S4E40.5: Convoy

13:48 I've been on a lot of very legal websites that have scraped the entire open subtitles page for a movie and so you can end up with multiple options for English subtitles for a film. I need to look through those more carefully to see if I can find the secret annotated version.

omg it would have been the Iron Council. Great Bas-Lag reference Devon

If y’all don’t hit Smokey & The Bandit in truck season it will be a missed opportunity. To be clear it’s pretty trashy but explores the relationship between the truckmen and the laaaw

I think what Lyle goes through is more like Elmer Fuddification than Javertification

Oh my god I’m BEGGING everyone reading this to listen to the sequel song to Convoy, Around the World With a Rubber Duck. They drive across the Atlantic Ocean to England and Germany and the USSR and Japan (where it does get a little racist unfortunately) and they create a beautiful internationalist convoy

The film was filmed almost entirely in New Mexico, the ‘Arizona’ highway is in the gypsum desert of White Sands 😤

My local arts org showed "She's the man" (2006) tonight. A movie based on the play twelfth night. Unfortunately, it's too scared to say much about masculinity and gender. Doesn't really fit in with this season, but I'd love to hear your takes on it.

I’m surprised there wasn’t more investigation of the influence of leading man, Kris Kristofferson’s politics on the themes of the film. Dude was a Rhodes scholar, Army Ranger helicopter pilot, and prominent, vocal leftist. He definitely read theory, but a lot of the film seems to accord with his anarcho syndicalism.

I love Nova subtly outing herself as a gamer with a Helldivers and a Call of Duty reference. I see you Nova

This podcast about leftist lesbians* extolling the virtues of long-haul trucking and CB radio communication in Convoy makes me want to re-listen to Alice Isn't Dead, a scripted podcast drama about a leftist lesbian trucker looking for her missing leftist trucker wife, telling her story over the CB radio as she drives across America fighting the forces of entrenched power.

I really feel that Fury Road was tailor-made for this season, featuring a heist, and a HUGE truck...

i hope you guys end up watching the smokey and the bandit movies. it would be beautiful to finally have the truck-man and the car-man unite against their common enemy: the cops.

You'll be glad to know that while it's still around the CB radio has taken a back seat to group chat VC with other drivers. And it's not rare for me to spend 11 hours in one go in a call with dozens of other queer furry truckers yapping and shit talking all day

'50,000 trucks used to drive here, now it's a car park.' . Convoy (1978) or the M20 on a bank holiday?

I deeply need the link to where the annotated subtitles version of Convoy is.

Canadian who was on the route to the capital when those fuckin' truck cunts were on the move, it was depressingly more popular than you would've thought. I had to suppress thoughts.

looking forward to Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Had me til the end, then I was looking up my nearest bridge.

Iron Council mentioned!

"They gave him a great cop name, too [...] He's called Mr. Swedley." "Such a good chaser cop name." And then I sat bolt upright in my airline seat because that's a way people have misread/mispronounced my last name.

For the Super Furry Animals fans out there (there has to be at least one): the secret track on the album 'Guerrilla' can be found by rewinding 4 minutes from the start of the first track, and it's made up almost completely of trucker slang. The only clue that it's there is a list of definitions for those slang terms printed inside the cardboard slipcase.

Most people need annotations when trying to read Shakespeare, but not Abi. She needs them to watch Convoy.

Could someone tell me the origins and meaning of crispen potato snacks? I think I missed where ever it came from, but they've said it a few times.

As usual suggesting Fury Road and Alien for truck season

my humble obscure suggestion for Truck Season is Black Dog (1998), which is about retired trucker Patrick Swayze teaming up with failed country singer Randy Travis to do One Last Truck Job at the behest of evil bolo tie wearing Meat Loaf. You get to see Truck-to-Truck Combat that culminates in a truck driving off a cliff and exploding

Please, do Space Truckers for Truck season. It's the bisexual movie that tried to do Boomers passing to the next generation. If for nothing else but the line: "You know for a gimp r*p*st murder, he died okay". And then The Great Train Robbery for Heist season. British stuff to make fun of, Donald Sutherland, and Chrichton's directorial debut.

I’d suggest transformers as those movies tend to have trucks and various such things in them

Please, I beg of you to do Death Race (2008).

