Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema rewind.
Speaker 2: This is Rob Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today's
Speaker 2: Weird House Cinema rewind is It's got to be one
Speaker 2: of my all time favorite Weird House Cinema episodes. It's
Speaker 2: the one we did on the Robot Jocks, originally published
Speaker 2: on December twenty fifth, twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, this one was a lot. This movie
Speaker 1: is just a lot of fun and it was super
Speaker 1: fun to discuss it, and I think, weirdly enough, it
Speaker 1: was our Christmas Day episode in twenty twenty, so you know,
Speaker 1: it feels good as well that this will be the
Speaker 1: final episode that we air in the year twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: I don't remember if we mentioned this at the time,
Speaker 2: but it's strangely appropriate in that a lot of the
Speaker 2: characters in the movie wear clothes of a color scheme
Speaker 2: that's kind of Santa Claus, very like red and white.
Speaker 3: Sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of red and white. And it feels
Speaker 1: very surgical in a way that some depictions of Santa
Speaker 1: Claus's headquarters and his workshop are are created. You know,
Speaker 1: this idea that it is this place, it's magical but
Speaker 1: also a little sci fi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ones that are operated by the technical elves
Speaker 2: that have that have like computers and machines. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: mean the machine elves, the machine elves.
Speaker 1: Yes, all right, let's dive in.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name's Rob Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe McCormick. And I think this episode is
Speaker 2: going to be publishing on Christmas Day, which is quite
Speaker 2: apt because, if I'm not wrong, one of the biggest
Speaker 2: toy crazes of the Christmases of yesteryear were Transformers toys,
Speaker 2: and I think Transformers also probably partially inspired the movie.
Speaker 5: We're going to be talking about today, So it's.
Speaker 2: Very much like a like a toy robot Christmas celebration,
Speaker 2: except imagine those toy robots were fighting it out for
Speaker 2: the fate of Alaska, trading between the clutches of some
Speaker 2: like evil capitalist empire and a harsh Soviet future state.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: robot jocks, which, yeah, I am to understand that the
Speaker 1: Transformer craze helped inspire this but I think you could
Speaker 1: also pretty fairly compare this to the boxing robots, you know.
Speaker 5: The other Rockam soccer robots, Rockham Sock and.
Speaker 1: Rogue of Robots. Yeah, this is basically big league rock
Speaker 1: Em Socker Robots of the future.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I imagine.
Speaker 2: So it's rock em soccer robots, but to settle territorial
Speaker 2: disputes between post nuclear apocalyptic superpowers and they're like one
Speaker 2: hundred feet tall.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is It's not a Christmas movie. We thought
Speaker 1: about doing a Christmas movie, but then this came up,
Speaker 1: and this was perfect. I will say that it is
Speaker 1: rated PG, and some of the people that made it
Speaker 1: talked about how it is for children. I did not
Speaker 1: watch this with my son. I guess I could have,
Speaker 1: but I'm ultimately glad I did not. There's just, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of language in there that you know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure a TV cut of this stuff that could
Speaker 1: easily be edited out. I'm sure. But still it's a
Speaker 1: very enjoyable picture and I'm excited to talk about it.
Speaker 2: This is one of those movies that is it's I
Speaker 2: don't think it's for children, it's for it's for adults,
Speaker 2: in whom the child inside never died.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so that's probably a better way of
Speaker 1: looking at it.
Speaker 5: Should we hit that trailer audio?
Speaker 1: Let's do it.
Speaker 3: It's a new age of combat, human beings poltically engineered
Speaker 3: to be the best fighters in history. Two champions. It
Speaker 3: isn't over until someone wins at war with each other. Good.
Speaker 3: I have already kulled you invincible men, Fish and Alexander.
Speaker 3: Here now the ultimate killing machines.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna get in this sec and I'm gonta jig.
Speaker 1: I really love this one. This is one of those
Speaker 1: with the I'm gonna kick your explosion sound bets, which
Speaker 1: I think has been used in various other cinematic trailers
Speaker 1: as well, but to great effect here.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this was actually directed by somebody you might not expect,
Speaker 2: by Stuart Gordon, who is mainly known for Lovecraftian adaptations.
Speaker 2: This is not in any way connected to Lovecraft. This
Speaker 2: is a giant robot fight movie.
Speaker 1: That's right, and again it is. It is rated PG,
Speaker 1: which which certainly some of Stuart Gordon's most famous works
Speaker 1: are not. He's probably best remembered for directing nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five's re Animator and then nineteen eighty six is from
Speaker 1: Beyond both just wonderfully weird adaptations of HP Lovecraft else
Speaker 1: that went off in their own, crazy, fleshy directions.
Speaker 2: He also made a Lovecraft adaptation confusingly called Daygone, which
Speaker 2: came out in the year two thousand and one, which
Speaker 2: is the name of a Lovecraft story, but it's not
Speaker 2: really an adaptation of that story. It's more an adaptation
Speaker 2: of The Shadow over Ensmouth, which is a different Lovecraft story.
Speaker 2: And that movie I remember kind of liking, even though
Speaker 2: I don't know if I would say it's good.
Speaker 1: Right, I remember at the time when I watched it,
Speaker 1: I remember thinking, wow, this is not an accurate, you know,
Speaker 1: depiction of an HBU Lovecraft story. But especially now, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like, well, good it went off into all
Speaker 1: these films. It's good that they went off in their
Speaker 1: own directions and became their own crazy weird thing. Like
Speaker 1: I think it takes place in Spain and it's a
Speaker 1: modern day and like sexuality exists in it, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah, I would say that's one of the
Speaker 1: major contributions that Stuart Gordon's Lovecraft films, and also you
Speaker 1: know the work of Brian Yazna who worked with often
Speaker 1: they inject sexuality into these horror worlds, the other rather
Speaker 1: sterile originally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the kind of barren, hateful landscape of the original
Speaker 2: Lovecraft is a little bit enlivened by the Gordon touch. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's another thing I really like about Dagon, though. I
Speaker 2: remember thinking it's just merely a visual touch, which is
Speaker 2: that the color palette of the film is very like
Speaker 2: blue and green everywhere, but the main character wears an
Speaker 2: orange sweater throughout the movie, and I just remember thinking
Speaker 2: that was a great visual decision and it really looks
Speaker 2: fun throughout.
Speaker 1: The whole movie had some cool monsters, as I recall too,
Speaker 1: they went with the like the double finned mermaid type creature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well let's see. So these are some of
Speaker 1: the most I think noteworthy Stuart Gordon films. But he
Speaker 1: also did a lot of other stuff, and I did
Speaker 1: mention already, but he did pass away earlier this year.
Speaker 1: He lived nineteen forty seven through twenty twenty. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he directed a lot of stuff. He did science fiction,
Speaker 1: such as nineteen ninety six as Space Truckers, and with
Speaker 1: Brian Yasna and Ed Naha, he created Honey I Shrunk
Speaker 1: the Kids for Disney. They were the original creators, and
Speaker 1: you know they have scriptwriting credits on that project and
Speaker 1: any subsequent projects. So when you see the next Honey,
Speaker 1: I Shrunk the Kids reboot or what have you, you're going
Speaker 1: to see their names again.
Speaker 2: Okay, I don't think I've seen any recent Stuart Gordon stuff.
Speaker 1: I haven't either. He seemed to have branched out a
Speaker 1: lot later in his career, getting further away from some
Speaker 1: of the really like obvious genre stuff, such as a
Speaker 1: two thousand and five drama film titled Edmund starring William H.
Speaker 1: Macy and written by David Mammett. So you know, he
Speaker 1: really ultimately had a very i think, a varied career
Speaker 1: and worked on a lot of different types of stuff.
Speaker 1: Though horror fans I think are always going to remember
Speaker 1: him best from some of those those early gory nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties Lovecraft adaptations.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, one thing that must be said about Robot Jocks
Speaker 2: is that it is a very zany, cliche written robot
Speaker 2: slugfest that is in many ways just excellent and delightful,
Speaker 2: but it's also I don't know, you could make many
Speaker 2: extremely legitimate criticisms of the script, and yet it was
Speaker 2: written by a like revered science fiction author.
Speaker 1: That's right, Joe Haldeman, the author of the Hugo Award
Speaker 1: winning nineteen seventy four military science fiction novel The Forever War. Now,
Speaker 1: I had not read this one before, but I picked
Speaker 1: it up after watching watching Robot Jocks last week and
Speaker 1: I've been reading it. I haven't finished it yet, but
Speaker 1: it's a very interesting book, very much a book of
Speaker 1: its time in many ways, especially concerning you know, various
Speaker 1: sort of like gender ideas and so forth. But it's
Speaker 1: essentially a Vietnam story, a Vietnam memoir, even written by
Speaker 1: an author who, having just received a bachelors in a
Speaker 1: in physics and astronomy, was immediately drafted in the US
Speaker 1: Army in nineteen sixty seven as a combat engineer. That's
Speaker 1: Haldemann's story, and he was subsequently wounded, received a purple Heart,
Speaker 1: and The Forever War it seems to reflect all of this,
Speaker 1: except dealing with futuristic warriors cast into an armed conflict
Speaker 1: in a distant star system of a slew of different
Speaker 1: star systems against an unknown alien enemy, and the main
Speaker 1: character in that a gentleman by the name of Mandela
Speaker 1: is also a physicist who finds himself drafted into a war,
Speaker 1: only this time it's against the so called Tarans, who
Speaker 1: are these aliens that nobody really has a clear picture
Speaker 1: of or understanding of as they're starting out. So it's
Speaker 1: again very much a product of its time, quite interesting,
Speaker 1: quite influential. It's a solid power armor military science fiction yarn,
Speaker 1: very much in the same in keeping with stuff like
Speaker 1: starship troopers and so forth, but it has a focus
Speaker 1: on first of all, the physics of other worlds and
Speaker 1: the physics of space travel, as well as of course
Speaker 1: the psychology of the soldiers experience and afe. The interesting
Speaker 1: things have very popped up in it. He touches on
Speaker 1: the perils of fighting around frozen hydrogen on other worlds.
Speaker 1: There's discussion of how time dilation impacts war. So you
Speaker 1: encounter the enemy one day and your technology is superior
Speaker 1: to them, but then the next encounter you have with them,
Speaker 1: their technology is yours ahead of yours because of time
Speaker 1: dilation and travel at speeds approaching light. Because you were
Speaker 1: a creature now of their past and they are denizens
Speaker 1: of what was your future.
Speaker 2: That's very interesting. So, like every time you travel to
Speaker 2: meet your opponent, they get a leg up on you
Speaker 2: because they have more time to prepare than you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's really interesting. He gets into the use
Speaker 1: of hypnotic suggestion to invoke xenophobic hatred and soldiers. But
Speaker 1: on top of that, he seems to spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time focusing on what it means to be enveloped
Speaker 1: by the war machine, how it changes your life, how
Speaker 1: it affects your psyche, and how in the Forever War
Speaker 1: it also co opts sexuality as well as individuality. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of like this all consuming force on your life.
