Year One Review – Part 1

Find the post for Part 2 here.

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Emily]
So BBQ Grill was our first for- fo- foyer.

[Shep]
Foyer?

[Emily]
Foyer.

[Shep]
What?

[Emily]
Yeah, you know. Grand entrance.

[Thomas]
Yeah. We made a big entrance into horror.

[Emily]
Yeah. It was our big first adventure into horror, or something along those lines.

[Intro music]

[Thomas J. Brown]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take a look back at our first year of the show. That’s right, Emily, Shep, and I have been putting episodes of Almost Plausible out into the world for an entire year. And for our final episode of that year, we want to take a look back at what we’ve done, in this two-episode special, where we give you some extra insights into the show. With me, as always, are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
A question that I get asked a lot is how did we come up with the idea for Almost Plausible? What do you two remember about the show’s origins?

[Shep]
Nothing. I have no idea. I think we talked about it at a party once?

[Emily]
No, it wasn’t a party.

[Thomas]
At Emily’s house, wasn’t it?

[Emily]
No, it was a Zoom.

[Thomas]
No? Oh, that’s right.

[Emily]
It was one of our Zoom coffees.

[Thomas]
During the pandemic.

[Emily]
During the pandemic.

[Shep]
Oh, wow.

[Emily]
Before we were braving the world about us, we were doing the Zoom coffees and it came up there and we took over the coffee hour and came up with the show.

[Thomas]
So I had recently watched the movie Battleship-

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
And was talking about how we could have done such a better job because it had nothing to do with it.

[Emily]
And then one of you was like, “We can make a movie out of Mac and Cheese.”

[Thomas]
Or something. Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And then I think Shep said, “That could be a podcast.” And I was like, “Yeah. No, wait. Yeah.”

[Emily]
“Could be a podcast.”

[Thomas]
“That could be a podcast.”

[Shep]
Well, just like, anything could be a movie, anything could be a podcast.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
But this would be a fun one to do. I think that’s the difference.

[Thomas]
Right. It’s a thing that all three of us like and have done together, frankly, as kind of a leisure activity.

[Emily]
Yes. This is very just what we do when we get together anyway. Why not record it and try to bring it to the world?

[Thomas]
So this is the 42nd episode. I thought today we would kind of take a look back at our 1st 35 episodes. That’s most of the first season. Year, whatever.

[Shep]
Year.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
We don’t really have seasons. So, yeah, let’s jump in with our first clip from our first episode. Calculator was the first episode that we released, and this is a clip right from the beginning of the show.

[Thomas]
As I mentioned before, on today’s show, we’re going to create a story where a calculator plays a central role. Emily, Shep, you’ve had a week to think about it. What have you come up with?

[Shep]
Well, obviously time travel is the number one, but that was done in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where the time travel device was an Abacus, which is a kind of calculator.

[Thomas]
So I love that literally, the first thing we do on the show is make a reference, a thing which we have- people have said to me when they’ve talked about the show that they’re amazed at how much stuff we know and talk about and how quickly we bring up references to other shows.

[Shep]
It’s almost like we like movies a lot.

[Thomas]
We’ve all just watched a lot of stuff.

[Emily]
I was going to say, is that impressive or sad? Because that means we spend a lot of time watching movies.

[Shep]
Movies are entertaining.

[Thomas]
Honestly i think it’s just typically us.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Also from that show is another thing that came up several times.

[Thomas]
What’s our main character’s name. Let’s give him a name. Hiro. No.

[Shep]
Protagonist.

[Thomas]
Yeah, exactly. Mark?

[Shep]
That’s a very-

[Thomas]
Steve?

[Emily]
I thought Steve but I was like Steve is such a Steve.

[Shep]
Steve is a little guy.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah, he’s definitely a Steve.

[Shep]
He’s a Steve.

[Thomas]
So again, first episode, right away, we’re just flipping shit at Steve.

[Shep]
And also, immediately I was like, “No, no, you’re all wrong. Listen to me. Steve is not the main character. He’s the little guy.”

[Thomas]
And even in that clip, making a reference to something else. So interestingly, although Calculator is the first episode that we released, it was actually recorded after Toilet Brush. So if you want to play along, you can count between here and Toilet Brush and see how many episodes we recorded before we recorded our “first” episode. And even then, the next episode is Pockets. Chronologically, that may have been the first one that we recorded for release, but even before that, there are three episodes that we recorded that we have never released. We will at some point, but they were sort of test episodes.

[Shep]
One of them in particular was really good.

[Emily]
So good.

[Thomas]
Yeah, yeah, they were fun and- but they were definitely very different. It was sort of us trying to find our feet and figure out the format of what is this show?

[Shep]
I still don’t know what this show is. So-

[Emily]
It’s fun. That’s what it is.

[Shep]
Yes, it’s fun.

[Emily]
It’s fun.

[Thomas]
So references sometimes bite us in the ass.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
I think because we’ve seen so many things over such a long period of time, we end up in a situation kind of like what happened. Only with hindsight did I realize this, but this happened in episode two, which is Pockets.

[Thomas]
He just finds this jacket, or he gets it from a thrift store? Like, how does he end up in his possession?

[Emily]
He’s helping his mom or relative clean out a dead relative’s attic, and finds this pants or jacket or something. And he’s like, “Yeah, this looks like me. This will work. I needed one of these.”

[Thomas]
It’s got a sweet tiger embroidered on the back.

[Thomas]
So if you remember from that episode, our main character finds a jacket. The jacket gives him sort of cursed luck. He tries to get rid of it, but it keeps coming back to him. And at the end of the episode, the jacket finds a new owner. And as you heard in that clip there, I suggested that perhaps the jacket has a tiger embroidered under the back of it. In episode nine of season one of We Bare Bears is the episode Jean Jacket, where Grizz finds a jean jacket with a tiger on the back, which brings the three of them cursed luck. They try to get rid of it, but it keeps coming back.

[Emily]
Noooo! How?!

[Thomas]
And at the end of the episode, the jacket finds a new owner.

[Shep]
Wow. Wow.

[Emily]
My son loves We Bare Bears. I haven’t seen this one yet.

[Thomas]
I don’t know. There aren’t new stories is what it is.

[Emily]
There aren’t.

[Thomas]
Every story has been told.

[Emily]
Oh, my God.

[Thomas]
But that’s what amazes me sometimes. And this happens every once in a while where we’ll come up with something and it’s like detail after detail after detail is just the same. Like shockingly the same.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Shep and I, we were writing a zombie apocalypse show years ago, before The Walking Dead came out.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
And while we were writing it, I was talking to a friend- because we were going to create a web series, an episodic web series. And I was talking to a friend that I went to film school with who I wanted to produce it. And he said, “Oh, so it’s like the Walking Dead.” And we were like, “What is that? We don’t know what that is.” And he said, “Oh, it’s this show that’s coming out.” Well, Shep looked into it and we found out how many similarities there were. Characters whose jobs, names, and ethnicities were all the same. The whole governor plot was our entire second season that we had planned out. Again, this is the thing that neither of us knew about or read or had never been exposed to, ever.

[Shep]
It wasn’t out yet. It wasn’t even out yet.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
But looking up the Wikipedia page for it or whatever it was, I can’t remember. And it was like three of our five main characters had the same name as a name in The Walking Dead. Three out of five is 60%.

[Thomas]
I think two of them had the same job and one of them was the same race as one of their characters. Something like that. Were all lined up and it was just like, how does this happen?

[Shep]
Yeah, I don’t know.

[Emily]
The zeitgeist, it’s out there. You just don’t realize it.

[Thomas]
So. Episode three Chicken Noodle Soup–

[Shep]
Ooh.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
You know, I love this episode, but boy. Let’s listen to the clip real quick.