Abby release the website deets I am begging

ACAB: All Convoys Are Bolshevik.

Fuck yeah a Bas Lag reference. I am one of those 10 people!

This is interesting because I was planning on doing some labour organising and or...

Smokey and the Bandit: the anti-Duel.

The only more truck movie than convoy is Maximum Overdrive!

You could have another patreon tier that is just Abi dropping random torrid tidbits and anecdotes like the one in this episode

1970s America really was an entirely different country. The whole zeitgeist was so different to just the next decade and it's really obvious watching media from the time. It gives me insight into some of the behavior of my dad and uncles as well as my own older brothers that was always incredible to me. For example: my dad's preoccupation with dash mounted police scanners and radar detectors, my brothers and their collective obsession with Dukes of Hazzard, and two uncles whose whole deal was similar to John McAfee, but with more fed prison time and less computer. It was just such a very very different time to when I grew up post Reagan, so different that I don't think I can ever really relate to them in a certain sense. My brothers had both a wild freedom and criminal sort of negligence growing up that would be unthinkable now and was only slightly more accepted in my day, and my dad and his brothers were very interested in stuff like spending a ridiculous amount on state of the art technology to pirate satellite television even into the 80s. Movies like this show where all that was coming from culture wise, and for that I find them really valuable apart from, y'know, the value they have as good movies

Vanishing point hits some of the same themes but for the isolated lonely carman

🎶We got a Christmas convoy, ain't she a beautiful thing? We gotta roll this trucking convoy, to see the newborn king, convoyyy https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t9mxviDcsRw&ra=m

I'm not sure if it's the politics or the whiskey sour, but I am suddenly an ardent supporter of Marxist-Leninist-Rubber-Duckist thought.

Listening to this podcast after watching Tomska's latest video on movie based on memes is weird. Other than Eight Mile and a few Christmas movies I'm not aware of any other movies based on songs, lol. I love the American-to-English translations and the accompanying translation voice.

There is a sequel (to the song) called "Around the World with a Rubber Duck". After just listening to it I can understand why Sam Peckinpah never adapted it to the big screen.

God yall were on fire with this one. There's like a spiritual exhaultation after you achieved liberation from the Fast and Furious mines

CB radio is still huge is Australia even amongst normal blokes who have utes

As a communist blonde American Trans woman truck driver....

MAD MAX FURY ROAD! LETS GOOOOOOOO

we're gonna roll this truckin' convoy across the USA...

On my KNEES requesting Smokey and the Bandit

That whole historically regressive figure thing- I grew up with family who were objectively by any measure white supremacists and they would be genuinely hurt and confused and defensive at any implication that they were not sparkling Martin Luther King style anti-racists.

Back to Feuerbach, Texas

Nova's info on no speed limits on interstate highways isn't correct there were only a couple of states with no speed limit on rural interstates. Those were Montana and Nevada. Both of which are very empty except in the urban areas. Prior to 1974 speed limits on interstates varied between 60-75 mph (96 to 121 in non freedom units). From 1974-1987 the 55mph (88 in non freedom units) was introduced and enforced by states no complying losing federal highway funding.

the message of the film is not about the lack of theory but the dangers of personality cults in leftist movements even though rubber duck doesn’t want to be the leader the convoy is destroyed when he is separated from the movement by the false flag ice cream truck I would say the film is about the need for decentralized governance in communist politics

Fun fact. The writer and performer of the song "convoy" also started the group Manhiem Steamroller.

CB radios are 100% still a big trucker thing.

I wanna suggest Smokey and the Bandit, the ultimate truck guy and car guy team up against the cop guy.

gen x-er with same phone anxiety 🫣

abi got her hands on the convoy norton critical edition

This episode is an all-timer boss

Zenigatafication is an inherently dialectical process.

CBT radio?

Nova said something this week about someone in Columbo sounding like the guy in Frontier Psychiatrist & it made me think about this guy in The Wild Bunch who also sounds incredibly like that guy. Also I’m so excited at the prospect of The Wild Bunch getting a SCUM rating

Dark star PLEASE

So... First Light?

CB enthusiast here, truckers still use it somewhat regularly in the US. most days driving down a highway you'll hear some folks on air, but not nearly as much as before. Some industries will have their fleet vehicles equipped with it for coordination on the property. One of the CB installers I know mostly equips fleet trucks for the oil business in the permian basin.