Speaker 2: This is interesting because I feel like what you're just
Speaker 2: talking about comes through, maybe not so much in the
Speaker 2: original novel, but in the Paul Verehoven movie adaptation of
Speaker 2: Starship Troopers.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I understand that the Forever War is often brought
Speaker 1: up as kind of a counterbalance to the largely pro
Speaker 1: war narrative of the original novel Starship Troopers, which I
Speaker 1: have also read, but I honestly don't remember much about
Speaker 1: it other than some of the cool power armor battles
Speaker 1: that were going on in it.
Speaker 2: So, how do Haldeman and Stuart Gordon get teamed up
Speaker 2: to make this ridiculous robot slugfest movie.
Speaker 1: All right, So apparently what happened is, let's say, Haldeman
Speaker 1: wrote this book and it was a huge success and
Speaker 1: critically a claimed and Haldeman and Stuart ended up chatting
Speaker 1: with each other and working on putting together a film
Speaker 1: adaptation of the Forever War, and they were both really
Speaker 1: excited about it, but it never came together. I think
Speaker 1: the way they described it is like Reagan was elected
Speaker 1: and then kind of like things changed. There was less
Speaker 1: funding for the arts, and therefore the project never came together,
Speaker 1: but it led to this project with Haldeman working on
Speaker 1: the script that would ultimately become Robot Jocks, directed by
Speaker 1: Stuart Gordon. Now, apparently there was a fair amount of
Speaker 1: disagreement between the two as the project rolled on, which
Speaker 1: has been summed up at times as Haldeman wanting to
Speaker 1: create a movie for adults that kids could also enjoy
Speaker 1: and Gordon wanted to create a movie for kids that
Speaker 1: adults could enjoy, and.
Speaker 5: They ended up creating not exactly either one.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's kind of a hybrid of the two,
Speaker 1: which is again perfectly enjoyable, but it's more more of
Speaker 1: a film that the inner child and the inner adult
Speaker 1: can both enjoy or kind of fight over.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So here's a bit from Haldeman's blog where he talked
Speaker 1: about this. He said, I wanted the mechanics he's talking
Speaker 1: about as a title. He Stuart Gordon insisted on robojocks.
Speaker 1: He finally wound up being robot Jocks after the people
Speaker 1: who did RoboCop asked whether we wanted to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of dreary time in court. I would try to
Speaker 1: change the science into something reasonable. Stuart would change it
Speaker 1: back to Saturday morning cartoon stuff. I tried to make believable,
Speaker 1: reasonable characters, and Stuart would insist on throwing in cliches
Speaker 1: and caricatures. It was especially annoying because it was a
Speaker 1: story about soldiers, and I was the only person around
Speaker 1: who'd ever been one. In fact, he was right and
Speaker 1: I was wrong, But it wasn't until we were actually
Speaker 1: shooting the movie that that became clear.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. I mean, you can absolutely feel this tension
Speaker 2: in the movie when you watch it, because it will
Speaker 2: alternate between moments that almost kind of actually work as
Speaker 2: as thoughtful science fiction. There'll be like moments of dialogue
Speaker 2: that are kind of thoughtful and interesting, and then it
Speaker 2: just immediately like throttles back into hilarious, absurd, cliche sci
Speaker 2: fi mode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can get whiplash at times from it because
Speaker 1: you're like, oh man, that was really beautiful, and then
Speaker 1: and then something else happens and you're like, that was goofy.
Speaker 1: But but then again, like I started, I started thinking,
Speaker 1: I tried to sort of divide these two possible films
Speaker 1: in my head, and I was thinking, all right, what
Speaker 1: if what if this character was played by a different
Speaker 1: actor and it was a more of a serious role,
Speaker 1: it was more of a soldier role, like Haldeman would
Speaker 1: have written. You know, maybe maybe you bring in some
Speaker 1: like Michael Ironside to play in instead of a cartoon cowboy.
Speaker 1: We'll get to that in a bed. And I was thinking, well,
Speaker 1: that would be good. But but then again, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be Robot Jocks, Like there's the ultimate form of the picture.
Speaker 1: Like the absurdities and the contradictions are one of the
Speaker 1: most notable things about it.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, I wouldn't change a thing about Robot Jocks.
Speaker 2: Robot Jocks is exactly the thing it should be. I
Speaker 2: absolutely would not change it. I mean, Robot Jos is
Speaker 2: the kind of film for which weird house cinema exists,
Speaker 2: something that that cannot just be praised as a normal
Speaker 2: kind of successful movie that is in some sense absurd
Speaker 2: or a failure, but is absolutely worth talking about and
Speaker 2: has things to be appreciated.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think just on the serious end of the spectrum,
Speaker 1: on the Haldamn end of the spectrum. Even though I
Speaker 1: think he ultimately like considered it a you know, a
Speaker 1: disappointing child from a creative standpoint, I feel like there
Speaker 1: are elements that totally arrange to you. You get the sense
Speaker 1: of the absurdity of war, a vast war machine, you know,
Speaker 1: a military industrial complex that just sucks everything in and
Speaker 1: in this film co ops reproduction. So yeah, there's lots
Speaker 1: to talk about here.
Speaker 2: And one more thing I will say about it is
Speaker 2: that the ending of this film I think is a
Speaker 2: genuine triumph in both senses in which the movie works.
Speaker 2: It actually is a surprise narrative conclusion.
Speaker 5: That I was kind of like, Wow, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: They did that, but it's also hilarious in an unintentional way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, like it seems to like if it seems
Speaker 1: like there are two different films competing for coexistence. At
Speaker 1: the end of the film, those two visions come together
Speaker 1: and fist bump each other and it works.
Speaker 5: So maybe we should talk about the cast.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, our main character in this is Achilles,
Speaker 1: played by Gary Graham. I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: will recognize Gary Graham out that he's been around for
Speaker 1: a long time. The main place I knew him from
Speaker 1: due to all my time watching the Sci Fi Channel
Speaker 1: back in the day, is that Graham was on the
Speaker 1: Alien Nation TV series. He played Detective Matt Sykes on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know what I recognized him from, but
Speaker 2: he looks like a sort of combination of other existing actors,
Speaker 2: so that kind of helps him seem very familiar to me.
Speaker 2: He was a three way if they of Scott Glenn,
Speaker 2: Mick Jagger and Billy Bob Thornton put those three in
Speaker 2: a blender and that's him.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's him. And you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: a lot about about him and his work, but in
Speaker 1: this particular film, he does a good job. I have
Speaker 1: no complaints about his acting. He's perfectly serviceable as the
Speaker 1: lead in an action film.
Speaker 2: I would say, his name, Gary Graham is so close
Speaker 2: to the name Garrett Graham, of who of course was
Speaker 2: in Chopping Mall and who played Beef in Fantom of
Speaker 2: the Paradise, And this movie could only possibly have been
Speaker 2: improved by swapping him for Garrett Graham.
Speaker 1: Oh, that would have been interesting. Yeah, And I feel
Speaker 1: like Garrett Graham would have had to lean into like
Speaker 1: a sleazier version of Achilles, like he has, like he
Speaker 1: has a natural sleezy era and a lot of the
Speaker 1: roles that he has.
Speaker 2: So Achilles Achilles is the hero of the movie. And
Speaker 2: he is the titular robot jock. He is one of
Speaker 2: these pilots who drives around these giant mech robots and
Speaker 2: fights it out. And I guess we'll get into more
Speaker 2: of the plot mechanics and setting when we do the
Speaker 2: full plot breakdown. But imagine this guy we're talking about,
Speaker 2: like sitting in the pilot's seat of a giant mech warrior.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he is the best. He is the best
Speaker 1: robot jocks jock that this particular faction has at their disposal.
Speaker 2: Right, But there are some up and coming robot jocks
Speaker 2: who maybe could rival his greatness and probably The most
Speaker 2: promising of them is a young robot jock named Athena.
Speaker 1: Right, and she's played by Anne Marie Johnson. She was
Speaker 1: in the Heat of the Night TV show that I
Speaker 1: mainly remember as being a show that my grandfather watched
Speaker 1: all the time, and I don't think I ever watched.
Speaker 1: But Amory Johnson, she's been around forever. She's done a
Speaker 1: lot of work, and I understand she's also been heavily
Speaker 1: involved in the Screen Actors Guild. So yeah, a major name,
Speaker 1: especially if you're an actor, you probably are familiar.
Speaker 5: With her now.
Speaker 2: I think there are a couple of roles that make
Speaker 2: this movie by adding in a level of cartoonishness that
Speaker 2: I think clashes with whatever serious thing Holdoman may have
Speaker 2: been going for. And I would say that the one
Speaker 2: of the two main super cartoony characters is the villain
Speaker 2: of the film, Alexander, who is I think supposed to
Speaker 2: be Ivan Drago from Rocky four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you get a strong sense of that.
Speaker 3: He is.
Speaker 1: He is our Russian villain, our Russian superman that that fights,
Speaker 1: I should say, in a in this giant mech that
Speaker 1: has an amazing design but is interestingly less human, in
Speaker 1: form less humanoid compared to the mech used by our hero.
Speaker 1: So even though it's not I forget what the factions
Speaker 1: are even called, but it's not called the US versus
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union. This is supposed to all take place
Speaker 1: after warfare or a comet or something something that's wrecked
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: There was a nuclear war. Yea, there was a nuclear
Speaker 2: war that like wiped out huge parts of humanity. And
Speaker 2: then after the nuclear war, your two main superpowers, which
Speaker 2: again are just apparently basically the United States and the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union. But the United States is called the Market
Speaker 2: and the Soviet Union is called the Confederation or the Confed.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, so these are the two main main factions.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they're essentially the US future US versus future
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. And this particular robot jocks Jack played by
Speaker 1: Paul is played by Paul Koslow, who lived nineteen forty
Speaker 1: four through twenty nineteen. He was a German Canadian actor
Speaker 1: who was in a lot of TV back in the day,
Speaker 1: but also some key seventies cult films. He had a
Speaker 1: supporting role in nineteen seventy one's The Omega Man oh Okay,
Speaker 1: which is a wonderful film.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: His Russian accent in this is so awful. Every time
Speaker 2: he talks, I couldn't stop laughing. It's on the level of, like,
Speaker 2: you know, he like meets up his opponents in the
Speaker 2: bar for a drink. Why is that happening? By the way,
Speaker 2: we should talk about the when we get into the plot.
Speaker 2: But like so he and Achilles are drinking at the
Speaker 2: bar together and he's like, your drink It makes me
Speaker 2: think of blood?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean again, he was German Canadian, he did,
Speaker 1: you know? And this is not his natural accent. I
Speaker 1: had to look him up because he's been in some
Speaker 1: other like key film, like The Vanishing Point from seventy one. Okay,
Speaker 1: I was looking at it something that claimed to be
Speaker 1: his reel on YouTube, and yeah, he's he seems good
Speaker 1: in things, but he's he's never using a Russian accent
Speaker 1: except in this film, where it comes off as a
Speaker 1: like a Saturday Night Live or World Wrestling Federation level
Speaker 1: of believability.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he would be like a wrestler called the
Speaker 2: Czar played by a guy from New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Now that being said, he's he's very fun in this role,
Speaker 1: but that accent is not believable.