[Emily]
I was thinking more along the lines of it would be sort of like a story where she’s at the end of her life, her daughter’s making it for her. Like, she’s got Alzheimer’s or whatever. Her daughter’s making her chicken noodle soup, and that’s bringing back some of the touchstone memories for her throughout her life.

[Thomas]
I like that. That’s good.

[Emily]
And so you can do it very disconnected, too, and make it more like how Alzheimer’s works, where you’re in time and place randomly.

[Shep]
Yeah, I like that as a framing device.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I think another benefit of that is that you can still have that moment where the daughter doesn’t like the soup-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And then later comes around on it.

[Emily]
And then she makes real- You’re just going to end up sobbing at the end of this movie because of the beauty of the soup. Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah. That’s the goal. The audience’s tears gives us our terrible power.

[Thomas]
This really is you will end up crying at the end of this one episode, I think. Not just for myself, but for people that we’ve talked to who’ve listened to the episode. It really struck kind of close to home.

[Emily]
I had a couple of friends who have seen relatives go through it and they were like “I kind of ugly cried listening to it.”

[Thomas]
Interesting that’s our third episode and already we’re just like so deep into the emotions and whatnot. I was looking at our analytics recently, our download statistics, and one thing that I found really interesting is that Chicken Noodle Soup is probably the most downloaded episode that we have.

[Emily]
Wow.

[Thomas]
It’s consistently up there. It gets downloaded on a regular basis. So I don’t know what it is about that that is drawing people to it. But-

[Emily]
Sounds like a studio needs to give us money and make this movie.

[Thomas]
I really liked the way that we came up with how to tell that story, where it sort of you moved like ABCD and then D was the mirror and you started going back CBA and worked your way back out and you got sort of the first portions up front and then the payoffs for all of those, and you really got a better sense of what was going on and what these relationships were and why they were so impactful. Our fourth episode was Ceiling Fan. That was a fun episode. I really liked- I think that was our first fantasy episode.

[Emily]
Yeah. First kids fantasy episode. It really gave me Time Bandits kind of feeling for some reason.

[Thomas]
Or like Labyrinth or-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Those kinds of vibes.

[Emily]
I was going to say it reminds me of a show my kids used to watch, but it involved a bucket of dinosaurs.

[Shep]
This could have a bucket of dinosaurs.

[Thomas]
We’ll save that one for when we do Bucket.

[Shep]
Yeah, the Bucket episode has everything.

[Emily]
Bucket’s gonna be a masterpiece.

[Thomas]
That’ll be the finale, we’re calling it. Now, if we do Bucket, you know the shows over.

[Shep]
It’s over.

[Emily]
It’s over.

[Shep]
That’s the peak. It’s all downhill.

[Emily]
We’ve reached our pinnacle.

[Thomas]
“So next week on Almost Plausible, we’re doing Bucket- Oh, shit!”

[Thomas]
I mean, we haven’t done Bucket yet.

[Shep]
Yet!

[Thomas]
So we can still keep this promise that it’ll be our last episode.

[Shep]
I mean, we can just do Bucket whenever, and then every episode after that is a bonus episode.

[Emily]
Well, we can do Bucket. We just got to save Kitchen Sink.

[Thomas]
There you go. So for the three of us, one of our favorite episodes is Pillows.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Oh, it’s totally one of my favorites.

[Thomas]
Anytime we’re telling somebody new about the show, Pillows is one of the ones I always reference. Go, listen to this one.

[Emily]
Yeah, it’s up there with my recommendations,

[Shep]
It’s not my favorite favorite, which we haven’t gotten to yet.

[Thomas]
It’s up there for sure.

[Emily]
But it’s up there.

[Thomas]
Yeah. One of the things I really like about this episode is this throwaway joke which turns into a major plot point later in the episode.

[Thomas]
Maybe on the way home, she walks by a pet store and sees some cats in the window, and she’s like, “I’ll be back for you tomorrow.”

[Shep]
It’s only a matter of time.

[Emily]
That definitely has to be a scene.

[Thomas]
It was just a stupid comment that I made that came up several times. Like, we talked about her having cats and living with her cats at the end and those were being her companions.

[Emily]
And she was happy because all you need is cats.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s funny how that happens kind of surprisingly often, where one of us will make some dumb joke and it’s like, “No, no, that’s good.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
“Let’s keep that.”

[Emily]
A lot of our throwaway jokes end up becoming the next vein of the plot.

[Thomas]
I’m not sure what that says about us.

[Shep]
That we pay attention to details?

[Thomas]
Yeah, perhaps. Episode six was our Printer episode. Some pretty varying ideas going on in this episode. And the one we ended up picking was kind of out there and wild.

[Shep]
Okay, what if the technology was complete like the scientists already had- And it wasn’t just to cure diseases or fix problems, but in the scientist’s mind, this was the next stage of evolution. “We’re going to make bodies that don’t have our weaknesses. These bodies don’t need to breathe, these bodies don’t need to pump oxygen or blood around. So the heart is no longer a weakness. The lack of air is no longer a weakness.” Maybe they’re more efficient on food or water or whatever. They don’t need as much water because they’re not exhaling moisture when they breathe, because they’re not breathing, for one, and they don’t exhale moisture because when they’re talking, for whatever reason. Where I’m going to with this is that the scientist gets shot at some point and presumably killed, but it turns out he’s already in one of the new bodies. So getting shot in the heart doesn’t kill you.

[Emily]
I like it because I had a similar thought that we would find out the scientist was, in fact, not his original body anymore.

[Thomas]
I like that.

[Thomas]
This was a great moment in this episode because it’s really where the episode took a big turn all of a sudden. I mean, it was sort of there were a few twists and turns, but this one, I feel like was if this movie got made, it would be a big reveal.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. This would be a big shocker that you don’t talk about.

[Thomas]
A spoiler.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Boy that Shep sure loves to monologue.

[Emily]
Shep loves the sound of his own voice.

[Shep]
I really hate the sound of my- this is- the hardest part of listening to these episodes is listening to my voice.

[Emily]
I feel like these early episodes my voice is way I’m trying really hard to be deep and whatever.

[Thomas]
These early episodes are interesting from a listening standpoint because I think we all have different microphones than we were using back then. Our setups are different. The way I was editing them is different. There’s a whole bunch of things that are different about them. And in fact, I think later on there’s going to be some clips where Emily’s microphone is particularly fussy. I know there was a period of time where your microphone just did not want to play nice.

[Emily]
It didn’t want to do anything, so I replaced it.

[Thomas]
Yeah. One more clip from Printer before we move on.

[Thomas]
But I think you could easily throw something out there that says, “No, they can’t, because that’s part of the reason they keep the original under, so that it can’t create new memories beyond that point. Because if you have two sets of memories for the same time period-“

[Shep]
“You’ll go insane.”

[Thomas]
Right? It’ll break the brain, literally.

[Emily]
So now we’re in the Dollhouse.

[Shep]
I don’t know. Is that a thing in the Dollhouse?

[Emily]
Yeah, they got their memories wiped in between jobs, but Alpha splintered and could remember all of the consciousnesses. That’s why he went insane. It’s the plot of the first season.

[Shep]
Okay, so what I’m hearing is none of these ideas are original so far.

[Thomas]
I mean, we thought of them ourselves. It’s just other people thought of them first.

[Emily]
Hey, it’s called Almost Plausible, not Almost Original.

[Shep]
But it is Almost Original.

[Thomas]
Okay. It’s called Almost Plausible, not Definitely Original.

[Shep]
There you go.

[Shep]
I like our collaborative-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
We come together.

