The Mandalorian and Grogu with Chris Gethard

11:12David Sims:There was like a 20 to 25 minute section that David and I were locked in on.

11:16Griffin Newman:But I want to report to you. Did you guys see it together? We did. We saw it together in IMAX. I didn't get the invite. Well, because it was We knew a year ago I was going to be on this episode. We did book it a year in advance. During one of the busiest weeks of my life when I was already canceling other plans I had to find time to fit this in when I didn't get the info.

11:30David Sims:to not go to the after party for Colbert's final taping last night so that you could be rested. Everyone settled down. I was exhausted. Get your beauty sleep. Everyone settled down.

11:40Griffin Newman:I started a press screening, which, you know, suddenly get that invite a few days earlier. And I had a plus one at Brock Griffin. Yeah. Ben did not go. Ben didn't go. Ben saw it by himself last night. I also figured, like, you would probably just see it in Jury. You know, you would see it in, like, I'm giving you the guff. The comfort of, you're giving me the guff. The bad boy got to be bad. I honestly, I didn't. You don't get mad at a dog for barking. You don't get mad at guests for being a bad boy. Come on, baby. I was a little annoyed at the screening because my wife was out that night. We had to fucking get a babysitter because she was like, is there going to be another screening?

12:13Griffin Newman:I'm like, it's Disney. They're just kind of like,

12:15David Sims:you show up or fuck you. Let's also acknowledge the other thing. We were coming from Citi Field where we had spent the afternoon at Star Wars Day. That was fine. Star Wars Day, which I will say also, I think factored into our experience of being very, very underwhelmed by this movie was Star Wars Day with the Mets was an experience that reminded me more of what I like about Star Wars than the Star Wars movie I saw that night.

12:45Griffin Newman:Mr. Met was dressed up as the Mandalorian.

12:48David Sims:I thought he gave a better performance than Pedro Pascal. I thought he was a little more locked in.

12:52Griffin Newman:He was locked in. The t-shirt cannon, there It was just a lady dressed as Padme. And I want to say episode two. And the t-shirt is canon, right? You know, like they were just kind of doing shit. Like there was just a stormtrooper walking around. Yes. You know, like, you know, like. And a dark. There were a couple stormtroopers. You could kind of like high five them, I guess. And they had like good video package stuff. They had great video packages. And you didn't see this because of where our seats were exactly. But on the screen for every picture. I could close a little bit. Your current enthusiasm for the New York Met Star Wars Day versus what I can only imagine your tone and body language will be for the actual men to learn and grow experience is making me sad ahead of time.

13:28I also want to say, it's making me sad ahead of time.

13:30David Sims:We went to Citi Field. We took the seven to Manhattan. I'm currently,

13:32Griffin Newman:we took seven to the upper west side. Yeah, right.

13:35David Sims:And saw the film.

13:36Griffin Newman:I'm currently all in on the Mets. It was also a fucking great game. They're bouncing back, right? Quality start from Nolan. See, I didn't know any about that. Five dingers. I wasn't watching any of that stuff. Great game. Yeah, it's true. My friend Ellen was there and she was like, I really, I want to get Griffin into it. And I was just like, Griffin's been going to sports games all his life. He knows how to entertain himself at a sports game. He gets his food. Yes. He's got his business. Check out the merch. Right, yeah. You're not about to be like, Griff, look at this guy. Let me get you in.

14:04Griffin Newman:This is a misnomer.

14:05David Sims:She did turn to me at one point, and this is Ellen Cushing, who co-hosts your secret podcast. It's different, not secret podcast that you should all listen to. She turned to me at one point and went, so Griffin, what relationship do you have to baseball? And I'm like, everyone thinks that I've just been like, never looked at it. And I'm like, this was shoved down my throat for 12 years.

14:24Griffin Newman:Right. There was an extended prison sentence. That war was waged. Yes. You know, I'm not going to wage that war. Right.

14:29David Sims:It was much like Andor.

14:31Griffin Newman:We fought so hard for our freedom. The Gorman Massacre.

14:35David Sims:From the tyranny. I mean, I've been talking about this with my therapist lately. I'm like, about Andor? No, I should talk more about Andor with her. I don't know if she's watched it, but I feel like until I was 12, I played two sports a week.

14:46Griffin Newman:Yeah. I mean, they kept making me do it. That doesn't seem true. They did that. I've known you. I've known you almost 20 years now, and that does not ring true. Isn't that crazy? But sports. Was it Manhattan sports? Were you playing like high line? No, no, no. I was in Manhattan too. I did all the little league sports. I did baseball. I did soccer. I did basketball camp at one point. For Griffin in particular, would you be shocked if he was like, I had to play two sports and it was racquetball and chess? Would you be shocked if Griffin - I mean, I'm laughing. I'm laughing.

15:14David Sims:Would you be surprised that when I got to high school to fulfill my P requirement, I took a physio ball class. That was when I had the agency to lean into the bit. What is physio ball? Is that like a medicine ball? It's basically like Lamar's class. It's doing exercises on a big medicine ball. Kind of like rolling up and down or whatever. Yeah, and I almost got an incomplete. I'm not even joking. I'm not even joking. They were like, what's the right field of you doing this? How do we make this easier? 13 on, I was exactly what everyone thinks I was. From before 12, I was - Like in gym class discussing Betty Friedan with the other kids in gym class, like that type?

15:52David Sims:Yes. Not to stereotype, with the girls. Until I was 13, I was doing baseball. I was doing soccer. They made me go to basketball camp, roller hockey, boxing. You boxed? Yes. There's not a - No.

16:10Griffin Newman:Yes. No, I -

16:11David Sims:This shit was a nightmare. And by boxing, were you just a punching bag? He was foxy boxing. Well, no, I wasn't like competitively boxing against people. But my dad was like, you should learn how to defend yourself. And I'm like, what if I'm a professional podcaster? And he's like, what's a podcast? I'm like, I'm going to figure out how to make this a thing. We're going to do that instead.

16:30Griffin Newman:And I'll defend myself on Mike. Thank you very much. Hurry up. You're talking about the game. I had a good time at the game. And Ellen, I'm like, Ellen. You guys really don't want to talk about the men. We've gone through all of it. The game was good. Game was great. Yeah. And then we went to the movie and, you know, we're watching the movie and I would say, you know, we're chatting a little bit. We're sitting in the back row and like, you know, a lot of times we're sort of like, this ain't really, you know, light my fire. And then the Grogu part, which we'll talk about more, where it's only Grogu, right?

16:59Griffin Newman:Where he's in the swamp alone trying to help. Like two minutes in, I whispered to Griffin, like, not saying this is good, but I'm more interested. I'm leaning in. Two minutes later, I was like, I'm officially declaring this part of the movie good. I came aboard. For how long into it? Basically, the whole Grogu alone segment, I was very into it. Until spoilers, the Mandalorian wakes up again. Now again, I know that anytime I'm... I don't want to lean in too much to my relationship with your guys' fans, but anytime that I have a counterpoint to you guys, it does set me apart. Don't worry about it.

17:31I got very restless during that stretch.

17:33David Sims:See, I was restless during every other part. I would agree. And David and I were checking in. I did hate this movie. It did not inspire enough to make me angry. It is not the worst Star Wars movie. No, because... Can we agree? No, not even close. Yes.

17:48Griffin Newman:And Solo, I would argue. I think I prefer Solo to this. I do as well. I like... But I mean, it's probably kind of... Okay, I would say I liked this better than... Keep going. Are you going to say it? Most of the prequels and sequels? That's a little low. Yeah, I'm not there right now. If I had to sit down and watch one of them again, I might watch this one again because it's standalone and not tying me into a bunch of lore that I know is kind of a headache and confusing.

18:16David Sims:Look, I'll say this. This probably will end up being a Star Wars movie I rewatch a lot because I, of course, suffer from insomnia. And this movie was threatening to put me asleep. When you guys hit it at a press screening, I will also say, I saw it in Morristown, New Jersey where I was in the theater and there were two moms who brought a group of about nine boys who all seem to be about 11 to 13 years old. Yes. So I also got to watch it in that context where as I left the theater in a way that I promised was not too creepy. Yeah. One of the moms made eye contact with me and I was like, how'd they like it?

18:50And she was like, hey. So I'm like... I had the same exact experience.

18:56Griffin Newman:I got to see the Star Wars movie. That's a lot different than seeing it with a bunch of professional reviewers. No offense to one of my favorite reviewers. Well, it's Sims, it's Sepinwall. It's everybody else, baby. That's very nice of you, Chris. Seppin Wall was at the screening I'm sure he was He texted me Seeing it in a room With Sims and Seppin Wall I think sets a difference Sims and Seppin Sims and Seppin Go right down the list I would say That's a different environment Than eight kids in Jersey Who like fucking monsters fighting They want to see a poison snake Live action I hear you on the kids They want to see a dragon snake They want to see IRL Dejarik I very much was like Yeah it's a movie It's very much like A movie for kids I'm like I don't buy that as a defense exactly But I was like Certainly that's the tone it's going for.

19:36Griffin Newman:Experientially, though, I had that. I would say at a Star Wars press screening, yes, there's a few learned espresso sipping. I was going to say. There is a lot of people who work in this sort of fan and genre journalism world who are very enthusiastic about Star Wars.

19:53David Sims:I would say it was majority, like, fandom journalists over film critics. Yes. Right. I will throw out, it was, like, pretty silent. It was very late in the movie. In that same section, I want to say, where I turned to Dave and I went, I think that's the first joke that landed. Like, that got a laugh from the audience outside of, like, one isolated... The jokes were bad. The dialogue was bad. The jokes were bad. The score was awesome. The score was awesome. The score was legitimate. Luda Garnson is beyond, in a sense. The score was good enough that multiple times throughout the movie, I clocked, this score is fucking cool and weird and awesome.

20:26Well, you know what's interesting about the score?

20:27Griffin Newman:It's different. It is. And it's like, there's not a lot of stuff in this movie that felt too different. No. The score is one thing where you're like, that's bad. I also, even as someone saying I liked it, like seeing a movie and obviously spoilers, right? You don't need to say that. Seeing a movie where Brogu establishes no new powers that we haven't seen in the show, to my memory. He does not. Healing and lifting. He does that already. And literally it ends with them getting just the two of them back in a fucking spaceship and flying away, which I've seen a thousand times again. I'm like, this reflects so much corporate boardroom.

21:02Yes, a little bit. Test grouping analysis in a way that's frustrating that, again, the refusal to meet the moment.

21:10David Sims:Holy shit. I've just held the balance on a couple things. Having rewatched season three recently, they do at one point dub him Din Grogu. Yeah, it's like a family name.

21:19Griffin Newman:Din is the family name.

21:21David Sims:They accept that they're training him as a Mandalorian, even though in season two and Boba Fett, both Ahsoka and deepfake Luke trained him. So the idea is that... Yeah, but they trained him and he kind of is like, but I don't want to be a Jedi. So the idea is that he's the first kind of hybrid. That he's like the first Jedi Mandalorian, but they don't do it. He's a force using Mandalorian. They don't do it in this movie. Yeah. But season three, they're like, he is canonically Din Grogu, and when they start calling him Din Grogu, they don't stop calling him Din Grogu, which speaks to kind of what you're saying, which is this movie is in this insane, damned if you do damned if you don't place where the movies have just been on ice.

22:00David Sims:The TV shows have become this unwieldy thing. Grogu as a character is the one thing that undeniably has been working for them. And selling toys for seven years. Making money hand over fist, right? Don't fuck with Grogu. Totally. Kind of all we want to see is some character development from fucking God. And you can just tell that this was a corporate mandate. Favreau has said this himself, that they had season four at least like broken down into outlines, if not like basic like scriptments. They had the season figured out. And Disney was like, can you make a movie instead? And they scrapped all of that and they wrote a new thing from scratch.

22:35David Sims:And it was because he said, A, it felt like what we had was designed for TV and it wouldn't work in film because you need to tell one cohesive story and not be episodic. I would say this movie fails on that front. It is crazy to me that it's not just several episodes mushed together, that he claims all of that was thrown out and that would potentially maybe be a season four if they go back to TV, which is the real issue here. You're making a movie that is not like a finale to a TV show. It's not the graduation. It's just, here's another adventure. It's a little bit bigger in terms of length. We don't want to make it too tied into the lore of the three seasons of The Mandalorian, let alone the Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, what have you.

23:17David Sims:So it's like basically not building on anything for the people who have watched that. But if you haven't watched that, it doesn't really like get you into the world well or make you care about these characters outside of just Grogu being cute. And I saw... Poor Babu Fricks on a little dune buggy fly. Totally. They gave me that. There's stuff. There's stuff. But I saw someone... Sigourney Leaver in a rogue squadron. We're going to talk about her. How fit talk about that? I saw someone in a review say... Nothing else she did was good. Things already were getting out of hand when season three of The Mandalorian lost the intimacy of the lone wolf and cub dynamic and the standalone adventures.

23:57They did try to make this one kind of lone wolf and cub and cub where the second cub was Jeremy Allen White.

24:04David Sims:As a slug. As a jacked hush. He's sort of, it was kind of wild. Lone wolf and cub and bub. Kind of wild. It's insane that that happened. I want to keep, I want to just be clear. we would do of like they're gonna make a movie with like Hot Jabba's son he's played by Jeremy Allen White I just wanna be clear though even me saying like I liked it better than the reviewers I think being in a theater with a bunch of kids helped my final feeling really was like going from a show that I loved that season one made me feel like maybe Star Wars is back on track that the end of the movie as I walked out I went did I really just watch those two fucking assholes fly away in a spaceship again like that to what end like I liked it better than the reviewers and I still walked away like, it's not how movies work.

24:45In movies, the characters are different at the end than in the beginning and they just copped out on the very basic narrative choice. At point A, things begin and in the end you see how characters change and how that affects the narrative.

24:58David Sims:If this movie would even claim to have an emotional arc, it would be Din Djarin, the Mandalorian himself, learns that someday Grogu's gonna grow up. Well, that is, like, vaguely accepts it. If we know one thing about Grogu, it's that he ages so fucking slow. Well, he's not allowed to grow up that we can't sell him in toy form. A, we can't sell him in toy form. Right. B, timeline-wise, I think Mando will be fucking dead before Grogu even hits puberty. Possibly, yeah. Can I, there's a thing I do want to talk about that I wrote down. Please. Ties in directly to what we're saying right now. The written in blood.

25:36Right, like a napkin. And what I don't want to do is dwell in the air. I don't want to dwell in the air of fan fiction. It's boring. Okay. But to the exact point that we're saying right now of like this little Muppet sells toys, we can't ever have them change. It's very frustrating corporate thinking. And there is a thing that I perked up for that I only want to put out there as like fantasy booking, so to speak. Okay. I wonder if it's the same thing I thought. Because only because I have a feeling that if I say this out loud right here, the day after the movie came out on the Blank Check podcast, that I have a feeling it may be revealed at some point that corporate interference interfered with something I thought they were about to do.

26:22Griffin Newman:Okay. And I have... Just say the thing, please. What is the thing? Why are you already mad at me? David, this is our care friend. You're already mad at me. We never would have met... I drove from New Jersey. I paid tolls and congestion pricing. We will absolutely cover your travel. Jeez, just tell Ben. drove very far. You know, no one told you to move to the boonies. Sorry. He's happy. He's got a canoe. He got a kayak. He got a kayak. That dragon, the dragon thing scratches. Mando. The poison-y thing. They establish this poison's going to kill him. He tells Grogu to get lost. Grogu comes back.

27:04Yeah, he puts him in the weird little mud hut he tries to build. Bonks his head a couple times. It's sort of cute, but I've seen it a million fucking times.

27:11Griffin Newman:The one Bonk I laughed and then they kept doing it. And I was like, guys, you got me the first time.

27:15David Sims:By the way, Bonk was the laugh in the audience. That was the one. I'll also say too, nobody loved Babu Frick's original appearance more than me. You guys heard it. True. I don't know that multiply it by four and put them on a fast little dune buggy is like, come on, guys. We're treading on why people hated the Ewoks. I posted a negative letterbox thing and people in the comments went, how was Babu Frick? and I'm like, this is the trick they're pulling in the marketing. People are like, Babu Frick's in it. And I'm like, no, this is set decades before Rise of Skywalker. At best, we are watching Babu Frick's uncles.

27:47David Sims:Yeah. That's the best case. I know that some of what I'm about to say is... Same actor. Yeah. Some of what I'm about to say is tangled up in the existence of this timeline that they're bound to. But he's there with the fucking scratch. Yeah. They established that they have said so many times that Grogu doesn't speak, right? Right. They explicitly say he doesn't speak. These all feel like choices here. I will tell you when I'm watching Mando with that scratch, I am brought back to one of the most influential moments of my entire childhood, which is Transformers the movie, which I did not see in the theater.

28:18I've only seen it once, but

28:20Griffin Newman:is Optimus Prime dies in it? Someone famous dies in it, right? Spoilers, great, 1986.

28:26David Sims:Optimus Prime dies, Orson Welles was dying when he recorded it. Orson Welles plays the planet. He plays Unicron. He is a giant Transformer the size of a planet. It's incredible. That's a great performance. Fantastic use of weirdo and convicts. But Optimus tried. By the way, incredible use. But Optimus tried to be stupid. He does. He's like the first act of this movie. Let me talk to you about this. Because I'm older than you guys. I was watching Transformers episode by episode as a six-year-old child in my two weeks.

28:52Griffin Newman:It was like one of your first genre properties. I'm hanging on to this thing. Half an hour, half an hour, half an hour.

28:57David Sims:Is it the matrix of power? Is that what it's called? Matrix of leadership? Oh, yes. It's the thing in the chest, right? Push the cube. My family didn't have money growing up and that was the same year my parents bought a new house so there was zero disposable income plus I don't think anyone in my family wanted to sit through the Transformers movie. But also you're not getting Hot Rod that year. I only had Minibots. I never had the big Transformers toys. I only ever had Minibots. Many of them bought a garage. Like Headmasters? No, Minibots.

29:25Griffin Newman:Whenever we do Michael Bay, I don't see Transformers the movie. I'm also six years old. I think it was 86 it came out. You're right. this is the anniversary I'm six years I turned six in May of 86 okay I don't see the movie thank you so much the show comes back on in the fall and for some reason it was not on at 3.30 I was watching it before school and before school the new season comes on and it is revealed to those of us who didn't see the movie because at six you're not catching spoilers not in the free internet world I turned on this show and realized they fucking killed Optimus Prime and when I tell you without exaggeration I remember distinctly falling to my knees and grieving the death of Optimus Prime as a six-year-old boy.

30:05That's not an exaggeration.

30:06David Sims:It is widely reported as one of the greatest kind of like corporate boondoggles of all time. They went for it. On the level of like New Coke. Right. Where it really fucking damaged the brand. They were like, we're doing this. And then they were like, what have we done? They reversed it. Crying in the theater. Right. They also sold a bunch of Hot Rodimus. He went from Hot Rod to Rodimus Prime. Yeah. They sold toys for him. Yeah. Fucking, what was the blue and red guy's name? Is there? Alpha of something. Is there a reason they did this?

30:32Griffin Newman:Like, what was their... It was dramatically interesting. Well, there is a story, too, that... It wasn't like some, like, we need to get rid of Optimus because we don't like the voice actor or whatever. I have read that they wanted to kill... No, you kept doing the Michael Bay movies. I've read that they wanted to kill Duke in the G.I. Joe movie. Yeah, yes, I've heard that as well. But that it was flagged that it would be, like, really disturbing to kill a human, so they used the idea with Optimus. They were around the same time. I think they just... Point being, though, it was a big narrative swing, and it was fucking cool.

30:57David Sims:Can we end on a downer note? I think it was that kind of thing. Now I'm watching Mandalorian and Grogu and I go, are they really about to kill fucking Mando? It did kind of feel like it. It gets interesting. And I have a feeling there was a script that he was going to die. And I have a feeling where then Grogu is going to come back and we're going to watch Grogu go fucking ape shit. We're going to watch Grogu murder those Hutts in a way that Jabba the Hutt's completely different thing. Let me finish the thought. Let him finish. I think you're going to see him fucking wield. he's gonna pull off fights that fucking Ray Park as Darth Maul didn't pull off.

31:33He's gonna do disturbing shit that's more disturbing than we saw Vader do in Obi-Wan, the most redeeming aspect of the Obi-Wan series. We're gonna see him fight with more fucking Yoda shit than Yoda did versus Count Dooku. And it's gonna end with him finally saying he's gonna end with him saying his first words, my father he was. And we're gonna realize that Jabba the Hutt's son is witnessing it and we're going to see a franchise that so canonically says that sons hang on to the sins. It is the responsibility of a son to reject the sins of the father and not carry them forward in generations. We're going to realize that Mando's refusal to have Grogu train fully with Ahsoka and Luke was about the emotional attachment, the most dangerous emotional attachment in this franchise since Padme and Anakin himself.

32:20And we're going to be left with a cliffhanger that suggests that perhaps Grogu is reactivating as the Jedi Master Yoda was. or perhaps the Sith have been reborn because Mando was not brave enough as a dad to let his son go live his own life. And it's going to be one of the most, it's going to be the best and most intriguing heel turn since Hogan joined the goddamn NWO. And somebody came in and said, we can't do it. Grogo's got to stay a good guy. There is no way they were ever going to do that. I will predict that someone will hear this on Blank Check and it will eventually come out that there was talk of killing Mando and turning Grogu bad.

32:57I would bet money on it. I agree with you on two out of three things.

33:02David Sims:I agree. David, let's finish before you make sticky poo-poo face. Don't make sticky poo-poo face.

33:10Griffin Newman:I'm making the face.

33:12David Sims:I'm making the face. I thought there was no universe in which Grogu ever turned bad. No. I did think for a second, this feels like at some point someone pitched, can Mando die? It got shut down almost immediately and they were like, what if he's out of commission for 30 minutes? It's a great, it's not great. It's a far more intriguing movie if Mando fucking dies. I agree with you. It felt like that was killed immediately. You guys are crazy. David Sims, you're letting me down right now. No, you guys are crazy. You're letting me down right now. You're calling me crazy. I'm just getting yelled at.

33:46So I will actually shut up.

33:47Griffin Newman:You're literally calling us crazy. You guys have ranted for five minutes about how you think they wanted to kill the Mandalorian in the first Mandalorian. That is fucking nonsense Let David have the floor Sorry That got weirdly heated You guys were yelling at me You started telling a notoriously Mentally ill friend of yours That he was crazy Career suicide 2017 Highly rated on Rotten Tomatoes Thank you so much But it's an insecurity of mine to be called crazy Sorry You're crazy about this. No, it's just like, why the fuck would they kill? This is a dude bitch. To fucking grow and change and take a narrative chance and to meet the moment.