Speaker 2: I literally think the one I just did to make
Speaker 2: fun of it was better than the one he uses
Speaker 2: in the movie. Okay, but then we got to get
Speaker 2: to our other main cartoon character from the movie. This
Speaker 2: one is the character of Texts text Conway, played by
Speaker 2: an actor named Michael Aldridge.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This, Oh my goodness. So this character Tex Conway.
Speaker 1: He's our heroes trainer, he's his mentor. He's a former
Speaker 1: robot jocks champion in his own right who won some
Speaker 1: key battles in the past. But man, he is a
Speaker 1: root and toot in text and stereotype with a cowboy
Speaker 1: hat but a futuristic jumpsuit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he's Buck Strickland in a red and white jumpsuit
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 3: You can't get the lasers calibrated.
Speaker 2: And he so he specifies that he was a former
Speaker 2: like you say, he was a former robot jock himself,
Speaker 2: like one of the greatest that ever lived, and that
Speaker 2: his jock, his jocking, his robot piloting won the area
Speaker 2: of Campuccia, which I guess is Cambodia for the market.
Speaker 2: So you got to imagine, Okay, they're capitalists now and
Speaker 2: it's all because of texts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's He also reminds me of the
Speaker 1: rich Textan character from The Simpsons. Yes, pops up from
Speaker 1: time to time. Yeah, so it's it is a very
Speaker 1: cartoony role, but a richly enjoyable role. It's it's every
Speaker 1: time he's on the screen, it's it's it's wonderful. And
Speaker 1: Aldrum himself is as an actor who was just a
Speaker 1: regular TV player back in the day, Like you just
Speaker 1: you scroll through his IMDb page and it's just everything
Speaker 1: that was on television with with some notable titles to
Speaker 1: call out, like Murder she wrote, Dallas of course the
Speaker 1: A team. He was on that mini series V So, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was in tons of stuff as well, and he's
Speaker 1: great in.
Speaker 2: This as we as we go on, we should also
Speaker 2: be thinking about like who should be cast in each
Speaker 2: role for our twenty twenty one remake of Robot Jocks.
Speaker 2: And I think there's a pretty obvious choice that you
Speaker 2: landed on for the new casting of Texts.
Speaker 1: Oh I think this was this was you?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: Oh? No, no, well you brought up Buck Strickland, who
Speaker 1: was voiced by Stephen root Right and Steve and we
Speaker 1: would be perfect for this role because you know, he's
Speaker 1: great at yucking it up, but also is superb at
Speaker 1: also having this kind of streak of darkness which plays
Speaker 1: into Tex Conway's characters as well.
Speaker 2: Right, all right, let's see, who else do we want
Speaker 2: to talk about in the in the connections.
Speaker 1: Here, Well, let's see, there's a character named doctor Matsumoto
Speaker 1: played by Danny Kamikono, part of the He's part of
Speaker 1: This character's part of the tech team. This is a
Speaker 1: solid performer who did a lot of a lot of things,
Speaker 1: most notably The Karate Kid. He was in that, but
Speaker 1: he also appeared in nineteen ninety threes Robot Wars, directed
Speaker 1: by Albert band We'll get to him in a minute.
Speaker 1: Same production company also Giant Robots, sometimes marketed as a
Speaker 1: sequel to this film, but not directly related to Robot Jocks.
Speaker 5: One was not enough. People needed more robot jocks.
Speaker 1: We always do. There's a fun cameo in this We
Speaker 1: mentioned Reanimator earlier and the Beyond well, Jeffrey Combs, the
Speaker 1: love Crafty and Lothario himself the B movie Icon shows
Speaker 1: up as just one of the robojocks. Robot Jocks fans
Speaker 1: that are cheering on what's happening.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Occasionally we get some shots of the proletariat,
Speaker 2: you know, just the regular society and what they think
Speaker 2: about the ongoing They treat the Robot Jocks battles. It
Speaker 2: basically is a sporting event rather than a major geopolitical conflict.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And and there is a great scene where we're watching
Speaker 2: a couple of the proles watch the robot Jocks announcements
Speaker 2: on TV, and for some reason they're wearing the hats
Speaker 2: that members of House Frey wear.
Speaker 5: I don't know where that comes from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is an interesting wrinkle in the show though,
Speaker 1: where it's geopolitics as pure entertainment to a large section
Speaker 1: of the populace. So yeah, there again another area where
Speaker 1: this show gets. Uh, this movie gets a bit meaty
Speaker 1: before it gets goofy again.
Speaker 2: Now, one thing we see in the credits of the
Speaker 2: beginning of this movie is that it is definitely a
Speaker 2: Charles Band production, and that name. If you have watched
Speaker 2: a lot of trashy eighties movies, that name shows up
Speaker 2: a good bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I almost hesitant to spend too much time on him
Speaker 1: here because I know we'll come back to some pictures
Speaker 1: that are actually directed by Charles Band or Albert Band.
Speaker 1: But briefly, we're talking about the Band family here. Their
Speaker 1: history begins with artist Max Band, who lived nineteen oh
Speaker 1: one through nineteen seventy four, born in Lithuania, lived in France,
Speaker 1: and then made the move to California. His son, Albert Band,
Speaker 1: who lived twenty four through two thousand and two, became
Speaker 1: a filmmaker. He was assistant director on John Houston's The
Speaker 1: Asphalt Jungle in nineteen fifty and then went on to
Speaker 1: direct a bunch of genre films, including I Bury the
Speaker 1: Living from fifty eight, Dracula Dog from seventy eight, and
Speaker 1: Gooli's Too from in nineteen eighty seven. So he's already
Speaker 1: be Cinema loyalty. But then his son is Charles Band,
Speaker 1: who again we've mentioned before on the show. So he's
Speaker 1: the man behind first Empire International Pictures that put out
Speaker 1: Robot Jocks and then Full Moon Features, and he directed
Speaker 1: some really awesome eighties and nineties sci fi horror films
Speaker 1: before going increasingly in the evil bong direction, which isn't
Speaker 1: quite my thing, but you know, you can't argue with success.
Speaker 5: Oh he does like demon Bong movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the evil Bong like one through however, many
Speaker 1: Ginger dead Man that that sort of thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, okay, but.
Speaker 1: I can't stress enough that his earlier pictures are are
Speaker 1: often a lot more serious and are really interesting. Will
Speaker 1: definitely come back to something Charles Band directed in the future,
Speaker 1: but again, evil bong direction seems to have been very
Speaker 1: successful for Full Moon.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 1: Charles's brother, by the way, is Richard Band, a composer
Speaker 1: who worked on a lot of Full Moon pictures. And
Speaker 1: then Charles Band's son is Alex Band, the lead singer
Speaker 1: of a band called The Calling, which I'm not that
Speaker 1: familiar with but exists, so like the the Band family
Speaker 1: is still going strong.
Speaker 5: They are a schlock dynasty.
Speaker 1: And another connection to Robot Jocks is that Charles Band
Speaker 1: had a nineteen ninety film called Crash and Burn that
Speaker 1: was marketed in Europe as Robot Jocks two. But again
Speaker 1: there's another one where it's not actually related to Robot Jocks,
Speaker 1: but it does feature a cool giant robot plus Bill
Speaker 1: Moseley as a killer cyborg.
Speaker 5: Oh, I'd watch that.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: One thing I will say about this movie that I
Speaker 2: do just totally unironically enjoy is all of the robot fights,
Speaker 2: including I think there's some stop motion animation, and I
Speaker 2: think there's probably also some people in suits, some puppetry.
Speaker 2: I get the feeling that both are at play at
Speaker 2: different times. I could be wrong about that, but whatever
Speaker 2: they were doing, I really enjoyed the robot effects. It's
Speaker 2: not like they look realistic. They don't, but they're that
Speaker 2: kind of non realistic, highlight stylized, great old school practical
Speaker 2: effects that I just adore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And so it's not surprising that you
Speaker 1: have some you have it at least a couple of
Speaker 1: big names in this one that stood out was this
Speaker 1: guy Steve Berg, who was a conceptual designer. He went
Speaker 1: into work on the art department on a number of
Speaker 1: big films, big sci fi properties like Chronicles of Ritick,
Speaker 1: Alien Three, Leviathan, The Martian, Interstellar, Prometheus.
Speaker 5: Oh, Leviathan.
Speaker 2: You've seen Leviathan, right, Oh, we've talked about it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right, we've talked about it on the show before.
Speaker 2: That was one of the nineteen was it eighty nine?
Speaker 2: Was it that the year when like five different underwater
Speaker 2: terror movies came out.
Speaker 1: I think that was the underwater terror year. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: have to come back to Leviathan because there's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun stuff going on in that picture.
Speaker 2: Oh, we should do a whole series of weird house
Speaker 2: cinema where we just do one after another. We do Leviathan,
Speaker 2: Deep Star six, Lords of the Deep, we were like
Speaker 2: round up the whole crew.
Speaker 1: But it's like diving deeper into the ocean, Joe. The
Speaker 1: deeper you go on that play list, the greater the pressure,
Speaker 1: the harder it is to come out without doing harm
Speaker 1: to your body. Because Yeah, they're the underwater films that
Speaker 1: come to mind, and they are the ones you have
Speaker 1: to sort of hunt for from that same year, and
Speaker 1: they just get progressively harder to watch.
Speaker 5: I remember the Lord's of the Deep.
Speaker 2: Really not much happens in it, Like most of the
Speaker 2: movie is just watching people sit in a chair and
Speaker 2: say like they're coming for us.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Lords of the Deep is probably the point in anybody's
Speaker 1: attempt to watch all the underwater movies of eighty nine
Speaker 1: where they realized that their eyes were bigger than their stomach.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But oh, one of the huge names on this picture
Speaker 1: on robot jocks that helped create these wonderful stop motion effects,
Speaker 1: David Allen, who did stop motion animation and visual effects
Speaker 1: director credits on this. So this is the I think
Speaker 1: this is the real star of the movie. He's an
Speaker 1: awesome name in the stop motion animation field. He sadly
Speaker 1: died in nineteen ninety nine at the age of fifty four.
Speaker 1: He worked on The Howling on Willow, Ghostbusters Too Young,
Speaker 1: Sherlock Holmes, you know, all the all films that had
Speaker 1: some wonderful stop motion work in them, I believe, And
Speaker 1: then he did a ton of Charles band Full Moon productions,
Speaker 1: providing the store to sort of stop motion work that
Speaker 1: really sets some of those films apart. So he's the
Speaker 1: man behind the cool animation in Laser Blast, in Q
Speaker 1: the Wing Serpent, and in various other films like where
Speaker 1: oftentimes films where there's not much else notable about it,
Speaker 1: but just has some real eye catching stop motion effects.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, I would say that that's probably true about
Speaker 2: laser blasts, except that Laser Blast is pretty funny. Q
Speaker 2: the Winging Serpent that's a little bit different. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's got that that that Cohen energy like, there's a
Speaker 2: there's a pretty fun script underneath that one.