Y'all need to share the totally legitimate place to watch this movie with the trucker translation subtitles

The curtain on a truck sleeper is horrible thick leather because if you need to sleep during the day, you can button it shut from the inside and create a pitch black space.

Much like with military nick names, your CB handle would be based around whatever made you stick out. My dad is from New York and drove trucks in the south, something people could hear in his voice. So he was known by 'Yankee' or 'Damn Yankee' or ' Yankee Driver'

CB radios were kind of like Boomer Discord. The radio had bands you could switch to ( think of them as channels ). There would be one or two common bands where everyone hung out, like public or main rooms. Some company men like Fedex or UPS would stick on other, less used bands and only talk to each other ( there was a kind of classism here because they were quite well paid and didn't associate with the average trucker ). Like Discord, a topic would take over a channel and 85 percent of the talking was about that until it ran out of steam and/or various long running beefs that would occur for however long two angry people were within radio range of each other for a given day. The rest would be like, oh, I broke down here, or is anyone willing to sell me this, or there's a traffic jam / accident at this mile marker

As someone who grew up in a truck in the late 90s, I am gonna yap.

https://discord.gg/cYvmzNau Here's a leftist trucker Discord^

Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose is technically a trucker movie. His day job is truck driver, and he also does bare knuckle boxing for money and beats up cops and neo-nazis

I have lost any sense of revolutionary optimism. I'm sorry. "The material base for an uprising has eroded, the working class betrayed mankind and itself. The historic opportunity for a revolution has passed." If the real Communists want to execute me for being a Reactionary and Counter-Revolutionary, then please do it, just make sure your Revolution wins.

34 year old here- phone call difficulty is textbook millennial stuff. I've been hearing and making phone call anxiety jokes for like 10 years now. If anything, it's a joke that dates back to when you didn't have the smartphone as much and you did actually have to make phone calls more often

The movie actually didn't match the song perfectly, they changed the lyrics of the song for the soundtrack and rereleased it.

I remember when I was a kid reading a YA book about a young girl who got into some car accident in the middle of nowhere and was saved because she knew how to use the CB radio. It really was the "next big thing" back in the 70s.

The Mann Act was also referenced in Smokey and the Bandit. It's "transportation a cross state lines for the purpose of sexual commerce", which could be "trafficking" of anyone, for the purposes of prostitution specifically.

I miss when movies could portray cops as the sniveling greedy sadistic cowards that they are.

The translator that Abby got clearly also translates manga and anime in the good old days before official translations.

did you say farmer season? is the next theme farmer season?

I have also come across a brilliant example of context subtitles but for British English when I watched a clip of Yes Minister and when Sir Humphrey Appleby mentioned "the universities, both of them" the Chinese subtitles added "Oxford, Cambridge" in which is great because otherwise the joke wouldn't work

Listening to this as I hammer across Illinois in a Freightliner. Keep the shiny side up, Comrades. HENCHMAN clear.

1976 prop 14 was an agricultural vote supporting unionization 1978's proposal or prop 14 was to clean up the language and numbering in California's constitution to make it more understandable

I started watching this and immediately went "Directed by Sam Peckinpah?!" It's a strange movie to watch shortly after The Wild Bunch. You have Peckinpah pioneering slow motion to tap into the time dilation feeling of being under fire, and then using that same technique for a scene where truckers and cops punch each other in a diner

🎶🎶🎶 We got a big ol' Group Chat Postin' through the night Come on and join our Group Chat Ain't she a beautiful sight? GROUP CHAT 🎶🎶🎶

You know how you've talked in the past about having certain ur-movies that your family taped off TV and then rewatched incessantly as a kid? One of them for me was Convoy. Which is possibly why I identify as a truck these days.

They were still really Huge in the. 90s

We still use cb's, but yeah, alot of people are on phones.

Rise and shine, America! The Convoy episode has dropped! Racist prop 14 was a decade before. Rubber Duck was backing farm worker organizing: https://library.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/ufwarchives/RogeroPitt/04/Yes%20on%2014%20Flyers_001.pdf The Mann Act has been used against some famous people, having a passing knowledge of it doesn't imply being a human trafficker. Rubber Duck also is wrong, it applied to adults and minors.