[Thomas]
To knock on our own show or our own ideas. It just goes to show every story has been told. Going back to what I said earlier.

[Emily]
It really has.

[Shep]
So it’s our fault for being exposed to so many stories. So that one of us is going to recognize, “Oh, that thing that you’re pitching, that was the thing from this 1967 Finish indie film.”

[Emily]
Funny story. When Thomas and I were in film school, we were talking about the originality of like movies and stuff. And the teacher who was not the biggest fan of me, had said something about oh, “Next it’ll be a movie about dinosaurs and cowboys.” And I was like, “Well, there is one.” And she’s like, “What?” And I was like, “Yeah, in the 60s they made one with dinosaurs and cowboys.” The Land Time Forgot or something like that. And she’s like, “What?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s filmed in Mexico.” And she just was like, flabbergasted, that one, I knew of such a thing and kind of didn’t believe me.

[Thomas]
She would seem very like- I think she thought you were having her on there.

[Emily]
It’s a real movie. I watched it with my dad.

[Thomas]
That sounds like the kind of movie your dad would watch. For sure.

[Shep]
The secret is all of our pitches are actually real movies. So.

[Thomas]
It’s a game that we haven’t told you we’re playing.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
You can spot which movie.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Boy, there’s going to be people who take that seriously and going to go back and listen to all of them. “What are these movies?”

[Shep]
Leave a message in the comments if you figure out which movie we’re talking about.

[Emily]
Leave all the messages in the comment. Leave any message in the comment.

[Thomas]
Yeah, definitely.

[Emily]
Just say you think we’re pretty. I know you haven’t seen a picture of us, but our voices sound pretty. Right? I know what you think I am. I’m a leggy blonde with big boobs and a tiny waist. And you’re absolutely right.

[Thomas]
I’ve gone on a few different dates and more than one person has said that they think that I have a sexy voice. So yet another reason for me to plug the podcast is to get that- those big ups.

[Shep]
How are they saying it, though? They’re saying it when they see you in person after having presumably talked to you like, “Oh, your voice sounded really sexy.”

[Thomas]
That’s a fair point. Damn. Now I need to go back and think about those interactions. Maybe I was just so- not blinded, but you know what I mean. Just so focused on the words.

[Shep]
Guys get so few compliments that. It’s like, “Oh, I heard sexy.”

[Thomas]
She was talking to me, and she said sexy, so.

[Emily]
Is that what’s going on with mediocre white men? You just only hear the positive parts?

[Shep]
I heard positive. What else did you say?

[Emily]
Damn, I need to be a man.

[Shep]
It’s kind of great. I re-up every year.

[Thomas]
Emily, your female perspective is such a valuable addition to this show that we need you to stay a woman.

[Shep]
Oh, yes.

[Emily]
Yeah. Making the female masturbation joke in Pillows was-

[Thomas]
Look, all I’m saying is that if one of you does a body swap, then one of the others of us has to also do a body swap into an opposite gendered body so that we can keep that perspective happening.

[Emily]
That dynamic.

[Thomas]
Yeah, exactly.

[Shep]
The dynamic of two men and one woman? So if I became a woman, Thomas is like, “No no no, this is untenable.”

[Thomas]
I can’t have you guys ganging off on me.

[Shep]
Emily, you have to be a man.

[Emily]
So I have to become a male in-

[Shep]
You were just talking about how you wanted to be a man, so-

[Emily]
That’s right. Okay.

[Shep]
All your wishes are coming true.

[Thomas]
Well, from one misogynistic topic to another, here’s a clip from Toilet Brush.

Shep]
Oh, you could split them up here at this point. So the college kids, when they meet up, when they are first talking earlier, they’re like, “We need this and this and this and this,” and they go, “Okay, we can help you with the military thing, whatever.” So they know what some of the other items are and they know what the college is. And if you have five people… or four people?

[Emily]
We had four, but we said four to six. So we can have five people. Wally could be number five and we can have four people looking for Wally.

[Shep]
Well, is Wally number five or is he number six?

[Thomas]
Is it two or three couples or is it two couples and Wally? Is it-

[Emily]
Wally’s number six. There’s five of them.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Emily]
Two couples and a free dad or free mom.

[Shep]
Free Dad is a very different kind of movie. So each couple goes to one of the place, where does the free dad go?

[Thomas]
To the other place.

[Shep]
Which couple does the free dad go with?

[Emily]
He goes back to the college.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. They sent him to the college to wait.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Thomas]
How are they all getting around? I assume they’re all in one vehicle.

[Shep]
It’s all Ubers these days.

[Emily]
Yeah, they’re Ubering the shit out of this city.

[Shep]
Or Lyft?

[Thomas]
Or Luber? No, wait.

[Shep]
Again, that’s a different kind of movie.

[Thomas]
That’s in Free Daddy.

[Thomas]
You know, we’ve talked about doing a porn episode, so-

[Emily]
Our parents will be so proud.

[Thomas]
Maybe we’ll do that in the Patreon. We’ll do Almost Plausible After Dark.

[Shep]
I think we missed our chance. Now, porn in the 70s, you youths don’t know this, but porn used to have plots.

[Thomas]
What?

[Shep]
Porn movies used to be movies that had explicit sex scenes in them. They weren’t explicit sex scenes with the barest flimsiest thing to put them together.

[Thomas]
Well, maybe we can start doing that in a Patreon.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
We can do that as a side project.

[Thomas]
Okay. All right. The next episode, episode eight, Paper Bag.

[Shep]
This is my favorite we’re talking about our favorite episodes. This is my favorite episode.

[Thomas]
This is a great episode.

[Emily]
This one is really good.

[Thomas]
Paper Bag was the first time that we dealt with a container, and, well, boy, containers are hard.

Shep]
What I don’t want is for the paper bag to just be like a MacGuffin. The bag shows up at the beginning in an inciting incident, and the person looks inside and that causes them to go off. And we never find out what’s in it. Or a kid forgets to lunch on the day of the track meet or football tryouts or whatever. And they’re worried they’re going to be too weak to qualify if they don’t have a big beefy lunch. Those aren’t about the bag.

[Thomas]
Right. And that was what I really struggled with was it was always about what’s in the bag and the bag-

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
The bag is a container. It’s so natural to think of it that way. But then it’s not about the bag. It’s about what’s in the bag.

[Shep]
So a man robs a bank and he’s got his hand in a paper bag insisting he has a gun. It’s not about the bag. So forget that.

[Thomas]
And that’s not the last time we had to deal with a container. And, boy, those ones are tough.

[Shep]
Yes. Agreed. This is why we don’t do Bucket. If we do Bucket, it means we’re out of ideas because we’re doing another container.

[Thomas]
This episode also contains both our first reference to St. Bart’s as well as Ryan Reynolds.

[Emily]
Do we have a lot of references to St. Bart’s?

[Thomas]
We have more than one, which is weird in a show with 40 some episodes.

[Emily]
That’s so crazy.

[Shep]
We do have a lot of references to Ryan Reynolds.

[Thomas]
We have a lot of references to a lot of the same stuff.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
The Earth has a lot of references to Ryan Reynolds. Like, that’s just we exist in this time.

[Shep]
Relistening to these episodes for this clip show, I was like, “This is, again? Again? Ryan Reynolds again?”

[Thomas]
We’ll just have to have him on the show.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Oh, my God, I would die. Let’s do it.

[Shep]
We’ll let him plug his booze company, what’s his-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Aviation Gin.

[Emily]
Aviation?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
So one of the things that we have often said, jokingly, but also seriously in a way, is that episodes that start with the letter P are the best episodes. So Pillow, Paper Bag, those are both ones that we thought were particularly good ones. This was one of those ones that was really good, but in, like, an underdog kind of way or like a dark horse kind of way. I forget about this episode a lot. There are a whole bunch that I can’t remember when I’m thinking through them. But Penny, this is such a good episode.