Speaker 5: In addition to the great stop motion effects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so when David Allen died, he was still working
Speaker 1: on a picture called The Prime Evils and it was
Speaker 1: was never finished and this was going to be just
Speaker 1: like an old school stop motion animation fest. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he died before he could finish it. But around twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: Charles Band announced that it would be completed and released
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, and I think that got pushed back
Speaker 1: to twenty twenty, and then, of course most things in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty were pushed back or released in a weird fashion.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it's actually come out yet. But
Speaker 1: if you look around for information about the Prime Evils film,
Speaker 1: you'll see some clips from it, and it looks really awesome.
Speaker 1: So I do hope that finally comes to light.
Speaker 2: Well, are you ready to jump into a full breakdown
Speaker 2: of the plot and then maybe talk a little bit
Speaker 2: of weird science and the ideas in the movie.
Speaker 1: Let's do it?
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I guess we got to start with the
Speaker 2: opening credits, which really set the scene. So the very
Speaker 2: first thing, you are panning over a snowy field of
Speaker 2: dead robots and mechanical debris, and I remember I was
Speaker 2: watching this with Rachel. She was like, is this a
Speaker 2: Christmas movie? Because it very much seems like a combination
Speaker 2: of the Terminator and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and
Speaker 2: the voiceover narration. While you get the Terminator font credits,
Speaker 2: the voiceover says, it has been fifty years since the
Speaker 2: nuclear holocaust almost destroyed mankind. War is now outlawed. Oh
Speaker 2: good idea, nobody ever thought of that before. Just make
Speaker 2: it illegal. And so they specify, well, with war outlawed,
Speaker 2: how do you settle disputes between these superpowers between the
Speaker 2: Market and the Confederation, While they say that territorial disputes
Speaker 2: are now settled by single combat, and they go on
Speaker 2: to explain here at the Confederation playing field in Siberia,
Speaker 2: and they recount that these robots that are piloted by
Speaker 2: robot jocks fight it out and whichever robot and they're
Speaker 2: corresponding jock wins the you know, to the victor go
Speaker 2: the spoils. So like you might be fighting over who
Speaker 2: gets control of Campuccia, and the winner in this case
Speaker 2: apparently was the Market with the old tex Conway piloting
Speaker 2: his mech and so they get control of the land
Speaker 2: and then you immediately cut to the present from here,
Speaker 2: where there is an ongoing fight between Alexander, who we
Speaker 2: mentioned before, the villain the Russian robot Jock, and a
Speaker 2: market robot Jack who I think is maybe named Ajax.
Speaker 5: I could be wrong about.
Speaker 2: That, but he's a guy in a red and white
Speaker 2: jumpsuit with a black guy and a bloody lip, lying
Speaker 2: in the cockpit of his robot. His robot has been
Speaker 2: destroyed and he's trying to throw in the towel. He's
Speaker 2: like pleading for mercy.
Speaker 5: He says, Alexander, you win, Alexander. I can't move. I
Speaker 5: think my back is.
Speaker 2: Broken, and Alexander just coldly says judgment.
Speaker 5: I would like judgment. It's very very much.
Speaker 2: If he dies, he dies Ivan Drego thing and then
Speaker 2: he just stomps on him. He uses his robot to
Speaker 2: stomp on Ajax and kill him, and it's victory for
Speaker 2: the Confederation.
Speaker 1: Fun behind the scenes fact is that I believe that
Speaker 1: the stop motion animation we see in this ultimate this
Speaker 1: opening encounter was actually originally test footage that was used
Speaker 1: to convince Charles Band that they could make the picture.
Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting, So maybe that's why it's in a
Speaker 2: different setting than the rest of what goes on in
Speaker 2: the movie. So the battle is a victory for the Confederation.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure exactly what they're fighting over in this case.
Speaker 2: And again, yeah, Ajax is like, I yield mercy and
Speaker 2: Alexander's like, too bad, and he just smashes him. And
Speaker 2: then Alexander looks into the camera and says, you're next Achilles.
Speaker 2: He's you know, he's got it out for Achilles. I
Speaker 2: guess because Achilles.
Speaker 5: Is the best and he wants to defeat him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's all about just superiority and proving himself in battle.
Speaker 2: And so next we cut to the market robot Jocks commands.
Speaker 2: It's like mission control for robot jocks, where the Allied
Speaker 2: robot jocks and their friends watch in horror as Ajax
Speaker 2: is stomped by the bot and we find out that
Speaker 2: Alexander has killed nine of their guys. Now and it
Speaker 2: is and there's immediately talk about why this is.
Speaker 5: It's because there's a spy, and.
Speaker 2: I feel like this is great. You know, set this
Speaker 2: up right at the beginning that there's a betrayer in
Speaker 2: their ranks. Somebody keeps giving the Confederation advance information about
Speaker 2: the new weapons systems that they bring online in their robots.
Speaker 1: Right, and of course you only have what five characters
Speaker 1: with names that matter, so so you know, you don't
Speaker 1: have have that many choices here to go on, but
Speaker 1: you easily can see one of them is a spy,
Speaker 1: and part of the fun of the film is going
Speaker 1: to be trying to figure out who that spy is.
Speaker 2: Right, So they are, So there are various people hanging
Speaker 2: out and you get to meet some of the characters.
Speaker 2: One of them, of course, is Tech Conway, who've talked
Speaker 2: about before. Techs is a kill he's trainer and he's,
Speaker 2: as we said, a former robot jock himself who had
Speaker 2: been very successful and ultimately victorious. Now I guess he's
Speaker 2: retired and he's he's the burgess Meredith teaching Rocky how
Speaker 2: to fight. Oh and we also find out that they
Speaker 2: are fighting over Alaska. They're fighting for control of Alaska.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure why they want it so bad, but
Speaker 2: that's what the dispute.
Speaker 1: Is, right, Yeah, Like maybe it's the first step and
Speaker 1: then subsequently conquering other areas that belong to the market.
Speaker 2: But I guess we find out that Achilles is the
Speaker 2: only robot jock left that Alexander has killed all of
Speaker 2: the other market robot jocks. It seems like they should
Speaker 2: have had more, but eh, and I guess they.
Speaker 5: Are making more. We'll get to that in a second.
Speaker 2: So then from mission control you cut straight to a
Speaker 2: sparring scene where they've got Achilles fighting a circle of
Speaker 2: people all around him. All these people in pads surround
Speaker 2: him and attack him one at a time so he
Speaker 2: can fight them off. It's kind of like that scene
Speaker 2: in The Chinese Connection where Bruce Lee goes to the
Speaker 2: Japanese martial arts school and is surrounded by people in
Speaker 2: the circle and they all come in one at a
Speaker 2: time and he.
Speaker 5: Has to fight him off.
Speaker 2: Except everybody here is wearing goofy looking red pads.
Speaker 1: Not only pads, though, Joe, They're also wearing jumpsuits. Because
Speaker 1: this film is a celebration of futuristic jumpsuits. They're like
Speaker 1: multiple different varieties of jumpsuits, and they seem to be
Speaker 1: whoever is in charge of jumpsuits did a good job
Speaker 1: of putting them together and making them look quality and
Speaker 1: keeping track of who should be wearing what, which I
Speaker 1: love because I realized more and more watching this film
Speaker 1: that it's something I love about science fiction films. I
Speaker 1: love a good jumpsuit, be it a jumpsuit in something
Speaker 1: like Mystery Science Theater three thousand or any other science
Speaker 1: fiction film. Like in the future, there will be jumpsuits
Speaker 1: and you will be assigned to jumpsuit. And so everybody's
Speaker 1: got one, even Text Conway's wearing this big, diculous bright jumpsuit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're red and white jumpsuits.
Speaker 3: That's so.
Speaker 2: The market wears red and white jumpsuits and the Confederation
Speaker 2: wears I think yellow and black jumpsuits.
Speaker 1: I think that's right.
Speaker 2: So we see Gary Graham the Achilles fighting all these people,
Speaker 2: and he does quite well, except there's one fighter who
Speaker 2: really puts up a good fight against him. And it
Speaker 2: turns out that this fighter is Athena, who at first
Speaker 2: I thought her name was Pathena the way they were
Speaker 2: saying it. But we find out that a lot of
Speaker 2: these fighters, or maybe all of them, are something. This
Speaker 2: is again something I couldn't understand what they were saying
Speaker 2: at first, but it becomes clear they are what the
Speaker 2: characters refer to as two bees. In this scene, Text
Speaker 2: makes his prejudice against multiple types of people. Clear, it's
Speaker 2: clear that he does not like two bees. And he
Speaker 2: also states his opinion that women will never be jocks,
Speaker 2: so there will never be a woman robot jock.
Speaker 1: Yes, he also doesn't seem to like Japanese people.
Speaker 5: Yes, text is just full of prejudices.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so you then but then so you're wondering,
Speaker 2: what are these two bees? Why doesn't text like the
Speaker 2: tubs and what are they? Professor Laplace shows up and
Speaker 2: I love her. She is all business.
Speaker 5: She shows up.
Speaker 2: She's this uh, this small older lady who is apparently
Speaker 2: like the the market's greatest geneticist, greatest scientist, and she's
Speaker 2: there to collect DNA samples from all of the great
Speaker 2: robot jocks. So she like gives these tubes to U
Speaker 2: two Achilles and texts and is like, I need your
Speaker 2: genetic material because she's developing what she calls gen jocks, which,
Speaker 2: as far as I can tell, these are, uh, these
Speaker 2: are eugenically created perfect robot jock soldiers that are that
Speaker 2: are created through in vitro fertilization. And there is there
Speaker 2: is like there's a twobe race in this movie. The
Speaker 2: people they're calling tubs are these people who are who
Speaker 2: are a product of in vitro fertilization, which they regard
Speaker 2: in the film as this like bizarre futuristic thing, even
Speaker 2: though it was it was already being done at the
Speaker 2: time the movie was made.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's in it. So first of all, not a
Speaker 1: lot of detail is really provided about how they're supposedly
Speaker 1: doing this, Like are they are they growing two bees
Speaker 1: at the rate one would actually create you know, you know,
Speaker 1: reed new people through a process like this, or is
Speaker 1: there some sort of sci fi speeding up of the process.
Speaker 1: You know, is this Boys from Brazil? Or is this
Speaker 1: attack of the Clones? I can't tell.
Speaker 2: Well, the way it seems like in this movie the
Speaker 2: concept of two bees is invoked because it's it sounds futuristic.
Speaker 2: It's almost as if it's being written about by someone
Speaker 2: who didn't maybe didn't even know what was actually involved.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, right, Yeah, Like I'm one hand on
Speaker 1: the Haldeman level, I think it works perfectly as this
Speaker 1: idea that like the military industrial complex ends up absorbed
Speaker 1: being co opting reproduction itself, you know, like that makes
Speaker 1: sense within his seeming worldview of of the military engine.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it also hearkens to a time when when
Speaker 1: there were a lot of headlines and certain a certain
Speaker 1: amount of fear mongering and even moral panic about the
Speaker 1: idea of test to babies. Yeah, so, perhaps some of
Speaker 1: our listeners remember that hysteria, because I feel like we
Speaker 1: see less of it now specifically.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think it's this movie is weirdly
Speaker 2: projecting into the future a kind of temporary, irrational stigma
Speaker 2: that arose from culture at a particular.