34:35We are not living in a time of happy fucking endings right now. I will say something different together.

34:39Griffin Newman:You guys are triggering me because I think the worst, worst, worst dramatic choice any franchise ever makes is that death is like a way of, you know, conveying storytelling, like maturity and shit like that. But you don't think in Star Wars, a father dying is not. It's been done a million times. Boring. It's so boring.

34:57David Sims:Make my case. Sure. Go ahead. I agree with you generally.

35:01Griffin Newman:Yeah.

35:02David Sims:Oh, he died. Great. Now it's important. I think it was a thing that probably in sitting down ideation, oh, we have a Mando movie on the schedule two years from now. We just threw out our season. What's the movie about? I bet you it was pitched at one point and he is just asleep for 30 minutes was the solve for that. The reason why I am inclined to feel like Gethard, that there were seeds of intention somewhere, even if they were nipped out immediately, is that the movie is all trying to be about what happens to Grogu when the Mandalorian's gone. How is he going to be on his own? And the only good section of the movie, as we said, is him being on his own.

35:43David Sims:It is different than just killing a character for emotional weight or growth because the whole notion of the movie is, can this thing survive on its own? I also think the only section of this movie that had any narrative tension in me was, oh, I'm a little bit worried about Grogu now. He doesn't have someone protecting him.

36:01Griffin Newman:You're Occam's razoring yourself. It's not that they were like, should we kill the Mandalorian? They were like, we need a Grogu section. I really think they just fundamentally were like, of course they did. This movie has the mandate of not doing anything. But they couldn't even say, give him a little fucking lightning bolt. Chris, this movie has a card. Let him go crazy because his dad's mom was dying. A literal card with a blank head and a question mark on it of like, this is the real bad guy. And you're like, oh, okay. I turn to David, I go, it's Sigourney, right? They don't hire Sigourney.

36:32Griffin Newman:Because she's the only famous person they got. We're looking at the opening credits. Double cross.

36:35David Sims:There's no surprise cast members.

36:36Griffin Newman:Or there's some secret, you know, reveal they're going to do of either a new celeb. Dukus back. Dukus back. Or fucking, you know, Filoni will start Or Dark Shagun. Shagun and it's like Thrawn or whatever, right? Instead, they're just like, oh, that was just the bald guy you saw right at the start. That was just him. And that's that. And that's done. This movie absolutely is just kind of like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. Don't worry. Nothing happens. I also, it's like close circle, guys. Outside of us getting heated, which I do apologize for, David, how much do you think that was from the start?

37:15How much do you think that was corporate interference? because I think Griffin and I are both on the side of this thing tanks to death.

37:21Griffin Newman:Filoni wanted to do a Mandalorian Ahsoka crossover series. Can I set up, can I introduce

37:29David Sims:the podcast and then I feel like we can do all of this? We haven't introduced the podcast.

37:32Griffin Newman:This is why I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help you. Well, sometimes you're trying to help me but I am in the middle of saying something. And you say, can I do something while I'm in the middle of saying it. It's a massive conversation we're about to tip off. It's a massive conversation.

37:45David Sims:Is this all still the intro? This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmography. And I'm Chris Gethard, motherfuckers. Directors who had massive success early in their careers giving a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby. This started out as a Star Wars podcast. And then for the first five years, even when we moved on from Star Wars, new Star Wars movies were coming out and we kept talking about Star Wars. And Gethard would come on to talk about other movies and we'd still talk about Star Wars.

38:15David Sims:and people loved it until they hated it. Some were calling a dark Grogu turn. And it has now been seven years since the last Star Wars movie. Now, to set up your point, in that time, here are films that have been announced and then canceled. Yeah. Patty Jenkins, Rogue Squadron, Rogue Squadron, announced at Disney Investor Day livestream in 2021. She was in a video

38:40Griffin Newman:with like an Air Force guy or whatever. Right. Rogue Squadron movie. Might have been cool. Who knows? Like, who can say?

38:56David Sims:David. What's the matter? I'm going to share for you a horrifying tale. A tale of woe and suffering. Whoa, this is scary. It's a tale of human error. Of failing on my part. Tell me. We went to the Wisconsin Film Festival. Sure. Visited our dear researcher, J.J. Burge. I'm scared already. Participated in a screening. We dined out. We had fried cheese curds. We drank Wisconsin beer. What was the mistake? Tell me. I forgot to pack my... Oh, Jesus. AG1. You didn't bring your AG1 to Wisconsin? This is a fuck. This is an ad read. This is a personal endorsement from experience. They got the travel packs because the thing I love about AG1, they give you different form factors.

39:36David Sims:They give you different ways to handle it. I forgot to pack an AG1. I was there for 72 hours. It took a week to undo. A week to undo. I'm not going to get graphic about this. But it just goes to show, as I always say in these ad reads, AG1 has really become load-bearing within my life. Yes.

39:56Griffin Newman:AG1, of course, it's a daily health drink. It's clinically shown to support your gut health. Fill in some nutrient gaps. It's got 75 ingredients, including five clinically studied probiotic strains. Yes. So it's replacing a need for like a multivitamin probiotics and more. For you, it is a pillar of existence.

40:14David Sims:Anytime I get thrown off of the routine, I am reminded just how helpful it is to me getting through any day. Yes.

40:23Griffin Newman:Spring brings daylight savings, packed calendars, and changing routines. One scoop, 20 seconds. That's all it takes to keep your gut routine steady so you can reset, recharge, and embrace the season without missing a beat.

40:35David Sims:You get the starter kit. They give you like a tin tub. They give you a scooper. They give you a shaker bottle, right? You get the monthly or whatever cadence, subscription cadence you want to set, but you get the delivery of the bags of powder. And it's just like, I pour that into the tub every morning. Just one scoop, eight ounces of water into the shaker. Shake it up, drink it. A world of difference. And summer's drawing near. People are going to be going on vacations. Sure. They're going to be traveling. Those travel packs really make a difference.

41:06Griffin Newman:Look, the benefits of AG1. Energy, the superfoods and B vitamins in AG1 provide nutritional support to help you stay steady and consistent. Big time. Daily energy support to keep you moving through the spring. Immune health, daily immune support that helps you stay your best. Power banks, antioxidants, probiotics, and functional mushrooms. Yeah. Whoa. Those mushrooms are functioning. Trust me. AG1 Next Gen delivers five strains of clinically studied probiotics that have been shown to support digestion, immune function, and alleviate occasional bloating. Go to drinkag1.com slash check to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 for your free AG1 welcome kit.

41:47Griffin Newman:I love to drop in that K2. With your first AG1 subscription order, that's a$72 value. Yours free. Only what supplies last. Go to drinkag1.com slash check.

42:05David Sims:Also canceled or announced and never realized Untitled Taika Waititi movie. Yeah. Rian Johnson trilogy. Sure. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss trilogy. That was movies, right? Trilogy. These things are all canonically dead. Correct.

42:21Griffin Newman:Yes.

42:22David Sims:And then at the Star Wars celebration three years ago, they came out and said, we're finally ready to announce the next one. couple movies. Yeah. Here are the three. James Mangold is going to make a movie that's the earliest thing we've ever done on the Star Wars timeline. Right. It'll be said thousands of years ago. The cursed Jedi. Sounds so cool. Sounds like the old Dark Horse comics. It's like these things where they bring a guy out and they're like, he's got an idea. And he just signed the contract a minute ago. Right. And gave us one sentence.

42:48Griffin Newman:And everyone's like, what's it called? When's it coming out? And they're like, see you later.

42:52David Sims:But yes, that is a thing. The second thing they announced was episode 10. Or something like it. They said it was episode 10. Did they actually say it? Daisy Ridley is back. Yes, that... This is episode 10. They had just fired... What's his name? Lindelof. Damon Lindelof. Or he'd walked away. Damon Lindelof had been on a secret movie that was then retroactively revealed to have been episode 10, which was announced with Daisy Ridley's coming back. That movie was originally going to take a different direction. Now they were like, it's the continuing adventures of Rey. That movie has had seemingly no public progress.

43:27David Sims:Although it doesn't seem entirely dead. They keep trying to figure out what that is. The third movie that was announced is Dave Filoni has this master plan Feige style of all these series. They're building up to Thrawn as the Thanos. Right. And he is going to make a movie that counts as basically the phase one finale of the entire Disney Plus project. It's going to be Ahsoka and Mandalorian and Boba Fett and fucking everybody. Who the fuck is Thrawn?

43:53Griffin Newman:You know what, Ben? Thrawn is awesome. It's just a great question. Thrawn's from the Timothys on novels. He's one of the only people from the extended universe they've brought into canon. Get the Tannoy. He's the blue guy. He's great. Okay. Those old Timothys on novels are fucking great. You know, people love those. I remember them being great. I read them, to be fair, when I was 12 years old. I also read them as a child. I don't really remember them. I remember Thrawn being cool, but right, they brought him into the show. That weird alien race. What was that species? Those like assassins that were under his thumb.

44:23I wish I could tell you.

44:24Griffin Newman:and I'll Google it. They brought him in. He's played by, what, a third Mickelson or whatever. Which Mickelson is it? Sir, we've located a third Mickelson. It's something Mickelson. Mickey Mickelson. And I think I already said this on an episode. I can't remember where. Lars Mickelson. There we go. He fucking has like Joe Biden energy where they're like meet Thrawn, like the scariest and he's just like, hello, you should get Ahsoka. I'll see you later. Like he doesn't do anything. Well, this is the Filoni thing, right? There's no energy. Like, bring a character from an obscure cartoon that he also is behind and it's just okay, it's also here.

45:00There's a thing that's here.

45:01Griffin Newman:Look at him pointing. Just the way the Filoni shows brought back Hayden Christensen to play Anakin.

45:08David Sims:And he's like, here I am. Well, the major project of the Filoni shows, of course, is that when Disney buys Lucasfilm, they go, here's the canon of Star Wars. The canon of Star Wars is the six movies that have been theatrically released. and the Clone Wars cartoon show. Yes. End of story. And I think, was Rebels in the works? Rebels was the first thing started by them. And a bunch of comic books. Well, once those started. They basically said, all previous comics, prior comics and books are now. The Marvel relaunched comics.

45:41Griffin Newman:But the prior stuff is now consigned to what they call Legends.

45:44David Sims:Exactly. And is not canon. Marvel is now going to start a new comic series. This is the start of the new canon. We're going to do new cartoon shows. that is expanding that canvas. I will just say the Lando series. Yep. Very good and gives you a lot of background. Is that a comic book? It is a comic book that does a pretty good job of explaining everything you've ever wanted to know about Lobot.

46:05Griffin Newman:I would say, well, I do have a few questions. I will say,

46:08David Sims:I think the first two years of the Marvel comics were really excellent and I was reading all of them and then like everything else, it got overwhelming. There was too much. I lost track. It's the exact same thing that happened with the TV.

46:18Griffin Newman:Yep. We all, the first season of The Mandalorian rocks. It's a triumph. And like, you know, I feel like even those early novels, like the new official novels that were being written in the wider people were like dialed in. The first High Republic novel people were all about. The reason is because they were really making an effort like to, you know, they were picking talented people and they were right. They were like, yeah, we have to make. And then as you say, they, you know, start to lose the thread a little bit.

46:45David Sims:There's too much style. I also think Filoni's. They get too many wheels spinning. I think Filoni's major project from the outside has seemed to be, I want to salvage things and bring them back into the canon. It has felt like that is his priority on the work he does. He's a bit of a keeper of the flame. What is the world building? What is the extended universe stuff that has now been knocked out of canon into Legends that I want to reintroduce? So like Thrawn was not on the Clone Wars. They reintroduced Thrawn on Rebels. It was a big deal. Holy shit, Thrawn counts again. and then live action Thrawn in Ahsoka.

47:20David Sims:This feels like the pipeline of what he's been doing for the last 10 years is just, let me pick my people. Let me put them in a cartoon. Let me make them live action. They count again. Next, repeat, repeat, repeat. That movie is supposed to be the payoff of all this shit. And then as you are setting up here, the movie mysteriously kind of disappears, doesn't really get talked about again. And there's a sudden surprise announcement. Mandalorian and Grogu movie coming 2026. standalone adventure. Does this negate or replace season four? There's a whole other aspect. And they were like, I don't know, maybe we do another season after this or maybe it would just be other movies.

47:56And then we also have to point out, which I think everybody knows, Andor, which hits and is truly special. It's a miracle. And we will talk about it. Of course. But just to also say, just to only tie it into what we're saying here, that with this thing that's regarded as phenomenal, that's getting credit with something that I bet drives them nuts, even if this wasn't Star Wars. How does this even come out of the Star Wars system?

48:18David Sims:Like a lot of the praise is backhanded. And then you start to also hear that there's bitterness about this and who knows how true it is, but the internet rumblings are that there's like a Filoni bitterness about the Gilroy of it all.

48:32Griffin Newman:And you hear these rumblings. Filoni has his garden, the Ahsoka rebels. He regards it as his. And is kind of left to it. And has apparently indicated that he's not a huge fan of Andor, which is only the more frustrating for all of us hardcore fans who feel like Andor is the thing that nailed it.

48:50David Sims:And it's also just the thing that felt different. It's also, it's good. Entirely different philosophical approaches. Do you want to make things that are exploring the ideas already within Star Wars in new ways? Or do you want to just kind of circle back to what Star Wars has been? You know? And it's a lot of like, you know, can I make movies that feel like the old movies? And Filoni, it's like, can I reintroduce my friends?

49:15Griffin Newman:And Filoni, we should acknowledge, is George Lucas' apprentice. Yes. His Padawan learner of sorts. He was the guy that Lucas entrusted with Clone Wars. He's the Roy Thomas to his Stanley. Right. He brings him over from Avatar The Last Airbender. Which we have to talk about. I think it has major implications. Very briefly talk about it. You brought it up. I was trying to be true. You brought it up. He has dropped his pen.

49:39David Sims:And like Gorman, his hands on the table. I don't know much about Filoni,

49:43Griffin Newman:who I've always heard is like a lovely guy. You know, everyone's always like, he's a sweetie pie. But like, I do feel like he's the last like keeper of the flame of like the Lucas 2000s era of Star Wars a little bit.

49:54David Sims:There is a feeling of, even though George Lucas is still alive, I'd say it's a little bit like Steve Whitmire with the Muppets, where, you know, he was eventually pushed out of playing Kermit. But there was this feeling of, Jim chose him. And now Jim's gone. we have to all kind of follow what Steve says is right. Right, because it's like he's still invested with Jim's energy and we don't want to like, yeah. And it's odd when George is still alive, but there is this feeling of like, I don't know, George picked Dave. Ralph is the most overrated.

50:26Griffin Newman:His name's Rolf.

50:28David Sims:I feel like you've said that before. You like to bust that. Joe Boyce has been doing a Muppets Month and Weiger loves Rolf, but hates all of the electric mayhem. He has the exact opposite take, which is... David, do you hate when I'm on this show? Not at all. Because the internet always says you do. And today's the first day where I really feel like it might be true.

50:46Griffin Newman:I do not. I do. No. We're having a great time. I low-key, again, will just stress to you, Tuesday was very traumatizing for me. And I'm feeling a little anxious about the amount of branching things going on. But no, I love having you on the show. I know I've been... To be fair, I won't do it. I have been threatening to the boys to make this entire episode about Avatar The Last Airbender. I don't think you've even seen it. Have you never seen it? I've only seen the first three episodes

51:11David Sims:for when I auditioned for the Shyamalan movie. I got to say one thing about it. It's lore we said back in the back. You watched it recently. My son found it. My wife and I both realized separately that we would go in to tell him it was time to turn off the TV and would sit and watch full episodes with him and then asked him at the age of then six, hey, can we, once he finished it, can we go back to the beginning and watch it together again as a family?

51:34Griffin Newman:Right, like can we actually, it's the best. I will say it is, it's a 2005 Nickelodeon cartoon. I think people know what it is. Incredible. But Griffin doesn't. No, I know what it is. I just haven't watched it. But when you watch it, I kind of always lumped it in. There was a phase there where Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, these things that either were from Japan or inspired by Japanese animation. Right. When it was on, I was in college and I was a little bit like, yeah. I was 25 years old when it came out.

51:58David Sims:My sister was the exact right age. She was weirdly into it because it's not her kind of thing. It's not weird. She tried to get me into it, and then I got an audition for what was supposed to be Shyamalan's trilogy to play Sokka. You were going to play fucking Sokka? Well, I didn't get the fucking part. You almost played Sokka. I did not get anywhere close. Well, if you're going to cast Griffin as one of the leads of Avatar, he can only be Sokka. I remind you, they made Sokka like a fucking hunk on the movie, and he's not funny. He's kind of a crybaby on the show in a hilarious way. But I've only ever seen the first three episodes.

52:33I've watched Avatar about, I would say six months ago. Okay, sure. I instantly really, really fell in love with it. You've been texting me about it a lot. And I've been talking a lot about it with people, but - You have the steals. I had - And the steals of Korra. Wow. You're the one who told me Korra's underrated and it's worth the watch.

52:49Griffin Newman:I stick up for Korra. But David, I don't know if you had the same feeling. I remember watching it with my son. Yes. And the reason I want to tie it into today's conversation is that I had this feeling that was maybe slightly heartbreaking for me, but also made me really happy for him, which was, oh, everything I got out of Star Wars, he's getting out of the show. Oh, like that you're not able to have the Star Wars shared experience with him?

53:14David Sims:Or that Star Wars isn't meeting him where he lives today. Yeah, sure. Kids today can just go watch an adventure movie and be like, Star Wars, cool. Right. It's all of us who are old and who grew up with it, who feel like, why can't they fucking figure out the mortal tales again? but since 2005 I legitimately think you could put I'm not blowing smoke I don't know if you'd agree with this David but I'm like Star Wars Lord of the Rings and Avatar The Last Airbender are to me the three fantasy epics that teach kids morals right and wrong good and evil how to exist in a scary world Avatar's very layered so since 2005 sure kids don't need Star Wars to do that Avatar's been doing that for a few generations of kids now but isn't that

53:51Griffin Newman:fundamentally a good thing like it's like there's more options but I think it's part of why I think I think it's part of why I can go to Mandalorian and Grogu and not be angry. Why I can go. I don't think Griff and I were angry. We're just like, that was a bit of a nothing burger. Yeah, but we're really doing nothing here. Come on. Like, I felt exhausted by it. I just think that as an adult, when you watch Avatar, and I watched it with a kid, but I do think there's something to be said for like, okay, Star Wars. I'm sadly recognizing that Star Wars used to be something like for a lot of us. I think a lot of us grew up and if you weren't that religious Star Wars kind of gave you what religion gave you and we get mad that it's not that anymore but like maybe we can let that go it does need to change

54:35David Sims:we need to let things go as things go as Kylo Ren said yeah right let the past go like the first one came out the first one came out a year after the bicentennial and like predicted Reaganism and good versus evil and it was at the same time as the Ramones and this whole idea of like look backwards while also establishing in the future. You're not going to recreate that. No, well, no. We got to bring the Ramones back. New Ramones. You think about the cultural moment, like a New Hope metacultural moment that ties into looking back at the 50s and moving forward to the 80s. And Star Wars was part of that.

55:09And like the heroes we needed then were Luke Skywalker and Rocky, you know? Like it gave us these heroes that met the moment.

55:16Griffin Newman:I don't know if we want to bring back Johnny Ramone right now. I don't know what you think of our current president. He might be a little too into it. Good. The most important band of that era was also looking back while reestablishing an exciting future. And like, Star Wars refuses to fucking give that to us anymore. And then when they almost do with Andor, a bunch of people involved in Star Wars publicly at least they get mad about. I was gonna say. It's sad. It's sad, but we gotta start letting it go if we're ever gonna be able to enjoy these movies as anything except a toy factor.

55:44David Sims:Weirdly, I think, you know, differing opinions, but Last Jedi really, really tried to do that and instead it launched a culture war rather than becoming part of a conversation of what it was commenting on. No argument. Yep. End of my contributions to The Last Jedi. Great. And then, and then Andor, I agree with you, is sadly, because of how fucking cyclical humanity is, is really in conversation with what's going on in the world today. And inputs into the original trilogy in a way none of this other stuff does. But it is fascinating to me that now having finally watched it for the first time, it's the greatest fucking TV show.

56:18David Sims:It's unbelievable. It's an astonishing work. I have, I thought too, I think if you watched The two seasons of Andor, Rogue One, and the original trilogy, that's the perfect Star Wars experience. I finished Andor last night, so I have not done the Rogue One rewatch post-Andor. It's interesting post-Andor. I will let you know how that goes. I imagine. Because even like, certainly I care a lot more about, let's say, Cassian Andor?

56:43Griffin Newman:Yes.

56:43David Sims:But let's also say a little guy that I know you like, Chris Gethard. Who's this? Someone who you've said is maybe the new Kit Fisto of the Star Wars universe. If you want to get into a Fisto discussion, we're talking Saw Gerrera. I have a million things to say, but thank you for that. Saw Gerrera is the current Fisto of Star Wars. Kit Fisto is no longer the Fisto. Fisto is now the title.

57:01Griffin Newman:I'm down with that. I love Saw Gerrera. Saw Gerrera is an awesome character. Saw Gerrera is the most intriguing Fisto. I love Fisto. The most intriguing Fisto. I'm playing ref. Give him the floor, please. I really need to talk for a sec. Yes. Okay. David, go. On Avatar The Last Snarebender. Very good show. Wonderful. I think it's good. I can't wait to watch that with my kid. That'll be great. I also can't wait to watch Star Wars with my kid. I think there's room for all of this. My kid was unimpressed by Star Wars. Maybe you can ask.

57:28David Sims:Okay, so maybe this is part of your... Oh, but you didn't take him to the movie yesterday. No.

57:34Griffin Newman:But you're saying this is your emotional journey you're on. Right. You tried to get your kid into Star Wars. You showed it to him and he was kind of like, eh. Right. And with Avatar, I saw him getting everything Star Wars gave me when I was his age. Avatar's giving them now. This idea, we live in a layered world. People are put up on your friends. Okay, okay, okay. All right, all right, all right. Wait, wait, I still need to reply. Okay, so Avatar. I watched that in the pandemic. My wife had already watched it when it was on. So she knew it. And it was one of those pandemic things of like, we ought to watch something all the time, right?