[Emily]
Oh, Penny. Yeah, I do- it doesn’t come to the forefront every time.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
But when you mention it and I remember, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that was a really good story we came up with.”

[Thomas]
There’s a lot of nice little details in there that we came up with.

[Emily]
I learned that you can’t sleep in a barn. It’s not going to keep you warm.

[Thomas]
The funny thing about Penny is how we went about deciding which pitch to choose.

[Thomas]
Does anyone have a penny? I feel like we should flip a coin here to decide between the two.

[Emily]
Don’t have one with me.

[Thomas]
I only have quarters at my desk. All right, I’ll flip a quarter here.

[Emily]
What are we choosing between?

[Shep]
So what are our top two picks? Is that what you’re saying?

[Emily]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s the girl who goes into the past and the lucky bad penny. I think of the top two. Those are the ones we have more of a story for than any of the others.

[Emily]
We can’t choose all of them. We have to pick two.

[Shep]
But they’re so good. We’ll make this a three episode series. We’ll just do pennies three times. We’ll work our way down the list. All right.

[Thomas]
All right. Yeah. Assign a heads and a tails to these.

[Shep]
So heads, little girl. Tails, unlucky penny.

[Thomas]
Okay, it’s tails.

[Shep]
So that’s the bad penny one. Well, we got it already. We’re done.

[Emily]
Okay, so what I’m hearing from Shep here is we want to do the little girl. No, retake that!

[Shep]
Are we not doing “Phrasing!” anymore?

[Emily]
What I’m hearing from Shep is that we want to explore the girl lost in time.

[Shep]
I like time travel stories.

[Thomas]
So I like how we flip a coin to choose which pitch we’re going to do and then immediately choose the other one.

[Shep]
That’s often what you can do when you flip a coin, because as soon as you flip it, you know what you want the answer to be.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And again, I talked about time travel in Calculator, our first aired episode, and then here we are again. Yeah. I like time travel stories. It is a true fact.

[Thomas]
Well, speaking of time travel, that comes up a lot in our next episode, which is Newspaper.

[Thomas]
So we’ve changed our story around kind of significantly. Where do we go from here?

[Shep]
This kind of reminds me of Groundhog’s Day. If you could keep using the same photo over and over again, you’re basically choosing to relive that day over and over again as many times as you want.

[Thomas]
Maybe there’s a girl he likes and there’s a photo of her in a bar or something. And he keeps going back into that photo to hit on her until he figures out what she is like and how that works.

[Emily]
Maybe it’s just a random photo of a bar in the town and he goes in. It’s like his first solo. He goes in and he meets this girl and is like, “Oh, I can figure out things and do the Groundhog Day thing where I can figure out things about you. So that when I meet you in real life-“

[Shep]
That was real problematic. I don’t know if we want that type of storyline. It might be okay if he goes in not with that intention, but as his first solo, he goes into the bar and he meets someone and they hit it off really well. And so he wants to meet her in real life, but she doesn’t have the same memory of experiences that he has.

[Thomas]
Also, she lives in New York and he lives in Vermont.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, it’s not a local bar, it’s a bar from L.A.

[Emily]
That works too.

[Thomas]
So the only way he can see her is to go into the paper.

[Shep]
But she won’t remember him.

[Thomas]
Right. Our story is going in several different directions or possible directions.

[Emily]
We have to pick a lane.

[Thomas]
That happens a lot, I feel like. We come up with a lot of really good ideas, and then it’s like, “Okay, now which one do we do, though?” But then there are other times where we have some idea that comes up really early, and it’s like, “Well, that’s what I want to do. That’s the one. Let’s do that.”

[Shep and Emily]
Yes.

[Thomas]
It can get a little frustrating. This has only happened a few times, but if we go down a path for a while and then it just ends up not working and we have to backpedal and start over or try to work our way back to some other point.

[Shep]
I think that a couple of those times have happened that haven’t made it into the episode.

[Thomas]
Oh, for sure. Yeah.

[Shep]
But we don’t know what’s not going to have legs until we try to get it to run for a while.

[Thomas]
And really, the only reason those get cut is for time. I think it’s valuable to see that in terms of what is the writing process and what is it like, but I’d hate to have the audience listen to half an hour of something that ends up getting thrown out completely.

[Emily]
That doesn’t even have a good joke.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah. So as long time or perhaps even relatively new listeners to the show will know, Shep has thoughts when it comes to consequences.

[Thomas]
What if the friend is a murderer or committed a murder or committed a hit and run or something like that? He has no way to prove it. But he knows this thing.

[Emily]
Okay. Yeah. Maybe somebody died in a hit and run and it’s always been a mystery for the town and they’re just never going to find out. Because there’s no way, it’s past the point of finding out, right? And then he learns that it was his best friend or brother or something.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. Brother is better.

[Shep]
It’s a big coincidence that it’s someone that he knows that committed this crime.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I don’t think it would be a known-

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
There’s a missing person. Nobody knows what happened to this person.

[Emily]
I was just thinking it was, there was a hit and run two years ago and nobody knew what happened. Maybe it’s not a well-known thing.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I don’t think it should be a well-known thing.

[Shep]
Why is he investigating this hit and run?

[Thomas]
I don’t think he is. I think it’s, I think he finds out.

[Emily]
He stumbles upon it. Maybe when he’s hitting on the girl in the bar picture, he notices-

[Thomas]
Actually, that’s not bad. He notices his friend is like, “Oh, I didn’t realize he was there that night” and goes to follow him.

[Shep]
I don’t like coincidences.

[Thomas]
Well, you don’t like anything, Shep, so…

[Shep]
I don’t. This is true.

[Emily]
Coincidences happen. If there’s no fate or determination, the world is coincidences.

[Thomas]
Yeah, it’s always going to be a coincidence.

[Shep]
Coincidences happen in real life, but in movies they feel like a cheat. So how about this? His friend or brother, his brother is accused of being in a hit and run and he is swearing up and down that he didn’t do it. So he thinks, “Oh, I’ll investigate it and I’ll find out what actually happened,” and he discovers it was his brother. His brother did it. His brother is guilty. People think that he’s guilty and he is guilty. And now he knows that.

[Thomas]
That’s a really good conflict.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Shep]
And no coincidences involved.

[Emily]
All very intentional.

[Shep]
What was the rule about coincidences? Coincidences that get you into trouble are fine. Coincidences that get you out of trouble are a cheat. That’s the Pixar-

[Thomas]
So you may poopoo our ideas from time to time, but at least you have a good reason why. And I think what you came up with in that clip was a fantastic solution to the problem that we were having. Ultimately, I think, made the story way better and way more interesting.

[Shep]
Yes. Because coincidences in movies are bad. I will die on this hill.

[Emily]
They’re easy.

[Shep]
Yes, they are easy. We are in agreement.

[Thomas]
All right, let’s take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll take a look at some more episodes.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we are back.

[Emily]
The next episode, Jelly Beans, was our first holiday episode and we really centered it around not the holiday at all.

[Shep]
What’s the jelly bean holiday?

[Emily]
Easter.

[Thomas]
Easter.

[Shep]
Ah, obviously Easter. Okay.

[Emily]
I know. Jelly beans are every day for you, Shep.

[Shep]
In my mind, I’m like, “What is the jelly bean holiday? St. Patrick’s day, somehow? I don’t know.”

[Thomas]
I’m sure there are people screaming at you right now or come on.

[Emily]
“Jelly beans!”

[Thomas]
Well, and Easter is not just jelly beans. It’s all sorts of candy.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And we mentioned those in the episode.