Speaker 5: Time, like in the late eighties or early nineties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because again, what Test two Babies refers to is
Speaker 1: in vitro fertilization, and in vitro means within the glass.
Speaker 1: But the process doesn't actually take place in a test tube,
Speaker 1: but rather in a Petrie dish. The egg is fertilized
Speaker 1: in a in a Petrie dish, and when it is
Speaker 1: three to five days old, it's transferred to a uterus.
Speaker 1: And today this is mainstream, granted expensive, but it's a
Speaker 1: mainstream reproductive choice. The term itself, however, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: Test two babies was coined in the nineteen thirties to
Speaker 1: refer to artificial insemination. Huh, So in both cases, we can,
Speaker 1: you know, just taste the moral panic regarding some sort
Speaker 1: of new reproduction trend. And in both cases these are
Speaker 1: things that you know, for the most part, quickly, it
Speaker 1: quickly became normalized. It is also interesting that there's like
Speaker 1: a brief gag in the film about just the idea
Speaker 1: of sperm donation as well as Oh yeah, in and
Speaker 1: of itself, is this ridiculous, like yuck it up kind
Speaker 1: of scenario.
Speaker 2: Yeah, text goes like, there ain't here's my DNA to
Speaker 2: make no tubes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly how it went. So Yeah, anyway, another
Speaker 1: case of science fiction doing what science fiction often does.
Speaker 1: But it certainly seems a bit silly now given the
Speaker 1: mainstream acceptance.
Speaker 5: Of ib Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the two bees remain a major theme in the film,
Speaker 2: and as I said, Laplace announces to everybody that there
Speaker 2: is basically a two B race between the between the superpowers,
Speaker 2: and each one is creating their own robot jock super soldiers,
Speaker 2: and so there's like a constant escalation back and forth.
Speaker 2: Let's see, so we meet some of the two bes,
Speaker 2: and if you watch this movie, they will say the
Speaker 2: word two b's until it loses all meaning. There is
Speaker 2: just so much talk about two bees in this movie.
Speaker 2: But we meet some of the young young soldiers, and
Speaker 2: of course Athena, the one we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 2: who's a major character in the film. And then we
Speaker 2: see Alexander doing a threat video for Achilles. It's kind
Speaker 2: of like those wrestling promos where the wrestler would come
Speaker 2: out and say, like next week, I'm going to destroy
Speaker 2: you in the cage. But then after that we get
Speaker 2: a view of the populace at large, just people hanging
Speaker 2: out in the street, watch on big public TV screens
Speaker 2: the ongoing saga of the robot jocks conflict, and so
Speaker 2: this is where we see the dudes in the house
Speaker 2: fray hats. But also most people we see in this
Speaker 2: movie who are outside at any point are wearing masks,
Speaker 2: which was kind of strange to watch this year. I
Speaker 2: don't think they're wearing masks for any disease control reason.
Speaker 2: My best guess is that so it's part of the
Speaker 2: setting that the world they live in is after a
Speaker 2: nuclear war has taken place. So my guess is it's
Speaker 2: supposed to be that there are radio nuclides everywhere and
Speaker 2: that the masks are to help prevent people from inhaling
Speaker 2: radioactive particles. I don't know if that would be effective
Speaker 2: in reality, but I think that's at least the reason
Speaker 2: that they're shown wearing them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is interesting to watch that this year because
Speaker 1: so many films and TV shows I've watched this year.
Speaker 1: I'm just constantly thinking to myself, why are they standing
Speaker 1: so close to each other? Why is no one wearing
Speaker 1: a mask?
Speaker 3: Huh?
Speaker 1: You know, as illogical as it is to expect that
Speaker 1: in a film from ten twenty years ago, as opposed
Speaker 1: to out in the normal world, where it is perfectly
Speaker 1: reasonable to expect that.
Speaker 2: So it's coming down to the big fight, right, It's
Speaker 2: going to be Achilles versus Alexander. So we see Achilles
Speaker 2: get into his robot and it's like getting ready for
Speaker 2: a rocket launch. There's like a launch platform and there's
Speaker 2: all this staff getting everything ready. He's wearing his jumpsuit
Speaker 2: and his helmet and everybody, instead of break a leg,
Speaker 2: they say crash and burn. That's the good luck saying.
Speaker 2: And in fact, they specify in the movie that it
Speaker 2: is bad luck to say good luck, just like.
Speaker 5: In a theater.
Speaker 2: While we were watching it, Rachel made some good joke.
Speaker 2: She said something like, we call it the confed play
Speaker 2: might have gotten that wrong on the delivery. But anyway,
Speaker 2: Achilles gets into a giant Optimus Prime, and of course
Speaker 2: there are a bunch of kids who call Achilles on
Speaker 2: a video phone before he goes into battle. I think
Speaker 2: they're his brother's many children and or his brother in law,
Speaker 2: maybe his sister's husbands. Anyways, a bunch of people call
Speaker 2: him on a video phone and they wish him good luck.
Speaker 2: And then so he goes into battle, and then we
Speaker 2: get one of the first big like full stop motion
Speaker 2: animation fight scenes. We get to see what the robots
Speaker 2: do when they fight, and I love the effects.
Speaker 5: In this scene.
Speaker 2: You get these these they sort of like go down
Speaker 2: the list of trying out each of their weapons on
Speaker 2: each other, like they're like try that new green laser pair.
Speaker 2: And this scene I thought is just great. Like it's
Speaker 2: not like it looks realistic, but that's not the point.
Speaker 5: It looks excellent.
Speaker 1: And I have to say the animation style that they use,
Speaker 1: the stop motion animation and the suits as well. They
Speaker 1: create a very clunky sort of movement, which I think
Speaker 1: really works well in the film because we're used to
Speaker 1: seeing some giant robot battles and more recent things like
Speaker 1: the Pacific Rim movies and so forth, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like fluid modern action in those films. But
Speaker 1: I feel like the clunky action in this works works
Speaker 1: really well because it does feel like colossal machines doing
Speaker 1: very specific things, and the stakes are really high, like
Speaker 1: there's no wasted movement. And we'll get into some of
Speaker 1: the physical challenges of the idea of giant machines battling
Speaker 1: each other in a bit, but I ultimately really like
Speaker 1: the kind of clunky and deliberate motions that happen in
Speaker 1: these battles.
Speaker 2: Yes, and so the battle ends with a horrific tragedy.
Speaker 2: So they sort of fight each other to a draw.
Speaker 2: But then then Alexander tries to do something dirty and
Speaker 2: fire a fire a projectile weapon and a part in
Speaker 2: the match when he's not supposed to do that, and
Speaker 2: it looks like it's going to hit the stands of spectators.
Speaker 2: I don't know why there were stands of live spectators,
Speaker 2: but this.
Speaker 1: Is it's a power claw. It's like a power punch, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: like he launches the fist of the robot.
Speaker 2: And Achilles is like, no. The people to reference Superman
Speaker 2: four he goes no the people and he dives in
Speaker 2: front of it before it can hit the stands.
Speaker 5: But I don't know.
Speaker 2: I guess he should have anticipated this. The power claw
Speaker 2: hits him and knocks him back, and he falls on
Speaker 2: the stands, crushing tons of people and killing them, and
Speaker 2: there is I'm not sure I was trying to put
Speaker 2: my finger on what exactly is so funny about this,
Speaker 2: but the staging of the horrific mayhem that we see
Speaker 2: in the aftermath of him falling on the stands is hilarious.
Speaker 2: There are all these like bloody bodies all over the place,
Speaker 2: but for some reason it looks so funny. And I
Speaker 2: think maybe it's because the bodies are all kind of
Speaker 2: like perfectly evenly spaced apart from each other. It just
Speaker 2: looks staged in a really funny way.
Speaker 1: I didn't get that as much, but I was thinking, well, like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't think the boy needed to see this. It's best,
Speaker 1: so we didn't watch it. One kind of neat bit
Speaker 1: of trivia about that scene, though, is apparently audio from
Speaker 1: it is used in the creation was used in the
Speaker 1: creation of the nine Inch Nails track. The becoming off
Speaker 1: of the downward Spiral huh okay, which I'd never picked
Speaker 1: up on that before. But as it turns out, like
Speaker 1: that album. As much as we might think of the
Speaker 1: Downward Spiral as just you know being this this industrial,
Speaker 1: you know, deep gothic, phallic oriented, you know, plunge into
Speaker 1: the psyche, it's ultimately a celebration of science fiction films
Speaker 1: from the day because you've got samples from Robot Jocks,
Speaker 1: but also from THHX eleven thirty eight, from Leviathan, Angel Heart, Texas, Chainsaw, Massacre, Alien,
Speaker 1: The Elephant Man, and.
Speaker 5: Sorcerer, the Truck movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Truck movie, the remake of Wages of Fear
Speaker 1: that had the awesome, I mean just amazing Tangerine Dream soundtrack.
Speaker 5: You had me at Leviathan.
Speaker 2: So next thing in the movie, we get to see
Speaker 2: what their international Criminal Cord or whatever it is looks like,
Speaker 2: and it's just dudes in referee outfits, which like, so,
Speaker 2: these these referees are now settling international disputes. Who appoints them?
Speaker 2: Where do they come from? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I assume it's supposed to be some sort of Unitedations
Speaker 1: type thing, But yeah, they have this cool floating vehicle,
Speaker 1: this like hover hovering referee vehicle that they use, which
Speaker 1: is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: But they're wearing literally the black and white stripe referee outfits,
Speaker 2: and they're they're like justices. They're like judges presiding over
Speaker 2: a trial in which both sides are presenting arguments about
Speaker 2: why they technically won this match in which a bunch
Speaker 2: of people got crushed. And it turns out the referees
Speaker 2: decided is inconclusive and there will have to be a
Speaker 2: rematch in one week, And of course Alexander loves this.
Speaker 2: He cries out in the trial. He says, yes, one week,
Speaker 2: I kill you dead. And Achilles is very sad because
Speaker 2: he does not want to fight anymore. He says, I
Speaker 2: did my contract ten fights.
Speaker 5: That's it.
Speaker 2: So he's like, I won't do anymore. I retire, and
Speaker 2: Alexander calls him out. He says, coward, you lost your nerve.
Speaker 1: Well, he's also really torn up about all the people
Speaker 1: that died when his robot fell into the stands right, yes,
Speaker 1: so I think it's understandable. Like he's like, I'm done,
Speaker 1: I don't want anymore of this. Let the tub's handle
Speaker 1: and the tubs of course are like yes, yeah, let
Speaker 1: us in there. This is all we've been raised to do.
Speaker 2: Oh, they're so excited that the tub's are loving it.
Speaker 2: One of them is going to get to fight. So
Speaker 2: one of the toob boys says Achilles is a coward
Speaker 2: for retiring, but Pathena is not having it. She stands
Speaker 2: up for Achilles, and Athena is like, he's not a coward.
Speaker 2: And then we get an argument with the market commissioner.