58:06Griffin Newman:Like the TV's just got to be on because we're so bored. So I watched all of Avatar, all of Korra, like then. I remember I was watching election night 2020. Biden, Trump, when Trump tragically, I mean, he won. And we all know he won, obviously. Right, when he was lied to and the public was lied to. No, like I remember like we were really stressed out at election night. And like, I was like, I'm putting on Avatar. Like we were not going to know anything for a few hours anyway. And we remember us watching. It's sort of a cherish. Love Avatar. Got the steals. Griff. Love that. Love that. Haven't recracked that, but I have been kind of like, yeah, that'll be perfect for my daughter in like a year or two.

58:41Griffin Newman:Like pretty soon. And you haven't done

58:43David Sims:Star Wars with your daughter yet, but we have several friends, mutual friends of ours who have kids around your daughter's age and you're too older. We have like a bunch of friends who have all in the run up to Mandalorian been like, is it time to show my kids Star Wars? We've gone through them and have Star Wars obsessed kids now. I would say... So it's not a thing that's completely bouncing off the entire generation.

59:01Griffin Newman:And my daughter's pretty interested in Star Wars because the toys are around. My daughter likes what she's seeing. He likes the toys. He likes the characters. Kit Fisto gave him some Kit Fisto toys. You did. You gave him a Kit Fisto onesie when he was born. Thank you for that.

59:14David Sims:And it was also a Coca-Cola onesie. It was soda and Kit Fisto. Gethard's two favorite things. That is true. He likes Boba Fett. Sure. And the sense I get from the kids his age is like, I can look back and I didn't know this as a kid, but I'm like, oh, right. I'm going to wind up not being a practicing Catholic and Star Wars is a little bit more of my moral and ethical.

59:40Griffin Newman:Which is great. They're not getting that out of it. Yeah. It's a big ask. It's a big ask where you're like, I need my kid to essentially religiously connect. Avatar's a little bit closer. But that's fine. That's a good, at least that's good. It's great. He's not like, I love... I mean, I don't know what the bad version of this is. Yeah, he's not out here like watching looks maxing videos. He's not getting in on that shit. He's not like, dad, can I eat elk meat and get a jaw reconstruction surgery?

1:00:06David Sims:Where do you introduce a kid to clavicular? I don't know, 12, 13.

1:00:10Griffin Newman:Just the second they sort of start asking questions about their body, you're like, oh, these questions can all be answered

1:00:15David Sims:by Mr. Clavicular. Someone who has it figured out. Height lying. Re-saw-Guerrera-kit-fisto. or Limex.

1:00:21Griffin Newman:It would be awesome if there was a scene in any of the Star Wars movies where someone said to Kit Fisto, like, you come on pretty strong. You know what I mean? Because what I love about Saw Gerrera is that even fucking Stellan Skarsgård, even he's like, he's a lot. It's beautiful. We need every weapon in our toolbox over here, but my God, is that man tough to deal with? I fucking love it because it takes Star Wars from rebellions are built on hope and goes, no, they're sold on hope. Yes. They're built on fucking lunatics like Stellan Skarsgård and Saugerrand. What's that?

1:00:58David Sims:Skarsgård's name is Lutheran Rael. Lutheran Rael. It's Lutheran and... That's who... They're built on fucking extremist maniacs. And when you watch Rogue One... They're sold by Luke Skywalker and the branding around Luke Skywalker.

1:01:10Griffin Newman:I was going to say. When Andor Season 2 ended and I was like, I gotta watch Rogue One right away. You put it on. You're dialed into Cassian. And then there is Jyn Erso. Right. And you are, after watching Andor, kind of like, I don't care about you or your dad's stuff. This is my exact concern. Now, the movie is really rocked. Yeah. I like that, and maybe I'm giving them too much credit because I love so much. And Cassian's like flirting with her, and you're like, you have a baby! But I do like the idea that all these characters were operating in their own little vacuums to foment this fucking thing, and they barely know each other, and putting their lives on the line, and there's this implicit non-trust.

1:01:48That's the best stuff in that movie. In a better world, too. Andor and Rogue One retroactively make one of Luke Skywalker's lines in A New Hope so sad. Which one? I used to bullseye. Have we talked about this before? I'm not sure. That's the line. That line becomes so tragically fucking naive. And you realize everyone else in that room must hear that kid say that and go, I hope he's not in my squadron because not only is he dead, he's going to get us fucking killed. Sure, sure, sure. Then the contextualizing of that, that Luke is legit on New Hope.

1:02:21David Sims:Like, optimism was dead. The thing that's crazy about Andor is that, like, right, it feels like... We got to see what the Empire did. It makes original Star Wars even richer because it is not diminishing it by being like, well, that's like silly, frothy, surface-level kid shit. It's being like, no, this is like religious myth. These are the sort of like figures that we can prop up as miracles that help sell a belief system and literally... And allow society to move on from trauma. A new hope. Right. And it's like, here's actually the historical account. Here's what was happening. Whereas the Book of Boba Fett says, what if this character you've always wanted to see kick ass becomes a low-level, county-level bureaucrat?

1:03:03So weird. He effectively becomes a county's sheriff.

1:03:06David Sims:Right. We should also mention, I think everyone knows this, but Dave Filoni is now in charge of Star Wars. He is now the creative head at this moment. And I like a lot of what he's done. Kathleen Kennedy's stepping down. Yes. I like some of what he's done. Have you watched all of Clone Wars? No, right? I've watched a lot of it. Okay.

1:03:23Griffin Newman:He was announced as president of Lucasfilm in January, 2026. However, Lin-Win Brennan, who's a longtime ILM person, was announced as co-president. It's similar to the James Gunn situation

1:03:37David Sims:where she is sort of the business person and he is the creative person. Because there is only one Feige who is seemingly good at doing both of those things. And anytime they've tried to make someone do both, it's been a calamity. And I think part of the worry, if people trying to do an autopsy on the Kathleen Kennedy era, their takeaway was, this is kind of one of the greatest producers in Hollywood history. Not kind of, inarguably, one of the greatest producers in Hollywood history. But she worked with incredible creative minds and storytellers. She was never someone generating stories or even developing material as much.

1:04:11David Sims:and do you need a balance between someone who understands the logistics of production and management and someone who can have the big overarching story view and in theory, Filoni is now placed to... Well, he's not because it's over. At this moment, at the moment we're recording, that is his position. Right.

1:04:29Griffin Newman:But like Kathleen Kennedy's obvious eye was for, you know, talent. Yes. She had a great eye for talent. Correct. And it paid off for her pretty well with Star Wars. Until I would argue she started getting the yips. I think, well, from what I'm aware, and I guess I have enough goss. Mostly from the audience. Last Jedi freaked out Disney, not Kennedy. Correct. Kennedy loved it, Iger, etc. She has always stood by it. The fans are yelling too much, so no more of that, whatever that was.

1:04:59David Sims:Not only that, that it was like, that was the best production they had. That was the only Star Wars movie that wasn't riddled with reshoots and panic, and she was unbelievably happy with the final result. Right. And people like to erase from history. It made so much fucking money. Because it was divisive, people like to be like, and that one disappointed. It did not. In the year 2017, three of the 10 highest grossing films in history were Kathleen Kennedy's Star Wars movies. Right. Force Awakens was number one of all time. It still is domestically. Rogue One was in the top 10. Last Jedi was in the top 10.

1:05:33Griffin Newman:So it was working. Yes. I mean, one would argue, oh, but then the movies after Last Jedi didn't do as well. It's like, well, yeah, because they were solo. Immediate problem. Which was a shambles. Yes. And episode nine, which people are sort of like, you know, oh, that's J.J. Abrams' fault. It's like, fundamentally, what happened with episode nine was Carrie Fisher died. Yes. And they had to completely dynamite what they were doing. They also had a director that they were losing confidence in. They fire a director. Yeah. They bring in Abrams two months before production starts or whatever, like so late.

1:06:04Griffin Newman:They push it back four months when they needed to push it back two years. And Abrams is like, I don't know, I guess Palpatine returns.

1:06:11David Sims:Yeah. I mean, he's just... Which, you know, many people think, and I don't think this is a baseless conspiracy theory. There's actually a lot of evidence that points towards this, that Palpatine was entirely a reshoot thing. I mean, it seems impossible. I have no idea. Yeah. It's so crazy. I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole, but there's stuff that makes it seem somewhat valid. But yes, it does feel like they started to freak out. we should mention also that the first season of the Mandalorian TV show a show we all love or that first season we all love

1:06:41Griffin Newman:two months before production by the way

1:06:42David Sims:two months after it doesn't matter whatever one month before Rise of Skywalker comes out Disney Plus launches and the big launch title is first episode of the Mandalorian it was before episode 9 is when Mando started by a month and in unison the world says they put a little baby Yoda in a Pokemon I mean truly They love this. They stuck a little Yoda in a Pokemon. We couldn't love this more.

1:07:07Griffin Newman:I remember episode one, which ends with the reveal of him. Yeah. I was like, a baby Yoda. I don't know. And by episode like three, you're like, baby Yoda's one of my family members. I love baby Yoda. A conversation I remember was -

1:07:19David Sims:Everyone agrees. They were so mysterious about that show. Can you believe? It's weird. Jon Favreau, the Iron Man guy, he's making a TV show for Disney Plus, but they're saying it's not going to be cheap. It's going to be really expensive. It's going to look like a movie, right? They got fucking Greg Frieser to shoot the first season.

1:07:34Griffin Newman:Right, sure. It looks incredible, right? But they're also like, it's called The Mandalorian. And I remember at the time being like, that's nerd shit. That's nerd shit. Like, this is supposed to be like, you know, for the masses. That feels like deep lore shit.

1:07:47David Sims:And the other part of it was, they kept saying, there's a twist in the first episode. That's why they're being so secretive. I remember you and I saying, I'm going to be so annoyed if he's Boba Fett. Right. And instead, the twist is, we've cracked the code. We've created, we found fire. This is Grogu. This is like a new element on this earth that is infinitely powerful. And we all were like, fuck, that puppet's pretty good. What is this show? And then the show reveals... Bernard Herzog's in it. It feels fucking weirdly cool because of that. It's got cool, weird energy. The show reveals itself to be like a Western, a standalone, he's a bounty hunter, he goes out on a mission, you meet new characters every time.

1:08:24David Sims:Which is all we've ever wanted. And it's like, here's the cleanest new entry point to Star Wars in forever. Anyone can watch this. actually, it is free of kind of lore shit.

1:08:33Griffin Newman:Yes. The only lore is like, it's after Return of the Jedi. Yeah. The Republic kind of exists. The Empire's still kind of, you know, hanging around. You don't even really need to know that. You don't really need to worry about it. Yeah.

1:08:44David Sims:And I just loved, I was like, this is TV. This is not a 13-hour movie. This is, every episode is 30 minutes of an adventure in a different style.

1:08:54Griffin Newman:Because I'm just remembering. That's what I loved. But, you know, when they start being like, let's learn more about the Creed. Season two. Let's meet cartoon characters. Let's hear about the Dark Saber. And that's Filoni being too protective of his own comedy.

1:09:08David Sims:Yup. And the stuff he loves. It's both. It's like, what's the lore that I grew up on? And what's the lore that I made in homage to the lore that I grew up on? Basically. I will say in general, I think the Disney Plus stuff gets a real bad rap. And I understand all the disappointment and sharing it. I generally think there is something redeeming about most of the shows. I like Obi-Wan and Asuka better than average. I disagree on those two shows.

1:09:34Griffin Newman:Those two, I can't really go there with you. I watched them. I can say with Obi-Wan, hugely disappointing to once again waste the potential of Ewan McGregor. It's just...

1:09:45David Sims:Yeah, that's the only good thing. It is just baffling. Him and Moses Ingram both give good performances and everything else in the show is bad. I do think for the first time since his introduction, we get to see why the galaxy was truly scared of Darth Vader. And like, I'm not going to be mad at that.

1:10:02Griffin Newman:Yeah. No, it just was sort of like, what was he was like fighting with Inquisitors or whatever? Three of the shows. He's going to small towns showing up as this cloaked fucking figure in black and people are fucking dying and getting their fucking shit torn up. Like that's, I've wanted to see that my whole life.

1:10:19David Sims:arguably all become the exact same thing. This was my big takeaway from grinding tape and watching a lot of these very close together, right? Because I got really turned off by Mando season two where I was like, guys, you're doing the exact thing I was praising you for not doing in the first season. Why is every episode reintroducing a character from lore and being like, look, it's Bo-Katan. Here's Bo-Katan's deal. It's Ahsoka. Here's Ahsoka's deal. And then it ends with the deep fate Luke. and I was like, I'm fucking out on this. The deepfake Luke is indefensible. You think so? I hate it. I hate it.

1:10:54I hate it. I mean, the deepfake, anything. They can't give a good performance. But the idea of Grogu traveling to go train with Luke Skywalker. You can't do it. Do something else.

1:11:02David Sims:You can't. That's how I feel. It looks like this. That's what they need to be smart enough to realize. It looks like this. And it's literally like a robot voice. And that's where it becomes, let's fucking. Deepfake Luke. That becomes like, let's just show our dick in public. You know what I mean? This is like take our dick out of our pants, basically, is kind of the effect. You can't actually follow through on this. Do you know that they created a Mark Hamill soundboard? It's not even him giving a voice performance because the other thing that happens, and the Mando movie has a lot of this, is they become so obsessed with the tech of we're pushing virtual production and the pipeline and the volume and all this sort of stuff.

1:11:40David Sims:We have our own proprietary deep fake thing. that rather than just bringing Mark Hamilton, incredible voice actor, into a booth, having him give dramatic line readings and then putting a digital effect on it to try to make him sound younger, they like study every second of line delivery he's ever given as Luke and put it into a computer and then basically just do like text to speech. So every line reading fucking Luke gives is flat because it's like, Brogu, I will train you now. That bums me out. But more than that, watching all these shows close together, I defend Skeleton Crew and The Acolyte.

1:12:19David Sims:I think the cardinal sin of both of those shows. Skeleton Crew got good reviews in general. Skeleton Crew is good. Skeleton Crew was like, let's do a Spielberg. Let's do a Spielberg - It's for kids. Mecca style thing in the world of Star Wars. I think it came so late that people had kind of tapped out and were tired on the whole thing. But I do think the people who - There's an upswing. I think it was under-watched. I agree. But I think the people who watched it appreciate it. No one was really against it.

1:12:39Griffin Newman:I just think people kind of shrugged it off. They shrugged it off because it's also Skelton Crew, sort of like this movie, is kind of like, we're just kind of doing our own thing over here. We're not really trying to mess with larger Star Wars. With Skelton Crew, I genuinely appreciate that it's doing that.

1:12:53David Sims:I think both Skelton Crew and Acolyte have the exact same core problem, which is they should have been movies. They both have like peak TV issues for me where I'm like, this is a two-hour story that's now stretched to five or six hours. Acolyte, I genuinely like. I like a tremendous amount. Really? I do think it would have been better as a movie. I haven't even watched it. You should watch it. Acolyte is one of the...

1:13:12Griffin Newman:I watched the first episode.

1:13:14David Sims:This probably won't sell you on it. I heard such bad things that I was like, I guess I won't have the rest of the time. I think you would find it interesting.

1:13:19Griffin Newman:It is one of the only things in Star Wars since, you know, the Disney takeover that one engages with the prequels, which I think is like vital unless, you know, we're not about to junk them.

1:13:30David Sims:It's the primary mission is to engage with the weird stuff happening between the margins and the prequels textually, not in a lore sense. Engages with like Jedi rot.

1:13:39Griffin Newman:The ideas. You know, the idea of like, what happened that like Yoda's like, I'm not seeing this coming. And then episode three. How did the Jedi become this bloated bureaucracy? It's got witches. It's got witches.

1:13:52David Sims:It does have witches.

1:13:53Griffin Newman:And it's got all this like interesting ideas about how witches are related to the force. But demonized. But like they stand kind of in between the dark side. Or like there's only one way to use the force. It's interesting.

1:14:05David Sims:It's about the birth of the Sith. And it's also about how fucked up it is that Qui-Gon Jinn just abducts a kid. Like that's the starting point for the show. Clearly as you watch it and just be like, it's weird. Is this a thing they do all the time?

1:14:19Griffin Newman:So fundamentally it's a do this day. The Qui-Gon's like, I won you in the bet. So I get to take you. And he's like, can my mom come? And he's like, I didn't include your mom in the bet. And I don't want to hear about it again. Get on the spaceship, eight-year-old.

1:14:31David Sims:The accolary schmee. In a way, I think people get pissed off by it.

1:14:34Griffin Newman:She's like, I can't go with you. I'm like, why? You are a fucking Jedi. Just take her. What's going to happen? What, Watto needs a 50-year-old woman? Like that badly?

1:14:44David Sims:No, he sells her off immediately.

1:14:46Griffin Newman:Once he's gone, Anakin's gone.

1:14:49David Sims:No, why?

1:14:50Griffin Newman:She wasn't in the bet I made with a bug Jew.

1:14:54David Sims:Mom, spaceship's a little heavy. We already have 80 astrometroids. I'm Jewish, I can say that.

1:14:59Griffin Newman:It's just, when you're a kid, you're just kind of like, of course. because when you're a kid, every story is about a kid being orphaned or separated from... But then when you're an adult, you're just like, my God, just take her.

1:15:11David Sims:That is what Acolyte's about. Acolyte is digging so deep into the text of what has been made and stuff that George did and being like, what does that actually say? What is that reflective of, right? And if these movies, the prequels are about how the Jedi were taken down by their own arrogance, then where does that start? and what was going on big picture. I think it's a really good show. I think it would have been better as a movie. I think the exact same thing with Skeleton Crew. And Obi-Wan was supposed to be... Skeleton Crew really should have been a movie. Really should have been a movie.

1:15:41David Sims:Obi-Wan should have been a movie. Obi-Wan was supposed to be a movie. Right. Obi-Wan, they had hired Stephen Daldry and they had started building the sets and it was going to be the next standalone after Solo. And when Solo underperformed, they were like, let's slow our roll and redevelop this for TV. And you can tell. You can tell. It feels so fucking padded. And Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, and what Mandalorian becomes are all... And Boba Fett. And Boba Fett. None of them are great, but I... Don't forget the book. But I was saying, those three in particular, what kind of blew my mind is that they're all the same fucking show, which is like a stoic character has a younger ward that they're trying to protect while they're looking for one thing and one mysterious person is chasing them.

1:16:27David Sims:It's all lone wolfing up. All that? Yes. And just the slider is slightly different. We've talked about this.

1:16:34Griffin Newman:I've never read the manga. I've seen a couple of the movies. They are a delight. I believe it. I mean,

1:16:39David Sims:Wolf and Cub is so fun to read.

1:16:42Griffin Newman:Animated. Maul Shadow Lord is animated.

1:16:44David Sims:It's Clone Wars continuation.

1:16:45Griffin Newman:I was just following along as we were talking through all of the, like, releases in order. Maul Shadow Lord? I've never even heard of them. They make Clone Wars sequel shows

1:16:55David Sims:that are also animated. I haven't caught up with this. match. Right. Right. Right. And this is a mini series that's following up on mall. David, sorry, you were about to say, I just had to answer Ben's mall perplexion. And I forgot about mall.

1:17:08Griffin Newman:I feel like they just got into this sort of the Disney, whoever Lucasfilm got into this kind of endless trick on themselves of like, well, it can't be a movie. And it's like, well, why can't it be a movie? And the answer could be like, well, because that's too similar, you know, like Obi-Wan, like whatever. We've done something like that already, or we don't want to do a prequel again. Why can't Skeleton Crew be a movie? Oh, it just doesn't feel big enough. Like that's, that's more of a kid thing. So we can't, why can't like, uh, Acolyte be a movie? It's too complicated. It's too dark. You know, like tone and bump you too weird.

1:17:47Griffin Newman:I almost feel like it can be a movie. And they're like, I don't know. You know, right. I almost feel like that's giving them too much credit. I feel like they go, why should this be a show instead of a movie? And the sad answer to me is because a movie they'll give us$20 once and a show they'll give us$10 12 times for the year. There's a little of that, but if you have a hit movie, you're making ungodly money. One would think, but they had a streaming service to launch. They did. But they started to move off of that.

1:18:18David Sims:They're trying to unwind this now. And you're seeing all the tendrils of Disney where they had been like, please make more stuff for Disney Plus because all the money is going here. And now they're like, how do we train people off of thinking these things are unspecial and making them think once again that it's worth paying to go out on a Friday night? Like, you know,

1:18:38Griffin Newman:I think they just got in their head of like, well, the next movie's got to be something big, right? It's got to be something, you know, we've had a couple of flops. Like, we kind of need something that's going to set the new tone. Longer the gap goes on,

1:18:51David Sims:the more they feel the pressure of, well, now it's got to be even bigger to justify the return of Star Wars movies.

1:18:56Griffin Newman:And so they've sort of compromised with like, well, if we have a movie with Ryan Gosling as a star fighter, well, you know, that'll be good enough. And that's the next movie that's coming out next year, right? You're aware of this. I'll buy a ticket. Sure. We'll all go see it. But like with Mando and Krug, it felt like Filoni was like, here's season four. And Filoni and Favreau, I guess, were like, we've written season four. I guess we want to do it. And Disney's like, that's going to cost $300 million. It's going to suck. I'm sure the script has so much Thrawn and fucking God knows Dark Sabres.

1:19:30Griffin Newman:I'm sure it's heavy on lore. Because they've said we pivoted from season four to something that had no lore. We made sure the movie was going to be a clean entry point. Favreau said we didn't want to do any of the lore. So Disney's clearly like can you just do a movie? And Floy is like sure can it be a big movie? No, no.

1:19:49David Sims:No.

1:19:49Griffin Newman:Can it just be fun movie with Baby Yoda in it? Yeah. That's for kids. It's for kids. It's for basically middle school. I mean, this movie is flirting with being a PG. It's a PG-13 because it's got enough kind of like gun shit, I guess. It feels PG. But it feels kind of PG. And I,

1:20:06David Sims:I, Solidly aiming for kid reaction.

1:20:08Griffin Newman:Right.

1:20:08David Sims:I think what you're saying, And it just has,

1:20:10Griffin Newman:from beginning to end, it's like, yes, sure, the bald guy is in season three. I guess I forgot about it. Which I did not remember

1:20:16David Sims:even though I had watched one week earlier.

1:20:19Griffin Newman:But it's basically just kind of like, all you need to know is the Mandalorian and Grogu go on adventures together. They're going to go on an adventure. I do feel like fundamentally, one of the questions we're circling around is it seems like no one in the Disney era is asking the question of, what do people out there need? No. Because people used to get something they needed out of Star Wars, and that's why it's a franchise that for 50 years has meant so much. One thing that really stood out to me about Mandalorian and Grogu that I think is so insane and I get it. I get what the world we're living in.

