218 - Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979)

Do to be or not to be next year

It's funny, the YouTube algorithm suggested an old superman cartoon i remembered having on VHS as a kid. I vaguely remembered but was shocked to realize it was called the Japateurs. A Japanese steals a huge us bomber and superman defeats a buck toothed, glasses wearing Japanese guy.

Kudos to Josh for having the self respect to refuse giving this movie his full attention.

Brian's accusing the others of having not watched the film, but I'd like to know how he himself watched it considering Brian is dead 🤔 ?

The Edward James Olmos directed Chicano crime drama My Family opens with the Zoot Suit Riots connecting the experiencing of getting beaten up as teenagers to why they had to form their own gang/protection racket and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies are now known simply as, The Daddies, and are a perfectly respectable Dixieland house band in New Orleans

Genuinely adore that the movie is so painful to talk about that this episode has digressions every two minute as you all try desperately to talk about anything other than the movie itself

I don’t quite know how to put in to words _why_, but I think this episode of the pod might be an All-Timer.

I try to watch or listen to some of what you cover. I made it through about 10 minutes of this movie. I'd rather listen to Down Gilead Lane.

A few points: Everyone on this movie was coked to the gills. This is a perfect movie for an autistic 11 year old, which is what I was in 1979. Mickey Rourke - he’s in there. My brother-in-law’s father was the Art Director on 1941, as well as Showgirls.

"Things would have to shift a lot before Japan attacked us again" ah, I see you haven't read the peak of political-thriller fiction that is Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy. The book that got him so many interviews on TV after 9/11 for having the book end with a jet plane flown by a Japanese pilot crashing into the Capital Building in DC. I kid, I just have the autistic desire to regale people with how fucking weird that book is (in a series of weird fucking books) and honestly I think if you had the right guest (November Kelly would be good) an episode on Tom Clancy could be wild.

I love you guys but gifting AJ's Horse Corner to a friend gets me yelled at

fun fact: during ww2, the US navy & MC had more casual “deck shoes” that looked a lot like modern converse (canvas upper & thick vulcanized rubber soles). idk why they had the japanese navy wearing them though, from what i can tell their uniform footwear was boots & rubber-soled tabi shoes

Fun fact: Oregon probably saw the most action on the mainland during the war. In 1942 a submarine shelled Fort Stevens but mostly just left some holes in the Fort’s baseball field. Later that same year the same Japanese sub launched a seaplane that dropped incendiary bombs in southern Oregon with the aim of starting forest fires. The pilot, Nobuo Fujita, was invited to the nearby town of Brookings Oregon in the 60s. He brought his family’s 400 year old katana and planned on using it to commit seppaku if they arrested him as a war criminal. Instead he gifted it to the town and continued to visit over the years and was made an honorary citizen. Some of his ashes were even left at the bomb site. His sword should still be on display at the library. In 1945 an incendiary balloon launched from Japan landed in Bly Oregon and killed 6 in a Sunday school group that likely messed with the unexploded bomb. They were the only casualties by enemy action in the contiguous United States during the war. Where’s my comedy about them?

Defender of '1941' here, I absolutely loved it and I rewatch it to this day. I could argue about it for hours, but I can boil my argument down to: The chaos is what makes it. The fact that it's technically adept to a fault and still manages to be the most nonsensical chaos ever committed to film is what makes it. The insanity of the time is reflected in the insanity of the film. When the Id of a movie is the complete chaos of it, you're either going to love it for it, or absolutely hate it for it, and you're both right.

Ohhh my god The Green Berets sucks so bad. And the theme is absolute dogshit too. Fuck you, Barry Sadler, I hate your song.

I like Always. I can see why it wasn't a hit, seeing as it's a weirdly faithful update of a wartime film that Spielberg was obsessed with.

Every year we inch closer and closer to y'all having do The Final Countdown (1980) for the Pearl Harbor episode I look forward to that day

You know what's insane? The US demanded that other American countries, specifically those in South America, also deport their Japanese populations to the US to be put in internment camps. Check out this video by Unseen Japan https://youtu.be/PghVL_DLC3k?si=GA7F66IpQ7JKjr6R

When you run out of Pearl Harbour movies will you have to do Ti West's Pearl (2022)

Remember remember the 7th of December Japanese treason and plot I don't feel like finishing this

Next on interstitials from the brink: horsey men from dimension x

The Worst of all Possible Worlds 218: Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979) (2025)