Speaker 2: I guess he's like Achilles's boss. I'm not sure exactly
Speaker 2: what he's supposed to be, but he's in charge of
Speaker 2: the robot jocks for the market side, I guess. And
Speaker 2: he tries to argue. We get like squabbling over what
Speaker 2: the contract means. He's like, you haven't actually finished your
Speaker 2: contract because you didn't finish ten fights. The last one
Speaker 2: was inconclusive and it isn't over until someone wins. And
Speaker 2: then Achilles response, I don't know what this line means.
Speaker 2: He responds by saying, you sound like one of your
Speaker 2: damn two bees.
Speaker 5: What what? What is the meaning of that?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I guess it's just that the two
Speaker 1: bees are utterly indoctrinated into this this idea of.
Speaker 3: Warfare.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know like the new generation has raised for
Speaker 1: it and knows nothing else and has and just in
Speaker 1: a way, it's kind of like they represent like youthful
Speaker 1: vigor for in almost innocence before the battle. And of
Speaker 1: course he is the veteran. He's been through it, he's
Speaker 1: come out the other end, uh and and knows that
Speaker 1: warfare is horrible.
Speaker 2: Right, So I guess the next thing that we get
Speaker 2: to is this really amazing scene. It's it's like there's
Speaker 2: a dance party in a bar that includes text dancing
Speaker 2: with a woman and it's hard to describe it. You
Speaker 2: just need to see this scene. It's like the scene
Speaker 2: in Message from Space where they have their canteena equivalent
Speaker 2: the it is a party that must be witnessed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a fun atina scene.
Speaker 2: And so while this dance party is going on in
Speaker 2: the background, Achilles, now depressed, is in the bar getting
Speaker 2: blackout drunk. He's doing this thing where he's drinking the alphabet.
Speaker 2: So he's going down the alphabet, drinking a drink for
Speaker 2: every letter, and I think he's made his way to
Speaker 2: J and the bartender suggests a julop.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Wow, this is an interesting concept that I kind of
Speaker 1: glossed over watching the film. Certainly not advisable for a
Speaker 1: single evening, though, But I wonder what would be the
Speaker 1: proper way to drink the alphabet. It would be kind
Speaker 1: of interesting to make that list and to pick out
Speaker 1: a particular cocktail for each one.
Speaker 2: What starts with a give me one alcohol please. But
Speaker 2: so then he's sitting there and then all the two
Speaker 2: b's come in, and they're young and full of excitement
Speaker 2: and vigor, and they try to cheer Achilles up, talking
Speaker 2: about how the.
Speaker 5: They this was great.
Speaker 2: The way they try to cheer him up is they
Speaker 2: talk about, Hey, the audience members in the stands signed releases.
Speaker 2: You know, they agreed to be there, they knew what
Speaker 2: the You shouldn't feel bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the two b's have just bought every line that
Speaker 1: the market has told them. Yeah, I just believe it
Speaker 1: all absolutely, Like.
Speaker 2: They actually read the fine print and they love it.
Speaker 2: They're all on board with every bit of the contract.
Speaker 2: And then Alexander shows up and this is one of
Speaker 2: multiple scenes in the movie where the characters are drinking
Speaker 2: in this bar that they share with the opposing side.
Speaker 2: And I don't know how to so, so the premise
Speaker 2: that's going on is that the Confederation is constantly winning
Speaker 2: these fights because of info security leaks on the market side,
Speaker 2: like there are spies and everybody's concerned about how people
Speaker 2: are finding out about the new weapons systems on the
Speaker 2: market robots. But then at night, the two different sides
Speaker 2: just go get drunk together in the same bar. That's
Speaker 2: that seems not secure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, it seems like a terrible idea, but it
Speaker 1: works really well to move the plot along because it's
Speaker 1: one of those things. Anytime you have giant robot battles
Speaker 1: or giant monster suit battles or whatever, you got to
Speaker 1: have a lot of human interaction to pat out the movie.
Speaker 1: And this works well for the most part.
Speaker 2: Right, So, one of the kids, so Alexander shows up
Speaker 2: at the bar and he's just being a bully. He's
Speaker 2: just swinging his weight around, just being me and everybody,
Speaker 2: and one of the kids challenges him and he and
Speaker 2: he scoffs.
Speaker 5: He's like, I do not fight poo bees.
Speaker 2: So apparently Alexander is also prejudiced against the two bees,
Speaker 2: and Alexander starts twisting this kid's fingers and then Achilles,
Speaker 2: still drunk, intervenes and that they start to fight, but
Speaker 2: then Alexander says he will not fight him. Now he says, I.
Speaker 5: Do not fight for fun? What do you fight for?
Speaker 2: Which is a strange moment where the movie suddenly like
Speaker 2: asks you to be thoughtful in a way that it
Speaker 2: hasn't maybe so far, or certainly not for a while,
Speaker 2: because it appears that Achilles does not actually know. He's
Speaker 2: maybe like, huh, I've spent my life becoming a soldier,
Speaker 2: but I really don't know if there's a good reason
Speaker 2: for any of the fighting that I'm doing.
Speaker 1: It feels like an artifact of an earlier version of
Speaker 1: the script, but it's also an energy that we come
Speaker 1: back to later.
Speaker 2: Right, So, Athena carries the drunk Achilles home. He she
Speaker 2: apparently she takes his clothes off, and then the next
Speaker 2: morning they have this long, like naked hangover conversation where
Speaker 2: he's like dragging his sheets around and arguing with her
Speaker 2: about arguing about what they're fighting for and who should
Speaker 2: be fighting, and Athena gets mad at him, I guess
Speaker 2: because he's retiring, and she's like, I was bred not
Speaker 2: to have fear.
Speaker 5: I was bred for a purpose. You you just happened, And.
Speaker 2: So it's clear actually that the prejudice kind of goes
Speaker 2: both ways. Like the two bees apparently disdain non two
Speaker 2: bees because they exist for no particular reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just random existence. Yeah, so it's interesting. There's a
Speaker 1: fair amount of cool world building going on in this film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so she's like one of the things in
Speaker 2: the scene I think is she's trying to figure out, like,
Speaker 2: what are the secrets of how he always won his
Speaker 2: battles and he was and he's like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: a lot of it's just luck. And she doesn't like
Speaker 2: this answer. So she gets really mad at him, and
Speaker 2: she says, I wanted to learn the secret of the
Speaker 2: Great Achilles, but you just talk about luck and fear.
Speaker 2: There's nothing you can teach me except how to lose.
Speaker 2: So there's another scene where we see like the the
Speaker 2: youngsters training, they're they're doing their their their to B exercises,
Speaker 2: and Text reiterates to Achilles. He says for the second time,
Speaker 2: you know a woman can never be a robot jock.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's again the old the old fashioned attitudes of
Speaker 1: text here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so text is quite the sexist and he and
Speaker 2: he makes it clear over and over.
Speaker 5: But this does not.
Speaker 2: This does not discourage Achilles from retiring. I think maybe
Speaker 2: he's trying to talk Achilles into staying on. He's like, look,
Speaker 2: you know, you're the only one who can do it.
Speaker 2: But Achilles retires anyway, and he becomes a sivvy. Uh
Speaker 2: So you see him suddenly going around the city. He's
Speaker 2: not at mission control anymore. He sees a mural on
Speaker 2: a wall somewhere. I think that has his picture on it,
Speaker 2: and someone has written the word coward but misspelled it's
Speaker 2: cow erd.
Speaker 1: Now, how do you know that's not just how they
Speaker 1: spell in the future.
Speaker 5: Go, that's true. Spelling changes over time. That's a very
Speaker 5: good point.
Speaker 2: It's just like how in the future the word jox
Speaker 2: plural is spelled with an X instead of cks.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But so now the market's got a problem. Achilles, their
Speaker 2: greatest warrior, has retired. So they've got to put one
Speaker 2: of these two b's in the robot to fight Alexander.
Speaker 2: So they go through some rapid two B training and
Speaker 2: the way this shakes out is that Athena and the
Speaker 2: other two bees have to climb the Agrocrag. There's this big,
Speaker 2: rattling jungle gym of death and they're all fighting each
Speaker 2: other to get to the top first and climb through
Speaker 2: this hole in the ceiling, and Athena is victorious. She
Speaker 2: is the greatest of the two b's, so she's going
Speaker 2: to become the new jocks, and as a newscaster declared,
Speaker 2: she is the first female robo jock. But Achilles, now
Speaker 2: at home, sees this on TV and he's like, no,
Speaker 2: I can't let her go into battle, so he goes back.
Speaker 2: He goes back to Jock's control, and he's like, I
Speaker 2: will be the jock, and he trains with Texts, and
Speaker 2: then there's a scene where doctor Matsumoto and Text begin
Speaker 2: to argue about how to best keep the new robot
Speaker 2: system a secret from spies. Doctor Matsumoto has taken measures
Speaker 2: to keep it secret in a way that Text does
Speaker 2: not approve of. And so there's more drinking at the bar.
Speaker 2: Of course I mentioned that would come back. Alexander sits
Speaker 2: down next to Achilles, and he declares that you make
Speaker 2: my drink.
Speaker 5: Taste like blood? Thinking, is that an expression? What does
Speaker 5: that mean? Do you know what he's getting at there?
Speaker 1: I can think of no way that that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: unless because he is he saying I can't tell. He's
Speaker 1: saying it in a way where he's like, my drink
Speaker 1: is better because it tastes like blood, or is it
Speaker 1: worse because it tastes like blood. It's really hard to
Speaker 1: get a read on what exactly floats Alexander's boat here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're ramping up to the final confrontation between
Speaker 2: Achilles and Alexander. But then before that, there is a
Speaker 2: great scene where I think maybe we shouldn't reveal what happens,
Speaker 2: but there is a confrontation about who is actually the
Speaker 2: spy on the market side, who's been leaking the new
Speaker 2: technology secrets to the enemy. There's a great show down
Speaker 2: there that has some good dialogue in it, actually, well
Speaker 2: some like good dialogue that changes almost mid sentence to
Speaker 2: become hilariously cliched.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's punctuated by hilarious cliches, but has some nice
Speaker 1: lines in there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a very interesting scene, and of course
Speaker 1: the spy is.
Speaker 5: Revealed, but we won't spoil it for you. We're not
Speaker 5: going to tell you who the spy is.
Speaker 2: But then anyway, so Athena comes to Achilles room the
Speaker 2: night before the big battle, and you think maybe this
Speaker 2: is going to pan out to be like a love scene,
Speaker 2: but instead she tricks him and shoots him with a
Speaker 2: sedative and locks him in his apartment. Because her angle
Speaker 2: is no, I will be the robot jock, I will
Speaker 2: fight Alexander.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to harp on the film, because the
Speaker 1: film looks great and I love I love the way
Speaker 1: the sets look, I love I love the props, I
Speaker 1: love I love everything. But in this scene when she
Speaker 1: uses an injector gun on him, it's it's fairly obvious
Speaker 1: that in the wide shots she's using a hot glue gun,
Speaker 1: like a hot glue gun that's been painted silver, and
Speaker 1: then on close ups it's like an actual injection gun
Speaker 1: or something that looks more, far more believably like an
Speaker 1: injection gun. So it's just something interesting. I noticed. They
Speaker 1: didn't really take me out of the film, And again
Speaker 1: I don't want to harp on it, like this is like, yea,
Speaker 1: you know, the cheapness of the movie, because for the
Speaker 1: most part it looks wonderful.
