky depiction of
(13:12):
the two thousand and four Indian Ocean tsunami.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
It's incredible movie though, it is.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
It's so it's probably the most realistic film I've ever
seen in my life.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, I mean I remember, I think I remember when
it came out. We might have even talked about that
on the air at some point when we did the
tsunami episode with the how they recreated that was just
herrowing exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
So that's disaster films in a nutshell. And I feel
like we could probably take a break here and then
come back and talk about the history of disaster films.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
What do you think, Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
So Unlike some other things, disaster films are one of
those things you can explore and find that there's an
actual beginning and it's not like this thing developed over time.
There were disaster films because there's these definitions, these characteristics
that you have to have. There were films along the
way that just happened to have those, And the first
(14:32):
one was Deluge from nineteen thirty three, where if you
watch it, there's a several minutes of New York City
being destroyed by a tsunami and it's pretty impressive for
nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Three, Yeah, for sure. And it also sort of as
we'll see, and usually they're the schlockier ones. But you
get a lot of these one word title disaster movies, right,
especially in the seventies, but then again, as we'll see
in the nineties, resurgent things like tornado, flood stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, you put an exclamation point at the ada of
a natural disaster or a force of nature in your set.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
So I didn't know, I didn't know any of these
early early ones, but one from nineteen thirty six. It
was called San Francisco, right, yep, and it was made
thirty years after the nineteen oh six earthquake and about
that earthquake.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yes, but it's also apparently people break into song in
it here or there, so it's sometimes listed as a
musical drama.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
There's another one called Old Chicago, about the eighteen seventy
one Chicago fire that came in nineteen thirty eight. Titanic
apparently was a favorite subject of early disaster films and
actually stayed that way over time. Yeah, but it wasn't
until nuclear anxieties really started to develop as the Cold
War picked up and it was reflected in movies that
(15:50):
people started imagining what would happen if all these nuclear
weapons went off? Yeah, that actually kind of created the
first crop of what you could really point to was
the Earth disaster films.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah, kind of like the ones as we know it
in the early sixties. Voyage to the Bottom of the
Sea was one in sixty one when a nuke powered
sub that was radiation fire coming from space. They were
going to bomb that radiation fire from below. Like anytime
you're using a nuclear bomb to you know, launch it
(16:22):
into a disaster, Like, I feel like that's happened a
couple of times at.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Least, sure for sure. What else? There's the day the
Earth caught fire?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Not a good sidy.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
No, that kind of wondered what would happen if a
couple of nuclear bomb tests that happened to be carried
out simultaneously by the US and the Soviet Union, what
would happen? And they said, oh, well, probably the Earth's
axis would be shifted and we would be knocked out
of orbit and we would start heading toward the Sun.
That is cut and dry disaster plot.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah, for sure. Also in the sixties we had crack
in the world and for me, one of the great
movie of all time. Panic and Year Zero such a
great title.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
It is a great title. And then of course The
Birds an undisputed disaster film.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yeah, I take issue with that. The Knight of Living
Dead is listed that is not a disaster movie.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Well, that's a great question, because is a zombie apocalypse
that a handful of survivors have to survive and negotiate.
That's an ongoing disaster. You have a group of people
from different walks of life sometimes stereotype coming together. Yeah,
their lives intersect through this disaster. Yeah, and then they
have to survive. Some people do, some people don't. There's
a hero I mean in that sense, Night of the
(17:35):
Living Dead definitely qualifies. World War Z would qualify Nope. Yeah,
I think that there's like a I mean, there's room
for debate there. Like those could also be horror monster
movies too.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, I consider those sub gens. I think as soon
as you add any zombie, it becomes something else, something
else entirely. That's again, these are all just my dumb opinions.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Did you see god Zilla Minus one?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
No, but I've heard a lot about it. Is it
garbage or great.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
No, it's great. Oh it has a great plot, great acting,
great dialogue, and then the action sequences unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
I gotta check that out.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Then it's a really good movie. Again, is it a
disaster movie? If you add Godzilla? I don't know. I
could make it a monster movie.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, let's see what Chuck says, Chuck, monster movie.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Okay, it is officially a monster movie.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Then. Well, you know I did host a movie show
for a couple of years.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
I know you did. That's why I deferred to you.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That makes me an expert. The seventies is when really
things start get cooking with all manner of disaster movies,
from things like The Andromeda Strain in nineteen seventy one,
you know, a Michael Crichton novel, so one of his
early novels. It was adapted.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I tried to watch that the other day, and the
animal torture, I yea, get past man.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
That's when they just didn't care about depicting that stuff
with any kind of tenderness at all.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
You know, Well, I stopped the movie and went and
looked it up, like, did they actually kill this monkey
and these rats?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Did they?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
And no, luckily they did not and the ASPCA was
on hand and signed off on it. But what they
did was they suffocated it with carbon dioxide until it
passed out, and then the moment it passed out, they
cut and then they revived it. But that that monkey
was still suffering from this phyxiation during that those moments
(19:27):
where they filmed it. It's awful.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Did someone do mouth the monkey resuscitation?
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Well, there's this, there's this when the monkey dies. If
you look closely before they cut, there's a shadow of
somebody moving toward it. All righty to be serious, So
I think they used a little tiny oxygen mask to revive.
Oh god, but it's yeah, I mean that makes it
a little better. And that they didn't kill them, but
they still tortured them. So I couldn't finish that movie.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, I don't blame me. I never saw it, but
I remember that kind of as a holdover, you know,
came out here I was born, so but I remember
it just being a thing.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah. So okay, yes, you said we started off with
their drama Streen.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right, Yeah, I mean Airport was in nineteen seventy and
that's the one that you know kicked off a huge
I mean it had sequels. It led to Airport seventy five,
Airport seventy seven, and then Concord Colon Airport seventy nine, Yeah,
which all eventually led to Airplane. As I mean, that
had to be the first spoof, right, like disaster spoof.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
That's as far as I could tell, unless I would
qualify or include Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as a
disaster spoof. And I'm not sure if that came out
before or after Airplane.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I think it was before. But Airport was a very
lauded film. It got ten Oscar nods. It actually won
Helen Hayes one for supporting actress it. And this is
something that we'll see over and over again. Most of
these movies they make a huge, huge return on even
if they cost a lot to make, Like that costs
ten million bucks in nineteen seventy, which was a lot, yeah,
(21:02):
but it brought in one hundred million dollars in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah, And so that really caught the attention to the
studio bosses. They're like, let's do that again. And like
you said, there were three sequels to it. This is
probably one of my favorite movie franchises. I would Yeah,
I would make the case that the sequels, at least
the first two sequels are better than the original. I
didn't see any of these, they're so great. I watched
(21:25):
seventy seven and seventy nine in the last twenty four hours. Really,
I love them so much. And Airport seventy five is
probably the best of the bunch.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
All right, I'll check that out. And Airport seventy seven,
of course brings in the Bermuda Triangle, because I think
nineteen seventy seven was peak Bermuda Triangle paranoia.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, for sure. And then that concord, the Airport seventy nine.
The concord, it's people keep shooting missiles at it. They
have to take like evasive action, and you're like, okay,
this is definitely when the genre really started to die
or died it had already started. But one of the
big things that Airport ticked off, in addition to eye
(22:03):
popping box office returns, was that huge cast of like
where you recognize every single person, especially I mean if
you were alive at the time, in an adult at
the time, you would recognize everybody in there. Sometimes there
are cameos, and what they were following Airport was based
on a novel by Arthur Hailey, and he had written Hotel.
(22:24):
One of his things was a ton of different characters
whose lives kind of intersect in this issue or this
problem or this disaster. So basically, Arthur Hailey, the novelist,
in invertently it invented the disaster film through like his format.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, and you know they movie post respect then reflected
that too, because I remember stuff like Towering Inferno. They
would be the more artistic like the inferno, the you know,
the building on fire, but then like at the top
of the bottom, they would literally just have like frames
of people's faces of the cast, like just tagged on there,
(23:01):
like look at all these all the star power.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Right, and as time went on, the stars got a
little schlockier. In Concord, Charro makes a hilarious one minute
cameo Oka JJ Walker is one of the major minor
characters that smokes grass the whole time. Okay, I think
(23:24):
in Earthquake, which we'll talk about in a second, Walter
Mathow makes this inexplicable cameo a few times where he's
dressed like a seventies pimp with a curly wig and everything,
and he's drunk out of his mind.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Wow, that's his character.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Like, they were definitely known for cameos, but yeah, those sweeping,
huge casts of generally A List and then former A
List stars. That was a big hallmark of disaster films
that came around in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, you know, they're trying to appeal to a broad demographic,
so they would definitely bring back, like some of the
stars from like the Golden Age of Hollywood when they
were in their later years would be in these, Like
Fred Astaire was in one of them, right, Yes, I
can't remember.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I think he might have been in the Towering Inferno.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, so you know, they're clearly trying to appeal to
all age groups. Another thing a lot of these had
in common, at least in the nineteen seventies was a
man named Erwin Allen, the Master of Disaster. He came
up in the nineteen fifties, but he really hit his
stride in the seventies with things like The Poseidon Adventure
aforementioned Towering Inferno. Each of those was the top box
(24:31):
office hit of their respective years. Poseidon Adventure very famously
was about an ocean liner that flips upside down and
sinks basically, so everybody is upside down on this boat,
on the ship trying to trying to get out while
they're underwater. Pretty great, yep.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
And it's a bunch of different people who are stereotypes
from different walks of life who are laid out to
safety by in every man in this case of priest
named Gene Hackman, hal the character's name, that's actor's name.