1:20:49I get the blend of visual. No, no, no. I mean like the, the star Wars universe is one with creatures and masks and a combination of, you know, always the debate about practical effects versus digital, all this stuff. But I go, we are in an era where everyone's relentlessly talking about the loneliness epidemic and how much loneliness is killing us. And we literally have a movie where you only see human eyes for it's five to six minutes of a two hour and 15 minute movie. Like everything is either a mask or digital. Like we're living in a world where everyone's fucking lonely. And I can speak for myself.

1:21:25I'll get weirdly vulnerable this deep into a Star Wars thing where I go, I am literally like a mental health advocate working to get kids less lonely in schools while also struggling deeply with the fact of, oh, I'm a living, I'm so relentlessly lonely on a daily basis. You and I were saying this yesterday.

1:21:42David Sims:We are people who, for outside perception, people would be like, you got like a friend base and you're like busy and you're doing stuff. And we're like, you and I are both like burdened with the fundamental loneliness as a condition. Literally lonely. Like my birthday is tomorrow and I never have a birthday party and reached out to friends because I go, a birthday is a reason that people will actually come out and I need to fucking connect with people. I forgot that that was part of this planning was to do this the day before your birthday. Yes, this is a birthday present to myself is to be called crazy by David Simms on mic.

1:22:10I apologize for calling you crazy.

1:22:11Griffin Newman:I mean, your notion that Mandalorian would die and baby Grogu would turn evil at the end of this movie was a little crazy. All I'll say is this. When it leaks that that was proposed, we're going to see who is crazy. Excited for that leak. But I just want to say, like, the idea that I watched a two hour, 15 minute long movie where I did not look at human eyes is just such a lack of grace of like, what do people need? apart from Sigourney it's like you're right right his helmet comes off one time and he says I'm gonna kill you to the huts and it goes right back on and we've seen versions of that in the show before and it brought me immediately back to fucking Princess Leia in that first movie with the blaster up looking around the corner and she's stone faced and badass but she's teeny tiny with these big doe eyes and she's a princess it's primal shit and you sit here and like you don't even realize it in the moment but then you watch it over and over again you go oh for like a late teenage era princess who's a tiny diminutive person to have that steely resolve is masking so much fucking pain and fear and you immediately are sucked in by Carrie Fisher's eyes yeah totally and now what they give us is a movie where Jeremy Allen White is playing a jacked yelling that he's not like his dad I'm not like

1:23:35David Sims:I'm not like my dad. I just want to take another look at you. It's hard being a hut sometimes.

1:23:41Griffin Newman:It's beyond that. It's like all of it. Like, I want to love baby Yoda, but like, I kind of don't give a... He's a cutie. He doesn't have big eyes. He's the only addressing the eyes complaint. But he's a puppet doing cute shit. And like, I just kind of need someone in my life to make fucking eye contact with me. I agree. And tell me a story that explains to me what's good and what's bad. Wish you a happy birthday. And that's what Star Wars used to be. Yeah, well, right. You are yearning for Star Wars, as you keep coming back to this, as this sort of like moral force, which like, you know, that's right.

1:24:11Griffin Newman:That feels kind of long lost. And it's tough for any, you know, franchise to hold that burden or whatever. Part of the disappointment is that film fans and film nerds like getting vocal on the internet. Comic-Con nerds like getting vocal on the internet. Star Wars is a flashpoint for all of them. Like another big point of what's going on right now is like, this is a franchise that spoke to us on a deep level for a long time and just swings and misses and asks us to pay them for another shot. It's like the boomers who made shit like Star Wars, you know, had a sort of a more woo-woo. I'm, you know, speaking positively, right?

1:24:47Griffin Newman:Like this kind of like post-hippie, you know, these interests, you know, this sort of expansive view of things. I think there's a larger issue. They had the hippie optimism mixed with the punk cynicism. and cool filmmaking of the ever. I think there's a larger issue

1:25:03David Sims:in my opinion is Grogu needs cooking. Grogu doesn't need cooking and someone should address this. I've watched in the last couple of months six seasons of Star Wars television and a movie for the first time. I want to formally congratulate you on doing that. You thought I wasn't going to get it done. We haven't even really started talking about Andor. I want to try to do something here. I want to try to do something here. Ben, can we as an exercise Ben's eating the cookies. Do you want to bring this up?

1:25:27Griffin Newman:Do you want to mention this?

1:25:28David Sims:Oh, I'm just hungry. Yeah, I just wanted a snack. By the way, there's a merch spotlight, including a food spotlight at the end of this episode. I got bags under the table. But Ben's snacking on Grogu Nell and Wafers. Wait, do you guys want some?

1:25:39Griffin Newman:There's plenty of share here.

1:25:40David Sims:I do want some. It's crazy. All right, I got you. Ben, can you stick your tongue out quickly? Oh, man. That's a blue tongue. Ben, can you start a counter for three minutes? I think I can. And I'm not saying this is all we're talking about it. but I just want to like actually run through the entire plot of the movie in under three minutes. Of the Mandalorian and Grogu? Yes. Yeah, go right. Because I was practicing this on the way here. I think you can honestly do it. Yeah, three almost seems roomy. Okay, ready? Start. Okay, we start with Mandalorian on a bounty hunter mission trying to capture a warlord.

1:26:16David Sims:He brings him back to Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver's like, cool, I got two more missions for you. One is find Rod of the Hut, Jabba's son, and free him, bring him back to his aunt and uncle. Secondly, here's a mystery warlord. Can you find this guy? Rada might help. He goes to find Rada. Rada's like, I don't need to be freed. I like fighting because my dad was bad. And so, but by the way, I know where that warlord is. I can bring you to him. But then Mando gets captured by the same people and he gets caught in the fight with Rada. They escape. They find the warlord, bring them back to Sigourney Weaver.

1:26:52David Sims:Sigourney Weaver's like, where's Rada? he's like Radha didn't want to be freed she's like this sucks because we work closely with the aunt and uncle can you go make things good with them he goes back to the aunt and uncle they're like fuck you they throw him in a pit he gets scratched he falls asleep Grogu who's been separated from him and started was about to go Gremlins 2 gizmo mode like Rambo style badass instead just learns to be alone meet Stephen McKinley Henderson on a porch then Mandalorian wakes up and they have to escape and all their friends come and help them escape and then Sigourney Weaver's like, thanks for your work.

1:27:25David Sims:That's the entire movie, right? And for some reason...

1:27:28Griffin Newman:That was a minute 14. Yeah. And for some reason, Sigourney Weaver decides they need to like nuke the hut, like house. They're already escaping. At the end of the movie, it's kind of like, I don't know, something's going to blow up. That was wild. It was a bit of an Eagles and Lord of the Rings moment of like, if you... She's like, hi. And he's like, I'm out of here. And she's like, don't worry about it. Let it go. Let's blow him up. She's also like, jump quickly because the bombs, it's shot already. I also was like, man, like you didn't even have to kill the Nazgul to get the eagle. Like you could have done that the whole time.

1:27:58Griffin Newman:Look, look, the Eagles and Lord of the Rings is too complicated for this day. I was fairly detailed there. Was I not? I mean, the only thing you left out was Scorsese. Star making turn by Scorsese. But Scorsese is not actually vital to the plot. He's just kind of like Rada's over there. Who doesn't want to give information, which is funny. That motherfucker went so hard that that character shines, David.

1:28:23David Sims:And I turned to each other.

1:28:24Griffin Newman:The other part of the movie we left.

1:28:25David Sims:We were like, I cannot believe how locked in he is. Yeah. He's giving this his all and it has personality and humanity.

1:28:32Griffin Newman:Does it speak to something that Martin Scorsese, who has sort of, you know, grumbled about franchise filmmaking, right, in interviews? Ben prepared all of us a little dish. Ben's giving me some Mando cookies. That's a lot of cookies. I don't know if I'm going to eat all those. But thank you, Ben. I got five other food items in my back. They make a real cool banana pudding with these blue Nilla wafers. That's true. They call it like space Nilla wafers or something. Like a guy being paid, you know, like a shill in this movie. I just run a flat meat stand. I don't know anything. Don't ask me about it.

1:29:02I don't know. Maybe. An incredible impression of Martin Scorsese as that streetcar operator. Thank you.

1:29:08David Sims:Specifically. I ate it. It tastes like a Nilla wafer. I guess there's no like blue flavor. No, but the cognitive dissonance of it not being blue flavor does fuck your brain a little bit.

1:29:17Griffin Newman:Well, we should properly name it. It is Grogu Nilla Nummies.

1:29:21David Sims:Mm, num, num, num, num, num, num, num, num.

1:29:23Griffin Newman:It says right here in the box, Nummies.

1:29:36David?

1:29:36David Sims:Yes? You look like a man who doesn't know that fast-growing trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. I had no idea. Yeah. Well, David, they have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and houseplants. My home is littered with all of these and they're all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy.

1:30:05Griffin Newman:It's like your local nursery, but anywhere you live with more plants than you'll find anywhere else. And whatever you're looking for, fast growing trees helps you find options that actually work for your climate, space and lifestyle. For me, all inclusive.

1:30:19David Sims:I'll take any kind of tree you got.

1:30:21Griffin Newman:Griffin, I know you're, you know, a green thumb. Yeah. And I think you're going to - I got 10 green fingers. Yeah.

1:30:27David Sims:I think you're going to agree with me on this,

1:30:28Griffin Newman:that, you know, you go to a garden center

1:30:30David Sims:and you just find it so overwhelming and inconvenient. You took the personal statement out of my mouth, Ben. That is how I feel. And then here's the other thing. You try to hire some landscapers. It's too expensive. I'm so tired of spending every day of my life on the phone with landscapers.

1:30:45Griffin Newman:Listen, with fast-growing trees, it's just so reassuring that you know you're going to order plants and they're guaranteed to be healthy and to thrive.

1:30:56David Sims:But let me guess, when the trees arrive, it takes a really long time for them to grow. They have their alive and thrive guarantee.

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1:32:00David Sims:David! Yes? They say that the eyes are the window to the soul. They do say that. What does that make our glasses? The windows? The window frames? I don't know. The curtains? Yeah, the curtains. The point is, if you are glasses wearer like I am or like our own producer Ben is, it's a big decision. Sure. Because this is how you introduce yourself to the world. This is how you engage with other people. You make eye contact through the frames. Sometimes it's just time for a refresh.

1:32:28Griffin Newman:Totally agree. All right. Well, so what about Zenni Optical?

1:32:31David Sims:Oh, the fine folks' zeni glasses. The eyewear. They got fun shapes, sizes, and colors. They got a lot of colors. Right. Statement pieces. Bold statement pieces, they call them. And they're inexpensive, I would say. They're an online eyewear shop with prescription glasses, sunglasses, blue light lenses, all starting at under$30. That's crazy. That is very low.

1:32:59Griffin Newman:I feel like glasses often cost more than$30. Way more. But you go to Zenni.com, you pick a frame, you upload your prescription, they ship it to your door. No appointment, no store, no upsell at the counter. Easy. At that price, something kind of shifts. You're not like, do I need new glasses?

1:33:15David Sims:You're like, why don't I try something fun? Because sometimes you've got an old pair, they've got a scratch on them. It's annoying, but you're like, am I going to go through the hassle? Or the screws start to get loose, and you find yourself taking out that microscopic little screwdriver over and over again to tighten them up. At this price, why not just get another pair? Ben, I ordered a pair of the Magoo. I think this is funny. Okay. We all know from Mr. Magoo, the cartoon character who can't see. And Zenny is saying, let's solve that problem. Let's give you glasses called Magoo. They're blue and green, two of my favorite colors, a nice boxy frame.

1:33:52Griffin Newman:You're not agonizing over one pair that has to do everything for the next two years. Get the ones for work. Yeah. Get the fun ones. Get some options. Get the pair that only matches one outfit at under$30. You don't have to justify it. Exactly. They've got 150 ,000 five-star reviews. Yeah. And if you've never run glasses online before, they have a virtual try-on so you can see how it's going to look on your face before you commit. If your glasses are overdue for a refresh, now's the time. Go to zenni.com slash podcast and use code podcast15 for 15 % off your first order. This dials sell out, so don't sit on it.

1:34:26Griffin Newman:That's Z-E-N-N-I dot com slash podcast promo code podcast15.

1:34:40David Sims:David and I, as he said, are sitting here at the theater. And I want to be clear. We're considerate moviegoers. We're not talking the whole time, but occasionally we turn to each other and whisper one sentence. And I would say about every 20 minutes, one of us would turn to the other and go, is this really all there is? Like we kept being like, there must be some story idea that the trailers were hiding. Not a big twist. But it's not that I wanted that.

1:35:04Griffin Newman:No. Like it's not like I wanted the third act of the movie. I was basically like, is this movie going to be what it looks like? Which is just kind of like a disposal.

1:35:12David Sims:They got to find one guy, except they find the warlord halfway through. And then you're like, what is the movie now? You turned to me and said, I actually don't know what the rest of the movie is.

1:35:20Griffin Newman:Right. And so then I'm like, right. Will the third act be AI, Luke, and fucking, you know, take your pick, shows up.

1:35:27David Sims:Is there a bad surprise behind the mystery door?

1:35:29Griffin Newman:You know, Grogu shoots some lightning or grows wings. You really don't think Dark Grogu would have been a more interesting third act? No. You really triggered me there because it's the kind of shit I hate the most. We were actually screaming at each other. I really hate the someone needs to die for a movie. Can you guys say that you love each other just so we can... I love you very much, Chris.

1:35:49David Sims:Here's my pitch that hit me when we got to that section.

1:35:52Griffin Newman:I was like, are they going to do some slop? Yeah. But they didn't. No. But instead it was just kind of like, Mando's... Why did you even make this? What was the idea? Just got to get away from the Hutts. What's your pitch? My pitch is... Can I just say one thing to close out that thought? Please. And I think this actually is truthful. this does feel like the exact Star Wars movie you would make at a cultural moment where it feels acceptable to people to remove Stephen Colbert and replace it with Byron Allen's comics. I mean just kind of like let's not hurt anyone's feelings. A society where it's like we're looking for something and we're not getting it.

1:36:25Griffin Newman:I heard you just traveled over here from New Jersey. Anything you want to share about that? We need to be talking about this Lincoln Tunnel traffic, Byron Allen. We gotta be talking. The Lincoln, the Holland, the George Washington. You know, like one of the great comic figures of our lives.

1:36:45David Sims:That is a brutal comparison. It is 100 % on point. It's not even about inoffensiveness. It's about this sort of like the whole weirdness of Comics Unleashed is you're like, this looks like comedy, but something feels off. Everything's for sale. Everything's leaseable. It's a comedy, but it's in a hollow way, and it's so packaged and strategized, and they're acting like this is organic conversation, but it's neither stand-up nor interview. And it's getting an 1130 slot, which used to be sacred to the American people. We're treating this as if it's the legit thing. When this used to air at four o 'clock in the morning, and this was only watched by people who were struggling.

1:37:25David Sims:People who should not be watched by drug addicts. Yes, literally. The core demographic was men in hotel rooms debating whether they wanted to live through the night. Some of the worst nights of my life had been watching Comics Unleashed, and it wasn't because of Comics Unleashed. Comics Unleashed was meeting me where I was. You and I both just revealed that we watched that show while having suicidal ideation. I just also want to shout out to you

1:37:54Griffin Newman:that while we're all talking right now, everyone has a blue tongue. This is true. What are you doing? It might be a blue boy immediately. He didn't grow you, Nilla Wapers, talking about killing ourselves. It went blue immediately.

1:38:05David Sims:Nilla nummies. Nummies? Num nums? Numbies. Thanks for the nummies. Right. All right. Thanks for the nilla nummies. Griffin, can you get back to... This is my third cat, my flag, my own mental health concerns.

1:38:14Griffin Newman:Your pitch. I hope you're doing okay, Chris.

1:38:16David Sims:So like minute 30, 40. I love you, Chris. I love you guys. You're doing all right, right? You're all right. It's funny dissonance for us to do that bit while eating these treats. I got to say, you're making a little sinker face while you're eating the nilla nummies. we've never stopped talking we never stopped eating the Nilla weppers as we talked about look it's the most respectful way to honor the movie is to just keep snacking keep buying the product baby we don't give a fuck say whatever you want about our movie you're literally eating our tie-in product while you talk bad about our movie we're giving you what you want Disney we were underwhelmed by the movie and thank you for the blue Nilla wafers you fucking corporate fucks minute, like maybe 30, 40 of the movie, they go to get Radha.

1:39:08David Sims:Radha's like, I'm not like my dad. And Din Djarin's like, okay, I guess I'll leave. And then they gas them. And as he's starting to pass out, he's like, Grogu, run, I'll find you later. And I was like, oh, is the core idea of this movie, because I'm not asking, in going from TV to film, make the movie really big in a all plot threads connect, Ekthron comes in, deepfake Luke kind of way. I'm like, can you tell me a story that could not fit within an episode? Ideally, that's a story of greater emotional range. Right. That's what I want. Not necessarily even scale that's bigger than the TV show. A lot of this is the murky, uncanny valley of the more that TV has become like movies, does movies feel like TV?

1:39:52David Sims:And how do we make this distinction? We saw it in IMAX. weirdly anytime it went to the IMAX ratio what is closer to the traditional old school TV ratio it felt more cinematic because it didn't look like Disney Plus which is now super widescreen. This whole weird backwards thing we're living in, right? All I want is for this movie to be like, we came up with a story that is two hours long that has an emotional through line that's not an episode and doesn't feel like a couple episodes smushed together. And when Mandalorian's getting gassed. You're like, they're going to make him do the Dejarik fight, which for the listeners who don't know, is the hollow chess board that Chewie has at the Millennium Falcon where he plays against C-3PO and then leans back and looks fucking awesome.

1:40:39David Sims:Let the Wookiee win. We see like the real version of that in this. It's like a pit fight, right? With all the big creatures. And he's like, Grogu, go, I'll find you. And I was like, oh, is the big idea of this movie that they get split up? Yeah. That it is Grogu has to fend for himself on his own and Mandalorian has to deal with the emotions of feeling what that's like. Now, we've already split them up. Season two ends with Luke taking him. Mando's really upset. And it's the first major boondoggle in the greater Mandalorian experiment is they resolve that not in a movie, which would have been a storyline fitting for a movie or season three.

1:41:19David Sims:They resolve that in the second half of Boba Fett, a different show. So then season three starts and it's like, this is resolved. Now I'm training you. And then season three becomes basically a Bo-Katan show. As you said, David, it's largely Mandalorians talking about politics and caves.

1:41:34Griffin Newman:Right, they're in a cave.

1:41:36David Sims:Many caves. It's like dark.

1:41:38Griffin Newman:Yes. There's like a big lake with like a, what, a serpent or something that they're like... Sure, big fish. Right, we maybe don't believe that it exists. It's the skull that's on our shoulders except that we think it's fake. It's the whole... And they're just like... And they're just... There's like a lot of like, to what extent should we wear our helmets?

1:41:55David Sims:And I'm like, guys, I'm also shut the fuck up. I'm watching it and I'm like, this show is barely about the Mandalorian or Grogu at this point.

1:42:02Griffin Newman:Right. They all kind of just sound like Emma Thompson.

1:42:06David Sims:So I can't like tell which one is which. Right. This movie still makes a big point of like the disgrace of his helmet being off. And I'm like, I thought all of season three was litigating the helmet thing and sort of going, eh, maybe we're not that serious about the helmet thing anymore. Chill with the helmet rule.

1:42:21Griffin Newman:Truly. Literally. To the extent that I was almost like, is this, was this written before season three?

1:42:26David Sims:Like, but like, no, like it was not. You also have a very famous actor who has famously, infamously, not done most of the physical performance for this character across the previous three seasons plus Boba Fett.

1:42:40Griffin Newman:Credit to him. Like his stunt performers are second and third billed.

1:42:43David Sims:Single card billing. Like big ups for the transparency on this. Yeah. But it is fascinating that this movie is like, we had Pedro Pascal do one sequence. Right. We had him do one sequence that starts with a little emotional dialogue and then is one big action set piece. The rest of the movie, I'm like, did he ever meet Sigourney Weaver until the press? Yeah, right. Definitely not. But after the Dejarik fight, he just immediately reunites with Grogu. And then the movie has them split up and get back together like two or three times until it finally does the thing where he's asleep because he was scratched by a space slug or whatever.

1:43:21David Sims:and then there's 20 minutes of him having to fend for himself. And I'm leaning in because I'm like, this, I mean, this is the thing. Grogu is the star. This is the thing they like. And the biggest reason... And this is the exact point where I would actually say, I mean... It's also puppet stuff, which I like. One of the things that I was most disappointed though by, I'm like, at least we'll see Grogu finally level up. And instead I just saw him continue to be able to just lift.

1:43:44Griffin Newman:I cannot deny that they consciously clearly were like, we're not going to have him level up.

1:43:49David Sims:It's also a conceptual fuck up that they have him level up way too fast when he starts training with Luke. And when they start showing him do the Jedi shit, it always looks dumb. I think in your words, he looks like a fucking idiot jumping around. You said that about someone in the prequels, maybe Grievous back in the day. I said that about many people. I think so. But it looked silly and they gave him too much power too quickly. And they've already set up this thing of he ages really slowly. When the Mando meets him, he's already hundreds of years old, but he's a baby. So any growth is going to be so slow as to be indistinguishable.

1:44:26David Sims:And the money is this character needs to stay in this exact form. I agree with you that it feels like dramatically he should say at least one word by the end of this movie. Have him say one thing in the style of Yoda and watch every theater go nuts. Totally, but they're too terrified of fucking with the magic of whatever the sanctity of the character sells t-shirts. Literally have him say, dad, wake up. You must when Mando's passed out and watch everyone cry their eyes out. Or nummies. Could have said nummies. He could have said daddy. Yeah, daddy. I want more nummies. Daddy nummies. Have him do one new force power or say one thing.

1:45:02Yeah. And satisfy everybody. But that would disrupt the status quo. I don't think I would like that.

1:45:11Griffin Newman:Would like what? Him talking like Yoda. I think that would annoy me. So he just says daddy. What if he just says daddy at the end? That would obviously wreck me. Well, because I'm a mark for this sort of stuff right now. But even that's too risky for them.

1:45:27David Sims:Sure. I mean, the two major reasons they greenlit this movie. He has to talk like Yoda when he talks. He's a Yoda.