[Shep]
Did we see the giant harvesting Cadbury eggs, like, from the Peeps?

[Emily]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Oh, my God. Yes. Obviously. We do now.

[Emily]
100% yes.

[Thomas]
Oh, man. The Peeps should be just, like, brainless giant sugar birds. Like, they’re a threat in their own right.

[Emily]
Because they’re clumsy and stupid.

[Thomas]
And hungry.

[Emily]
Do they eat jelly beans? Is that where the jelly beans come from?

[Thomas]
Oh, the jelly beans should totally be, like, rabbit poop or something.

[Shep]
No, stop making them rabbit poop.

[Emily]
We’ve already established they’re on the vine, so I think they should be the food for the Peeps.

[Shep]
Oh, that’s why the giant was harvesting them. It was for the Peeps.

[Emily]
Yeah. He was harvesting that vine so he could get the jelly beans to feed the Peeps and the kids end up over with the Peeps.

[Thomas]
It’s two parallel stories. The group doesn’t get back together until, like, the beginning of the third act.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
That gives Steve and Jack lots of time together, have to rely on each other. There’s literally no one else coming to save them as far as they know. So they have to rely on each other, which helps them kind of get over whatever issues they have. So that when the group all comes back together, Steve’s like, “No, he’s cool now.” And they’re all just like, “Whatever you say, man. You’re the leader.”

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So the Peeps are some sort of a threat to the kids, those three kids. And then the first thought that came into my head was they somehow tame the Peeps or sort of tame the Peeps. And they’re, like, riding on the backs of the Peeps, and they’re using them to get-

[Shep]
Like Chocobos.

[Thomas]
Across the lawn. We go away from them for a while, and then when we come back, they’ve figured out how to saddle up the Peeps or whatever.

[Shep]
I figured that they would have started to use the jelly beans since they have powers.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
If one gives you the power of flight or the power of speed or whatever, then they figure out which ones, because they’re coming to rescue the other two kids. So they need to know what the powers are. And we, the audience also needs to know what the powers are.

[Thomas]
One of them should definitely make you gigantic.

[Shep]
Which in this world just makes you normal sized. One of them, if there’s one that makes you gigantic, there should be one that makes you tiny as well.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Down to their size or smaller than their size?

[Shep]
Oh, it’s smaller than their size.

[Thomas]
So one jelly bean makes you larger and one jelly bean makes you small. Do the ones that mother give you do anything at all?

[Thomas]
Guys, I can’t help it. My brain just- that’s just how it happens. I’ve trained my brain for years to do this, and I’m not sorry. I’m just saying that that’s what happens. That’s why it happens.

[Emily]
Can’t help it now. It’s too late.

[Thomas]
Right. It’s a feature, not a bug.

[Emily]
Next, we did another container because we had so much fun with Paper Bag and thought, “Why not make more difficult decisions?”

[Thomas]
But I think we did a good job on this one about making it about the Lunch Box specifically and sort of the whole crazy world we built around that Lunch Box.

[Thomas]
We need to learn, too. We need to see basically everybody doing stuff. So what about the Cosplay Couple? What do they do in the middle of the movie? What is their job? Do they run like a fan site? They have a podcast, of course.

[Emily]
Of course they have a podcast. They do run a fan site.

[Thomas]
Do they organize a convention or volunteer at a convention or something like that?

[Emily]
They don’t organize it because they’re competitive assholes. So they have to be able to participate in any kind of competition.

[Thomas]
What happens to them at the end? Are they still together? Do they win second place in some costume contest? And they’re really bitter because it’s like a four-year-old that wins or something.

[Emily]
Yeah, they have to lose to a child.

[Thomas and Shep]
Yeah.

[Shep]
An age-appropriate person.

[Emily and Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Yeah. And they think it’s because they didn’t get the lunch box. That’s the only reason that they could have lost.

[Emily]
Do they just switch fandoms after? Do they get a bad taste of their mouth from this and they’re like, “You know what? Screw this. We’re going to-“

[Shep]
No, next year they’re going to win it.

[Emily]
How?

[Shep]
This is their year.

[Emily]
Every year is their year.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
They’re just completely deluded.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
“I heard that one of the wigs is going to go up for auction in Pasadena.”

[Thomas]
This is like a year later, and they’re like, a couple of the items from the original auction are going up again already.

[Shep]
The museum burned down, so a lot of things were lost.

[Thomas]
What happened to their cat? Did their cat die?

[Shep]
Oh yeah, the cat died. They have a new cat.

[Emily]
Are they special cats? Are they just any kind of cat? Are we talking like hairless?

[Shep]
No, it’s a cat that looks like the cat that was on the show.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And the new cat is even better because he has the mark on his paw and their old cat didn’t.

[Emily]
That’s right.

[Shep]
So this is their year.

[Emily]
They started training this one earlier so he’s responding to the commands much better. And you just see the cat flop over.

[Thomas]
Oh, man. I can see this whole thing in my head. I really want to see this movie. What about the third sibling? What are they up to at the end? Are they the most normal person of the three? And so they’re just back at their job?

[Shep]
Yeah. They’re out of this entirely. They have no comment.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So it’s like a walking shot. They’re leaving their work, heading to their car, and they’re like, “Please, guys, I don’t want to be in this anymore. Why are you still filming?”

[Shep]
Because they were originally in it to promote the museum-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Which has since burned down, so they have no more reason to be in it.

[Emily]
Why did the museum burn down?

[Shep]
Well, obviously the Superfan burned it down.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
So what happened was Superfan wins the auction and gets the lunch box. And the Former Child Actor still wants the lunch box because it started as a scam to drum up whatever, and then that didn’t pan out. And now all they have is their nostalgia. So they want that lunch box for real now. And so they agree to go out with the Superfan, and it doesn’t go well. The Superfan doesn’t like them in real life because they haven’t done anything really, because they keep talking to them as if they were the kid, they played a child genius or whatever. And he’s not a genius in real life. “Well, you knew all that stuff as a kid.” He’s like, “No, we had writers and I just memorized the script. It’s not realistic to expect someone to actually know all this stuff.” And so she gets over her fandom. She gives him the lunch box because she doesn’t care. But then she’s so angry at the show for ruining her life, basically, with a fantasy. She burns down the museum. We don’t know for sure, but we know the museum burned down and she disappeared.

[Emily]
She just disappears so we don’t see her again. They were unable to locate.

[Shep]
Or she’s in prison for arson. So the last interview with her is behind the glass window.

[Thomas]
Maybe she insisted on their date being at the museum, at the exhibit.

[Shep]
Oh because they had other props.

[Thomas]
Right. And so she’s like, “Let’s go see those other props.” And then she freaks out and pushes some displays over and light something on fire. And you see, like, security camera footage of it at like twelve frame per second. Jerky.

[Shep]
It burned real fast.

[Thomas]
Those old props and stuff, they’re all made out of really flammable materials or asbestos. And unfortunately, these ones were not made out of asbestos.

[Shep]
That’s why the prop guy is still alive this time. All the other prop guys died.

[Thomas]
Yeah, this was the first show that didn’t use asbestos.

[Shep]
So several things. One, I go, “No no no, here’s what happened” twice in just that clip. And also, I act like we all watched this show and know everything about it, and I have to explain what’s obvious. I have this whole thing in my head, like, I’m reminding you, I’m not telling you. No, here’s the thing that it could be. I’m like, no, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember from our childhood, this show? Don’t you remember watching this documentary that we’re talking about? How do you guys put up with me? I’m so confident in that clip that I know exactly what happened.

[Emily]
Because, as they say in The Paper a confident wave and a clipboard will get you in any building in the world.