That'd be pretty coincidental that you had played a character
by named Gene Hackman.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Such a brutal tragic very upsetting and for such a
wonderful person.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, upsetting is definitely a good word for it.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, I can't stop thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Sometimes you should probably try to. I think that would
be for the.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Best I know, towering it for and O of course,
you know we mentioned there was a fire. If you
don't know this movie, you should check it out for sure.
It's one of the good ones. But faulty wiring of
course makes it catch fire. People are trapped at the top.
But you've also got you know, sometimes they can work
in other mini disasters within it, and that's the case
here where there's a flood scene because they're trying to
(25:40):
douse the fire and then all of a sudden, you've
got a flood to reckon with.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
That's like a prestige disaster film. They played it straight ahead,
there's no shlock to it. The cast was just amazing,
and they did something that would be picked up again
in like the nineties and then today's disaster films, where
they had two heroes you kind of have to work together.
One was Paul Newman, who played the architect of this
(26:04):
one hundred and thirty five floor skyscraper. Yeah, just totally
fictional at the time, especially, Yeah, and then Steve McQueen
was this fire chief and they had to work together
to figure out how to get the people out of
this building and keep the quench the fire.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Man McQueen and Paul Newman. Does it get any better
than that?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Not really? Maybe Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Yeah, that's
whance kid.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Oh Yeah, that was great.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Okay. So yes, if you see one disaster movie, see
The Towering Inferno.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Yeah, agreed. If you want to see one that's kind
of super slocky. If you want to go down that avenue,
you could start with Earthquake from nineteen seventy four. Yeah,
Old Charlton Heston was in that one. People are in
this case again trapped in a skyscraper once again, but
this time it's an earthquake. A lot of you know,
when you see these earthquake moves, they're always shaking the camera.
(27:03):
But what's funny is if you ever see them being shot,
obviously nothing is moving except the camera, so the people
are all just going whoa on just you know, solid grounds.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
It's always fun So Earthquake did not really mean to
be schlocky. It just kind of ended up being schlocky.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
They did a great job of doing it unintentionally.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
And it wasn't the film that like led to the
end of the seventies boom, but it was definitely one
of the early signals that this is not this party's
not gonna last forever. And it's a good movie. I
watched it last night, No, I watched it early this morning,
and Charlton Heston, who's a regular in these disaster movies,
he did great. Everyone did really good in it. It
(27:45):
was just some of the premises and then also some
of the special effects. Like there's a scene where the
earthquake tremors are rocking the street in La Yeah, and
they're just pushing over the facades so you can see
that it's just this cardboard facade coming down. Stuff like that.
And then there's a very famous elevator scene.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Yeah, that's a weirdtube.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
It drops like all the way down, killing everyone inside.
But the way they show the impact is they just
freeze the frame and then some animated blood splatters across
the screen for some reason.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, it looks it looks really really bad and is
so abrupting, jarring and weird. But it's, like I said,
that part is on YouTube if you just you know,
type in Earthquake movie elevator scene.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
It's so good. You know, it's a good scene if
someone is taking the time to clip it out and
put it on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Right, Yeah, it is definitely worth But Okay, you want
to take a break now and come back and talk
about the end of the seventies or push on through
until the nineties.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, let's maybe push on and then we'll stop at
the nineties.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Okay, sounds good. So, like I said, it was kind
of clear fairly early on that this wasn't gonna last forever,
and I definitely did not make it out of the decade.
It really kind of came to it ugly and starting
around nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, and you know, one person's great disaster movie is
another person's shlock. It all kind of depends because some
of the ones listed here is sort of being the
lazier versions. Avalanche and Meteor are that's not one movie
that would be pretty great though. Actually sure it'd be
Media or then Avalanche probably, but those are two different movies.
(29:29):
The Hindenburg I thought that was okay from being a
kid and watching it. I haven't revisited. But then Roller Coaster,
I as a child loved, loved that movie about a terrorist.
It's you know, again, I don't know if it holds up,
but it's about a terrorist that's going to blow up
a roller coaster. You know, he's targeting amusement park.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
So are the people on the roller coaster like having
to go on it or stay on it over and
over again, like it can't stop or something like that.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I don't think so. Oh, but like there's the bombers
in the park and I just you know, I'm having
these fleeting memories. It's probably terrible, but you know, as
a you know, ten or eleven year old, it was great.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah, I got you. And then there's Flood with an
exclamation point.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Shout out to Laura who helped us with this, who
came up with this list of lazily named disaster movies,
kind of like they were phoning it in.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, roller Coaster isn't the best name.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Okay, all right, I'm gonna watch that one though. All right,
But a lot of people who think about this kind
of stuff point to The Swarm from nineteen seventy eight
as the one that was like, yeah, this is over.
Not only was this over, but Irwin Allen's career was
over because he had not one, not two, but three
disaster film flops from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty
(30:48):
and that really ended the boom.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, that was pretty much the Swarm kind of. I
don't know if Nicholas Cage if they were referencing or
paying homage to that with the bees thing later in
The Wicker Man. It became a very popular meme the bees.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Oh I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
That, Yeah, from Nicholas Cage. But in this movie, in
The Swarm, there's a pilot that yells bees, bees, millions.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Of bees, right, and the bees take down an air
force helicopter.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Of course they do.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
And the way that they're overcome is somebody figures out how.
I think it's Michael Caine leading the cast. He's the hero.
He figures out that they can lead these bees out
to an oil slick in the ocean and then set
the oil slick on fire and no more bees.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
That's hey, I think that's a pretty decent, you know,
disaster movie solution.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Okay, fair enough. But I was reading a criticism of
that movie by Tyler Sage, I think, on a site
called Ultimate Classic Rock of All Things, and Tyler Sage
says that the cast seems either faintly embarrassed by the
proceedings or confused about what's supposed to be actually happening. Yeah,
I mean, that's all you need to know. Like, that's
(32:01):
not supposed to happen in a movie, you.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Know, No, it's not. So Alan had a black mark
on his record with that With a Swarm and then
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, they tried to recapture that magic
in nineteen seventy nine movie released seven years later, even
though it took place the very next day of the
original movie.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, and that was Michael Kane too, but also Sally Field,
Telly Savalis, Peter Boyle, and like, if you're cast like that,
can't keep a movie, Yeah, like make it good, then
there's something really wrong with it.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Oh I thought you were about to say afloat.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
You almost did, and then I was like, no, Josh,
do not say that.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
He did produce perhaps one of the worst entries Irwin
Allen did of the genre with I don't think it
was his swan song, but it was definitely the end.
In nineteen eighty a movie called When Time Ran Out
that did have Paul Newman. It was about a volcano
at an island resort, but he was very much forced
into this movie because of his contract. I don't think
(33:00):
he had all wanted to make it. They cut the
budget Warner Brothers did, so they didn't even have the
money to make it look okay, and it was just
it was really bad. There's a pretty good quote in
here too.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Right, yeah, that the eruption when it finally comes, is
a wonderfully cheesy amalgam of wobbly back projection, bathtub title
wave and scared expressions from the cast.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
So then because of all this, because these movies has
got worse and worse, but then also like the high
drama that was played straight, it was just ripe for parody.
And like you said, Airplane was the one that you
really don't need to mention any other parody. It's it
as far as disaster film parodies go. It just completely
captured it perfectly.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, and that movie holds up pretty well. I have
to say, it's still a fun watch, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Okay, I think we've made it to the end of
the seventies. The first real disaster boom has come and gone,
and things quiet down throughout the eighties. And we'll let
you think about this quietly through this ad break.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
All Right, we're back, and we're going to talk about
the resurgence of disaster movies in the nineteen nineties. And
I may have mentioned it on this show before. I'm
not sure, but this is one of my legendary predictions.
My friend I can't remember it, but it was one
of the very, very very early nineties disaster flicks came out.
(34:47):
I wish I could have pinpointed which one it was,
but I remember very distinctly at the time in college
telling my friends, I was like you watch I was
like they're going to start making all of these movies again,
just like they did in the seventies, and there's gonna
be a ton of disaster movies. And it literally happened
like starting that year.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Man, did you hear that from the Ghost standing in
the middle of the street.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
No, no, no, no, that we've whispered it to you.
It's probably pre Ghost. But yes, Sharknado, Jared from Subway,
Hugh Jackman, and disaster movies the only four things I've
ever predicted.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I don't know. I think some more are going to
come to the four over the coming years.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Chuck Stradamus could it could.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Only have been one of just a few movies, because
I can't remember what it was. Yeah, this whole, this
nineties disaster boom started and peaked and within a two
year period, and it got started off. You could say
in retrospect it was started off by Outbreak, which came
out in nineteen ninety five. It's an epidemic disaster movie.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, that counts.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
I think most people don't point to that and say
that kicked it off. It's more like they say Twister
or Independence Day in nineteen ninety six picked it off.
And then yes, you would definitely lump Outbreak into it,
but it was probably one of those two movies.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, it's there was a movie called Avalanche in nineteen
ninety four, so they were dabbling in that world, but
it was not a big movie at all. As far
as like capturing attention. I think Twister for sure, And
that may have been the one actually where I was like,
oh man, you because that is what I think of
as like typical disaster. I don't I know this is controversial,
(36:28):
but I'm not sure I put Independence Day in disaster movies.
There's something about when you add like zombies or aliens
and stuff, it just tweaks it slightly for me from
classic disaster. But again just my opinion.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Well, okay, so even if you accept and not with
an A, but at ex Independence Day from this list,
then you still have Twister.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
I think it was Twister.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
I remember the entire country was talking about Twister.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah it's I famously said Emily's favorite movies of all
time or every independent film ever made in Twister.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, And I mean it's a really good movie. Bill
Paxson's amazing in it. Helen Hunt does great too, Like
it's a good movie and One of the reasons I
think that it did kick off that that second Boom
and disaster movies was that you could take the disaster
formula but then apply emerging CGI computer assisted special effects
(37:26):
that were at the time. It was like, holy cow,
we can do this now, like the White House being
blown up by the alien ship and Independence Day, Like
you just had not seen stuff like that before. This
was all very new, and they were using it sparingly
enough too that it didn't look fake.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, for sure, it was like those are really great
special effects. At the time, Twister looked really, really good.