Speaker 2: The effects budget went mainly into the robot battles, I think.
Speaker 1: And jumpsuits too. Jumpsuits and robot battles.
Speaker 2: Yes, but I think you're right. In the close ups
Speaker 2: it's it's a regular prop gun. So it makes me
Speaker 2: wonder why they couldn't use the regular prop gun in
Speaker 2: the wide shots too. But in the wide shots it's
Speaker 2: a thousand percent of hot glue gun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe something that changed pretty late in production.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So anyway, the next morning, Athena goes in to take
Speaker 2: Achilles place inside the robot. She's got her visor down
Speaker 2: so nobody can see who she is. She's pretending to
Speaker 2: be him, and she's going to go do the fight herself. Meanwhile, meanwhile,
Speaker 2: Achilles escapes his apartment and he runs to the battlefield,
Speaker 2: and we get this final showdown. And I don't know
Speaker 2: how much we should say about the final showdown or
Speaker 2: how exactly to talk about it, but it's a pretty
Speaker 2: great robot battle that involves flying into space and different
Speaker 2: interesting weapons get deployed. I don't know, it's a lot
Speaker 2: of fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there's one way I will spoil one
Speaker 1: weapon that they use, that is the Bolo saw, which
Speaker 1: I remember from watching part of this, I think probably
Speaker 1: on Sci Fi Channel back in the day. But even
Speaker 1: in the rewatch, it was just a wonderful moment because
Speaker 1: I've never seen a sci fi weapon quite like it.
Speaker 1: It's this device it like shoots a chain around the
Speaker 1: limb of another robot and then that that boloed chain
Speaker 1: like locks into place, allowing rotary motion of the chain.
Speaker 1: So it works kind of like an inverted chainsaw then
Speaker 1: to saw off the limb of an enemy robot. And
Speaker 1: it's wonderful. It's great. I'm surprised it's not. I don't
Speaker 1: know that I've seen it ripped off in any subsequent
Speaker 1: giant robot movie or anything, but they should because it's
Speaker 1: a it's a fabulous weapon.
Speaker 5: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: Maybe we should just focus on the big robots for
Speaker 2: a minute before we get to the glory of the ending.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So again, the robots look pretty awesome in this
Speaker 1: a combo of awesome old school stop motion, and I
Speaker 1: think some old school man ensued effects and the battles
Speaker 1: may not feel as dynamic as something you get nowadays
Speaker 1: or even in mech fiction of decades past, but it
Speaker 1: all has a feeling of authenticity to it, and I
Speaker 1: think one of the main reasons, and this is something
Speaker 1: that I think ties in well with you know, some
Speaker 1: elements you see in the forever war. These are big
Speaker 1: weapons and mass and gravity. These are perpetually your greatest
Speaker 1: threat and your enemy's greatest weakness. As such, one of
Speaker 1: the worst things that could possibly happen to you in
Speaker 1: one of these robot jocks max is that you might
Speaker 1: fall over or be pushed over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is actually, I think really smart, Like,
Speaker 2: if you're going to take the premise seriously, it's good
Speaker 2: to think about physics in this way. And I guess Holdeman,
Speaker 2: did you know he knew a lot about physics, and
Speaker 2: so he did actually have this in mind. And I
Speaker 2: think this is a great monster science connection because it's
Speaker 2: worth keeping this in mind about biology. Evolutionary design problems
Speaker 2: are not symmetrical across great differences in scale. One of
Speaker 2: the examples of this offen sided is, you know those
Speaker 2: like articles we've probably said things like this in the past,
Speaker 2: being you know, being kind of loose when we talked
Speaker 2: about you say, like if a flea were the size
Speaker 2: of a car, it could jump the height of the Empire,
Speaker 2: state building or something like that. Except the problem is,
Speaker 2: in a way that could be true just as a
Speaker 2: matter of you know, scaling up the distance of a
Speaker 2: flea's jump. But it's also not literally true, because if
Speaker 2: a flea were the size of a car, it wouldn't
Speaker 2: be able to do that anymore. It's like athleticism would
Speaker 2: not scale up proportionately. It's because it's the size it
Speaker 2: is that it can make that jump proportional to its
Speaker 2: body length. So depending on the size of your body,
Speaker 2: you actually face vastly different threats and different constraints from
Speaker 2: the physical world. And one of my favorite examples, which
Speaker 2: I think people rarely think about, is the amazing difference
Speaker 2: that body size makes when you're thinking about the dangers
Speaker 2: posed to you by water. So there's a classic article
Speaker 2: by the great scientist JBS hall Day and who was
Speaker 2: behind a number of extremely important biological concepts in the
Speaker 2: twentieth century. He wrote this article called on being the
Speaker 2: Right Size, And this is a paragraph that I remember
Speaker 2: when I first read this, this really did blow my mind.
Speaker 5: So think about this.
Speaker 2: Haldane writes, A man coming out of the bath carries
Speaker 2: with him a film of water about one fiftieth of
Speaker 2: an inch in thickness.
Speaker 3: This way is.
Speaker 2: Roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about
Speaker 2: its own weight of water. A wet fly has to
Speaker 2: lift many times its own weight, and as everyone knows,
Speaker 2: a fly, once wetted by water in any other liquid,
Speaker 2: is in a very serious position. Indeed, an insect going
Speaker 2: for a drink is in as great danger as a
Speaker 2: man leaning out over a precipice in search of food.
Speaker 2: If it once falls into the grip of the surface
Speaker 2: tension of the water, that is to say, it gets wet,
Speaker 2: it is likely to remain so until it drowns. A
Speaker 2: few insects, such as water beetles, control to be unwettable,
Speaker 2: the majority keep well away from their drink by means
Speaker 2: of a long prebosis. So it's amazing to think about
Speaker 2: how like getting wet doesn't bother us at all, but
Speaker 2: for much smaller animals because of the difference in the
Speaker 2: mass of your body and the strength of your muscles
Speaker 2: compared to the surface area of your body and the
Speaker 2: properties of water at that scale, water could be like
Speaker 2: this horrifying slime that takes a grip on you, and
Speaker 2: like you can't get away from. But a lot of
Speaker 2: these asymmetries, not all of them, but a lot of
Speaker 2: them are based on the force of gravity and the
Speaker 2: ratio of surface area to mass, as an object, it
Speaker 2: gets bigger. And this brings us back to the robot jocks.
Speaker 2: So to read a section from that same JBS Halliday
Speaker 2: in article, he's talking about the dangers of falling. What
Speaker 2: falling is as a threat to animals of different size
Speaker 2: quote to the mouse. In any smaller animal, it presents
Speaker 2: practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a
Speaker 2: thousand yard mind shaft, and on arriving at the bottom,
Speaker 2: it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that
Speaker 2: the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a
Speaker 2: man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented
Speaker 2: to movement by the air is proportional to the surface
Speaker 2: of the moving object, divide an animal's length, breadth, and
Speaker 2: height each by ten. Its weight is reduced to a
Speaker 2: thousandth but its surface only to one hundredth So the
Speaker 2: resistance to falling in the case of a small animal
Speaker 2: is relatively ten times greater than the driving force. And
Speaker 2: I think this would absolutely be the same kind of
Speaker 2: concern if you were considering mech battles. So if you
Speaker 2: were to have something like the autoloader and aliens, you know,
Speaker 2: like these roughly slightly bigger than human sized mechs. Fighting
Speaker 2: in those things would be entirely different a proposition than
Speaker 2: fighting in these hundred foot tall or two hundred foot
Speaker 2: tall giant robots, where in the case of the larger robots,
Speaker 2: gravity itself is an immense threat to you, like just
Speaker 2: falling over will will very likely destroy you.
Speaker 1: So yeah, in this film, you get you do get
Speaker 1: the impression that most of these robot jocks battles end
Speaker 1: when the first combatant is is knocked over or made prone,
Speaker 1: Like it seems like most of the time there's no
Speaker 1: getting up from that, right, And it's interesting to think about, like,
Speaker 1: like how did they get here? How did they get
Speaker 1: to the point where they're basically each battling in a
Speaker 1: skyscraper on legs? Yes, and I'm guessing there's there would
Speaker 1: have been an arms race over time, So maybe they
Speaker 1: started smaller, like just kind of like power armor sort
Speaker 1: of a situation maximize the individual for one on one battle.
Speaker 1: But then over time, like what do you do do
Speaker 1: You start getting bigger suits, Like my suit's bigger than
Speaker 1: yours and has bigger weapons, so now you've got to
Speaker 1: get bigger too, And so now we see like the
Speaker 1: end results of that where the combatants are absolutely as
Speaker 1: large as they could possibly get and are you know,
Speaker 1: and they have all of these weaknesses based on that size,
Speaker 1: but there's just no scaling back at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost one of those like prisoner's
Speaker 2: dilemma type problems where like the incentives for the individual
Speaker 2: are different than the incentives for like both parties when
Speaker 2: they look at things together, and if you could just
Speaker 2: get them agreed to both agree to scale back down,
Speaker 2: that would be better for both. But they but you
Speaker 2: can't get them to agree to that, so they just
Speaker 2: keep getting bigger. And that also brings me to another
Speaker 2: interesting question. This movie raises some things about it that
Speaker 2: you wonder if they would make sense in reality, and
Speaker 2: that is the very concept of symbolic warfare through single
Speaker 2: combat or champion combat. So the premise of the film
Speaker 2: is that you've got these superpowers, they are in violent
Speaker 2: conflict with one another, but they can't go to war.
Speaker 5: They don't go to war on the whole.
Speaker 2: Instead, they pick one person from each side to get
Speaker 2: in the robot fight it out, and then the winner
Speaker 2: gets whatever it is they wanted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know it works in the in this
Speaker 1: film and of course you all see this in mythology,
Speaker 1: when mythological characters are used to embody whole nations or peoples,
Speaker 1: et cetera. It does remind me a bit of something
Speaker 1: that we discussed in our stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: episodes on the ant Wars earlier in the year, where
Speaker 1: we talked about the various tournament tournament battle that you
Speaker 1: see in ants, but also in certain small armed groups
Speaker 1: historically in human civilization, and the idea here being like,
Speaker 1: if you're if you don't have large armies that are
Speaker 1: combating each other, sometimes it makes more sense for a
Speaker 1: select few individuals to engage in sort of you know,
Speaker 1: less high stakes combat, to sort of feel each other out,
Speaker 1: to see which way the battle would go and then
Speaker 1: act accordingly. But in these cases we're still not talking
Speaker 1: about like one soldier fighting one soldier champion versus champions.