[Thomas]
But you know what, Shep? I think that that’s part of what made the world that we created in that episode so vivid was because it felt a lot like what you were saying, like a thing that we had just seen and we had grown up with.

[Emily]
Yeah. Did our P trend continue with Paperclip, do you guys think?

[Thomas]
I think so. I like Paperclip. I mean, speaking of episodes where there was something that you could really see, Paperclip, for me, what I really liked about it was the entire way through, I felt like, “Oh, I can see this scene really clearly” in a way that a lot of the other episodes hadn’t hit for me previously. Although I wonder how much of that was just me remembering Big Night.

[Shep]
Right. Except misremembering it because it’s totally different. Totally different.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah.

[Shep]
I’ve had people tell me that they liked Paperclip, like they liked this episode. I’m like, “Are you sure you’re thinking of Paperclip? You’re not thinking of Paper Bag?” “No, Paperclip.” “Oh, the one in the restaurant?” “Yeah.” “Okay. I’m glad you like it.”

[Thomas]
I think that America thinks that they don’t like farce, but really, they do.

[Emily]
Oh, I think they love it and they just don’t know.

[Thomas]
So-

[Emily]
Yeah, they’re in denial.

[Emily]
All right, now we get to pick.

[Thomas]
All right, what do we love? It feels like the two that we like the most are the office one and the restaurant one. So, both workplace comedies.

[Shep]
Yup.

[Emily]
I almost like the restaurant one more because it’s- a paper clip is more conspicuous there.

[Thomas]
I see what you’re saying. Yeah.

[Shep]
Whereas with the office competition, it’s all kinds of office supplies, not necessarily about a paper clip. The prize is the Golden Paper Clip.

[Emily]
Is the golden paper clip.

[Thomas]
I see what you’re saying. I agree.

[Shep]
All right, so we’re going with the restaurant.

[Thomas]
That might be the fastest we’ve ever made a decision.

[Emily]
Wow. We are on top of it this week.

[Thomas]
A quick, solid decision at the end of what was a really good pitch session.

[Emily]
Right. And I think that also helps make that more tangible for us. I think we all had a clear picture right away, which is why we all picked it.

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s always good. It’s always a good sign when we do our pitches and like, “No, we have one. We know which one we’re going to go with.”

[Thomas]
I was just pleased to get that crazy idea from college back out into the world after 20 years or whatever it was.

[Emily]
Speaking of episodes when people say that they like it, I had somebody tell me that they started with Flashlight.

[Thomas]
Oh, wow.

[Emily]
And I was like, “Oh, that’s one to choose to start with. That’s like, you know, your first drink at 21. That’s like taking a shot of Everclear, honey.”

[Shep]
No Aviation American Gin! Let’s get that Ryan Reynolds money.

[Thomas]
What happens in our tiny world? What is their goal? Obviously, the conflict is that the batteries are running low. Does somebody realize that’s what’s happening, and that begins an adventure for new batteries? Is that enough about the flashlight, though?

[Emily]
Well, if the flashlight is the source of something in their town, like the source of economy in some way, then, yeah.

[Thomas]
Maybe there’s this old guy in town who everyone thinks is crazy because he keeps talking about the Caretaker or something like that, this giant person who helps them out. And it’s like some kid. They’re an imaginary world. They don’t actually really exist in the real world. They’re all in some kid’s imagination. He’s like, put the flashlight, or she has put the flashlight in there. And so because they all live such short lives, nobody knows about the Caretaker except for one really old dude. Or maybe he remembers the stories and nobody else does. Or something along those lines.

[Shep]
Or there’s a secret organization that passes down that knowledge of the Caretaker.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So they have to try to bring the Caretaker. They have to somehow summon the Caretaker to fix the flashlight.

[Shep]
What if the Caretaker never comes? What if it turns out the Caretaker was a myth and the flashlight is just going to go out and they can’t change the batteries? They can’t. It’s impossible. They’re too small.

[Thomas]
I think that’s basically the story, right? You’ve got the people who are saying “The Caretaker will come,” and you’ve got the other faction of people who are saying “The Caretaker is not real. We need to figure this out ourselves.” And they’re arguing back and forth.

[Shep]
Oh, they’re living in a dark place. They’re living in a dark place and they’re in the light beam. See, we’re back to monsters outside the light again. So they’re living in a dark place, but they’re safe in the light beam. But now the light beam is going out, and there’s a faction that’s saying “We need to leave. We need to find a place that has light because we’re not going to have light here anymore.” And there’s a faction that says, “We’ll survive. We’ve always survived. Something will happen, a miracle will occur, or the Caretaker will return. Sometimes the light has been dim in the past and it got brighter again. So, you don’t know. Science doesn’t know everything.” And it’s all just The Allegory of the Cave where the ones that leave find out that they’re in a cave and there’s a whole world outside that has lots of light. Spoilers for the ending.

[Thomas]
How old is The Cave? I feel like if you haven’t read it by now. It reminds me a bit of Warrior Cats. That’s essentially the plot of, I think, the first book in the series. My kid was reading it at one point, I don’t know. But basically, like, food is running out. And there’s a group that says, “We need to go somewhere else to find the food.” There’s this fabled better place. And then there are the other ones who are like, “No no no, we couldn’t possibly do that.” But I like that idea.

[Emily]
I think it’s a solid idea.

[Thomas]
So their options are leave or stay? Wait for the Caretaker to fix their problems or be active participants in their own possibly demise or salvation?

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
What is the plan that the pro-Caretaker people are proposing they do to bring the Caretaker there?

[Emily]
Are they sit and wait and have faith?

[Thomas]
Is it like a big prayer group?

[Emily]
Pray, chants.

[Thomas]
A ritual that they attempt to perform.

[Emily]
Are there three factions? One that’s like, “We just got to go. We have no other choice. We have to venture into the dark and hope for the best.” And then there’s another faction that’s like, “Well, we can figure out how to harness something to create a new light or a new-“

[Thomas]
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. There’s a group of people who- they’re like the pro-science group, and they are like, “Well, we can develop our own light source.”

[Shep]
But that’s heresy, because the one true light is the flashlight. So they haven’t developed any technology that creates light. “That’s trying to steal the power of the Caretaker. That doesn’t belong to us, that belongs to them. It’s their domain alone.”

[Thomas]
Okay. And then, how do people- I assume they leave- do people leave and discover there’s a new, better world or a bigger, better world with lots of light?

[Shep]
The survivors of the journey, they leave the cave, see the sunrise.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Well, you’re going to have a few that stay.

[Shep]
You can have lots of people that stay.

[Emily]
What’s the consequence of staying?

[Shep]
We don’t find out. We don’t know.

[Emily]
They just stay in darkness, and that’s what we know.

[Shep]
We can only assume that the light is going to go out for them.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Shep, you got into the cult of the Caretaker really fast in that clip.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
You were, like, gunning for a head priest or whatever.

[Emily]
We get it. You believe in the caretaker.

[Shep]
You know how I was raised; you know my family history.

[Thomas]
This episode also has well, it has a funny moment that I really love. And I think Emily will hate it.

[Emily]
Well, I mean, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a spelunking contest. That’s just where I took it. We could change it to some sort of, not exactly spelunking as the sport, but cave… what is the word for that? Where you go and search things?

[Thomas]
It’s called spelunking.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Like urban exploration?

[Emily]
Yeah, but in a cave.

[Thomas]
So spelunking. Is there another word for it? Caving?

[Shep]
Yup, classic.

[Thomas]
Cracks me up every time. Probably one of the best cold opens. I think maybe that’s why people like that episode, is they hear that bit, they’re like, “This is great.” Well, the rest of the episode is pretty different.