We should also mention too. I know we didn't go
over this, but the it's just now occurring to me.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Twister is also a kind of
a classic disaster movie trope character, which is sort of
a side character to the guy in the Chair. You
(38:07):
ever heard that, like the computer expert that just literally
sits in a chair the entire movie and figure stuff out.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah, and usually has a smart mouth always.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
This is sort of an adjacent thing though Philip Symore
Hoffman's character, which is sort of he's not in a chair,
but it's the wise, cracking, irreverent kind of you know,
he's wearing the Hawaiian shirt when everyone else has on
like tactical gear. That's you know, but super smart and
figuring stuff out. I'm not sure what they call that
(38:35):
in disaster movies, but it's their version of guy in
the chair.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I think. I don't think people have written enough about
disaster movies for anyone to name it. So call them,
call them what you want.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
A Hoffman.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
There you go. That's thet He was the Hoffman of
the movie and maybe one of the first.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
We got to talk about Titanic. It's a disaster movie,
but it's got so much story and romance. It's definitely
a subgenre within it.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I think Bill Paxson was in that too.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, all right, b man, what a great guy.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Oh I forgot he was gone.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
That was so sad.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, it was sad. So one of the other things too,
that fueled this nineties resurgence of the disaster broom is
that these movies, some of them Titanic, Independent, State, Twister,
they're among the highest grossing films of all time.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
So just like in the seventies, studios were like, we
can spend lavishly on a production, but we're still going
to make back ten times or more what we put
into it. So they're like, good, let's start making disaster films,
and very quickly after some of these really creative original
disaster films you could see in theaters virtually at the
same time disaster films about the exact same topic.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Yeah, that was the thing for a little while. I
think I was still getting Premier magazine at the time,
and I remember they started writing about, you know, these
product auctions being kind of out trying to outrace one
another to get to the box office first, maybe to
their disadvantage as a production. But very famously the two
biggest examples, or I guess four are Armageddon in Deep Impact,
(40:13):
about a meteor striking the earth, you know, to basically
wipe out humanity, right, and then Dante's Peak and Volcano.
Neither of those were that great.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
No to me, weren't. I don't was Volcano with Tommy
Lee Jones? Is that the one?
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah? And Ann Hesh Yeah, ip again.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, And Dante's Peak was Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Oh, Linda Hamilton, that's right.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
And that's a really good example of like just how
disaster films like minimize women and their contributions. Linda Hamilton
was well known by this time as a female action star. Yeah,
like she was in the Terminator movie. She was a
total b a.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah, Sarah Connor.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Right, and but and in this movie, apparently she's she's
like a single mom who's totally dependent on Brosden to
help her and her kids. She's like kind, she whimpers
at times, like, Yeah, that's just one of the big
problems with the genre. Like if you can just kind
of hold your nose and make it through stuff like that,
then you're you can enjoy them. But if you focus
(41:15):
on things like that, you're probably not gonna like disaster films.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Yeah, agreed, What a waste of Linda Hamilton. What a shame.
I got to shout out a few more that weren't
listed here from the nineties Hard Rain, remember that one
Christian Slater and Mini Driver. No, it was a it
was a flood movie. But you know what was it about.
It's about a very hard rain. Okay, I just won't
stop raining. Friend shout out a friend of the show
(41:39):
Mini Driver. Listen to her wonderful podcast on our own network.
Many questions, very nice, I don't know if you remember
this one Firestorm with NFL legend Howie Long. No, Yeah,
that was one of the bad ones. I think he
was a like a forest fire, like a fire jumper
kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Are these ones you're shouting out sound like riff tracks? Candidates?
Speaker 1 (42:04):
They probably are? And then also some of the one
word titles. There was a movie called Tornado. There was
a TV movie called Tornado Warning that starred Jerald McCraney
from Simon and Simon.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Nice. I love that kid.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
There was another movie called Flood, a second movie called Flood,
and then there was one from nineteen ninety nine, which
is sort of when things started to peter out, called
Storm with Luke Perry and Martin Sheen.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Wow, that is that's some nineties casting is a mini
driver in Christian Slater that screams nineties pretty.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Hard too, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
But like you said, there's one other thing. The nineties
definitely contributed to the hero scientists where it wasn't it
wasn't necessarily some you know, tough dude. It was a
guy who had the smarts to figure out how to
deal with this or knew what was coming. That's another
trope from Disaster films, especially now, Usually the hero is
(42:59):
the only one who can see the impending disaster. You
believe him, and then he ends up having to save
everybody Else's took us because no one believed him and
didn't take any measures to thwart the disaster from happening.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Right, And once again you were saying he because all
of these movies failed the Bechdel.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Test for sure.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
And there's also a thing that pops up in the nineties,
which was the like the rival scientist. If there was
a hero scientist, a lot of times there was an
ant well not anti hero, because that's still a hero.
Just the anti scientist show was still a scientist. I'm
clumsily working my way through this. But they thwart the hero.
(43:42):
It's you know, like usually a government scientist or something,
or maybe an official and they dismiss everything like that.
The hero scientist is.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Saying, right, that's it can also be a government official.
Very frequently they get their come up, and pretty commonly
in nineties on disaster movies.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, what do you call it? Diehard? That's not a
disaster movie, is it.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
I've seen it listed.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah, I guess it could be.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
To me, it's just a straight ahead action film.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
I totally agree, but it does splash Christmas movie.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Like you would say, all the people in all the
people in Nakotomy Plaza, that's a disaster to them.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah, the world's going.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
About its business as usual, but to them inside, they're
in the midst of a disaster. They have to survive.
I don't know, I think just I don't know. I
think so. The same thing with Speed. In Speed, Keanu
reads the hero was a.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
SWAT member, right, Not in every person right die.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Hard John McClain. He's a cop, even though he's off
his beat, he's still a cop. Like the hero has
to be some sort of everyman who or may not
possess some special sort of skills or knowledge that help
him overcome this problem. And then his medal that he
may not even have known that was there is tapped
(44:59):
and he leads other people the safety.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah, for sure. But you know, as the nineties wore
on with things like Luke Perry's movie Rip once Again
in ninety nine, things really kind of stopped. In the
wake of nine to eleven. It just wasn't something that
people wanted to see for a little while, so there
was a lull. You knew it would come back. Early
(45:23):
two thousands had a few of them here and there.
There was one called the Core in two thousand and three,
where the inner core of the Earth ceases to rotate
and scientists once again have to vomit to get that
thing kickstarted, just like using the paddles in the er,
right clear?
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeh? What was the two thousand and three So yeah,
the very next year was the Day after Tomorrow, and that,
to me is the bridge between the nineties YEA disaster
films and the ones that kicked off in the twenty tens.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Agreed, It is awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
It's got a great cast. Scientists are the heroes. There's
a bunch of different stuff going on. The world is
being threatened. There's amazing special effects of things just going haywire.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
There's wolves.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
There's wolves, yep. And then that scene of the tsunami
flooding New York. There's a shot that's the exact same
shot in Deluge of the tsunami coming.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
To no interest.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
So I've read that it was probably an homage to that.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Oh that's kind of cool. Yeah, so too. Two thousand
and nine was a pretty big year, just when they
really started to come back. You know pre twenty ten's
with the movie the Mayan Calendar anxiety movie twenty twelve
came out.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Do you remember that?
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah? That was rolling emerick right, yes.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
No, But I mean, do you remember living in that
time where people were actually like a little nervous about
it was like y two k light.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yeah. I mean we did a podcast on it.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
We totally did.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
Yeah, and if I remember correctly, we told everybody it's
totally fine. The Maya Calendar doesn't actually say the world's
gonna end, a new calendar starts.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
That's right, and we're all here right now. So thankfully
that came true. Twenty twelve was not a great movie,
but it did because of the scope of like just
the world ending. They could be they could be like, hey,
let's just do any disaster we want anywhere, all across
the world.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Not a great movie. I watched that one yesterday too.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
I didn't think it was very good.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Oh I liked it a lot, I think to me,
and I know you know this, but to me, twenty
twelve is basically up there with The Towering Inferno as
far as the best examples of a disaster film. Go, okay,
there you go.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
My favorite disaster film is not listed here, but it
is from the twenty tens. As far as being an
actual great great film is Steven Soderberg's twenty eleven film Contagion.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah, that is a good one.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
It is. I mean, it's a disaster movie, but it
doesn't play like one because it is so realistically scary
and doesn't have that sort of summer movie kind of
schlocky appeal. But it's it's a disaster movie for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Did you like me detect a note of hostility when
the medical examiner pulls Gwyneth Paltrow's face like roughly off
of her skull during her autopsy?