1:45:31Griffin Newman:He's a Yoda. I mean, this is the debate, right? He's a Yoda and a Yaddle. All due respect to Yaddle. Right. It's like, we don't know Rude. They don't call him baby Yaddle. That's true. Did Yaddle talk that way? I know Yaddle eventually made like a cartoon appearance or something, right?

1:45:45David Sims:I remember the first season. Yeah, Bryce Dallas Howard played Yaddle. Do you remember the first season?

1:45:49Griffin Newman:I mean, that might be true. It is true.

1:45:50David Sims:I'm not joking. Love her. Love her. Very pro Bryce Dallas. First season, we all call him Baby Yoda. Disney's like, please call him the child. Don't call him Baby Yoda. His name isn't Baby Yoda. And we're like, okay, so his name is the child? And they're like, no, he has a name. But we're not telling you yet. I remember when the Ahsoka episode dropped in season two. She calls him Grogu. And the internet was like, do we like this? Did they just fuck it up? Is the sanctity the purity of just little cute thing eats things? We have a name we like for him ruined. Eventually, everyone comes around to Grogu for a name.

1:46:26David Sims:This movie refuses to even make a move as strong as his name is Grogu. They're like nothing new about this guy. And part of it is, as they've said, their strategy in this is a movie now is they're like there is one thing that the current generation has grown up with of kids under 10 as their Star Wars that feels proprietary to them. It's Baby Yoda. Even if they don't watch the show, Baby Yoda is just omnipresent culturally. My son has a Baby Yoda water bottle. My daughter knew who Baby Yoda was before she knew

1:46:58Griffin Newman:any other Star Wars thing. They point, they say Grogu, they like. My son is by far most familiar with Baby Yoda as a Star Wars thing.

1:47:04David Sims:Probably doesn't know much about Yoda. No. It's the second thing, which is the Cars effect. Every Cars movie made less money than the previous one. They made three theatrical films and two planes movies and they all dropped. Right. But the merch was insane and they kept being like, I guess we got to make another movie to keep the merch relevant. And at some point they're like, do we? Maybe the merch is the thing. That merch still flies off the shelves. Totally. I have to watch for that. Right. Maybe we can leave it alone. There hasn't been a Cars movie in almost 10 years, but they're just like, do we gotta do it again just to like the brand deposit?

1:47:41David Sims:And that's some of their math. I don't think they were responding to a false notion of the public is demanding this, but it was a real path of least resistance thing and also, if our like majority shareholders are freaked out about our lack of action on Star Wars, is the promise, hey, I bet we're gonna sell twice as much, five times as much Grogu shit in 2026, is that good enough? And it feels like that's the only justification for this movie. And I feel like if in that scene where he's gassed outside the Djarik scene, they are actually split up for the next hour plus of the movie. And that's what the bulk of it was, that Mando's trying to figure out how to get back to Grogu and Grogu's trying to fend for himself.

1:48:28David Sims:That's different than what they've done on the show. And that is a story that I feel I could sustain a slightly longer narrative. would give us something. And instead what I saw was them get back in a spaceship just the two of them.

1:48:41Griffin Newman:You're so mad that they go. But it is... How about the scene where they just... Grogu, Armando's like, I need to take a break and they go back and they take a break and they're just like, okay, let's go again. And I'm like, did we just do a commercial break?

1:48:54David Sims:Isn't this a movie? There's a scene in this movie where they listen to our episodes with Gethard talking about Star Wars in the past and I'm like, why are we watching them listen? It's not even a video podcast. It's just like, it felt like television the whole time. The final moment back in the spaceship, he lets Grogu push the button. Yeah, you remember that button? I didn't let you push. You sighed and you went, he gets to push the button now. And that to them is their notion of like, look at the character growth.

1:49:26Griffin Newman:Because they're like, we planted the seed. In the first act, he was like, don't push the button. This is probably elemental storytelling. I want to say one very nitpicky thing. Please. And Griffin, you just rewatched the seasons of the show more recently. I also found myself feeling very not into how often Mando uses dog language to tell Grogu what to do. Yeah, I don't like that either. Telling him heel. Yes. The heel thing they think is funny and it's not funny. It's like, is he your kid or is he a dog?

1:49:58David Sims:It is clearly that. it's bad comedy instinct. It ended up being funny a couple times and I think when it used to happen, when it happens earlier, mostly in the first season, the joke is this guy doesn't have bedside manner. He doesn't know how to be a dad. But at this point, he's made choice after that this is his child. And as a dad, I watch it and I'm like, that's child abuse. You seem like a dick now. When parents treat their children the same way they treat their animals, it's because they're bad parents.

1:50:26Griffin Newman:Yes. Obviously, The Mandalorian's supposed to be, you know, whatever. A man of few words and so on and so forth. But yeah, there's not much of a connection that you can detect because of how muted and flat the character is.

1:50:40David Sims:But this is also the seasons lost their way. I mean, you have the end of season two when Luke comes on the ship and takes him. So right, right.

1:50:46Griffin Newman:So season one is perfect and is the one that ends with the Taika Waititi robot saving them and everyone, like all the characters they've met from all the episodes sort of come together and it just felt like great TV. Does that also, though, Mark? I don't want to say let me just let me finish before we right okay and basically ends with him being like I'm gonna keep the kid yeah and then season two ends with like Giancarlo Esposito wants the dark saber or something and then Luke Skywalker shows up to rescue them and he takes Grogu and he like nerfs them all

1:51:16David Sims:but then he takes Grogu I have to train him and Mando takes his helmet off and has a tearful goodbye showing his face to Grogu for the first time and the emotional growth is he cares more about connecting to this kid. Then the creed. And he's showing his emotions. The stoicism wall is over.

1:51:33Griffin Newman:And Ahsoka's in season two. Like she drops in somewhere in there. She tries to train him a little bit. Yes. And I guess she's the one

1:51:40David Sims:who tells Luke to go find him.

1:51:42Griffin Newman:And then Book of Boba Fett was in between those two seasons?

1:51:44David Sims:So like the first half of Book of Boba Fett is Boba Fett being like, do I want to be a sheriff? A mayor? Right. I'm in charge, I guess. The fact that he just becomes a sheriff, which is an elected county position. There's never been. You know what's so wild about Boba Fett? Let's leave Tatooine.

1:52:00Griffin Newman:Let's go.

1:52:01David Sims:And the season ends with him kicking fat Bib Fortuna off a throne and going, I like that chair. Are you taking his position? No, maybe just the chair. Say your thing. I got to say this. On this show, we have created, honestly, at this point, our own language, which is ludicrous. But the idea of a Fisto, as represented by Kit Fisto in the prequels, the character that you see, and you go, I want more of that. And we said today that the current person holding the crown of all Fistos is actually Saw Gerrera. Who is dead. But in the Star Wars universe, even Fisto has been out-Fisto'd by Saw Gerrera.

1:52:37We've never talked about the fact that the most famous and iconic Fisto is Boba Fett starting in the Star Wars special. The original where fans are just like, what's the deal with that guy?

1:52:47Griffin Newman:All the way. And then Vader says no disintegrations. And you're like, so he's fucked up, huh? So he's done disintegrating. We've been begging them to get them right. We haven't. It's to be specifically told. They have mishandled him so much that we've never even addressed that he's the original Fisto. Right. But he's actually the most mishandled. The attempt to Fisto to give the fans what they want. Yes. In an incorrect way with a Fisto. Yeah. Leads to what we have now with Boba Fett, which I would actually argue should now be phrased a swing and a misto. It was a swing and a misto. It was. He's the ultimate swing and a misto.

1:53:24Swing and a misto. You have a Fisto, which is Fisto himself, the absolute representation of what this should be. Tease us with some intrigue and then don't give us too much. Make us watch some deep cut cartoons to find out more. Saw Gerrera currently there with, I would say we're probably not the only people. Ben and I clearly kind of begging, if you can get fucking Forrest Whitaker to recommit to a prequel about how that asshole came to be, I will put... But you know, his backstory is great too. I went down a rabbit hole reading all about his shit. He's a Clone Wars character, right? He was a cartoon first.

1:53:54Griffin Newman:The weirdest thing is that Saw Gerrera, not looking like, you know, Forrest Whitaker, because they didn't have that idea yet, but he is in the Clone Wars cartoon. First. You know, and like, and like is a minor character that they decided to recycle for Rogue One. But then obviously Forrest kind of just transformed the character and everyone kind of forgets that. That character is so good. It's the rare example of a jump from the cartoon being interesting. Yeah.

1:54:25David Sims:And done in a very considered way. You also have to imagine that you're going to an actor of that caliber who whatever you tell him to go says, thank you so much for your input. Right. I've got this from here. And you actually shut the fuck up and listen. I think also Rogue One

1:54:40Griffin Newman:is crazy where it's like, because like he was going to be in more of it. There's a scene where he like rescues her and I think there's stuff. The trailer, he has two different haircuts and one of the haircuts never shows up in the film. There's stuff they decided to cut of their relationship because like in Rogue One he's a little weird because you only really see him, you know, in the last days of his life. Yes. And he's crazy. Yeah. And then Andor gives you much more seasoning on him, but it is still basically like, you need to understand how this person became such a fanatic. Yeah. Yes. He's kind of like the weather underground.

1:55:09Griffin Newman:Yeah. He's like, we're just going to blow shit up. He's the dirty work. He's the one who's getting shit done and they all love to pretend it doesn't have to be that blocking machine. Von Mothma's the least, like, she's the most like, we need to win over the people, hearts and minds. We can't just be blowing shit up. And he's like, he's the IRA that's like, actually, we need to kill fucking Mountbatten. We need to, how about we bomb a boat and kill an ancillary member of the royal family? We do that, but also I don't care if, right, if we're going to kill some civilians, like, they're all culpable, blah, blah, blah.

1:55:38Griffin Newman:You know what I mean? Like that kind of thing. It's dirty. And Luthan is more on that side of things, but Luthan has some control, whereas Saw likes to like huff. But where Saw is the inverse of Vader. Yeah, well, they kind of do that in Rogue One, of. He kind of sounds like him. The suit. I mean, I love it, though. And Luthen is one of the most psychologically fucked up characters in Star Wars. But what I love about Luthen is he's like, I'm a bullet casing and I'm going to be spent. Like, I will be done and I know I will die. It's an incredible character. And I know that it's in service of something important and I know that I'm like a sin eater.

1:56:15Griffin Newman:Like, I will do the bad stuff. I know I won't be remembered. That's fine. Like, you know, this is my purpose.

1:56:21David Sims:He basically shows up at the end of episode two in the first season, I think. And I was watching the first two episodes and I was like, yeah, this is good. But there are a lot of great TV shows that people tell me for years to watch. And I watch them. I'm like, I get this. This is well made, but I don't like TV this much. Or, you know, that's just not my temperature. And you've been hearing for years from people like me who watch Andorward. You love Star Wars. This is the greatest thing ever.

1:56:44Griffin Newman:You don't understand it actually rocks. Like it's actually, it's not just good TV. Where do you think it stands up? It's the best thing they've ever done apart from the big two? I mean, I don't think that's really... Big two being

1:56:55David Sims:Empire and New Hope? Yeah. I basically, I'm inclined to agree with that. My only regret is that they didn't do five seasons. I think I said previously on the show about Rogue One, and I think if you view Andor and Rogue One as a package deal, I think time will only perhaps elevate them even more. Possibly. Yeah, but I also think part of its power is that it's building something underneath the foundation of the original Star Wars. It's in conversation with the original in such a smart way. It serves it. It makes it better.

1:57:23Griffin Newman:Yeah, exactly. It doesn't feel like it's like, you know, messing with it. I'm saying this as a callback, but also really, there's so much eye contact. It truly is. There's so much fucking men.

1:57:33David Sims:There's people. And actors making choices in spaces. That's what's incredible about it. The idea that like, it's not digital, that you go like, oh, sometimes the way a street revolution starts is someone takes a spoon and bangs on a fucking frying pan so you have time to lock your door. That's the most human, real-ass shit, you know? Those first two episodes, I'm like, this is well done. Yeah. Second episode ends with Skarsgård on a train. I lean in a little bit. I go, oh, Skarsgård, okay. Third episode starts with him introducing himself to Andor. Like, two minutes in, I text you guys, Andor's the best shit ever.

1:58:06David Sims:I get it immediately. I see the whole thing now. Just the entire conception of his character is so perfect and so smart. And then his performance on top of it, and then everything feels like that, where you're just like, oh my God, I'm watching them practice rebellion runs in the mountains of how they're going to infiltrate these things. They're doing their play. Right, this is like the fucking Cuban revolutionaries. It's so smart about commenting on human history and also the text of Star Wars. And this is a big thing I felt watching all these shows and watching this movie. And you saying, David, like the 70s creatives, more woo-woo and all of this.

1:58:46David Sims:There's a bigger thing, which is the magic of Star Wars is that George Lucas put basically the entire history of storytelling into one container. He was like, what if you could make a three in legend exist with Saturday morning serials and religion and samurai and westerns and all of this shit? And he put it all in a blender and then he kept pulling from different genres. What if you have an alien kind of mob boss? That's Jabba the Hutt. What if this? What if that? And you kept building and building and the longer Star Wars goes on, Star Wars starts to become more and more about itself. The prequels for all of their faults are not about themselves.

1:59:23David Sims:They are him saying like, this is actually what's like the foundation of this world I built. You know, it's about me commenting on the cyclical nature of how, you know, fascism rises and falls and all these sorts of things. The human instincts and structures and governments, you know, and people and power. And the Disney era has had this really uncomfortable relationship with, are we trying to comment on Star Wars? Are we trying to make a new Star Wars for the current audience? Or are we just trying to point backwards for the things that the fans love, minus any of the deeper meaning? I have not watched much Clone Wars, but the people I know who love Clone Wars, and I'm sorry, I'm forgetting who said this to me, but someone recently was making the case for why Clone Wars were so good and what the problem with the live-action shows and specifically the Filoni-led ones have been.

2:00:11David Sims:And they said this thing that Filoni did that was really smart on Clone Wars, first handful of episodes, rough going. That was the stuff that felt a little more passed down by George. And then Filoni starts to find his own voice. And what he did was he clocked into, George was pulling from so many movies he had watched, so many stories he had read, books he had read and stuff. Filoni just starts watching like Turner classic movies and going like, oh, here's like a B-Noir from the 40s. This is kind of an interesting plot line. Could I transpose this onto Star Wars? And part of Star Wars to me, the magic is that.

2:00:45David Sims:it's taking a different mode of storytelling or a different genre and finding how to put it into this universe. Andor's doing that. Andor's like, what's the Star Wars version of Battle of Algiers, right? Yes, totally. And it rules and it's in conversation with everything and it's deeper and more meaningful for that reason. I think Acolyte does that. I think even Skeleton Crew in a very superficial way while not being self-burdened with seriousness. That's not an Anbar movie or whatever. It's the Goonies. It put Goonies inside Star Wars. We said that in unison. We did. And Mando, because it's right.

2:01:15David Sims:Mando smartly why the first season works so well is it's like what if you just did do Lone Wolf and Cub do Gunsmoke you know do like have gun will travel or whatever here's a question that I have for you Griffin having just watched it though because we've talked so much about how and again I'm the one who liked the movie the most had fun watching it saw shit I enjoyed and still kind of rolled my eyes but like part of it feels like don't change a thing about Grogu he's our money maker this is about Star Wars and beyond that it's about Grogu It's like about, like, it's so myopic. But then we also talk about, you know, from Force Awakens to Last Jedi to the Rise of Skywalker, how they're constantly unwrapping what's been done based on overthinking fan reactions and this and that.

2:01:58And how in the world in an era where it's clear that the creative and corporate culture is leading to so many moments like that, let alone the number of high caliber filmmakers that have been announced and then it's been pissed away. how the fuck does Tony Gilroy get two seasons of a show on that so clearly meet the moment in the way no other Star Wars is, in which he does a show about regular street-level people trying to deal with the encroachment of fascism at an era where the news is so heavily dealing with all over the world, street-level protests of people trying to fight back against the idea of no kings, George Floyd, Minneapolis, this last year.

2:02:41So I can answer this very quickly. How did he pull that miracle off of getting it on?

2:02:45David Sims:He pulled it off in the way that most miracles happen in this level of like corporate art, which is like something slipped through the system. There was a mistake and it was actually it solved a problem to let him do this. That same deep pandemic Disney Investor Conference Day where they announced 87 projects and these things that used to happen behind closed doors were suddenly live streamed and none of us had stuff to watch. So many people were watching it and it was being reported on. They announced these movies that didn't happen, and they announced like eight TV shows. And half of them never manifested.

2:03:15David Sims:There was some new droid show that never happened. There's the Gina Carano show that never happened. There's the Lando show that never happened. Oh, boy. And Andor is part of that lineup. Andor was of the things they announced that hadn't actually like been going. And Ahsoka was part of that as well. Andor was kind of highest priority. A, they have Diego Luna on a contract. They're trying to negotiate his holds. He's a busy actor. they're like spending money to keep him available to do a show. Right. They hire writers quickly. They start developing it. They put months of work and money into it.

2:03:48David Sims:I think there's some amount of pre-production. Well, Jared Bush. It was Jared Bush's show. And it was also Stephen Schiff who had come off of The Americans. There were a couple different teams. No, but Jared, no. Jared Bush develops the show.

2:04:00Griffin Newman:The Zootopia guy. He writes a pilot. The guy behind Zootopia? That's the original. Yes, he writes a pilot. He writes a Bible. So it wasn't Gilroy at first? No, not at all. Then Schiff is hired as the showrunner. Yes. And then Gilroy joins in a little later. And that is how this all happens. It's what happened with Rogue One. Where he's like, I have a few notes. And then it's like, he seems to have just kind of taken over in a good way.

2:04:26David Sims:My understanding is, you know, Rogue One, they said like, the movie has problems. Can you come and fix it? And he was like an assassin. And they credit him with solving a lot of the issues, even though it costs a lot of money. It was a lot of panic late in the day. And so they're like working on this and they're like the Zootopia guy, Stephen Schiff, who's coming off the Americans. Oh, let's hire a spy show guy. None of this is working. And they're like, can Gilroy come in and give us the three fixes? Right. And he sort of says, like, I think you sort of don't have anything. And Kathleen Kennedy challenges him and says, like, OK, if you could do anything, what would you do?

2:04:59David Sims:And he goes, let me think on it. And he comes in and pitches it. And basically there was enough money sunk into it. that it was prudent to do something with it. And then I think they got excited by it. And they were like, let's fucking support this. But he never could have pitched that from the get-go.

2:05:18Griffin Newman:I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so. And it doesn't seem like there's any part of them that's going to look at it. I don't know about the actual subscribers, but the critical praise and the fan... It matters. Well, they listen to the negative fan love to the point where they have... I think that... Abrams unwrapping Giants' movies, but they don't listen to the positive fan love to go like, what's our next political star? But how do you replicate Andor? They're like, that's like... Well, Saw Gerrera. Well, you know, people... The Book of Saw. Hell yeah. Buzz buzz, motherfucker.

2:05:51David Sims:Gerrera from The Book of Saw.

2:05:54Griffin Newman:You know, it's like this weird series of accidents that led to this thing. It cost a fortune. It was so expensive. They don't want to do that. You know, I mean, partly it's COVID, partly it's streaming TV, you know.

2:06:03David Sims:But also, Gilroy was like, if we're doing this, it has to look real. We need bodies in places. They said it in real places. Mando was shot entirely in LA.

2:06:14Griffin Newman:Which they keep saying, and people have been making fun of Favreau for trotting that out. And obviously, it's like Favreau is saying... He's doing right by the industry. Exactly. He is saying that in Hollywood, where a crowd understands that matters right now. And I think that's fine that he's doing that. As a human being, it's a great move. But some people are kind of pointing out like, hey man, Star Wars is kind of defined by like going to a really crazy place. Tunisia or whatever. Or even Australia or, you know, where... The Arctic Circle. Yeah. And like getting some cool landscapes. And instead, like you're having a conversation with Rod of the Hut in what's clearly like nothing.

2:06:47Griffin Newman:Right. But credit to Favreau. Like the unions and the out of work people

2:06:51David Sims:and the industry are rallying.

2:06:52Griffin Newman:What he's saying is,

2:06:53David Sims:I didn't shoot this in fucking Bulgaria, guys. You know, like... That's what he's saying. They weren't going to shoot this in real places anyway. Favreau has basically become a guy who seemingly doesn't like fresh air or daylight anymore, right? Like, you're right. It was a binary. It was either they go to Eastern Europe or they shoot this in stages in America, but it was going to be shot on stages. That in and of itself is not a death knell, but it's like every decision on this movie is a version of that. And there's even a story, there's a Vulture article that came out yesterday at the time we're recording this about like...

2:07:25David Sims:The clown scene in LA. I read that. No one's talking about it. Everyone's normal about that piece. Did you read it? Yeah. I was just jumping in to make a joke. No, no, no. Anyway, you're the vulture piece. You were saying. It was asking the question of why is this the thing that they made? What was the strategy here? Is it going to work? It's not opening well, right? The reviews have been bad. Everyone's kind of shrugging about it. And they call out this movie was very cheap to make, especially for Star Wars. It cost$175 million. LA was so grateful to get production entirely there. They gave a$25 million rebate.

2:08:02David Sims:It cost less than$150, which for Star Wars is nuts. I know it's an insane amount of money. It's nuts. It's money that was spent to put a lot of people to work and create jobs and fucking whatever. But they also have this anecdote that two friends texted us yesterday.

2:08:18Griffin Newman:Yeah.

2:08:18David Sims:And I was like, there's the review right there. And they go, Disney just trusted Favreau because he's like a smart, steady hand. He launched the Marvel Universe. He launched Marvel. He kind of launched live action Disney in a way. He doesn't stress out. He gets things done. He works fast. He works quick. He's such a multitasker that one day when they were filming easy interior shots of Mando and Grogu in the cockpit, he also spent his time grilling up 500 grilled cheeses on a griddle for the cast and crew. And I'm like, this feels like a movie made by a guy who's also making sandwiches at the same time.

2:08:54chef call that.

2:08:55David Sims:There are TV shows that feel like, you know, we joke, this is a show you're supposed to watch while you're folding laundry. This is a movie made by someone who's in the act of folding laundry. And it's like, it's the whole thing where you're like, it's great that he brought production back to LA. That's nice that he made sandwiches for everybody. I don't know, maybe the scenes in the cockpit should be better. I would not be shocked if this movie outpaces the financial projections that the reviews are dismal about because people are going to bring their kids to it. The Thursday numbers, which is not a kid thing, right?