[Emily]
I do really want, like- maybe I’m going to commission a shirt that says “So, spelunking?” with a question mark.

[Shep]
Make it glow in the dark so that people can find you in the cave.

[Emily]
Oh! Yes.

[Thomas]
Yeah. What you do is you have it screened to say “Spelunking” (or “Caving”). And then the other one is just the glow in the dark stuff so that in the light it says one thing and the dark it says the other.

[Emily]
Oh, my God, that would be hilarious.

[Thomas]
That would be funny. “Caving?” “Spelunking.”

[Emily]
We have a lot of false starts. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that we go down a lot of paths and then like, “Meh, no.” But I think one that we regret, maybe not exploring, but regret that it’s not an actual thing is from Bread Maker, where the idea of a door to door bread kid.

[Emily]
See, the kid one, I see a very Dennis the Menace kind of story coming out of it. I don’t know, just Little Rascals kind of thing.

[Thomas]
What is the story in that one? I think we like the basic idea, but what actually would happen in that story?

[Emily]
Well, clearly the City Council would have some things to say about him just selling-

[Thomas]
I was just going to say the Health Department shuts him down. Oh, it’s a totally a kids movie. And so it’s like incompetent adults, like evil bad guy, like animal catcher style adults, right? It’s like the mean old Health Inspector who’s trying to track him down and-

[Emily]
Shut down his operation.

[Thomas]
Stop him from making money.

[Emily]
And he has to move, like the old school craps games that have to move from location to location. The floating craps games. He’s a floating bread maker. He goes from garage to garage and they can’t figure out where he’s operating out of to shut him down.

[Shep]
It’s easy to just smell. Just smell for the bread.

[Thomas]
Somebody has a giant machine that’s just like a big nose and it’s the Smellatron and they’re trying to track him down. “Where is he?”

[Shep]
Is this an animated movie?

[Thomas]
No no, live action. It was a van with a big nose on it, and they’re just driving around.

[Shep]
The nose turns back and forth.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
I imagine at one point he’s got a bunch of his friends making bread in a bunch of garages so they can’t narrow it down.

[Thomas]
They keep, like, pounding on doors, and it’s like some person just making some dinner rolls or something.

[Shep]
But it’s like the prohibition. They’re breaking the bread machines in the streets, and all the kids are lined up against the wall getting handcuffed.

[Thomas]
This got really dark for a kid’s movie. I mean, is there more to it than just, he’s breaking the law?

[Emily]
Is he raising money for something special? Is he just making money because he’s a capitalist entrepreneur?

[Thomas]
That’s how it all works out. In the end, he gives kickbacks to the mayor. “Here’s $20 and a loaf of freshly baked bread.”

[Shep]
“Still warm.”

[Emily]
“And you’ll have more of those every Tuesday at 03:00 P.M.”

[Thomas]
Bribing people with slices of bread.

[Shep]
Well, is that the entire pitch?

[Thomas]
I don’t know. The entire pitch was that a kid starts selling bread. That was the whole idea.

[Thomas]
Definitely a fun idea.

[Shep]
Whenever you guys pitch young people movies, all I think is, you guys want to remake Newsies.

[Thomas]
I mean-

[Emily]
No. Yes.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah. Have you seen Newsies?

[Shep]
No, I still have not seen Newsies.

[Thomas]
It’s been a year of us talking about Newsies.

[Shep]
Is it good? Do you have any opinions on Newsies?

[Emily]
It’s a really good movie.

[Shep]
Oh, is it?

[Emily]
Christian Bale’s. Best work.

[Shep]
Really better than Empire of the Sun?

[Emily]
No, that was a good one.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
So Garden House.

[Shep]
Garden Hose!

[Thomas]
And what a fun episode.

[Emily]
That was a cracked out romp, in my opinion. This is one that I would die laughing watching and would watch over and over again.

[Shep]
Yeah. It’s Kung Fu Hustle in my mind.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, absolutely.

[Shep]
Except with even more absurdity, if you can imagine.

[Emily]
Right?

[Shep]
Oh, he doesn’t save her. He goes back to rescue her and gets beaten down because that’s the classical-

[Thomas]
Yes. Excellent.

[Emily]
He loses his confidence, returns defeated. Ashamed.

[Shep]
Well, he gets- what do they do? They cut the ligaments and make it so he can’t move and break his dantian and cripple his foundation. And so he’s basically dead. And his friend, who was still in the city, carries him out to the village because where else can he go?

[Emily]
Straps him the back of his vespa and drives him out to the village.

[Shep]
Yes, where he’s all wrapped up like a mummy.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I love it.

[Emily]
And then when he gets back, the master’s sister, she’s going to help heal him. Right?

[Thomas]
Right. She’s an herbalist.

[Shep and Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
She has all the acupuncture-

[Emily]
And as she’s doing it, she tells him how her brother was saddened by the failure of the first student, but saw the real potential in this student and knew he was the one that would carry on the tradition.

[Thomas]
She just happens to have all of his martial arts books.

[Shep]
Well, it’s a family martial art.

[Emily]
Well, yes. She learned alongside him growing up.

[Thomas]
There you go.

[Emily]
So she’s like, “You were his favorite student. He knew you were the special one. You were the chosen one. You have all the midi-chloria.”

[Shep]
What a good reference that everyone likes.

[Thomas]
Yeah, not the least bit controversial.

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
I think it would be funny if the master was just the worst one in the family at the martial arts. He tried to start a school thinking that teaching it would help him learn it. But everybody else in the family, everyone else in the village is better at it than he is.

[Emily]
I like that. She’s telling him the story of how horrible he was at home.

[Thomas]
His mentality is “Growth through adversity.” And what could be a bigger challenge than trying to teach something you’re not very good at?

[Shep]
That’s why he could never teach it even though the student had that innate talent for it. He could never learn it because the master, sadly, was bad at teaching. So the master kept trying to tell him “Anything could be a weapon.” And the master keeps using old style stuff, and the student keeps using modern day stuff and saying, “If anything can be a weapon, then this can be a weapon.” He’s like, “Yeah, but you’re not using it, right. You don’t have the balance for that. Use this old wooden hoe or whatever, because then you could use that as a weapon because it has balance.” But it’s like, that’s not the teaching. The teaching is anything could be a weapon. So they were at odds over that. And then learning in the village from the rest of the family, he does use modern stuff with balance, as his teacher had always tried to impart to him.

[Thomas]
I just love the idea that he’s there “If anything can be a weapon, then this weapon could be a weapon.”

[Emily]
“I could use this gun.”

[Shep]
That would be great if the sister is also saying that. And he’s like, “But I have a machete. I have a weapon.” And she’s like, “Go ahead and try to attack me with it then.”

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah, that’s good.

[Shep]
“I’m sorry, I thought you had a weapon. Was that not a weapon?”

[Thomas]
Yeah. She just immediately disarms him, turns it around on him. He’s down on the ground. She’s got the machete raised over her head and says that. “I thought you had a weapon. Oh, here it is.”

[Thomas]
I was thinking at one point about what are the different genres that we’ve done? If somebody wanted an action film, what would I suggest to them? Like, we don’t really have a lot of action films, per se, but I think this is a good example of one of the few that we do have.

[Emily]
Yeah. I think we explore a lot of genres, and it’s kind of cool that we do that. It’s not all just rom-coms. It’s not all just, like, spy mysteries.

[Thomas]
Though it easily could be. We all love rom-coms.

[Shep]
It’s mostly rom-coms.

[Emily]
It’s mostly rom-coms with a little bit of time travel.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
One sad story.

[Shep]
So this was our martial arts action film, Steven Chow style, who was interested but then heard how we treat Stevens and he’s like, “No, I’m out.”