Speaker 1 (48:14):
I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
It seemed like they that was gratuitous, like they there
was like Soderberg had a problem with Gwyneth.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Palkwyneth Paltrow maybe.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
So Yeah, that was a really good movie too, And
that would be an example of some of the highbrow
ones that started to come out in twenty ten, like,
like we said, The Impossible, there was a Korean one
called Pandora that came out in two thousand and seven
about a nuclear meltdown. Solly about Captain Chelsea Stulemberger's landing
(48:42):
in the Hudson River where not one person died. I
have seen a plane I should say landed a plane.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah that was Hanks, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
He was in every single movie that was out at
one point. I think.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Yeah, he went through a string of playing real life
characters here and there. That's right. Some of those weren't great,
but I did like the one about the Somali pirates,
Captain whatever his name.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
Was, Captain Hoffman.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
So one of the other things that the two thousand
and ten Onward Disaster films did was at the very
least the studios figured out, like, hey, these are kind
of like easily translated internationally, and we don't mean the
dialogues translated easily, although it definitely is, yeah for sure,
(49:32):
And because everything's so morally cut and dried, people anywhere
can get what they're seeing, even though it's an American
made film about Americans. But also in these movies that
are like a worldwide catastrophe, you have the opportunity to
take down landmarks all over the world. So in France
they can see like the Eiffel Tower going down, they're like,
(49:55):
whoa France, you know. And then one of the other
things too. Is because of these huge, huge all star casts.
You can easily cast foreign actors or actors who are
really big in the country they hail from, and that'll
up the box office too in the country.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Yeah, it's all a formula. The Rock started being in
a lot of these. That was one of the few
moves I've ever walked out on was San Andreas in
twenty fifteen with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. I did not
think it was very good at all. He followed that
a few years later, you liked it.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
I didn't see it in theaters, though. I think if
I had paid twenty bucks to see it, I probably
would have been upset.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
Yeah, and then he was in Skyscraper, not to be
outdone by San Andreas, another not so great movie a
few years later in twenty eighteen. But again, some people
love all the Rocks stuff. Sure, it's just my dumb opinion.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
I had an idea or a thought that I wanted
to share, Chuck, let's hear it about the twenty ten's boom.
It didn't burn out in one decade. It's still they're
still making straight ahead twenty ten style disaster films. And
I was thinking that the reason why is because there's
so many more studios now putting out so many different
(51:09):
types of movies that it hasn't become a glut of
so so movies, or even if there are so so
disaster movies, there's still room to make other good ones
rather than just three or four studios going all in
on disaster films for the same few years.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Right, Yeah, just spacing them out as you know, like
just something you can return to. That's a pretty dependable release,
but not like, hey, let's release nine of these in
the next two years exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
There's a wider variety. So it's been allowed to just
kind of continue on, and in my opinion it's gotten better.
Like Leave the World Behind was really good. The wave
of Norwegian one that came out in twenty sixteen was
like highly acclaimed. Don't look up, did you see that?
The satire from Adam McKay, Yes, I did. It was
(51:58):
pretty good. Actually liked it a lot. But it's it
satirizes government and people not taking climate change seriously. But
and it's a disaster film, but it's not a parody
of disaster films, right, it uses disaster films to satirize
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
Yeah, which is. That's an interesting take for sure.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
You know you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (52:19):
No, I feel like I need to watch more. I
didn't actually watch any full disaster films again in preparation
like you did. So this has inspired me to go
back and watch some of those from the seventies that
I never saw.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Definitely watch Earthquake and watch Airport seventy.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Five seventy five. And I still haven't seen Towering Inferno.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Oh, definitely see that too.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah, all right, done, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
Well, since Chuck agreed to see some movies that I
thought he should see, we've unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
I'm gonna call this follow up to morgana The Kissing Bandit. Hey,
Chuck and Josh and all that helped make your show awesome.
My wife and I are longtime listeners, but first time writers.
My wife Jennifer and I love having you entertain and educate.
It especially on long distance trips with the family. You
help keep us awake and focused, with a pleasant side
effect of putting our five year old Ben and seven
year old Eleanor asleep. That's great. I love it when
(53:10):
we can lull children to sleep.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
We live to give.
Speaker 1 (53:14):
We are on spring break traveling to my in law's
house right now and during the drive, one of our
episodes we listened to was MORGANA The Kissing Bandit. When
we arrived at our destination, to ask my father in
law if he remembers her since he is the biggest
sports enthusiast I know, Get this, dude, he said, of
course he sees her all the time because she lives
down the street. What you ended your podcast with the
(53:36):
mention that you didn't know she was still alive and
what happened to her? And we wanted to let you
know she's still alive and enjoying retirement with a full
life that is and cherry on top. This is written
to us by John Ritter.
Speaker 2 (53:50):
Wow, my mind is coming apart of the seams right now.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Yeah. Maybe best listener mail ever, so big Hello to
John Ridder and you're wife, Jennifer and Ben and eleanor.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yes, Hello and happy travels to you guys. And hats
off to your dad too for knowing MORGANA The Kissing Bandit.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
Yeah, and hats off to MORGANA. I'm glad. I'm glad
you're doing great. Hopefully this message gets to you.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yes, this message brought to You by John Ritter. If
you want to be like John and get in touch
with us, you can send us an email send it
off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:28):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us today. And that's okay because
we're just gonna be sitting around rapping about one of
our favorite things to talk about.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
That is movies. Let's go to the movies.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You had a little Katherine Hepburn thing going on there,
ethel Merman, it was Katherine Hepburn singing ethel Murmy. Okay,
that's how I think that. Yeah, we are going to
go to the movies, Chuck, and in particular specific kind
of movie that the more I dug into, the more
I realize is one of my favorite types of movies.
(00:48):
Oh yeah, yeah, disaster movies. I had no idea, but
remember we were talking. This whole thing was kicked off
by me watching The Day After Tomorrow a couple of
weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, And I was like, yeah, it's
one of my favorite movies. And the reason why is
because I love disaster movies. Love them.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, I like a lot of these. It's not my
favorite gen overall, but like I found myself saying like,
oh yeah, that was pretty good. I like that all right,
But generally, if we're in this, this is a subgenre
of action movies, and I think I prefer action movies
overall more than disaster movies.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Okay, all right, well, yeah, we'll get into that because
it is a subgenre of action, and that makes a
lot of sense. Disaster movies are packed with action, and
there are some that are like, Okay, this is definitely
a disaster film, like The Towering Inferno.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Oh yeah, I'd be okay, But then.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
There's also movies like Speed, and Speed checks off a
lot of the boxes.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, not a disaster movie.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
You would not call it a disaster movie, even though
it really could. If you really wedged it in there,
it will qualify. But there's just a couple of little
things that are different that make it definitely an action movie.
And then you have other ones like The Birds. Alfred
Hitchcock's The.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Birds not a disaster movie to me.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
It ends up on lists. It's part of the animal
attack subgenre of disaster films, which is a subgenre of action. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's interesting because I'm sure you did the same thing
when reading off some of these. It's sort of like
it just a gut feeling sometimes and you can't say
exactly what it is that you feel personally like doesn't count,
but someone you know, someone else might think it counts.
It's not like this is something you can say is
very cut and dry, you know, right.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
And because of that, I looked everywhere on the internet
to try to cobble together this list of like basically
the basic defining characteristics of disaster films. Yeah, and it
was hard. Nobody's ever seen sat down and said here
they are right. People have kind of piecemeal but people
don't talk that much about disaster films, which I find sad.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Well, maybe this can be that, and maybe you can,
like I don't know, start a website. Josh defines disaster
dot com.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I'll just put this article on there and that'll do that,
all right?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Should we go through some of these? Because you did
a bang up job, thank you. The first thing you
needed in a disaster movie is a disaster. Sure, but
this can be a lot of different things. A lot
of time it's a human made thing. Then that varies
from climate change movies, which we've seen a lot more
of lately, to like pandemics. And sometimes I get, like
(03:35):
I guess some things like Towering Inferno or a bit
of a mashup, because you can have like the thread
of a structural collapse, so that is a human made thing,
but it might be brought upon by like a fire
or flood or something. Yes, there's overlap.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Nobody said you can pin down disaster movies pretty easily.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
What else there's like, extraterrestrial is a big one. It
can be an alien attack, it can be a comet
or an asteroid headed toward Earth. Yeah, transportation is huge. Yeah,
people love screwing up like cruise ships and trains and
boats and airplanes love it. And then one of the
(04:14):
other things about it too, The disaster is ongoing, right,
so it's not like the people survive a five minute
earthquake and then the rest of the movie they all
like go out to dinner and everything's fine. They spend
the rest of the movie negotiating all the problems that
that disaster created, So they're they're negotiating sub disasters. Or
(04:36):
it can be like an ongoing disaster like a flood
or something like that. Like that can happen the entire movie,
but one way or another, the entire movie takes place
over some sort of disaster and all of its after effects.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yeah, for sure, impending or in in what.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
In Oh that's a good point too. Yeah, sometimes there's
a lot of lead up to.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
It, Yeah exactly. But what am I looking for in process?
In progress? Sure? No, good lord, it's usually a pretty
large disaster, and for me this is like can be
a real big differentiator in my personal opinion. But again
it's a gut check. Like sometimes if it's just a
local thing to me, I'm like, well, that's not really
(05:23):
disaster movie because it has to be more big and
sweeping to truly qualify. But then sometimes it is sort
of a smaller thing, and I feel like it does qualify.
So like in the case of you know, like a
bridge collapse or a collapse tunnel, or like Daylight Stallone's
movie about the when that one of the New York
(05:43):
tunnels was collapsing or collapse, Like, I considered that a
disaster movie. So I'm like contradicting myself. And that's what
makes this all fun.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, one end of the spectrum, the world can actually
be ending then to be the premis or like you said,
a little tunnel collapse, the rest of the world just
going on business as you care. Exactly let them die,
like that guy an airplane.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
I don't remember that. What happened.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There was like a debate TV show, like on the
News or something like that, and one was like, we
need to take better care of people in the FAA
has to step it up, and the other guy was
presenting counterpoint. He was like, I say, let them die.