Speaker 2: Right, And this brings us back to something that we
Speaker 2: also talked about in the ant Wars episode, which are
Speaker 2: these models. Again, these these are not perfect descriptions of
Speaker 2: what actually happens in battle, but they are somewhat accurate
Speaker 2: descriptions for modeling casualties in conflict, and they're known as
Speaker 2: Lanchester's square laws and Lanchester's linear laws, and so the
Speaker 2: main idea there is more complicated than this, but the
Speaker 2: main idea is that as you approach a situation that
Speaker 2: is a war of all against all, so the more
Speaker 2: your battle resembles something where any soldier can engage any
Speaker 2: other at any time, so maybe like a shooting war.
Speaker 2: As it approaches that instead of the type of battle
Speaker 2: where one soldier can only fight one other soldier at
Speaker 2: a times a big series of duels, as it becomes
Speaker 2: more of a war of all against all, than the
Speaker 2: advantages provided by having superior numbers go up, not just
Speaker 2: in a linear way but in a squared way, so
Speaker 2: that having superior numbers is much more important than having
Speaker 2: better individual fighters in a war of all against all.
Speaker 2: And that's be because like the force with superior numbers
Speaker 2: can quite quickly reduce the numbers of the other forces
Speaker 2: so that they can't really put up a fight of
Speaker 2: any kind. And so anyway, in a world with technology
Speaker 2: that enables, you know, a war of all against all,
Speaker 2: like a basic shooting war scenario, the side with superior
Speaker 2: numbers is almost always at an extreme advantage. And that
Speaker 2: makes me think about how It's hard to imagine in
Speaker 2: a modern context, with modern technology, that champion warfare would
Speaker 2: ever really emerge unless it were like imposed by an
Speaker 2: outside force. Like, for champion warfare to be the way
Speaker 2: that you would settle geopolitical conflict, it would require the
Speaker 2: side with more with numerical superiority to agree to the
Speaker 2: champion warfare and to say, yes, we will honor the
Speaker 2: outcome of this duel. But champion warfare necessarily improves the
Speaker 2: odds for the weaker force and hurts the odds for
Speaker 2: the strong young force. So why would the stronger force
Speaker 2: agree to it?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Now, if in this film, if the judges, if the
Speaker 1: referees were aliens representing say a technologically advanced species that
Speaker 1: could just simply wipe out either side without thinking about it,
Speaker 1: like that would potentially make more sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it did.
Speaker 2: Well, But I was gonna in that case though, Why
Speaker 2: not just have a trial where like you argue about
Speaker 2: who actually has the correct claim to the land, rather
Speaker 2: than people just both say they want the land and
Speaker 2: you settle it with a fight.
Speaker 1: I wish I could have, you know, seen more what
Speaker 1: Haldeman had in mind for this, like what his read
Speaker 1: on it, would it would have been, you know, because
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly it worked, there's the symbolic level at
Speaker 1: which it works. But I wonder what the world building
Speaker 1: arguments would have been.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think obviously it would be better
Speaker 2: for the soldiers and better for the people on both
Speaker 2: sides of a conflict if it could be settled without
Speaker 2: massive bloodshed, whatever whatever that method is. I mean, even
Speaker 2: if it's single combat between robot jocks, that's better than
Speaker 2: just having an all out total war where you send
Speaker 2: people into the meat grinder. But the the you know,
Speaker 2: you hit the war pigs problem, Like leaders setting military
Speaker 2: policy are going to want to win. They're not usually
Speaker 2: the people who themselves have to die in battle. So
Speaker 2: while the weaker force may very much want to settle
Speaker 2: things with robot jocks, it just seems like the side
Speaker 2: with the numerical and weapons superiority would tend to just say, no,
Speaker 2: now we'll have a war.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But you know, ultimately, this is this is not a
Speaker 1: picture that celebrates warfare. It's it has has a message
Speaker 1: of you know, an anti war message, which which I
Speaker 1: ultimately like.
Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about the ending, the very ending, which
Speaker 2: is both actually sort of transcendently excellent and hilarious.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So basically they just battle the hell out of each other.
Speaker 1: So this is this ends up being like the main
Speaker 1: event in which robots do get up after being knocked
Speaker 1: prone through the use of superior tactics, but also lots
Speaker 1: of tricky weaponry, because again it all comes down to
Speaker 1: what secret weapons do you have that your enemy doesn't
Speaker 1: know about. So they engage in a lot of this
Speaker 1: and they end up going up into the stratosphere. They
Speaker 1: end up coming back down again. They end up destroying
Speaker 1: each other's suits, and there's some clever twists and turns
Speaker 1: in that battle, but it ends up with them both unsuited,
Speaker 1: both of them just on amid the rubble, trying to
Speaker 1: bash each other with like pipes and pieces of metal,
Speaker 1: like reduced to you know, almost like paleolithic battle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, literally trying to bash each other with sticks
Speaker 2: and rocks.
Speaker 1: And they reach a point where, okay, it looks like
Speaker 1: Achilles is going to be victorious, you know, it's one
Speaker 1: of those those moments where is he going to finish
Speaker 1: off his adversary, But no, Achilles has another option that
Speaker 1: he presents, and they have this wonderful little back and forth,
Speaker 1: which I quite like the dialogue, you know, and the
Speaker 1: way that they ended this because Achilles says to him,
Speaker 1: you can live, and Alexander says, yes if I kill
Speaker 1: you with this, and it's the pipey thing that he's
Speaker 1: holding or.
Speaker 3: Was it a rock?
Speaker 5: I thought it was a rock, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 1: Okay, And then Achille says we can both live, and
Speaker 1: then Alexander says we are already dead. We are robot jocks,
Speaker 1: which which I think is a line. I think it
Speaker 1: works here, but I also have to remind myself that
Speaker 1: Haldeman's original working title for this was The Mechanics. Yes,
Speaker 1: so so that would have been a more interesting line.
Speaker 1: And he's like, no, we like we're mere mechanics, you know,
Speaker 1: like we're not even really controlling these things, these things
Speaker 1: and this this military engine. We're just caring for it
Speaker 1: and making it run, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, in a weird way. It's an exchange that,
Speaker 2: with a little bit of like verbal tweaking, could have
Speaker 2: been very powerful and is in some way as powerful,
Speaker 2: but because of the phrase robot jocks, it it absolutely
Speaker 2: spills over into absurdity, you know. So like if he
Speaker 2: had said we can both live, and Alexander said, no,
Speaker 2: we are already dead.
Speaker 5: We're soldiers.
Speaker 2: I think the idea would be driven home there that
Speaker 2: like their their fates are not up to them, you know,
Speaker 2: their fates are decided for them by forces beyond their control. Uh,
Speaker 2: And that does seem to be the theme. But instead
Speaker 2: he says, you know, we can live.
Speaker 5: No, we are robot shocks yeah.
Speaker 1: But then ultimately, like this is the spoiler for the
Speaker 1: end of the film, but but he wins. Achilles is
Speaker 1: able to convince Alexander that yes, we can live. We
Speaker 1: don't have to fight, we can stop fighting, and they
Speaker 1: stop fighting and then they do that awesome fist bump
Speaker 1: at the end, and that closes the picture, and you
Speaker 1: end up with this message of hope, that you know
Speaker 1: that we can resist, that we can move beyond like
Speaker 1: senseless battle. And I love it. I thought it ended perfectly,
Speaker 1: ends on a great note.
Speaker 2: It ends with the hero and the villain agreeing not
Speaker 2: to kill one another.
Speaker 1: Right, And they didn't do that thing that they often
Speaker 1: do in films where the hero appeals to the villain's
Speaker 1: humanity and the villa villain seems to say yes, but
Speaker 1: then goes for a double right then yeah, and then
Speaker 1: you know he shoots him dead, and then it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: he did kill the villain, but he tried. He gave
Speaker 1: him a chance, he gave him a chance to be good. No,
Speaker 1: instead they do something different, and I think it works that.
Speaker 5: I mean, so many movies use that.
Speaker 2: It is a plot device that I have come to
Speaker 2: absolutely despise just because of how common and how in
Speaker 2: a way, how cheap it is. Because what it's trying
Speaker 2: to show you is that it's trying to have it
Speaker 2: both ways. It's trying to have the hero show mercy
Speaker 2: and not be vindictive and cruel. So the hero gets
Speaker 2: the upper hand, gives the villain a chance to like
Speaker 2: walk away or to live or whatever, and then the
Speaker 2: villain tries to stab them in the back and then
Speaker 2: the hero kills them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's trying to have it both ways.
Speaker 2: So you get to see the villain killed and punished,
Speaker 2: but you also get to see the hero have mercy.
Speaker 2: I think it's it's better to just choose one or
Speaker 2: the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know what kind of arguments may have happened,
Speaker 1: or maybe there weren't arguments over this part, but I
Speaker 1: like the way it turned out, So I don't know
Speaker 1: if this was ultimately the way Halman wanted it, or
Speaker 1: if this was more of a Stuart Gordon direction, or
Speaker 1: maybe this is just the way it feels. Is like,
Speaker 1: this is where the two visions come together and they work.
Speaker 2: It is a weirdly transcendent way to conclude this utterly
Speaker 2: ridiculous film.
Speaker 1: All right, and well, speaking of concluding, it's time for
Speaker 1: us to conclude. You may be wondering, though, where can
Speaker 1: I see robot Jocks? Unfortunately this is a tough one.
Speaker 1: You can buy some at times crazy overpriced DVDs, vhs
Speaker 1: and Blu rays of robot Jocks, but the Shout Factory
Speaker 1: edition of this from twenty fifteen is currently out of
Speaker 1: print print. I think it went out of print in
Speaker 1: October of twenty nineteen, so hopefully it'll become more widely
Speaker 1: available in the future. No one seems to be streaming it, like,
Speaker 1: not even for rent or or digital purchase right now,
Speaker 1: say for the odd unauthorized like highly unauthorized version. Joe,
Speaker 1: didn't you find this one on Facebook of all places?
Speaker 2: Well, I didn't watch it there. I ended up watching
Speaker 2: the version that you rented lent me, but dig around
Speaker 2: for it if you desire.
Speaker 5: But yeah you should also.
Speaker 2: I mean, I would say, start a letter writing campaign
Speaker 2: to the Criterion Collection and get them to put out
Speaker 2: their own edition of robot Jocks, which is what.
Speaker 5: The world deserves.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, we definitely rented it. Got it from Atlanta's
Speaker 1: own video drome. They're still renting films there at Atlanta's
Speaker 1: last video rental place. But if you're not in the
Speaker 1: Atlanta area, you can still get in on the fund
Speaker 1: with their merchandise. You can find them at videodrome dot
Speaker 1: tv in their main website is videodromeatl dot com. As
Speaker 1: for US, Weird House Cinema will continue. We're gonna do
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Speaker 1: weird film. We may talk a little bit about science
Speaker 1: and culture in it, but for the most part is
Speaker 1: the celebration of the film itself. Our core science and
Speaker 1: culture episodes will continue to air on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 1: and then we have, of course some other content sprinkled
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Speaker 1: Tell us what you thought about robot Jocks. You have
Speaker 1: memories of seeing it back in the day, if you
Speaker 1: rewatched it recently, did you rewatch it for this episode,
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Speaker 2: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 2: Nicholas Johnson.
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