2:09:25David Sims:The kids will come in the weekend matinee, the afternoon. The existence of just wait to watch it on streaming is now also... It's also a problem. Yeah. But the Thursday previews, when you went to see it, are lower than what Solo did. And Solo opened on this exact same Memorial Day weekend and made$100 million for the four-day and like$80 for the three-day. And this is looking to make less than$80 for the three-day. So it's coming in below the low watermark.

2:09:52Griffin Newman:It's coming in at solo or worse. Yeah. It could, you know, because it's a family movie, you know, you could see some improvement. It's kind of like a rainy weekend. Yeah. That's sort of good and bad, you know, like that can help drive people to theaters.

2:10:05David Sims:But their triumph would be, we did the exact same number as Solo. The idea of them doing demonstrably better than Solo is basically out of the question.

2:10:13Griffin Newman:But also, wouldn't they make a bunch of money from all the toys and the nummies? Yeah, they're fine. They're fine. And it's cheap.

2:10:19David Sims:It wasn't that expensive a movie. Shot Solo two times. Solo costs like$400 million. Sure. They're going to be fine on this, but like, what's the long-term gain of it's fine? When Star Wars is kind of in crisis and Andor is starting to feel like an aberration.

2:10:39Griffin Newman:Yeah. And like, I guess Filoni's hope is next year we have this other movie comes out. It'll work and it'll do well. Yeah. And my skin is saved. Yes. but if I'm in charge of Disney and I'm seeing this go over so poorly this is going over poorly it's going over poorly it got bad reviews and it's not doing well financially Blank Check's barely even talking about the movie itself Blank Check's mostly just talking about Nilla Wafers and Avatar The Last Airbender

2:11:04David Sims:they're saying it's a good episode I can't tell if people are going to be upset that we're not talking about the plot but I did do that three minute challenge thing and that was 114 our editor's struggling a little bit with the screaming but we'll make it work oh I didn't even think about that thank you thank you Alan Smithy we can just cut that part out No, we can keep it in triple it. Nope. Appa's Last Day is the best. Appa's Lost Days. That's the best stretch of Avatar.

2:11:26Griffin Newman:That's very good. I mean, I love all the Ba Sing Se stuff a lot. I think that stuff's really, really special for kids, especially like, you know, like teaching them about totalitarianism and about like propaganda. Displacement and refugees and all this stuff. Avatar Rocks. And Nickelodeon cartoon. Yeah, no, I need to watch it. I don't question it for a second. You will love it. It took me years to watch it. The Podalorian and Kaskoo. Oh, sure. So I sent a text to you. But I was just saying, is, sorry, I just finished with, is Filoni fired, right? Like, is there a world where someone above at Disney is like, Star Wars needs a very strong hand at the hill now.

2:11:59Griffin Newman:Star Wars is a little lost. Yeah. We need to do the James Gunn thing that DC did. We need to bring in a respected creative force. I have no idea if they do or don't. I don't know. But like, if I'm in charge of Disney right now, Kathleen Kennedy has gone out into that good night and Filoni with his cowboy hat, he's in this movie. he's wearing a stupid hat. Trapper Wolf. God bless him. Do you think White TV's performance at that robot is when he said I'm the shit and I won't take notes anymore? I think so. I think it's all part of it. I think a lot of things contributed to Taika White TV.

2:12:31David Sims:And he was really feeling himself girdling sandwiches. I was so wrong about I thought that Thor movie was going to do the God Butcher stuff. That's one of the funniest runs you've ever gone on in this podcast. Well, a lot of your fans are making fun of me but I would say if you read the comics No, you're right about this. The comics is good. He betrayed it to have his own character jokes. Yes. He betrayed everything amazing about the storyline so he could keep coming back to life and personally making jokes. Thor Love and Thunder, which

2:12:55Griffin Newman:did you ever catch up with?

2:12:57David Sims:I still have not seen it. It is the only MCU movie I haven't seen. I haven't seen Iron Man 3, obviously. So good. One of the best ones. I regret to inform you, it has one flaw, but otherwise it is maybe our favorite Marvel movie. It's the one flaw that I was cut from the film. Yeah, correct. Obviously, it's the only thing that could have improved it. I acted opposite Don Cheadle and it hit the cutting room. Great actor. unfortunately he could not overcome the massive deficit i brought oh no um but uh thor love and

2:13:24Griffin Newman:thunder is one of those things where i'm like that kind of slipped under a bit of a sort of post-covid radar it doesn't get a lot of shit but i think it actually does not get enough shit how fucking bad it is and if you read that level of riffing that's freaking sublime then the source material goes out the window the riffing was freaking sublime the riffing was riffing. What did you want to say, Ben, about the Mandalorian Pascu or whatever? Excuse me, the

2:13:47David Sims:Pah-da-lorian and Kastgu. I sent you a text. Right now? Yeah, look at it. Just take a quick look. The great Pat Reynolds, our long-time Photoshop artist, titled this episode, The Pah-da-lorian and Kastgu. We give him no... Oh, I don't want to make you hear it. I'll just show you the picture. Yeah, show it. Wait, I know. I found it. I found my phone. Okay. Because I do think there's some powerful stuff going on here. He doesn't, you know, we rarely even give him notes. Sure. But he usually drops the thing like a day or two before it needs to post. And we just trust the process. He sent this photo yesterday and it did have us reeling.

2:14:23David Sims:I even showed it to my wife.

2:14:25Griffin Newman:And I don't show her every, you know, Photoshop that crosses my desk. And was she smiling? She was laughing.

2:14:32David Sims:I like that you came to Kasku's defense because Marie...

2:14:35Griffin Newman:Yeah, they were all like, oh, cursed. And I'm like, cursed with awesomeness. This is good.

2:14:40David Sims:We've really landed on something. And in fact, maybe Blank Check's first movie is the podcast Lorien and Cast Goo. Because I think we could sell a lot of Cast Goo merch. I think so. I mean, look, I know we're being critical of this movie, but we can do it right, right? If we sold like Cast Goo cookies and shit. Yeah. Are you looking at this, Gav? This is really strange. It's kind of an achievement. I wish I wasn't in the room with you. You wish you weren't in the room. Are you saying you want to be Photoshopped in? Do you want to be Zebra Ellis? I mean, I did think maybe I would be in there, but that's okay.

2:15:13David Sims:Do you want to be Zeb or Radha? Me as Radha.

2:15:17Griffin Newman:I think Radha's the right pick.

2:15:18David Sims:Geth is Radha and you're Zeb Aurelios.

2:15:21Griffin Newman:You remember Zeb, our dear friend? I'm going to email Pat right now and let him know. Griff, until this second, I forgot about Zeb. Yep. And they told you not to forget about Zeb, obviously. Yeah, Eminem said that. Yeah, right. But Zeb, who's in Star Wars Rebels, who's like... Which I love Rebels. Rebels is a show I actually watch. Love is too strong, but I watched most of it. I felt it somewhat disappeared up its own ass eventually, but I enjoyed it.

2:15:48David Sims:David, the exact same relationship. I don't remember if it was three or four seasons in total. I loved the first season of that show, much like Mandalorian. Yeah. At season two, I was like, I still like this. Season three, I'm like, it's getting really into tying back to Clone Wars shit. And then I never finished the show. Yeah, the end is not good. But I loved the start.

2:16:06Griffin Newman:Well, did you love in Ahsoka where, you know, all those characters are flesh and blood now and they deliver lines like this. We have to go get the guy. I liked it fine. I mean, I also just, you know, I like Rosario Dawson. I do too. So much. I think he's a good actor. I'll watch her be pensive and exist in this. Mary Elizabeth Winston, I love. Rosario Dawson existing in a liminal space where she rejected Jediism, but can never be human again.

2:16:32David Sims:Basically taking a nap for four episodes of that season. You guys are so harsh.

2:16:36Griffin Newman:I'm not harsh. I watched all of that TV show. It was a lot of hours I put into it. It was very low energy. It was very, very low energy.

2:16:44David Sims:But your face is lit up by the lightsabers. I was watching it. And it's a white lightsaber. That's cool. It's a white lightsaber. I was watching it and I was like, what is this acting style? Why are they like this? What does this remind me of? And then I cracked it. I went, this is children doing Shakespeare. This is when you see a high school production of Shakespeare and it's like no one knows what they're saying, but they know that it's supposed to be performed seriously. And so you just make an acting choice that is serious. I like Ahsoka fine. And I'm watching actors I like just be so juiceless.

2:17:20Griffin Newman:Quite juiceless. Can I share my joke with Chris?

2:17:22David Sims:Oh yeah, it's time. Yes, I've heard that there's a joke. I struggled to watch Ahsoka. I was really struggling and I made this commitment to I'm going to watch all the shows before this episode and Ben was a real friend and he helped me.

2:17:35Griffin Newman:Well, because in a little more context, we're...

2:17:39David Sims:Just say the joke first and then give the context. I think this is the way to do it. Fine.

2:17:43Griffin Newman:Okay. So Griffin's struggling. I say, do you want me to come inside and jump on the bed while you're soaking? Got it. Got it.

2:17:51David Sims:No context needed. Okay. So the context is we workshopped this joke a lot. It's been in the works for like two months.

2:17:59Griffin Newman:I pitched it.

2:18:00David Sims:I mean, I said it in real time when we were on our trip. We were drunk in the back of a car and you said, is a soaking anything? Is there a way to make that mean something?

2:18:09Griffin Newman:That's when the Mormons, they jiggle the bed. Yes. Because they can't move, but maybe someone else can move them. You can insert. But you can't. When you say you can insert, it's like I think already some rules are maybe being bent here.

2:18:24David Sims:What they do is they insert. And then they go, well, I'm not thrusting. And then someone else jumps on the bed like a bunch of monkeys. Jury duty did a thing. They did. Famous joke. Yes. So Ben was joking that I was holding my finger over the play button, but I didn't want to press it. And then he started jumping on the bed. Ah, soaking. And that's a soaking. So Zeb. Yes. Zeb. Now, I like all... Rebels, I think every character is well-conceived and fun. And the way they've translated to live action, all of them have become so boring and sad. And Zeb's thing is basically, A, he's based off of the original Ralph McQuarrie Chewbacca design, which is fun.

2:19:02David Sims:Chewbacca, right. Right, which most of Rebels is original Macquarie designs back to the drawing board. I like that. His character is basically like, what if the pilot is kind of like a big kind of monkey bear alien who's almost got like a football hooligan vibe, right? He's like a bit of a tough guy, but he's funny and he'll give you shit, whatever. This shows up. They just act like everyone's going to be cheering that he's back. He's from a TV show that's now over 10 years old. They brought him in for one scene, basically a like blink and you miss a cameo in one episode of Mandalorian season three where he never interacts with Mandalorian or Grogu.

2:19:43David Sims:And now he's just like their friend who pilots their ship, even though Mando famously loves piloting ships. Is a pilot, skilled. And they don't do any work to introduce him. They don't do anything to make you like this guy. He no longer has the traits that made him likable in his previous show. and they just act like we're all like thank fucking god Zeb is here and he's there and he disappears and he reappears twice and like Grogu pushes the button and then he's like oh Zeb's back I do have a follow up question for something you said David and it ties into this which I think you said like is there a chance Filoni gets fired yeah or maybe

2:20:21Griffin Newman:fired might be too strong but like exactly pushed again over to the side of like you know what you can be in charge of cartoon but I kind of I think one of the things that seems clear about him and I don't know him is that it seems like his greatest strength and his greatest weakness is that he really, really cares on a granular detailed level about the things he cares about. This is true. And that's what made so much of his early stuff feel so great and connected. Right. And is why we're all sitting around like, who the fuck is Zeb? Like that's clearly it's good and bad. My question is, if someone is brought in to share that load or to become the Feige of Star Wars that he is maybe proving not to be.

2:21:03Fundamentally, is that better if it's someone who really loves Star Wars or someone who doesn't give a fuck about Star Wars?

2:21:10David Sims:You know who doesn't give that much of a fuck about Star Wars? Who's that? Tony Gilroy. Could you hand the whole thing to Gilroy? Would Disney ever? No, and he wouldn't do it. They wouldn't do it now.

2:21:21Griffin Newman:The challenge is it's like, James Gunn was, I guess, down for it, but it's like, do you want that job? It's like, kind of this weird executive managerial job. You always need someone that's like, I just want good stories. Totally. And then the Star Wars stuff will come in.

2:21:35David Sims:Or at least a 50-50 split, you know, versus Filoni's interests feel 90 % maintaining the tenets of Star Wars. Yeah. In a very kind of like literal way. You say, you know, do they bring someone else in? Do they push them aside? The question is beyond who would even want to do that because it feels like such a poison chalice and the fandom has become so impossible to please. I feel like the fandom speaks as if they're monolithic, even though it's like a shattered, like 40-part fandom with different feelings. You know, it's like modern Christianity that's like a bunch of different sex, and then they're speaking as a monolith.

2:22:12David Sims:And then Disney reacts to them like they're also a monolith. So you're never actually making something that pleases everyone, and everyone's like, no, Star Wars is for me, and why are you not making the thing that I want? which is a struggle. I'm not against the idea of this being a movie that's just for kids to get the new generation in. And if kids are loving this, I'm happy. The screening we went to, our buddy Matt Singer brought his daughter, who I believe has not watched the show. Sure. I don't know if she's ever seen the original Star Wars movie. I think she's seen some Star Wars. I'm not sure.

2:22:43David Sims:But she's certainly not specifically a big Star Wars fan. You said you brought her to the press screen? Matt Singer brought his daughter. Oh, got it, got it, got it. And he, you know, I thought you did have a post. I did not. I did not.

2:22:58David Sims:He brought his daughter, who I think is nine, and was just kind of like, I want to see that movie because I like Baby Yoda. And he said that she enjoyed it. But she also enjoyed her green-colored sprite as much as she enjoyed the movie. And it was just sort of the general celebration of Grogu was enough. I'm not going to be cynical of that. I like anything that makes people happy that isn't aggressively harmful to society. We will all be dead sooner than those children. Totally. They need those children spending their money when they are in the workforce. Yes. But I question, is there even an obvious or semi-obvious person to point to of should that person take over Star Wars?

2:23:41David Sims:Because when people were angry about the movies four years ago, everyone would have said, probably makes sense to hand it to Favreau. Sure. And if not Favreau, Filoni's the bad fan choice. and now both of these guys have kind of like stepped in it. Well, but I mean,

2:23:56Griffin Newman:I personally would never have wanted Filoni to be in charge of Star Wars. Favreau, I could have seen that happening. Yeah. Yeah. He's more got that kind of like vague exec kind of status.

2:24:07David Sims:Now I would rather see him be in charge of a Cubano truck, for example, because it feels like that's what really makes him happy. Tasty Cubano. It's so funny that he made one great giant franchise movie, one franchise movie that was a mess then made his self-referential, I'm struggling working within these corporate demands. I just want to be doing my little thing, food truck. Got that out of his system has become the ultimate like studio hired hand guy. Has become the like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I figured out how to take all difficulty out of the filmmaking process and I will do nothing controversial.

2:24:49David Sims:David. Yeah. Quick question. and be honest. I solemnly swear, I will tell the truth and nothing but it. Thank you. When did you last actually think about how much fiber you're eating? Can't say. I can't say I think about it enough.

2:25:03Griffin Newman:Actually think about it. I don't know. Not recently enough.

2:25:06David Sims:I'm not talking protein. I'm not talking calories. Fiber. Fiber. It's important. Fiber. In the U.S., fewer than one in 10 adults hit their daily recommended intake, and fiber isn't a bonus nutrient. It's foundational. Fullness, gut health, something that certainly affects me, energy, blood sugar. It touches all of it. And as someone who struggles with, let's say, I do too. Digestion issues. Sometimes I try to be mindful of fiber and that's where Huel comes in. Sponsor of the podcast, H-U-E-L. Huel! Huel. Huel. Huelhauser. Here's what Huel actually is. It's not Huelhauser, who was himself California gold.

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2:26:18David Sims:Grab a bottle of this out of the fridge. it hits just right. Some days I'm locked in. I go to the gym. I meal prep for me. Those days are called never. It literally never happens. Other days. And I call these days every day. I look up and realize it's 2 p.m. and I've had coffee and nothing healthy. That actually is a little bit too accurate. Puel is the first thing that's actually helped me stay consistent instead of falling off every time my schedule blows up in the way I just said. The ready to drink I grab on the way out the door, 35 grams of protein, seven grams of fiber, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, under five bucks, and Don Cheadle uncredited.

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2:27:53Can I ask a question? Yeah, please. And I just also want to say, I think you guys would agree. Yeah. I think I've put the bad boy of blank check bit on hold for this episode. I think we've had a thoughtful discussion with a lot of good points.

2:28:06David Sims:I think you're blank checks. Good boy. Some passion along the way that maybe led to some early moments of contentiousness, but I think all in the spirit of the debate. Yeah, it's an emotional arc. And I think that you and anyone listening can hear that we are, I believe, two hours in, and I'm only bringing this up for the first time now. Yeah, or 17. I hope that that's a reflection that I'm asking this genuinely and not trying to force any past divisiveness back into the spotlight for real. Sure. When I watched Andor and I watched Rogue One, I mentioned before that I did have that. It's not that much harder than shooting womp rats in the T-14 back home.

2:28:41and you go, oh, Luke was so fucking naive. So innocent. And it actually, like, a new hope is, obviously you kind of know this, but it just underlines. He's hope. He's a farm boy who represents this idea. Like, not only does he step up in the face of people who know the history of Cassian Andor, killing someone who's like, you're on my team, but you're making too much fucking noise. Blah, you're dead. But also he's a vessel. He's an idea to believe in.

2:29:11David Sims:And he's a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy with optimism. How? And I don't. Oh, boy. You see where I'm going? I know where you're coming from.

2:29:21Griffin Newman:I just want you to say it. How do we, like, I sink my teeth into that, Luke, and it actually gets me choked up thinking about the beauty of, like, oh, right, there is no revolution in real life that can lose sight of hope and optimism. and Luke is the reminder of that in this universe that we love. But I think the other thing that Star Wars is about is that history repeats itself. But when we get to The Last Jedi and Luke himself is cynical, that's not even slightly heartbreaking.

2:29:50David Sims:No. It is heartbreaking, but that's the point. That's what it's using. That's the story engine is that it's heartbreaking.

2:29:55Griffin Newman:I just don't have this relationship with Luke that you do. I just don't at all. Then why do you like Star Wars? I don't want Luke to be... I'm fucking on Solo! You see that, motherfucker? Why are you yelling at me? Because you're like... Why do I like Star Wars? I like Luke all right I'm being so gentle about even bringing it up Because I think it's a valid question in light of Andor But I'm trying to respond It's just not what I feel about Luke I just don't care about Luke in that way I care about Luke, but I think it's more interesting To have these things tested It's also just so funny to me It's the same as Yoda Forever and ever And everyone's like, I can't believe Rian Johnson did that And I'm like, episode 7 begins with He has vanished That's the exquisite corpse he was handed.

2:30:36Griffin Newman:And number two, George Lucas's entire plan for his secret trilogy was the exact same shit. It was the exact same thing.

2:30:43David Sims:It was going to be more Wills-focused, but it was going to be Luke on his own island. I really am not trying to have a fight. Yeah. I'm really not trying to poke a beehive again. I'm not doing a bit. I just will say the dismal nature of Andor building up to the dismal ending of Rogue One, linking right to Vader on the ship and throwing you into Luke's story with the new context of like this world is fucking falling apart. This kid's aunt and uncle got killed. He's leaving this world and he somehow still fucking believes that like he has the fucking idiocy the audacity if not idiocy to think he can actually blow up the Death Star but then he does it.

2:31:29Because it's page 20 knowledge.

2:31:30David Sims:He's a young man. he hasn't experienced anything. All I'm trying to put on record is that that's the Luke I love. And I'm just leaving it at that. I'm not trying to have a fight about it. That's the Luke I love. Sometimes you love your dad and then he gets old and he's like racist and you're like, how is this the same guy? Not speaking of my own father. But they don't make a movie. The credits can roll before your dad gets racist. That's why it's fiction. But then you're questioning the entire enterprise of making these movies. Which ties into, do we need more stars?

2:31:58Griffin Newman:Maybe not. Okay, but here's the thing. we're going to have more Star Wars. It's happening. You guys can feel it. I'm being a good boy. All these debates died with Episode IX. Yes. Any chance to sort of properly resolve whatever you felt about the Luke story or any of the other sequels died with Episode IX, which had no story. They whiffed in a way that pissed off both sides. Because in Episode IX... Everyone was unhappy other than Chris Getherd, blank checks, good boy. The ocean fight looked cool. Some things... The Episode IX looks all right. It looks great. If Episode IX had successfully kind of given you a satisfying conclusion to the stories of Rey and Finn and Kylo Ren and maybe Poe but like those big three.

2:32:36Oh, Poe.

2:32:37Griffin Newman:I like Poe. No, but I'm just saying like if you had given them satisfying endings then you would have been like string him to a tree and chop his head off. Hey, come on. Let me talk. Sorry, dude. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Please. Forget it. No, no. I just run out of energy, guys. You're smart and I respect you. You're smart and I respect you. Please. I'm just, dudes, I'm so out of energy. I want to hear this point. It's too late. It's gone, guys. No, we're begging for it. You cut me off so many times. We're making a joke about chopping both ends up. I'm sorry. I'm going to be honest with you guys. I'm not mad, but I get cut off so much that I just, my brain can't fire anymore.

2:33:13Griffin Newman:I don't remember what I'm trying to say.

2:33:15David Sims:You were saying if it had given satisfying endings to the main character.

2:33:18Griffin Newman:Then the Luke and Leia and Han stories in the sequels might not hurt your feelings as much. They might be a fun debate then, instead of a... It would be like Luke did that and had all that in service of what happened to Kylo, which made sense, and Rey, which made sense. And instead it was like, Rey decides to be Skywalker because she thinks that's nice. Kylo died. He was all right the last 20 minutes there. It is ultimately... Poe. Where does Poe end it? I don't know. He's around.

2:33:49David Sims:He's dying and rolling his eyes because Palpatine returned.

2:33:51Griffin Newman:But I mean, like, after that, is he around? He's around. He blows up the Empire or whatever. And Finn, I guess, like maybe meets his sister or his friend or something. He wasn't his sister. And she's not Lando's daughter, but she's like, I don't know. She's like him or something. Because she also was a stormtrooper. But maybe they have force powers. We'll deal with it later. And it's just kind of like the movie just kind of ends with like, I don't know. Everyone's all right. Can we talk about the other elephant in the room? It is tough to be like, oh, right. it could be an interesting debate but like we don't even we fundamentally don't trust that anyone's at the wheel of this entire thing.