It's way funnier in the movie.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, obviously, surviving the disaster is a big part of
the plot point. We know some people won't make it
out alive, but usually, like most of the A list cast,
will make it out alive unless they're really trying to
pull one over on you in a scream sort of way.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yes, and you tease something just now. Some people will
definitely not survive. And one of the things about disaster
movies is all you have to do is basically see
one and the next one. Maybe you don't even need
to see a second one. You can pick out very
quickly who's going to die, yeah, who's going to live?
(07:06):
And the reason why is because the stereotypes are pervasive
in disaster movies, like you have like the dumb, brawny
guy or you know, a smart scientist damsels in distress.
Like to this day, disaster movies are sexist. I could
not come up with a single disaster movie where the
(07:28):
hero was a woman, not a single one. In all
the decades of disaster movies. It's men. Most of the
main characters and leads are men. Yeah, and the woman
is basically there to essentially be saved and maybe help
out some Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I mean, I guess more recently they may throw your
bone with like a woman as president, but then she's
like commissioning the team of men to usually solve the problem.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Good point, right, So you know very quickly who the
hero is, But there's also plenty of other people who
you're like, I think they're going to live, and you
can really kind of cut them into three moral categories good, bad,
and redeemable. Yeah, and redeemable can be like the guy's
ex wife's new boyfriend who you hate, but really he
actually turns out to be a good guy. He probably dies,
(08:16):
but he'll die a good, noble death. He could also
not die and become like a sidekick. And then there's
like the shady rich people, often the people who are
responsible for the disaster through like their greed or something
like that.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
MM hmm.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
You know they're going to die a very bad death.
And the point is like it's a really simplistic way
of looking at humans, and I think that's one of
the reassuring things about it that make them enjoyable.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Yeah, for sure. And I think we would be remiss
if we didn't bring up a little bit of a
prickly topic for our African American listeners. It has long
been a movie trope in horror movies, disaster movies or whatever,
where the black characters will die almost certainly and usually first,
and that has such a trope it's become a joke
(09:05):
and lampooned in like you know, the parody movies and stuff.
But we have to mention that and what I'm curious about,
and hopefully we'll hear from some of our listeners if
that has now become so ridiculous and crossed over to
where it's now just sort of funny and expected and
a movie thing and not like truly upsetting. Right, So
(09:26):
I'm curious how our African American listeners feel about this
at this point in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, there's usually about as many black characters as there
are women characters in disaster movies. Yeah, but like you said, similarly,
they're often the president, like Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover
or something like that.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I'd vote for Morgan Freeman, yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
For sure. But I heard the reason. You know he
wears those diamond studs in his ears all the time.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, he's been rocking those for a while.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I heard the reason why. This is an old pirates
thing where you wear some sort of jewelry or whatever
so that if you die away from home, you have
enough currency or value or something on you to pay
for your funeral.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
That's why he does that.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
That's what I heard.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
That's incredible.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yeah, it makes you want to vote for him even more. Huh.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I just want to hear that State of the Union.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, whatever speech he's delivering, it would be really smooth.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
I was going to try and bust out of Morgan Freeman,
but I just I think I would embarrass myself. I've
never tried, so it's never good to launch into your
first attempt live on the air.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well, maybe we'll workshop it off air.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Well, we have to talk about the hero. The hero
most times is not like a typical hero. It's usually
in every man kind of character who just like Armageddon
for instance. You know, they put together a rough and
tumble team, you know, Dirty dozen style. It wasn't a
bunch of like elite problem solvers. It's they were like
(11:00):
oil rig guys, right, like drillers.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, they weren't even astronauts for Pete's sake.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, they had to train them. I only saw armagedon once,
so I'm pulling a lot of this from distant memory.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, I'm more a deep impact dude.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Oh yeah, that's what I heard.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
As a matter of fact, I'm not entirely certain I've
ever seen Armageddon.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Uh, you know, it was okay, it was fairly you know, schlocky,
big budget sort of stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
You just described almost every single disaster movie you ever made,
and the response too, your judgment of it, almost every
single disaster movie you ever made. Like, they don't get
you to jump off off the couch at the end
and scream Bravo or Encore. You know what I mean.
You just kind of like them. They're just kind of fun.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, it's it's summer movie popcorn. Fair. I still love
these kind of movies. I think there's a place for
all kinds of movies, and I still love going to
the theater and seeing these sort of big budget like
it probably isn't a great film, but it might be
a fun movie. Right.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
So within these the structure, these constrictions, people have learned
over the years how to kind of play with them
and make new forms of disaster films. And a really
good example, I think so we said that either a
big disaster affects tons of people or a small disaster
affects a little amount of people. Something that kind of
(12:21):
combines the two is Leave the World Behind Ethan Hawk movie.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
I don't know that one.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Oh it's great. It was on Netflix, Ethan Hawk and
Julia Roberts. So basically there's a cyber attack that just
causes civilization to essentially collapse, but we're just following like
two families who are kind of having to figure out
what to do and what's.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Going on and all of that approach.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, it was it was definitely worth seeing. And then
other ones, rather than having kind of a schlocky humor
that really started to develop in the late seventies and
then it kind of turned in to like quips, I
guess in the nineties. Yeah, there's some very very serious
ones too, like the impossible, not a schlocky depiction of
(13:12):
the two thousand and four Indian Ocean tsunami.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
It's incredible movie though, it is.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
It's so it's probably the most realistic film I've ever
seen in my life.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, I mean I remember, I think I remember when
it came out. We might have even talked about that
on the air at some point when we did the
tsunami episode with the how they recreated that was just
herrowing exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
So that's disaster films in a nutshell. And I feel
like we could probably take a break here and then
come back and talk about the history of disaster films.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
What do you think, Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
So Unlike some other things, disaster films are one of
those things you can explore and find that there's an
actual beginning and it's not like this thing developed over time.
There were disaster films because there's these definitions, these characteristics
that you have to have. There were films along the
way that just happened to have those, And the first
(14:32):
one was Deluge from nineteen thirty three, where if you
watch it, there's a several minutes of New York City
being destroyed by a tsunami and it's pretty impressive for
nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Three, Yeah, for sure. And it also sort of as
we'll see, and usually they're the schlockier ones. But you
get a lot of these one word title disaster movies, right,
especially in the seventies, but then again, as we'll see
in the nineties, resurgent things like tornado, flood stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, you put an exclamation point at the ada of
a natural disaster or a force of nature in your set.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
So I didn't know, I didn't know any of these
early early ones, but one from nineteen thirty six. It
was called San Francisco, right, yep, and it was made
thirty years after the nineteen oh six earthquake and about
that earthquake.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yes, but it's also apparently people break into song in
it here or there, so it's sometimes listed as a
musical drama.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
There's another one called Old Chicago, about the eighteen seventy
one Chicago fire that came in nineteen thirty eight. Titanic
apparently was a favorite subject of early disaster films and
actually stayed that way over time. Yeah, but it wasn't
until nuclear anxieties really started to develop as the Cold
War picked up and it was reflected in movies that
(15:50):
people started imagining what would happen if all these nuclear
weapons went off? Yeah, that actually kind of created the
first crop of what you could really point to was
the Earth disaster films.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah, kind of like the ones as we know it
in the early sixties. Voyage to the Bottom of the
Sea was one in sixty one when a nuke powered
sub that was radiation fire coming from space. They were
going to bomb that radiation fire from below. Like anytime
you're using a nuclear bomb to you know, launch it
(16:22):
into a disaster, Like, I feel like that's happened a
couple of times at.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Least, sure for sure. What else? There's the day the
Earth caught fire?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Not a good sidy.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
No, that kind of wondered what would happen if a
couple of nuclear bomb tests that happened to be carried
out simultaneously by the US and the Soviet Union, what
would happen? And they said, oh, well, probably the Earth's
axis would be shifted and we would be knocked out
of orbit and we would start heading toward the Sun.
That is cut and dry disaster plot.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah, for sure. Also in the sixties we had crack
in the world and for me, one of the great
movie of all time. Panic and Year Zero such a
great title.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
It is a great title. And then of course The
Birds an undisputed disaster film.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yeah, I take issue with that. The Knight of Living
Dead is listed that is not a disaster movie.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Well, that's a great question, because is a zombie apocalypse
that a handful of survivors have to survive and negotiate.
That's an ongoing disaster. You have a group of people
from different walks of life sometimes stereotype coming together. Yeah,
their lives intersect through this disaster. Yeah, and then they
have to survive. Some people do, some people don't. There's
a hero I mean in that sense, Night of the
(17:35):
Living Dead definitely qualifies. World War Z would qualify Nope. Yeah,
I think that there's like a I mean, there's room
for debate there. Like those could also be horror monster
movies too.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, I consider those sub gens. I think as soon
as you add any zombie, it becomes something else, something
else entirely. That's again, these are all just my dumb opinions.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Did you see god Zilla Minus one?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
No, but I've heard a lot about it. Is it
garbage or great.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
No, it's great. Oh it has a great plot, great acting,
great dialogue, and then the action sequences unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
I gotta check that out.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Then it's a really good movie. Again, is it a
disaster movie? If you add Godzilla? I don't know. I
could make it a monster movie.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, let's see what Chuck says, Chuck, monster movie.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Okay, it is officially a monster movie.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Then. Well, you know I did host a movie show
for a couple of years.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
I know you did. That's why I deferred to you.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That makes me an expert. The seventies is when really
things start get cooking with all manner of disaster movies,
from things like The Andromeda Strain in nineteen seventy one,
you know, a Michael Crichton novel, so one of his
early novels. It was adapted.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
I tried to watch that the other day, and the
animal torture, I yea, get past man.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
That's when they just didn't care about depicting that stuff
with any kind of tenderness at all.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
You know, Well, I stopped the movie and went and
looked it up, like, did they actually kill this monkey
and these rats?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Did they?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
And no, luckily they did not and the ASPCA was
on hand and signed off on it. But what they
did was they suffocated it with carbon dioxide until it
passed out, and then the moment it passed out, they
cut and then they revived it. But that that monkey
was still suffering from this phyxiation during that those moments
(19:27):
where they filmed it. It's awful.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Did someone do mouth the monkey resuscitation?
