Reel Deep Dive Ryan Valentine

Filmed on a shoestring budget and released with modest expectations for box office success, A Hard Day's Night is a fluffy, goofy, and deeply unserious film that happened to capture one of the 20th century's most beloved cultural institutions at the apex of their popularity. The movie's approachable charm left a lasting influence on the marketing of pop musicians going forward; a very prominent example is Spice World, a spiritual successor that was produced when the Spice Girls were at the height of their own hitmaking run.

Ryan is joined by Cheryl and Sarah for a compare and contrast of these two musical comedies. Discussion topics include the artistic merits of frivolity, the flattening of historical figures as time passes, and how gender politics influenced the public perception of both movies.


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Originally intended as a light, comedic riff on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball soon outgrew that modest ambition and became one of the most popular action-adventure serials in modern storytelling. Soon expanding into a multimedia franchise, the Dragon Ball saga was spun off into at least twenty theatrically-released anime films; Ryan and Latisha discuss one of these movies in this recording.

The topics in this episode's dialogue include Dragon Ball's roots in Asian folklore, how the storytelling in Dragon Ball emphasizes delayed gratification, how the character arc of Vegeta is (for many) substantially more relatable and satisfying than Goku's, and how Dragon Ball's subtextual points about interracial relationships and mixed race children conflicts with common assumptions about the franchise's ties to fascist ideology.




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Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation earns the esoteric distinction of being the first original animated movie to be released direct to video in the United States. That sounds like a minor fact (and it is), but the movie's commercial success paved the way for a cottage industry of similar projects to flood department stores and video rental establishments for decades to come. It's also an entertaining and enjoyable snapshot of the time and place where it was created, showing its audience a glimpse of how the Looney Tunes were perceived by the world at large in the early 1990's.



Ryan is joined by Sylvan and Cheryl for a discussion of this meaningful pillar of millennial nostalgia. Talking points include the labored creation of Tiny Toons, why the home video market was considered an ideal platform for the characters, and how the very existence of Tiny Toons functions as an interrogation of Golden Age Bugs Bunny shorts and why their appeal has lasted as long as it has.


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The smash success of Universal's 1931 Frankenstein adaptation made a sequel practically mandatory. Director James Whale felt that it'd be impossible to top the first film and was therefore reluctant to return, but the studio eventually lured him back with a juicy paycheck, a promise to greenlight one of Whale's passion projects, and nigh-total creative control over what eventually became Bride of Frankenstein.

Still assuming that the gothic atmosphere and graphic scares of Frankenstein couldn't be replicated, Whale chose to go in a more campy, theatrical, and melodramatic direction with the follow-up. While the production did run overbudget, Bride did strong box office and is now considered one of the few movie sequels to surpass the quality of its predecessor.

Ryan is joined by Cheryl and Sylvan for a close read of this beloved sci-fi horror comedy. Talking points include the story's approach to scientific advancement, the movie's very self-aware use of Christian allegory, and whether Bride's heavy application of queercoding was a conscious filmmaking choice by Whale (and whether or not that matters).


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Taking place in a world where the United States and the Soviet Union are engaged in an arms race over shrink ray technology, Fantastic Voyage has the premise of a low budget B movie. 20th Century Fox, however, cast the film with prominent movie stars, spent lavishly on special effects, and promoted the film with an aggressive marketing campaign. While it didn't quite make it to profitability during its initial box office run, Fantastic Voyage easily made up for that shortfall when it came to television broadcasts and theatrical rereleases. Its basic plot, where a crew of scientists are reduced in size so they can enter the body of an injured man and perform delicate brain surgery from within, has been imitated and lampooned in countless films and TV programs.



Ryan is joined by Cheryl, Pete, and Sylvan for a roundtable deconstruction of this interesting time capsule of mid-60's Hollywood. Discussion topics include the general history of size changing in fiction, the film's reliance on Cold War paranoia, the historical context that informs the narrative of Fantastic Voyage, and why shrinking stories appeal to audiences across a wide array of historical eras and cultural dispositions.


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Produced for an unusually high budget in the nascent years of the character, the seventeen animated shorts starring Superman marked a significant high water mark in the Golden Age of Animation. Crafted with care and using tech that was on the bleeding edge of film animation, the shorts were highly successful and made a significant impact on both the cartoon medium and the development of Superman as a pop culture institution.

Ryan is joined by Sylvan, Sarah, and Carlos for a long discussion about six of these colorful, intense, and expertly-stylized films. Talking points include war propaganda, Great Man Theory, objectivism, 1930's pulp tropes, the concept of the Übermensch, and how Superman gradually shifted from being a quasi-socialist champion of the oppressed to an arbiter of the status quo.








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