2:34:33Luke's

2:34:34Griffin Newman:in episode 9 right? And Han Solo. They bring both of them back as Force goes. Han Solo I remember because that moment is fine because he doesn't even speak. No he talks. What does he say? That's so shit. Son I'm sorry. But Luke has like the scene like Ghost Luke sits with Ghost Yoda and they're like hey Rey Skywalker I like the sound of that yeah drink Schlitz like I just you know it's just like if there had been it then maybe you wouldn't be so mad or I'm not mad or whatever your emotion is about the sort of the later arc of Luke that they blew it's I don't even care to relitigate it I'm sorry that got any of us this upset I just realized I just really think Andor underlines the naivete of Luke in a way that I think it really underlines what I always liked about the character.

2:35:31David Sims:I agree, but that's the naivete of a young man and also a white man who's not being challenged in the same way that Andor is. I mean, that's part of what Andor is about. Nice fun part of the juice of Andor. Totally. And even down to him. Not in a over-the-top way. Not in a lecturing way. He is like coded as immigrant within the universe of the movie. And he's never going to be the poster boy. He's hidden in the shadows. Totally. Can't be the poster boy. What I would equate it to, Geth, is part of the enduring power of Jesus as an idea for people to believe in is that he died very young, right?

2:36:07David Sims:As a pure symbol. Kind of have to die. And there's also the promise of he's going to come back someday. But if he never comes back, we can all project how helpful he would be today. and I think there was a similar thing because you make this trilogy, it ends with Luke settling the universe, right? And now he's become the Jedi Master and then George Lucas is like, I'm stepping away and by the way, if I were to do more, they'd be prequels. It just takes Luke off the board where we all have our headcanons of how great Luke could be, right? And then he does the prequels and people are disappointed and then they come back.

2:36:45I will say not another word about it. I'm just putting on record and or made me like the Luke I met when I was young.

2:36:54David Sims:Totally. But that guy can't live forever. Like, life experiences are going to change him and test him. I mean, the thing that sucks,

2:37:00Griffin Newman:and then we should just, of course, return to, well, we should be done soon. Just talk a little rata. There's some toys we need to have. A little rata. A little bit of rata. But it's just like, that was your shot with Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher.

2:37:13David Sims:That's the thing they absolutely fucked up is never putting the three of them in the same frame while they had the chance.

2:37:17Griffin Newman:And that's a J.J. fuck up. It's a bit of a J.J. fuck up. And it's just kind of a like, you know, you had all those guys. They all look great in Force Awakens. It's like, you know, the energy could be there. Terry dying is a tragedy. No one could have anticipated that. That was a force majeure disaster. But just generally, it's kind of like, we saw old Han Solo, that kind of rocked. Yes. We saw Luke Skywalker, old Luke Skywalker, people have complicated feelings, but he gave a big performance. He did. We saw old Leia, you know, there's little bits where you're kind of like, chemistry. That kind of rocks, but like, there's not much of it and it's sort of, you know, and it's like, and now if they're like, hey, we're going to do episode 10, it's like, yeah, but you're not going to do it with them, so that's that over.

2:37:57Griffin Newman:So now,

2:37:58David Sims:what are you going to do? Our friends who've been watching Star Wars with their kids are all like, Rey still fucking hits. Oh yeah, Rey rocks. Like, kids watching this today, you know, born after these films ended, that trilogy ended, are like, I'm buying Rey. I'm buying Rey like I'm buying Luke. Both of these work for me. Like, on buying Anakin. I mean, that's the interesting thing about our friends with kids under 10 who have shown them all three trilogies are like, they're in on all three of these arcs. Yeah. They like the innocent. They like seeing the innocent go bad. They like seeing the different versions of what the innocent becomes.

2:38:31David Sims:That all works. The elephant in the room, I think we should just talk about very briefly. The rata in the room. The rata in the room. The hut in the room. It was revealed earlier this year that they had been deep in development and had greenlit. and Lucasfilm internally was ready to go on a movie that was going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott C. Burns, one of his regular collaborators, that was the Kylo Ren movie that was basically Adam Driver being like, we got to fucking undo this Rise of Skywalker.

2:39:00Griffin Newman:Clearly Driver just being like, that character rocked. Yeah. Yes, like, and we didn't do it right and can we just bring him back and like do a better thing?

2:39:08David Sims:Right, and no one knows exactly what the take was on how he's back or what, you know, it was, but it was going to be set after episode nine and it was going to be called The Hunt for Ben Solo and not be episode 10 proper, but it be this Kylo Ren, Ben Solo movie. And Lucasfilm greenlights it. Kathleen Kennedy greenlights it. It went along some amount of time. Disney says no to it. Yeah. And Kathleen Kennedy did an exit interview earlier this year where she was like, that's the only time that's happened, that we wanted to make something and they overruled us. And the argument that was given to us is, we don't think you've justified in the story undoing his death.

2:39:49David Sims:Right. It's like, I just don't see how he's alive. Right. Versus like Mando and Grogu, I got no questions about. They're on another adventure. And it speaks to like what a mess this thing is where kind of what everyone wants is a movie that could undo the damage of nine. And I accept some pretty stupid logic if it leads to a good movie that is functional on its own terms and leaves me feeling like these characters are in a better place. But then it's like, what?

2:40:15Griffin Newman:You're going to make a whole movie that exists to fix continuity, right? And it's like, on the one hand, sure. On the other hand, should you just do something else? Just forget it. Just like lob the ball to another field.

2:40:28David Sims:But then I'm also like, if Adam Driver wants to do it, that's already more of an argument in favor. That's the thing. That's the baffling part, that you have an enthusiastic Adam Driver and Steven Soderbergh that want to play in this sandbox. That's an energy that Mando doesn't have where Pedro Pascal is like, so what? Five days total, right?

2:40:44Griffin Newman:It speaks to the Disney thing where they are not hearing Soderbergh's driver. They're hearing like, they're going to be expensive. They're going to have notes. They're going to push back. You know, like they're probably hearing just kind of like, those are artists. We don't want to deal with that. We just want to make something that's like, you know, we can control.

2:41:04David Sims:The thing with Soderbergh was part of his big pitch was I figured out how to make this movie cheaper. I think these movies got too expensive and that created a fear around making creative decisions. He's been figuring out how to shoot movies on fucking iPhones. This wasn't going to be that. But he was like, I think I can apply some of what I learned to make a movie that costs half as much as what these other things cost. Closer to probably the budget of this movie. And said, like, it would be great if we could free Star Wars up to have different budget levels. You know, this is the thing that fucked Marvel eventually, is that the movies got so big, they couldn't make a smaller film.

2:41:40David Sims:So everything has to be$300 million worth of justification. And I, to some degree, commend that Mando's small. Sort of. At least he's not trying, right, to be the star to something new. It's not cacophonous, but it's like it really places a lot of its bets on Rod of the Hut, who is ripped ab laden Jeremy Ellen White with a pitch down voice whose characterization is just my dad was shitty. I'm trying not to be like my dad. I'm like a muscle break.

2:42:13Griffin Newman:Now let's fight the chess pieces from the chess thing. So, Chris. Yeah. This character. I'm actually watching a Twitter video of it right now. Rada. This character sucks. This is like hard to watch. Can I ask where you saw the film, Ben? I know you saw it with some kids. I saw it at the Cobble Hill Theater. Oh, that's kind of a fun place to see it. And what actually I think enhanced it for me on an emotional level is that the 15-year-old kids that were there were talking throughout the entire movie. Yeah. And that helped me get distracted from the film. Sure. Because I could then lock in on my anger at like this kid whispering to his friend that that's Jeremy Allen White up there on the screen or whatever the fuck.

2:43:09Griffin Newman:What did you ask me? Oh, just were they, yeah, were they into the movie? Were they like this rock? They loved it. They were laughing at everything. Every bad fucking joke, they were like rolling and fucking in the aisles. Maybe we're the old heads and we just need to let it go. Every time Grogu came on screen, there was a group of girls. They were just like, they were just like, ah! That's what I mean. Grogu. I understand projections. Thank you. But I watched a movie where I'm like, it's not for me. Yeah. I have to let go of the idea that Star Wars is going to give me anything to actually chew on like it really legitimately used to.

2:43:44But like the kids in that theater walked out.

2:43:48Griffin Newman:Is Andor almost a problem? because it demonstrated that that can still be done. And we're like, why don't you do this all the time?

2:43:56David Sims:This is the fascinating thing is I've been so deep in Star Wars. And the closer we've gotten to this, the more I've been watching, right? To make my deadline, my self-imposed deadline. And the majority of the stuff I've watched, I have not liked. And a lot of it, I found kind of a slog to get through and kind of boring. And I'm not a binge watcher in general. So that notion of being like, to stay on schedule, I got to watch three tonight has like often felt like true homework. In a way, this job of doing the podcast and having assigned viewing usually does not. Yet, the more I'm watching the stuff I don't like, as much as watching the stuff like Andor that I love, I've come out of it just being like, fuck, I'm remembering how much I love Star Wars.

2:44:37David Sims:Like when I see Andor, it reminds me everything that makes me love Star Wars. And when I watch the stuff I don't like, it reminds me of what it's not doing, which reminds me of what I do like about Star Wars. where I just like have bought three Star Wars shirts in the last two weeks because I keep being like fucking Star Wars. What'd you buy? They're like old comic art shirts, which I kind of like. Like it's the Marvel comic.

2:44:59Griffin Newman:Isn't it funny how all these like bespoke t-shirt shops online and stuff and like, you know, like with these sort of like indie designs of shit we like, like X-Men or Star, are basically just kind of like, you know those guys on the street who would just have weird t-shirts that were kind of like bootleg. Bootleg stuff has become official. Right. We're that. Yeah. It's$45. Right. Like it's like, you want a hoodie that makes you look like Nightcrawler. Right. Do I have a$98 deal for you? And by the way, you don't know if this is a drop shipping company in China that might take eight months to send it to you.

2:45:34David Sims:Or is it like a hype beast company run by VC people? I almost think to speak to what we just touched on, Andor almost feels like a really good, profound accident that it ever slipped through. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think that a lot of the explosions of nerd entertainment, when you look at them historically, actually max you up with points of major societal anxiety. Yeah. Right. Totally. And we're living through one of those moments. Right. Like superheroes were invented by young Jewish creators as Hitler was rising in Europe. This is when superheroes were invented. And feeling empowered as survivors making it through the other side.

2:46:11David Sims:Well, on 60s Marvel was a combination of those same Jewish creators. now also talking about survivorship and nuclear anxiety, right? All the origins of the Marvel race. A lot of civil rights. But you look at Spider-Man, Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men, all nuclear anxiety leading into social movements. Children of the Atom. Feminism, racial anxiety, all of it, right? The same years that race riots were happening in major American cities are the same years Marvel's exploding. And Star Wars about the Vietnam War. It's about seeing another era, a new form of fascism on the horizon. and it's about all of these things.

2:46:46And now we don't, like I don't know what to point to that's doing that now and then and or maybe it seems accidentally or Trojan Horse did in a way that feels like such a tease compared to everything else, which is like now they fight a big dragon snake. Now they fight a couple of robots and now they fight this and that and now they fight the whole fucking chessboard and now they fly away. Oh, the chessboard are the monsters Yeah. Oh. Yeah, you didn't love that, Ben? Well, because they just looked like nothing. Yes.

2:47:21David Sims:They just looked like moving. The monster. They looked like who? Ben, thank you for calling that out. I have a thing I want to say about this. So the chessboard was done by Phil Tippett, who's like one of my favorite film artists of all time. The original Star Wars movie with the little puppets. Yeah. Play guys. It was the first moment that Phil Tippett really kind of shown in the process because he was brought in as sort of an additional guy to do stuff. They had shot the Dajaric chessboard as actors in costumes, and it didn't look good. And George was like, can we get a Harryhausen type thing?

2:47:53David Sims:And they were like, Tippett's good at stop motion. And he does that, and it leads to the breakthrough of him being the guy who cracks the Tauntaun and the AT-AT and all these sorts of things, right? And then RoboCop and Ed 209 is like a legend to me and like a genius. And I watched this documentary about him that was called, let me look it up quickly but I watched it recently it's a documentary made by two French guys that's mostly just kind of like informational about the entirety of his career and his worldview and whatever and a lot of his compatriots were talking about him and what makes him so great and they said the thing about Phil is a lot of people start with detail and build out a design from there and Phil always starts with really elemental shapes he lands on a shape that's interesting and then he lands on a personality connected to that shape and then he works into the finer detail.

2:48:44David Sims:And it's like, right, you see the Djarik Tress board for like seconds and the different shapes on that board beyond being different colors feel so distinct and recognizable. This movie shows them for 10 minutes. It does. They move all around. It covers them in a way where you basically never see them full body. You can't distinguish between them. And these are very honed designs by a genius. they brought Phil Tippett in to work on this movie he did work a lot of the special effects feel like they are CGI trying to approximate Phil Tippett's stop motion especially the little walker that Mando's on in the snow at the beginning of the movie hated that but I sucked but then I felt like the big robots at the end might have actually been some version of stop motion it certainly they felt very Robocane so he's involved in this process like this is a guy that Favreau idolizes and yet he's not getting what made this guy's work work.

2:49:39Griffin Newman:What I didn't like about the opening sequence, apart from just generally kind of low energy, the weird thing of him going up and down the mountain in the walker, it just felt like a video game where you like one of those open world games where you like end up. No, it's like you're like, I'm going to go this way and then you like climb over a mountain by the snake. Like it just didn't make any sense of the physics of it. Well, why would they be walking in the mouth of a fly? He is a character who flies. Yeah, yeah. But there is still a part of me that's a sucker for like Empire starts with a big dumb battle on Hawthorne.

2:50:11And it's a big smart battle.

2:50:14David Sims:It's really a cold open. Yeah. It's a cold open. And Ben has quit the podcast. I guess I'm still just a bit of a sucker. Like there's still just enough of a kid in me that's like, maybe they didn't nail it in every way. But like I'll watch the heroes climb into a Star Wars Walker machine. I'll watch it. I was there five out of ten.

2:50:34Griffin Newman:They got a convertible AT-ST. They got an open top AT-ST. Okay. This is me being 100 % honest. I still am charmed by that.

2:50:42David Sims:I wanted to feel that so badly. And because I was like feeling so ramped up on Star Wars, I go into the screen with David and I'm like, I'm not excited for this, but I bet when it starts, some of the key jangling is going to get to me. Right. I bet they're going to start showing me things that are Star Wars. By the way, I like these characters. I love that first season. I like Grogu. Grogu is like a marvel, right? Like they nailed the execution of this character on a technical level, which is half really fucking high level puppetry. And the genius of Grogu is when he's digital, they make the digital look like a puppet.

2:51:15David Sims:They use the limitations. And like Grogu fucking just works visually this whole movie. And I sat there and I kept waiting for anything to give me any feeling of joy. And I wasn't sitting there with my arms crossed. I wasn't like, this sucks. I just felt bored. and I don't know if it's that I like maxed out on Star Wars, if coming off of Andor, the bar was set too high, it being so fresh in my mind, or if I just am like, guys, we can't be doing this. Like there has to be something new. I see the trailers for the He-Man movie, which is another dumb baby thing that I love so much. And like the trailers have not been great, but I'm like, I guarantee you I'm going to sit there and they're going to show me characters and I'm going to point at the screen.

2:51:57David Sims:I got hope for Ram Man. People are starting to say it's kind of good. There's starting to be some okay responses. Whereas the Street Fighter movie. Yeah. You're out on that? I don't know about that. Interesting. But yeah, I'm like... I don't know about that. If I see Ram Man ram into a bunch of guys, I'm probably going to like... And you have real connections to He-Man. I have been Orko. You've been Orko? What a wild thing to be able to say. Isn't that insane? Yeah. It really is. Orko and Arthur are the two things where I'm like, It's actually crazy that there are characters that meant that much to me when I was young that I got a chance to play.

2:52:31David Sims:And I think about this stuff where it's like, in both of those cases, I want to do my own thing, but there's a legacy of these characters. I want anyone who grew up with them to recognize, not that it's identical, but that the spirit of the thing is captured, but how do you do something new with it? I spent years professionally thinking on this stuff so much in a microcosm, only how it relates to these characters. And just be like, it's got to be new. Otherwise, you're just doing an impression. But also, don't try to make it your own thing and disregard the past entirely. And I just, this movie to me felt like it was just like snow, right?

2:53:11David Sims:Like Hoth stuff? Yeah. Like, you like that?

2:53:14Griffin Newman:You like Walker? I do. I do like Walker. I do like Walker. Like I said, I'm like, five out of ten. I ate my chicken fingers. If my kid was older, you know, old enough to see it, I would have taken my kid and been like, yeah, I was all right. You would have had a better time with your daughter than me because she would have gotten a little something out of it. And I'm not like just gripping my hands together going like, that's so fucking bad. But I am just kind of like, this ain't really getting my blood pumping. Yeah, I was tired. All right. We ought to be done talking about that movie because I know you have toys to show me or whatever.

2:53:45Griffin Newman:Like, we cannot ignore the toys.

2:53:47David Sims:Did we at least shout out Embo? It's crazy that we didn't even mention that. There's a fucking assassin, the skinny assassin character with the flat hat. Who basically becomes the antagonist for the second act with the wolf. I kind of like the character design. I thought he looked cool.

2:54:02Griffin Newman:Apparently he's from one of the animated... He's a Flowny. He's from the Clone Wars? He's a Flowny thing, right?

2:54:08David Sims:Oh, he's a Flowny creation? I briefly thought he was

2:54:11Griffin Newman:what, Constable Zuvio? You did. I was like, why don't they make him Zuvio? You were like, that would be the coolest move. I did. I just... I thought he was cool. He's like, I'm going to be a constable. I like that he has a dog. I thought that wolf was cool. Yeah. No, I thought this guy was cool. Can I say... Wait, what's the wolf? He has a little dog. He has a wolf. That's like his Grogu. Yeah. I'm going to say something. It's going to make me sound nuts. Yeah. You either... Here we go. Uh-oh. No. Never mind. It's the type of thing that I say.

2:54:40David Sims:You have to say it, and then we're going to do food and toys. I think if you're going to have the wolf pick up one of the Babu Fricks with its mouth, just kill the Babu Fricks. I agree with you. I agree with you 100%.

2:54:51Griffin Newman:Just crown the courage of your conviction. For Babu Frick. Kill one of the Babu Fricks. I think it's okay if maybe one is maybe. Much like like two Ewoks like die in Return of the Jedi. Right, and you have it roll over and go like, and it's kind of sad. It's kind of sad. It's good. It brings you in. Again, like the corporatism is showing when it's like, well, we can't possibly, we can't possibly kill one of the Babu Fricks. The children will be sad. It's like, then don't have the wolf ever put it in its mouth. But don't go halfway. Kill the Babu Frick. is there like, I just like the Star Wars thing of like the Anzalians.

2:55:25Griffin Newman:That's the epic aliens where it's like, so do they just all like being mechanics? Is it a world of mechanics? This is where Star Wars

2:55:34David Sims:gets weird with its like races sometimes.

2:55:36Griffin Newman:Like are there no Anzalians who are like, I make fucking pizza. Like someone's got to eat them. I'm working on an EP. Dad, I like music. Maybe they're like, just all guys with a bunch of goggles. Maybe they're like Cornish miners. Maybe it happens to be an industry they have excelled in culturally for decades. Let's go with that. So we bring them to Michigan and have them... They're like the Cornish miners of the Star Wars universe. Do you remember how Carrie Russell is in episode nine as like a lady with a helmet or whatever? And Zori Bliss. She's a spice dealer. Right. And like, I've forgotten that.

2:56:07Griffin Newman:She's got tight booty. But there was Babu Frick and it was like,

2:56:10David Sims:Babu Frick! Babu was on her shoulder and we forget that she existed. And like that Babu Frick... She's a fantastic actress. Incredible. You don't see her face. Incredible. She wears a helmet the whole fucking movie. Maybe one of our best living actresses. Absolutely.

2:56:22Griffin Newman:She's up there. Yeah. Bobby Frick only survives because Spielberg at the end was like, where's Bobby Frick? Where the fuck is Bobby? Are you guys idiots? So they have him like pop up and go like, hey, hey. Okay. I know we're trying to move on and I think you should do your thing. I want to, at least because we've been slamming on this movie, I want to call out some good stuff quickly at the end. I went on record from the start that I liked it better than I thought I was going for. Here's the thing I want to shout out is I like all of the shady droids that work for the twins. I think there's awesome design there.

2:56:53Griffin Newman:And even the assassin we've been talking about, Embo, he has some other guys in his crew. Yeah. Including the one that's headless.

2:57:04David Sims:I think that shit's cool. This is the stuff that felt very tippet to me. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the stuff he worked on directly. Because he's got a pretty major credit in the film, I noticed. Yeah.

2:57:14Griffin Newman:But I just like the idea that there's mercenary droids. Yeah. No. But that's been in Star Wars before, though. But I guess it's cool. It's cool and it's different. Yeah. Sure. I'm trying to. I don't know. I don't know why. Speaking positively about most of the Disney Plus stuff. Like I said, I liked Obi-Wan more than most people. I liked Ahsoka more than most people. I found Book of Boba Fett. I watched it all. Yeah. I found it disappointing. I didn't hate that. it was a little disappointing. I think it gets worse. I think the stuff on the Mandalorian world it got away from what I liked about the first season but on its own I liked it well enough.

2:57:52Sure. But I think I've had to kind of almost start treating Star Wars as like that's someone I used to date who I was deeply in love with. That is how I feel right now. It's a great way to... And I'm buying two shirts with my ex. I'm buying two shirts with my ex's face on it. But we can still text like it's an ex that I'm still friends with but we don't love each other anymore but we can still text. There's a reason you fell in love.

2:58:13Griffin Newman:Andor when you had like a week long like vacation with them later and like it was like back to the glory days but you had to leave it, you know, like behind. Andor is when you are frustrated in your current relationship and then while you're on the toilet you check your ex's Instagram to see how they're doing. I don't know, man. That's what it is.

2:58:31David Sims:Maybe that's why I like Andor so much. I also, I feel like my relationship to Star Wars is closer to it being the ex where I'm like, we're friends and it's good. Is she still dating that guy? you know I want to disappoint me again no no no no no the opposite I want to believe like maybe there's like a universe where it could work out again even if it seems unlikely yeah you've got we've got to get past the base of emotions is so strong culturally we have to get past the idea that we're ever getting back together what David I bought this toy for George Lucas talk show we were in Pittsburgh and Connor wanted to do the George Lucas pitch show which is an insane idea so I was like oh can I get a Grogu that does something sure so I can act like Grogu is a patient This toy is called Galactic Snack and Grogu.