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Well, there's this, there's this when the monkey dies. If
you look closely before they cut, there's a shadow of
somebody moving toward it. All righty to be serious, So
I think they used a little tiny oxygen mask to revive.
Oh god, but it's yeah, I mean that makes it
a little better. And that they didn't kill them, but
they still tortured them. So I couldn't finish that movie.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, I don't blame me. I never saw it, but
I remember that kind of as a holdover, you know,
came out here I was born, so but I remember
it just being a thing.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah. So okay, yes, you said we started off with
their drama Streen.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right, Yeah, I mean Airport was in nineteen seventy and
that's the one that you know kicked off a huge
I mean it had sequels. It led to Airport seventy five,
Airport seventy seven, and then Concord Colon Airport seventy nine, Yeah,
which all eventually led to Airplane. As I mean, that
had to be the first spoof, right, like disaster spoof.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
That's as far as I could tell, unless I would
qualify or include Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as a
disaster spoof. And I'm not sure if that came out
before or after Airplane.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I think it was before. But Airport was a very
lauded film. It got ten Oscar nods. It actually won
Helen Hayes one for supporting actress it. And this is
something that we'll see over and over again. Most of
these movies they make a huge, huge return on even
if they cost a lot to make, Like that costs
ten million bucks in nineteen seventy, which was a lot, yeah,
(21:02):
but it brought in one hundred million dollars in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah, And so that really caught the attention to the
studio bosses. They're like, let's do that again. And like
you said, there were three sequels to it. This is
probably one of my favorite movie franchises. I would Yeah,
I would make the case that the sequels, at least
the first two sequels are better than the original. I
didn't see any of these, they're so great. I watched
(21:25):
seventy seven and seventy nine in the last twenty four hours. Really,
I love them so much. And Airport seventy five is
probably the best of the bunch.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
All right, I'll check that out. And Airport seventy seven,
of course brings in the Bermuda Triangle, because I think
nineteen seventy seven was peak Bermuda Triangle paranoia.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, for sure. And then that concord, the Airport seventy nine.
The concord, it's people keep shooting missiles at it. They
have to take like evasive action, and you're like, okay,
this is definitely when the genre really started to die
or died it had already started. But one of the
big things that Airport ticked off, in addition to eye
(22:03):
popping box office returns, was that huge cast of like
where you recognize every single person, especially I mean if
you were alive at the time, in an adult at
the time, you would recognize everybody in there. Sometimes there
are cameos, and what they were following Airport was based
on a novel by Arthur Hailey, and he had written Hotel.
(22:24):
One of his things was a ton of different characters
whose lives kind of intersect in this issue or this
problem or this disaster. So basically, Arthur Hailey, the novelist,
in invertently it invented the disaster film through like his format.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, and you know they movie post respect then reflected
that too, because I remember stuff like Towering Inferno. They
would be the more artistic like the inferno, the you know,
the building on fire, but then like at the top
of the bottom, they would literally just have like frames
of people's faces of the cast, like just tagged on there,
(23:01):
like look at all these all the star power.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Right, and as time went on, the stars got a
little schlockier. In Concord, Charro makes a hilarious one minute
cameo Oka JJ Walker is one of the major minor
characters that smokes grass the whole time. Okay, I think
(23:24):
in Earthquake, which we'll talk about in a second, Walter
Mathow makes this inexplicable cameo a few times where he's
dressed like a seventies pimp with a curly wig and everything,
and he's drunk out of his mind.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Wow, that's his character.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Like, they were definitely known for cameos, but yeah, those sweeping,
huge casts of generally A List and then former A
List stars. That was a big hallmark of disaster films
that came around in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, you know, they're trying to appeal to a broad demographic,
so they would definitely bring back, like some of the
stars from like the Golden Age of Hollywood when they
were in their later years would be in these, Like
Fred Astaire was in one of them, right, Yes, I
can't remember.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I think he might have been in the Towering Inferno.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, so you know, they're clearly trying to appeal to
all age groups. Another thing a lot of these had
in common, at least in the nineteen seventies was a
man named Erwin Allen, the Master of Disaster. He came
up in the nineteen fifties, but he really hit his
stride in the seventies with things like The Poseidon Adventure
aforementioned Towering Inferno. Each of those was the top box
(24:31):
office hit of their respective years. Poseidon Adventure very famously
was about an ocean liner that flips upside down and
sinks basically, so everybody is upside down on this boat,
on the ship trying to trying to get out while
they're underwater. Pretty great, yep.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
And it's a bunch of different people who are stereotypes
from different walks of life who are laid out to
safety by in every man in this case of priest
named Gene Hackman, hal the character's name, that's actor's name.
That'd be pretty coincidental that you had played a character
by named Gene Hackman.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Such a brutal tragic very upsetting and for such a
wonderful person.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, upsetting is definitely a good word for it.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, I can't stop thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Sometimes you should probably try to. I think that would
be for the.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Best I know, towering it for and O of course,
you know we mentioned there was a fire. If you
don't know this movie, you should check it out for sure.
It's one of the good ones. But faulty wiring of
course makes it catch fire. People are trapped at the top.
But you've also got you know, sometimes they can work
in other mini disasters within it, and that's the case
here where there's a flood scene because they're trying to
(25:40):
douse the fire and then all of a sudden, you've
got a flood to reckon with.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
That's like a prestige disaster film. They played it straight ahead,
there's no shlock to it. The cast was just amazing,
and they did something that would be picked up again
in like the nineties and then today's disaster films, where
they had two heroes you kind of have to work together.
One was Paul Newman, who played the architect of this
(26:04):
one hundred and thirty five floor skyscraper. Yeah, just totally
fictional at the time, especially, Yeah, and then Steve McQueen
was this fire chief and they had to work together
to figure out how to get the people out of
this building and keep the quench the fire.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Man McQueen and Paul Newman. Does it get any better
than that?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Not really? Maybe Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Yeah, that's
whance kid.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Oh Yeah, that was great.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Okay. So yes, if you see one disaster movie, see
The Towering Inferno.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Yeah, agreed. If you want to see one that's kind
of super slocky. If you want to go down that avenue,
you could start with Earthquake from nineteen seventy four. Yeah,
Old Charlton Heston was in that one. People are in
this case again trapped in a skyscraper once again, but
this time it's an earthquake. A lot of you know,
when you see these earthquake moves, they're always shaking the camera.
(27:03):
But what's funny is if you ever see them being shot,
obviously nothing is moving except the camera, so the people
are all just going whoa on just you know, solid grounds.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
It's always fun So Earthquake did not really mean to
be schlocky. It just kind of ended up being schlocky.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
They did a great job of doing it unintentionally.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
And it wasn't the film that like led to the
end of the seventies boom, but it was definitely one
of the early signals that this is not this party's
not gonna last forever. And it's a good movie. I
watched it last night, No, I watched it early this morning,
and Charlton Heston, who's a regular in these disaster movies,
he did great. Everyone did really good in it. It
(27:45):
was just some of the premises and then also some
of the special effects. Like there's a scene where the
earthquake tremors are rocking the street in La Yeah, and
they're just pushing over the facades so you can see
that it's just this cardboard facade coming down. Stuff like that.
And then there's a very famous elevator scene.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Yeah, that's a weirdtube.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
It drops like all the way down, killing everyone inside.
But the way they show the impact is they just
freeze the frame and then some animated blood splatters across
the screen for some reason.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, it looks it looks really really bad and is
so abrupting, jarring and weird. But it's, like I said,
that part is on YouTube if you just you know,
type in Earthquake movie elevator scene.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
It's so good. You know, it's a good scene if
someone is taking the time to clip it out and
put it on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Right, Yeah, it is definitely worth But Okay, you want
to take a break now and come back and talk
about the end of the seventies or push on through
until the nineties.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, let's maybe push on and then we'll stop at
the nineties.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Okay, sounds good. So, like I said, it was kind
of clear fairly early on that this wasn't gonna last forever,
and I definitely did not make it out of the decade.
It really kind of came to it ugly and starting
around nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, and you know, one person's great disaster movie is
another person's shlock. It all kind of depends because some
of the ones listed here is sort of being the
lazier versions. Avalanche and Meteor are that's not one movie
that would be pretty great though. Actually sure it'd be
Media or then Avalanche probably, but those are two different movies.
(29:29):
The Hindenburg I thought that was okay from being a
kid and watching it. I haven't revisited. But then Roller Coaster,
I as a child loved, loved that movie about a terrorist.
It's you know, again, I don't know if it holds up,
but it's about a terrorist that's going to blow up
a roller coaster. You know, he's targeting amusement park.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
So are the people on the roller coaster like having
to go on it or stay on it over and
over again, like it can't stop or something like that.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I don't think so. Oh, but like there's the bombers
in the park and I just you know, I'm having
these fleeting memories. It's probably terrible, but you know, as
a you know, ten or eleven year old, it was great.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Yeah, I got you. And then there's Flood with an
exclamation point.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Shout out to Laura who helped us with this, who
came up with this list of lazily named disaster movies,
kind of like they were phoning it in.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, roller Coaster isn't the best name.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Okay, all right, I'm gonna watch that one though. All right,
But a lot of people who think about this kind
of stuff point to The Swarm from nineteen seventy eight
as the one that was like, yeah, this is over.
Not only was this over, but Irwin Allen's career was
over because he had not one, not two, but three
disaster film flops from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty
(30:48):
and that really ended the boom.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, that was pretty much the Swarm kind of. I
don't know if Nicholas Cage if they were referencing or
paying homage to that with the bees thing later in
The Wicker Man. It became a very popular meme the bees.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Oh I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
That, Yeah, from Nicholas Cage. But in this movie, in
The Swarm, there's a pilot that yells bees, bees, millions.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Of bees, right, and the bees take down an air
force helicopter.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Of course they do.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
And the way that they're overcome is somebody figures out how.
I think it's Michael Caine leading the cast. He's the hero.
He figures out that they can lead these bees out
to an oil slick in the ocean and then set
the oil slick on fire and no more bees.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
That's hey, I think that's a pretty decent, you know,
disaster movie solution.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Okay, fair enough. But I was reading a criticism of
that movie by Tyler Sage, I think, on a site
called Ultimate Classic Rock of All Things, and Tyler Sage
says that the cast seems either faintly embarrassed by the
proceedings or confused about what's supposed to be actually happening. Yeah,
I mean, that's all you need to know. Like, that's
(32:01):
not supposed to happen in a movie, you.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Know, No, it's not. So Alan had a black mark
on his record with that With a Swarm and then
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, they tried to recapture that magic
in nineteen seventy nine movie released seven years later, even
though it took place the very next day of the
original movie.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, and that was Michael Kane too, but also Sally Field,
Telly Savalis, Peter Boyle, and like, if you're cast like that,
can't keep a movie, Yeah, like make it good, then
there's something really wrong with it.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Oh I thought you were about to say afloat.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
You almost did, and then I was like, no, Josh,
do not say that.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
He did produce perhaps one of the worst entries Irwin
Allen did of the genre with I don't think it
was his swan song, but it was definitely the end.
In nineteen eighty a movie called When Time Ran Out
that did have Paul Newman. It was about a volcano
at an island resort, but he was very much forced
into this movie because of his contract. I don't think
(33:00):
he had all wanted to make it. They cut the
budget Warner Brothers did, so they didn't even have the
money to make it look okay, and it was just
it was really bad. There's a pretty good quote in
here too.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Right, yeah, that the eruption when it finally comes, is
a wonderfully cheesy amalgam of wobbly back projection, bathtub title
wave and scared expressions from the cast.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
So then because of all this, because these movies has
got worse and worse, but then also like the high
drama that was played straight, it was just ripe for parody.
And like you said, Airplane was the one that you
really don't need to mention any other parody. It's it
as far as disaster film parodies go. It just completely
captured it perfectly.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, and that movie holds up pretty well. I have
to say, it's still a fun watch, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Okay, I think we've made it to the end of
the seventies. The first real disaster boom has come and gone,
and things quiet down throughout the eighties. And we'll let
you think about this quietly through this ad break.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
All Right, we're back, and we're going to talk about
the resurgence of disaster movies in the nineteen nineties. And
I may have mentioned it on this show before. I'm
not sure, but this is one of my legendary predictions.
My friend I can't remember it, but it was one
of the very, very very early nineties disaster flicks came out.
(34:47):
I wish I could have pinpointed which one it was,
but I remember very distinctly at the time in college
telling my friends, I was like you watch I was
like they're going to start making all of these movies again,
just like they did in the seventies, and there's gonna
be a ton of disaster movies. And it literally happened
like starting that year.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Man, did you hear that from the Ghost standing in
the middle of the street.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
No, no, no, no, that we've whispered it to you.
It's probably pre Ghost. But yes, Sharknado, Jared from Subway,
Hugh Jackman, and disaster movies the only four things I've
ever predicted.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I don't know. I think some more are going to
come to the four over the coming years.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Chuck Stradamus could it could.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Only have been one of just a few movies, because
I can't remember what it was. Yeah, this whole, this
nineties disaster boom started and peaked and within a two
year period, and it got started off. You could say
in retrospect it was started off by Outbreak, which came
out in nineteen ninety five. It's an epidemic disaster movie.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, that counts.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
I think most people don't point to that and say
that kicked it off. It's more like they say Twister
or Independence Day in nineteen ninety six picked it off.
And then yes, you would definitely lump Outbreak into it,
but it was probably one of those two movies.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, it's there was a movie called Avalanche in nineteen
ninety four, so they were dabbling in that world, but
it was not a big movie at all. As far
as like capturing attention. I think Twister for sure, And
that may have been the one actually where I was like,
oh man, you because that is what I think of
as like typical disaster. I don't I know this is controversial,
(36:28):
but I'm not sure I put Independence Day in disaster movies.
There's something about when you add like zombies or aliens
and stuff, it just tweaks it slightly for me from
classic disaster. But again just my opinion.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Well, okay, so even if you accept and not with
an A, but at ex Independence Day from this list,
then you still have Twister.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
I think it was Twister.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
I remember the entire country was talking about Twister.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah it's I famously said Emily's favorite movies of all
time or every independent film ever made in Twister.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, And I mean it's a really good movie. Bill
Paxson's amazing in it. Helen Hunt does great too, Like
it's a good movie and One of the reasons I
think that it did kick off that that second Boom
and disaster movies was that you could take the disaster
formula but then apply emerging CGI computer assisted special effects
(37:26):
that were at the time. It was like, holy cow,
we can do this now, like the White House being
blown up by the alien ship and Independence Day, Like
you just had not seen stuff like that before. This
was all very new, and they were using it sparingly
enough too that it didn't look fake.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, for sure, it was like those are really great
special effects. At the time, Twister looked really, really good.
We should also mention too. I know we didn't go
over this, but the it's just now occurring to me.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Twister is also a kind of
a classic disaster movie trope character, which is sort of
a side character to the guy in the Chair. You
(38:07):
ever heard that, like the computer expert that just literally
sits in a chair the entire movie and figure stuff out.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah, and usually has a smart mouth always.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
This is sort of an adjacent thing though Philip Symore
Hoffman's character, which is sort of he's not in a chair,
but it's the wise, cracking, irreverent kind of you know,
he's wearing the Hawaiian shirt when everyone else has on
like tactical gear. That's you know, but super smart and
figuring stuff out. I'm not sure what they call that
(38:35):
in disaster movies, but it's their version of guy in
the chair.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I think. I don't think people have written enough about
disaster movies for anyone to name it. So call them,
call them what you want.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
A Hoffman.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
There you go. That's thet He was the Hoffman of
the movie and maybe one of the first.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
We got to talk about Titanic. It's a disaster movie,
but it's got so much story and romance. It's definitely
a subgenre within it.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I think Bill Paxson was in that too.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, all right, b man, what a great guy.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Oh I forgot he was gone.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
That was so sad.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, it was sad. So one of the other things too,
that fueled this nineties resurgence of the disaster broom is
that these movies, some of them Titanic, Independent, State, Twister,
they're among the highest grossing films of all time.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
So just like in the seventies, studios were like, we
can spend lavishly on a production, but we're still going
to make back ten times or more what we put
into it. So they're like, good, let's start making disaster films,
and very quickly after some of these really creative original
disaster films you could see in theaters virtually at the
same time disaster films about the exact same topic.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
Yeah, that was the thing for a little while. I
think I was still getting Premier magazine at the time,
and I remember they started writing about, you know, these
product auctions being kind of out trying to outrace one
another to get to the box office first, maybe to
their disadvantage as a production. But very famously the two
biggest examples, or I guess four are Armageddon in Deep Impact,
(40:13):
about a meteor striking the earth, you know, to basically
wipe out humanity, right, and then Dante's Peak and Volcano.
Neither of those were that great.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
No to me, weren't. I don't was Volcano with Tommy
Lee Jones? Is that the one?
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah? And Ann Hesh Yeah, ip again.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, And Dante's Peak was Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Oh, Linda Hamilton, that's right.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
And that's a really good example of like just how
disaster films like minimize women and their contributions. Linda Hamilton
was well known by this time as a female action star. Yeah,
like she was in the Terminator movie. She was a
total b a.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah, Sarah Connor.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Right, and but and in this movie, apparently she's she's
like a single mom who's totally dependent on Brosden to
help her and her kids. She's like kind, she whimpers
at times, like, Yeah, that's just one of the big
problems with the genre. Like if you can just kind
of hold your nose and make it through stuff like that,
then you're you can enjoy them. But if you focus
(41:15):
on things like that, you're probably not gonna like disaster films.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Yeah, agreed, What a waste of Linda Hamilton. What a shame.
I got to shout out a few more that weren't
listed here from the nineties Hard Rain, remember that one
Christian Slater and Mini Driver. No, it was a it
was a flood movie. But you know what was it about.
It's about a very hard rain. Okay, I just won't
stop raining. Friend shout out a friend of the show
(41:39):
Mini Driver. Listen to her wonderful podcast on our own network.
Many questions, very nice, I don't know if you remember
this one Firestorm with NFL legend Howie Long. No, Yeah,
that was one of the bad ones. I think he
was a like a forest fire, like a fire jumper
kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Are these ones you're shouting out sound like riff tracks? Candidates?
Speaker 1 (42:04):
They probably are? And then also some of the one
word titles. There was a movie called Tornado. There was
a TV movie called Tornado Warning that starred Jerald McCraney
from Simon and Simon.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Nice. I love that kid.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
There was another movie called Flood, a second movie called Flood,
and then there was one from nineteen ninety nine, which
is sort of when things started to peter out, called
Storm with Luke Perry and Martin Sheen.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Wow, that is that's some nineties casting is a mini
driver in Christian Slater that screams nineties pretty.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Hard too, Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
But like you said, there's one other thing. The nineties
definitely contributed to the hero scientists where it wasn't it
wasn't necessarily some you know, tough dude. It was a
guy who had the smarts to figure out how to
deal with this or knew what was coming. That's another
trope from Disaster films, especially now, Usually the hero is
(42:59):
the only one who can see the impending disaster. You
believe him, and then he ends up having to save
everybody Else's took us because no one believed him and
didn't take any measures to thwart the disaster from happening.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Right, And once again you were saying he because all
of these movies failed the Bechdel.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Test for sure.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
And there's also a thing that pops up in the nineties,
which was the like the rival scientist. If there was
a hero scientist, a lot of times there was an
ant well not anti hero, because that's still a hero.