2:59:13David Sims:He's got a weird open mouth. And if you push his tummy, his cheeks flex. And the idea is that he comes with little snacks. Little niblets. And you feed them into his mouth. And he chews them, sort of. Let's see. Yeah, there you go. They go down there. Oh, they go down. Yeah. And then how do you get them back? Pretty far back. Now this was... It's more of... I was just doing it for visibility. It's more about... You can do it facing up. I bought this for the show. and then the theater had bad eye lines or sight lines. Yeah. So it didn't work at all. I'm gifting you this for your daughter. Oh, sure.

2:59:45David Sims:She will have fun with it. The food's in the backpack. And this is what Mandalorian and Grogu is all about. It's about merchandise and it's about snacking. So I found four different food items. We don't have to eat all of them now, but I at least want to just introduce them. I have a feeling I know where you bought them. I don't think you can guess. I'm holding a big Target bag. These are... So many toys. Oh, fuck. No, they're not toys. They're food. Oh, you're saying your box of toys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you get these as well? I did. Great. Ben and I parallel thinking. Great. Okay. Fan foods.

3:00:18David Sims:Officially delicious. Outer Rim ranch flavored chips. The cutest chip in the galaxy. The chips are shaped like Grogu. I find this pretty morbid. There is a part of me that this is bringing me back to growing up in the 80s where Mr. T's face was just on everything. though. Yes, it does feel like that. So we have two boxes of vanilla wafers. We have two boxes of Fan Foods. Ben, did you buy anything else?

3:00:43Griffin Newman:Ben was late to this. I mean, not late, but like, you know, delayed because he was buying these at Target. Yes. I do have one other thing.

3:00:53David Sims:Did you also purchase Muddy Bites cookies and cream filled waffle cones with green vanilla filling?

3:00:58Griffin Newman:No, I didn't. No. The Target I went to.

3:01:00David Sims:Okay, so that's a proprietary item to the Griff bag. Did you purchase this? What is that? What the fuck is that? It's like a... It's called a Pop Pulse. Oh, boy. At-home movie theater popcorn kit. Does it make popcorn? It's three buckets and two bags of microwave popcorn, but most interestingly, Galactic Stardust popcorn seasoning. Oh, sure. I don't know what that tastes like. Ben... The stars, of course. What was the other item that you bought?

3:01:31Griffin Newman:Well, because I knew it was Chris's birthday tomorrow, So I thought it would be nice to at least get him a gift. That's so nice. Thank you. So here, I'll give it to you. One sec.

3:01:41David Sims:Okay, here's the galactic seasoning. It doesn't have ingredients listed on it. This unit is not marked for individual. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. This is really kind.

3:01:49Griffin Newman:And this was worth you being delayed. This was worth that. This is a Mandalorian and Grogu electronic Mando mask.

3:01:57David Sims:Wait, so are you saying it's a voice changer mask like the one my sister had? Is this going to make you get Jeremy Allen white voice? It does seem to have a thing that if you hold down the button on the side and speak...

3:02:10Griffin Newman:This is the way. Oh, there you go. Okay, so it says Mando stuff. So it's not like you can put it on and be like, Donald Trump did nothing wrong in Mando. Like... Can I ask why there are two Star Trek poster things on my desk? Yes, you can ask. Okay. Why? I'm not mad. I'm just wondering. Yeah. They're little pictures. I thought you might like them because they're interesting little promotional paintings.

3:02:34David Sims:Yeah. I found at a vintage store, I think it was when I was in Pittsburgh, action figures of the Malcolm McDowell villain from Generations. Of course, Tillion Soren. And Alfre Woodard's character from First Contact. We love her. And they both came with these posters and I thought you might like them. I like them fine. I thought they're nice little original art.

3:02:54Griffin Newman:I just like that they're anything with that kind of 90s feel. That's what I'm saying. That's why I thought you'd like it.

3:02:59David Sims:I thought it was your aesthetic.

3:03:01Griffin Newman:I'm pro. I'm pro.

3:03:02David Sims:Okay, I'm putting the ears on this popcorn bucket. I think this has been a good episode. I think we've gone on a journey. There have been ups and there have been downs. Look, if we just literally like broke down.

3:03:11Griffin Newman:Okay, Chris. Okay, someone get a picture of this because this is pretty good.

3:03:15David Sims:Okay, this is really good.

3:03:18Griffin Newman:Although it is underlining that the Mandalorian is the most quotable guy. Okay, he's just saying lasers. This does not even work. Mandalorian. What was that? I am the Mandalorian. It's a mask that literally says I am the Mandalorian. What if the next one is I am not Boba Fett? Some of these are just sounds. I don't think the sound effects were a good call. I need some information. I need some information. This is what he talks like.

3:03:50David Sims:Where is Ron? Hi. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Thank you, man. You look great, Jeff. You're so welcome. Truly a kind present. This definitely feels like the most thematically appropriate way to sort of wind down this episode. Because this is what it's all about, folks. Yeah. Unfortunately, this movie exists to create these bags of bullshit. It exists for toy. And for snack. Yeah. For nommies. But we'll make sure to post pics of all of this stuff on social.

3:04:21Griffin Newman:God, this thing is freaky.

3:04:23David Sims:It is weird, right?

3:04:24Griffin Newman:The cheek movements are weird.

3:04:25David Sims:I thought it was going to be really funny, and then you just couldn't see it from the stage. It's kind of cute. It's kind of cute. The cheek movements are weird, and I thought the creepiness would play more visually. Right. So we think this is going to end up at like a 74-day, 75. Oh, you think it's not going to make a 104-day? That's where people are projecting right now.

3:04:47Griffin Newman:Let me see what the... We're doing, I guess, sort of the box office prediction game. Yep, yep, yep. So it opened, no, it had 12 million previews. That's the exact number that Captain America Brave New World had. Okay. That made 104. Okay. My guess is that Manda will be slightly over that because it's more kid friendly. Uh-huh. So I would guess that it's like low 100.

3:05:08David Sims:Okay.

3:05:09Griffin Newman:Four day. But obviously the word of mouth is not great. Although nor was it great for something like Captain America Brave New World. That's true. But I just think the kind of like, dude, it's a fucking rainy Memorial Day weekend and Baby Yoda is on a screen. Like, take your kids. Like, what's the worst that could happen? I'm going to say 85. Obviously, the other contenders at the box office right now are Curry Barker's Obsession, which is already like a kind of a breakout hit.

3:05:40David Sims:It looks like it's maybe going to go up this weekend. Yes. It's certainly going to... It feels like it's number two dethroning The Horror Movies. The Horror Movies. The Horror Movies. It's a very good film. It's good. I liked it. It's quite effective. I shouldn't say very good, but I liked it a lot. I had a good time. It's effective. It's very effective. That's a good way of putting it. You're a good film critic. Oh, Jesus. And a dear friend. Please relax. I'm sorry if sometimes the show gets annoying to do. It's quite hard. This is the way. We kind of got a Mando-Grogu relationship. Sometimes you have to tell me to kneel.

3:06:08David Sims:It's funny how Griffin's kind of trying to apologize for cutting me off. I mean, it's a somewhat self-aware bit.

3:06:13Griffin Newman:It's pretty good. Devil Wears Prada 2 is doing fine. like it's holding fine. I mean, yeah, exactly. Like it's like, it's good. Mortal Kombat 2 is doing, you know, the kind of 60 % drops one expects of a Mortal Kombat movie. But like, hey, everyone's happy. You see Mortal Kombat 2? No. Not bad. It's a lot of fun. Do you like Kitana? Sure. Do you like Baraka? All of our friends are here. This is probably the best Kitana's been in a movie in a long time. Raiden's in there. Maybe I'll take the flyer on it. Sheep Detectives, that's holding on. Is there anything else new this week, Griff? No. No.

3:06:47David Sims:There's no counter-programming.

3:06:49Griffin Newman:I know. I mean, oh, no, there's, there is counter-programming, right? Because there's... There's what? Fuck, isn't there one thing? I'm going to look it up. Yeah, there's I Love Boosters. Oh, sure. But I assume that'll be a little low. It doesn't, right. Yeah. And then there's this horror movie, Passenger, which I haven't seen. Oh, Andre Orvidal.

3:07:05David Sims:Whose movie is that kind of like? What else did he make? He did Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and he did Autopsy of Gene Doe, I want to say.

3:07:11Griffin Newman:Oh, yeah, those are both kind of interesting. It's just funny because it's like Deadline is referring it to as like the Melissa Leo horror film Passenger. Sure thing. And I'm trying to imagine how many people are like walking up to the box office being like, I hear there's a new Melissa Leo movie. Next week though, I think this is something Mando didn't see coming. I think Backrooms is going to eat its lunch a little bit. I mean, they're saying Backrooms might open to 50 now, which is crazy. Backrooms is one of those things where it's like, you don't understand. Every 20-year-old is very locked into like liminal spaces.

3:07:43Griffin Newman:This is an A24 movie directed by a 22-year-old? He's 21. No, he's 20 years old, and he will be turning 21 in a month. He cannot drink. I interviewed him recently.

3:07:56David Sims:Legally. This movie is about to open. Incredibly large. It's an adaptation of a viral YouTube video. It's like a real changing the guard moment for Hollywood. It is. It rocks. It's a good movie.

3:08:07Griffin Newman:And I liked him a lot. He was really smart. Just a kid self-taught during COVID how to make visual effects. shit and, you know, started making YouTube shorts and kind of rocks. Yeah. Like he was housebound by both the pandemic and arthritis. I can't read it to that. Taught himself Blender.

3:08:24David Sims:Yeah, except I didn't learn Blender. I got a faulty bucket. It's got two right ears. Yeah, that doesn't look right. This Grogu bucket. So we'll post a picture of... I've been fussing with it trying to figure out if I was thinking that wrong. It is.

3:08:38Griffin Newman:Yeah, it's a rare variant. Chris, is there anything we haven't covered that you wanted been very thorough. No, we did. Are you sure? No, we got to all my notes. I haven't watched Cora yet. It's next up on my list. Avatar is very good though. Has your son watched Cora? He started watching it, yeah. But then we decided to watch it as a family. Okay, okay. So he put it. What else is your son into? That's been the big one lately. Jurassic World has been very big for him. World. The whole Jurassic World cartoon. Oh, yes. I've heard that show's kind of fun. The films are too scary for him. Yeah, I can say that Jurassic World seems to be very big with kids in his age group.

3:09:14Dinosaurs. Yeah, dinosaurs are back in a big way. And what else? That's about it. He went through an Italian brain rot phase. I'm really glad that's over.

3:09:22David Sims:I don't know what that means. Asa Ehrlich was really into Italian brain rot. What the fuck is that? It's so funny that David Ehrlich was like, my child will never watch Western animation. It will make you feel feebly only. It'll make you feel worried. He did get very into how he got him very into Totoro and Miyazaki stuff. Yeah. These AI generated ADHD cartoons called Italian Brain Rot. Tongue, tongue, tongue, tongue, Sahor, Crocodilo, Bombardillo. They all have insane names and they look like nightmares. Chimpanzee, bananini.

3:09:54Griffin Newman:Is this on YouTube that they find it? A cup of coffee with a hot dog. It's all YouTube nonsense. I don't know if it's like Russians influencing my child to betray America someday.

3:10:02David Sims:It's one of those things where it's like, oh, this is just like random AI slop. And you're like, no, it feels like this was made by a human hand. They've got millions of views. For some nefarious purpose. Right. There's also like rap songs that have 55 million views on YouTube. That is AI generated rap song by the town brain rats. But I will tell you, I'm glad that phase is over. In the beginning of first grade, my son would often say to me, who's your favorite brain rot? And I would go, I don't know, man. Tongue, tongue, tongue, tongue, tongue, to her. And he'd go, who are your favorite 17? And would not stop until I named 17 brain rots.

3:10:34And when I tell you this happened like three times a day, every day, it was starting to drive me into madness.

3:10:39David Sims:Chris I congratulate you on making it through that period and I hope you never have to look back although some of the songs are catchy some of the AI generated raps I'm sure they are they are Beautiful Anonymous I mean I still have the the Pink Fong Lion song

3:10:58Griffin Newman:anyone out there get at me if you also listen to that a hundred times I'm never gonna listen to that I don't want it

3:11:03David Sims:affecting my brain Beautiful Anonymous is still one of the best podcasts out there yeah Beautiful Anonymous just celebrated its 10 year anniversary hell yeah Oh, shit. We have a sister show to us in a way. Yeah. I will ask too, all bits aside, I know I've been the bad boy to blank check facts, but go listen to an episode because I'm trying to get that show to survive. We have a contract to 2028 and I'm trying to just like get people back into it. It's an incredible show. Thanks. And it's like a good thing you do. Not to be self-righteous about it. Thank you. Yeah. I feel good about it. And then also on June 11th, we're doing a What's in the Dumpster live stage show.

3:11:39Griffin Newman:We're paying homage to the 10-year anniversary. 10-year anniversary of the one episode of my show everybody universally liked. It's going to be live at UCB. Paul Scheer will be there. This hasn't been announced yet, but Manzoukas arranged his schedule. He'll be coming in. Hell yeah. I've reached out to, spoiler, person from the first dumpster. I won't say it to see if he wants to be there on stage. And yeah, it's already sold out, but there will be a live stream ticket for 10 bucks. So you can watch that live. And what's the date on it, sorry? That's on Thursday, June 11th. Nice. And if you're in New Jersey, my beloved New Jersey, I've got tickets on sale in Red Bank June 19th.

3:12:15Griffin Newman:Oh, where Chris Kevin Smith's... Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Secret Stash is down there. Places, right? Red Bank, New Jersey. You guys, you've been to Smodcastle. I've been there with you.

3:12:25David Sims:Yeah. Yeah, we did. We did a GLTS there and then I went to a Dogma screening there. Did I go there one other time? It's pretty great. I really love it. I really love him. Like the Smodcastle. The fact that he owns a movie theater. He bought his childhood movie theater, the Smod Castle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands. Is that correct? Yes. I know you know him better. You've worked with him, and you know him much better. On the He-Man show. I know. Yeah, yeah. But I do have to say, meeting Kevin Smith, and you realize he's just exactly who you hope he is. He's just like that. He really is. He's exactly who you want him to be, and it's good.

3:12:59David Sims:You know, I weirdly get asked about him a lot. There's something very special about him. He looks so large, especially for our generation. But people are like, you're friendly with him, right? Like, you know him. Like, what's he actually like? And I was like, he's actually everything you want him to be. He's wearing a suit jacket and denim shorts and down to tell stories. He laughs a lot. I think the people who are the most cynical about him are completely disarmed when they meet him. When you see just like how thoroughly genuine he is. And he's incredibly thoughtful and smart. He is, as you can imagine, as a DIY Jersey creator, he looms very, very large in my history.

3:13:32I mean, we were...

3:13:33David Sims:And I'm one of the biggest mall rats defenders you'll ever meet. Geth, we were only going to have him be the guest for that show. And I threw out the flyer and I said, I think we should ask Chris to be honest. That was very nice. I think beyond the fact that it's like a mitzvah to have you two guys like engage on stage and connect as people, I was like, I think it will make for good entertainment. I think you guys are going to get into it. And you did. You started just naming locations and the audience was applauding. It was fun shit. It was great. Thanks again. No, you're the best. And I said it before, very cleanly with no crosstalk.

3:14:04David Sims:The three of us would not know each other. without you. On the most fundamental level, there's no universe in which the show exists without you.

3:14:09Griffin Newman:Maybe Griff and I are acquaintances, but like obviously these bonds were forged to TCGS. But I meet Ben

3:14:15David Sims:in the basement because he's assigned to become the second producer of Talking TCGS, the podcast I do with Riley Salmer. I was thrilled by the assignment. No, I was. A weirdly popular show in its time from what I remember. It was bizarre. And David and I only meet because Alyssa Stonoa tweets that the two of us should be friends because we're both active in the together community. Well, I will say at this point in my career, which has slowed down a lot, it is very strange for me to be in rooms sometimes and realize I am just strangely a person who can sometimes walk into a room and realize, oh, most of these people know each other because of me.

3:14:48Yeah. Which is strange to say for a guy who is generally pretty socially uncomfortable and sort of off in the corner. But it's a point of pride that I've been able to work with so many great people and smart people such as yourselves over the years.

3:15:00David Sims:You're the best and we love you. and it's always a pleasure to have you on you were never shadow banned I need to communicate that very clearly why did you think you were shadow banned because you felt like there was a gap post Spiderman 2 that was pointed because I'm mentally ill brother I feel you big time my brain is so bad it's crazy a lot of people

3:15:19Griffin Newman:like being on the show we're always just trying to like match guest to thing well yes you know

3:15:24David Sims:we'll say like Matt Singer is about to come back on the aforementioned Matt Singer and he was like thanks for having me on like I hope I can be on again sooner than three years from now. And we were like, shut up. You were on six months ago. We checked the calendar. We were like, three fucking years later. What the fuck are we doing? And this has been the way. Clearly. We talked about the movie a little bit. A smidge. Oh, the one, this was the one connection. I'm not like my dad. The one connection I was going to make. Do you know who was the DP on this film? The who? The man who shot Clerks. Is that true?

3:15:57David Sims:Yeah. Is that true? Kevin Smith's Jersey body, who, like, that was his first professional. And Malrats. And Chasing Age. Malrats. Yes. Malrats. Underrated. But I'm just saying like this. You guys don't like seeing a spaceship that looks like a turtle? I like the ship. I like the Anzellians. It's okay. Turtle. I like Stephen McKinley Anderson, the best part. What was the best part? Oh, Stephen McKinley Anderson, the rocking horror chair. Right. And yeah, grilling some sandwiches, I guess. And then Scrooge. I guess the only two good characters are the ones who grill meat.

3:16:25Griffin Newman:Are puppets grilling meat? I mean, I know Scrooge says he wasn't really a puppet. Yeah. Voiced by esteemed members of the artistic community.

3:16:33David Sims:But I'm just saying, is that what is really kind of activating Favreau the most as an artist, is being able to tell the story of people making sandwiches?

3:16:43Griffin Newman:You're so right. I'm seeing here David Klein shot a bunch of the Book of Boba Fett. Yeah, he's become the default

3:16:49David Sims:Disney Plus Star Wars guy. I just bring it up because he was a guy bootstrapping it with the Kevin Smith thing, learned how to be a DP across those movies, and now is shooting Star Wars. And I know that like Kevin's been doing screenings all weekend with him talking to the audience afterwards, which is really fun at the Smod Castle Theater. So shout out that if you're in the area and you need to still see the movie. Sorry that we ruined it for you. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. Next week is an episode. It's a movie that I kind of hoisted upon David.

3:17:22David Sims:It's called Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World. Right, that's next week. David very quickly sets the rules in place that it is his episode. Yeah, you're like, you try some, like, you know, I did one bit at the beginning.

3:17:32Griffin Newman:And I'm like, we're not doing that today, sir. You were in tears.

3:17:35David Sims:I was like, no. Best step off, sir. But don't worry. It is absolutely you and John Hodgman.

3:17:42Griffin Newman:We have fucking Andrew Stanton coming up. There's plenty of Griff material in the future.

3:17:47David Sims:No, no, no. I was saying, don't worry that you go off.

3:17:49Griffin Newman:No, I think we had fun on that episode.

3:17:51David Sims:John talks a lot about boats. Hodgman talking boats. Yes. It's a good episode. So yeah, we're finishing that up. And then yes, we've already sort of soft announced it, but Andrew Stanton is coming right after that.

3:18:01Griffin Newman:We will be covering Disclosure Day as well.

3:18:03David Sims:Yes, yes. There are a couple summer releases that will take some breaks. Odyssey obviously comes in the middle of Stanton, but we'll be doing Finding Nemo through Toy Story 5. Yeah. And then Scorsese starting right after that. Martin Scorsese, I don't know if you know this, the guy who plays the flat meat dealer in the Mandalorian and Grogu movie. His name is... He also directs movies. He's Flarp or whatever. I'll have to look him up. And we're going to cover him on the podcast.

3:18:27Griffin Newman:We also have a Patreon. We're currently... We just recently covered Mortal Kombat. And we're going to soon kick off our Robocop series on June 1st. Yep. You can sign up for that at patreon.com slash blank check.

3:18:41David Sims:Guys, I'm so excited to take a nap. I'm like... Don't worry, Griff. We have like six ads to do after we stop recording. A post-ad nap is the sweetest nap of all. I'm so excited to pee. Yeah. I love Rada his abs his body his brain his sparkling what do I love from this his dad you love his dad right his dad's a good person yeah and he's just like him

3:19:07Griffin Newman:I miss him he had some riz again I'll shout out a lot of the images we've been talking about will be posted on our social also sign up for our newsletter we have a sub stack called checkbook yes where they also have a lot

3:19:18David Sims:of that stuff if you don't engage with social media and I'm sure Marie's gonna have a lot of Mandalorian and Grogu Thoughts, a movie she has many times said she is excited to never see. Can't really argue with her. And as always, David, you were trying to remember things you love. Yeah. And I just want to end this episode on a positive note. I love you and I want to remind you that you love Coaxium, which I think is best served cold?

3:19:45Griffin Newman:Isn't it actually best served cold? I think you did it wrong. Fuck. Yeah, you did it wrong. It has to be cold. So good job remembering that coaxium should be cold. Okay, so I'm responsible. Yes, nice. I guess that's how we're going to end it. Yeah.

3:20:02Griffin Newman:Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims. Our executive producer is me, Ben Hosley. Our creative producer is Marie Barty Salinas. And our associate producer is AJ McKeon. This show is mixed and edited by AJ McKeon and Alan Smithy. research by j.j. birch our theme song is by lane montgomery in the great american novel with additional music by alex mitchell artwork by joe bowen ollie moss and pat reynolds our production assistant is minick special thanks to david cho jordan fish and nate patterson for their production help head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit join our patreon blank check special features for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.

3:20:47Griffin Newman:Follow us on social at BlankCheckPod. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook, on Substack. This podcast is created and produced by BlankCheck Productions.

3:20:58David Sims:Ben, are we recording? Okay, and what I'm about to say is going to sound like it's pre-roll, but I both want you to keep it in and actually do what I ask. Okay, Ben?

3:21:11Griffin Newman:Yeah, of course.

3:21:11David Sims:It'll make sense in a second.

3:21:12Griffin Newman:I'll do what you ask.

3:21:14David Sims:Okay. Not like...

3:21:16Griffin Newman:blanket statement. No, no, no.

3:21:18David Sims:Okay, so kayfabe starting now. Ben, can you put a filter on my voice? And post.