Just the anti scientist show was still a scientist. I'm
clumsily working my way through this. But they thwart the hero.
(43:42):
It's you know, like usually a government scientist or something,
or maybe an official and they dismiss everything like that.
The hero scientist is.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Saying, right, that's it can also be a government official.
Very frequently they get their come up, and pretty commonly
in nineties on disaster movies.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, what do you call it? Diehard? That's not a
disaster movie, is it.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
I've seen it listed.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah, I guess it could be.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
To me, it's just a straight ahead action film.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
I totally agree, but it does splash Christmas movie.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Like you would say, all the people in all the
people in Nakotomy Plaza, that's a disaster to them.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah, the world's going.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
About its business as usual, but to them inside, they're
in the midst of a disaster. They have to survive.
I don't know, I think just I don't know. I
think so. The same thing with Speed. In Speed, Keanu
reads the hero was a.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
SWAT member, right, Not in every person right die.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Hard John McClain. He's a cop, even though he's off
his beat, he's still a cop. Like the hero has
to be some sort of everyman who or may not
possess some special sort of skills or knowledge that help
him overcome this problem. And then his medal that he
may not even have known that was there is tapped
(44:59):
and he leads other people the safety.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah, for sure. But you know, as the nineties wore
on with things like Luke Perry's movie Rip once Again
in ninety nine, things really kind of stopped. In the
wake of nine to eleven. It just wasn't something that
people wanted to see for a little while, so there
was a lull. You knew it would come back. Early
(45:23):
two thousands had a few of them here and there.
There was one called the Core in two thousand and three,
where the inner core of the Earth ceases to rotate
and scientists once again have to vomit to get that
thing kickstarted, just like using the paddles in the er,
right clear?
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeh? What was the two thousand and three So yeah,
the very next year was the Day after Tomorrow, and that,
to me is the bridge between the nineties YEA disaster
films and the ones that kicked off in the twenty tens.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Agreed, It is awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
It's got a great cast. Scientists are the heroes. There's
a bunch of different stuff going on. The world is
being threatened. There's amazing special effects of things just going haywire.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
There's wolves.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
There's wolves, yep. And then that scene of the tsunami
flooding New York. There's a shot that's the exact same
shot in Deluge of the tsunami coming.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
To no interest.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
So I've read that it was probably an homage to that.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Oh that's kind of cool. Yeah, so too. Two thousand
and nine was a pretty big year, just when they
really started to come back. You know pre twenty ten's
with the movie the Mayan Calendar anxiety movie twenty twelve
came out.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Do you remember that?
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah? That was rolling emerick right, yes.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
No, But I mean, do you remember living in that
time where people were actually like a little nervous about
it was like y two k light.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yeah. I mean we did a podcast on it.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
We totally did.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
Yeah, and if I remember correctly, we told everybody it's
totally fine. The Maya Calendar doesn't actually say the world's
gonna end, a new calendar starts.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
That's right, and we're all here right now. So thankfully
that came true. Twenty twelve was not a great movie,
but it did because of the scope of like just
the world ending. They could be they could be like, hey,
let's just do any disaster we want anywhere, all across
the world.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Not a great movie. I watched that one yesterday too.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
I didn't think it was very good.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Oh I liked it a lot, I think to me,
and I know you know this, but to me, twenty
twelve is basically up there with The Towering Inferno as
far as the best examples of a disaster film. Go, okay,
there you go.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
My favorite disaster film is not listed here, but it
is from the twenty tens. As far as being an
actual great great film is Steven Soderberg's twenty eleven film Contagion.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Yeah, that is a good one.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
It is. I mean, it's a disaster movie, but it
doesn't play like one because it is so realistically scary
and doesn't have that sort of summer movie kind of
schlocky appeal. But it's it's a disaster movie for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Did you like me detect a note of hostility when
the medical examiner pulls Gwyneth Paltrow's face like roughly off
of her skull during her autopsy?
Speaker 1 (48:14):
I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
It seemed like they that was gratuitous, like they there
was like Soderberg had a problem with Gwyneth.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Palkwyneth Paltrow maybe.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
So Yeah, that was a really good movie too, And
that would be an example of some of the highbrow
ones that started to come out in twenty ten, like,
like we said, The Impossible, there was a Korean one
called Pandora that came out in two thousand and seven
about a nuclear meltdown. Solly about Captain Chelsea Stulemberger's landing
(48:42):
in the Hudson River where not one person died. I
have seen a plane I should say landed a plane.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Yeah that was Hanks, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
He was in every single movie that was out at
one point. I think.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Yeah, he went through a string of playing real life
characters here and there. That's right. Some of those weren't great,
but I did like the one about the Somali pirates,
Captain whatever his name.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
Was, Captain Hoffman.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
So one of the other things that the two thousand
and ten Onward Disaster films did was at the very
least the studios figured out, like, hey, these are kind
of like easily translated internationally, and we don't mean the
dialogues translated easily, although it definitely is, yeah for sure,
(49:32):
And because everything's so morally cut and dried, people anywhere
can get what they're seeing, even though it's an American
made film about Americans. But also in these movies that
are like a worldwide catastrophe, you have the opportunity to
take down landmarks all over the world. So in France
they can see like the Eiffel Tower going down, they're like,
(49:55):
whoa France, you know. And then one of the other
things too. Is because of these huge, huge all star casts.
You can easily cast foreign actors or actors who are
really big in the country they hail from, and that'll
up the box office too in the country.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Yeah, it's all a formula. The Rock started being in
a lot of these. That was one of the few
moves I've ever walked out on was San Andreas in
twenty fifteen with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. I did not
think it was very good at all. He followed that
a few years later, you liked it.
Speaker 2 (50:30):
I didn't see it in theaters, though. I think if
I had paid twenty bucks to see it, I probably
would have been upset.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
Yeah, and then he was in Skyscraper, not to be
outdone by San Andreas, another not so great movie a
few years later in twenty eighteen. But again, some people
love all the Rocks stuff. Sure, it's just my dumb opinion.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
I had an idea or a thought that I wanted
to share, Chuck, let's hear it about the twenty ten's boom.
It didn't burn out in one decade. It's still they're
still making straight ahead twenty ten style disaster films. And
I was thinking that the reason why is because there's
so many more studios now putting out so many different
(51:09):
types of movies that it hasn't become a glut of
so so movies, or even if there are so so
disaster movies, there's still room to make other good ones
rather than just three or four studios going all in
on disaster films for the same few years.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Right, Yeah, just spacing them out as you know, like
just something you can return to. That's a pretty dependable release,
but not like, hey, let's release nine of these in
the next two years exactly.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
There's a wider variety. So it's been allowed to just
kind of continue on, and in my opinion it's gotten better.
Like Leave the World Behind was really good. The wave
of Norwegian one that came out in twenty sixteen was
like highly acclaimed. Don't look up, did you see that?
The satire from Adam McKay, Yes, I did. It was
(51:58):
pretty good. Actually liked it a lot. But it's it
satirizes government and people not taking climate change seriously. But
and it's a disaster film, but it's not a parody
of disaster films, right, it uses disaster films to satirize
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
Yeah, which is. That's an interesting take for sure.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
You know you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (52:19):
No, I feel like I need to watch more. I
didn't actually watch any full disaster films again in preparation
like you did. So this has inspired me to go
back and watch some of those from the seventies that
I never saw.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Definitely watch Earthquake and watch Airport seventy.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Five seventy five. And I still haven't seen Towering Inferno.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Oh, definitely see that too.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Yeah, all right, done, Okay, great.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
Well, since Chuck agreed to see some movies that I
thought he should see, we've unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
I'm gonna call this follow up to morgana The Kissing Bandit. Hey,
Chuck and Josh and all that helped make your show awesome.
My wife and I are longtime listeners, but first time writers.
My wife Jennifer and I love having you entertain and educate.
It especially on long distance trips with the family. You
help keep us awake and focused, with a pleasant side
effect of putting our five year old Ben and seven
year old Eleanor asleep. That's great. I love it when
(53:10):
we can lull children to sleep.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
We live to give.
Speaker 1 (53:14):
We are on spring break traveling to my in law's
house right now and during the drive, one of our
episodes we listened to was MORGANA The Kissing Bandit. When
we arrived at our destination, to ask my father in
law if he remembers her since he is the biggest
sports enthusiast I know, Get this, dude, he said, of
course he sees her all the time because she lives
down the street. What you ended your podcast with the
(53:36):
mention that you didn't know she was still alive and
what happened to her? And we wanted to let you
know she's still alive and enjoying retirement with a full
life that is and cherry on top. This is written
to us by John Ritter.
Speaker 2 (53:50):
Wow, my mind is coming apart of the seams right now.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Yeah. Maybe best listener mail ever, so big Hello to
John Ridder and you're wife, Jennifer and Ben and eleanor.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yes, Hello and happy travels to you guys. And hats
off to your dad too for knowing MORGANA The Kissing Bandit.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
Yeah, and hats off to MORGANA. I'm glad. I'm glad
you're doing great. Hopefully this message gets to you.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yes, this message brought to You by John Ritter. If
you want to be like John and get in touch
with us, you can send us an email send it
off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:28):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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