[Emily]
“No, I’m out.” My favorite genre, of course. I don’t know if anybody noticed. Horror. True crime, serial killers. That’s what I love.

[Shep]
What?

[Emily]
I know, it’s shocking,

[Shep]
This is the first I’m hearing of it.

[Thomas]
This is brand new information.

[Emily]
Right? So BBQ Grill was our first for- fo- foyer.

[Shep]
Foyer?

[Emily]
Foyer.

[Shep]
What?

[Emily]
Yeah, you know. Grand entrance.

[Thomas]
Yeah. We made a big entrance into horror.

[Emily]
Yeah. It was our big first adventure into horror, or something along those lines. And I just love the idea of pod people coming from a barbecue.

[Thomas]
I think it makes sense, this being, for the three of us, our first foray into horror where it ends up being a horror comedy.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yes. You’ve got to start with the vegetarians. They’re bringing hummus to the barbecue.

[Thomas and Emily]
Yup.

[Shep]
Classic, which I don’t know why that’s a joke. Hummus is delicious. I don’t know if people haven’t tried it.

[Emily]
Hummus is delicious.

[Shep]
It’s amazing.

[Thomas]
Love hummus.

[Shep]
Where was hummus my whole life?

[Thomas]
Right?

[Emily]
All right, so we got the vegetarians making hummus, going to the barbecue, having a discussion about whether or not they should bring some portobello mushrooms in case they want to have a burger.

[Shep]
I mean, you don’t need mushrooms to have a burger. There’s plenty of non-meat burgers these days that are amazing.

[Emily]
Perhaps that’s part of the argument. She’s like, “But I really want a portobello mushroom.” He’s like, “But then we have to stop at the store and we already have some-“

[Shep]
Wait, they’re vegetarians and they don’t have portobello mushrooms at their house?

[Emily]
They ran out.

[Shep]
They’re bad at being vegetarian.

[Emily]
They ran out. They haven’t gone to their shopping yet. It can be all part of the conversation.

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s good. “Where are the portobello mushrooms? I want to take some to have at the-” “We had them all last night. We had the last of them last night.” Or, no. One of them had the last of it last night because he came home late. It’s obviously the guy that fucked it up. We can all just agree that… He worked late. He came home late. He helped himself to the- So she’s already mad that he’s working late all the time now she’s mad that he ruined her plan, that she didn’t tell him that she was going to bring portobello mushrooms to the barbecue.

[Emily]
Checks out.

[Shep]
Just assuming that he’s psychic and he would know.

[Emily]
And he’s like, “Well, we have these Impossible Burgers.” And she’s like, “It’s not the same.”

[Shep]
“I don’t want a burger. What part of that do you not understand? I don’t want a meat replacement. I’m vegetarian.”

[Emily]
“They’re really good. You can’t tell they’re vegetarian.”

[Shep]
“I don’t want hamburger. You’re telling me that it tastes more like a thing I don’t want to taste.”

[Emily]
So we get to the protago- or, the pod BBQ house.

[Thomas]
Do we need anybody else outside of the barbecue first?

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. Do we want to?

[Shep]
Well, are we focusing on the couple? I figured that if it’s a horror movie, we’re just focusing on the two of them and their adventure through the day or the weekend. It’s a three-day weekend. So they’re going to a barbecue- or they’re going to a Friday afternoon barbecue before a three-day weekend.

[Thomas]
That’s totally a conversation they have to be having. Like, “Who does this?”

[Shep]
Right. “We have how many barbecues this weekend? And we’re vegetarian. So-“

[Emily]
“Why are we even going? Why can’t we just stay home?”

[Thomas]
“Why did we agree to this?”

[Emily]
“I’m on the HOA board. It’ll look bad if we don’t show.”

[Shep]
Tie it all together.

[Thomas]
Some good banter there.

[Shep]
I liked a lot of the details that would come up later. Like why they didn’t go to the store, that kind of thing that were like, that’s not the point of it at this time.

[Thomas]
Yeah, right. It’s just I sort of, like, goofing off and coming up with ridiculous improv scene type of stuff.

[Shep]
I was very impassioned about vegetarianism. And I remember I used to be a vegetarian for years. Do you guys know about that? My history when I was younger?

[Thomas]
No, because famously, you hate vegetables.

[Shep]
Now I do. I’m no longer a vegetarian.

[Emily]
I would like to point out I was a little, like, you were trying to do your overpowering “No, no, no. This is how it-” and I was just “Let’s just turn this into the scene.”

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
“This is all part of the act.”

[Shep]
Which was great.

[Thomas]
Yeah. It worked really well. And like you were saying, Shep, brought out a lot of details, just naturally through that dialogue that ended up being used and pretty important to the plot later.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Well, from one horror to another (Whiteboard). Sort of a much more serious take on it.

[Emily]
Yeah. A much more serious take that came out of nowhere, really, because we started this episode on a whole different track.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. This was one of the ones where we went deep on the wrong direction.

[Emily]
Deep, deep, deep on the wrong direction.

[Thomas]
Probably 30 or 40 minutes into the episode and realized this just isn’t working.

[Shep]
Yeah, it was so awkward. “We’ve been recording for 2 hours.”

[Emily]
This is the one where we can’t cut it because we’ve been doing it for so long.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
So we got to show you the process.

[Shep]
It’s got to reach a point where something is unconscionable.

[Emily]
Wouldn’t she want to become some sort of, like, world dictator at some point?

[Shep]
Yeah. That would be the fastest way to solve the problem.

[Thomas]
So she has to have something to dangle over everybody so that they do her bidding because it’s 7.5 billion to one. So she has to have the nukes.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah, Let’s give her the nukes.

[Thomas]
Oh, they’re going to dispose of the nukes. That’s the plan. The whiteboard is like, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense.” But of course, that’s not really what she’s trying to do. She’s just trying to get control of them.

[Emily]
So she can control the world.

[Thomas]
Does she nuke something to demonstrate that she actually has power?

[Shep]
What kind of pitch is this? It seems very lighthearted up to this point.

[Thomas]
We don’t have to go this direction.

[Shep]
We don’t have to go in any direction. This is all optional.

[Emily]
Maybe not have her go to that extreme so that she doesn’t have to serve long prison terms or face certain death, because we want redemption.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. I forgot that was coming.

[Thomas]
What does happen to her afterward? I mean, if she does this, she’s going to jail forever.

[Emily]
We did kind of write her into a corner there, didn’t we?

[Thomas]
So far.

[Shep]
I don’t know how I’m feeling about this.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Let’s back up to where you’re comfortable and let’s go a different route.

[Shep]
Okay. So the whiteboard can talk back.

[Emily]
Just scrap the whole thing.

[Shep]
Writing is hard.

[Emily]
Why is this one so hard?

[Shep]
I don’t know. It feels kind of just generic.

[Emily]
Have we run out of ideas?

[Shep]
Normally when we’re doing this, we’ll be able to see scenes in our mind and go, “Oh, yeah. And then they say this, and then this happens,” and there’s like an emotional resonance there. This is just falling flat to me.

[Emily]
Is it just the blah-ness of a whiteboard and its limited functionality?

[Shep]
I mean, I was the one that did suggest it, so…

[Thomas]
We know who to blame.

[Shep]
Yeah. I take full responsibility. This is my fault.

[Thomas]
All right. So whiteboards, they’re white, they’re shiny. Everything that you write on them is theoretically temporary. You typically find them in an office or a school. Ink smells bad.

[Emily]
This one’s hard.

[Shep]
It is.

[Emily]
Why can’t we do it?

[Shep]
I thought it would be easy because there’s so many possibilities with the whiteboard. It could be anything. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s not constrained enough.

[Thomas]
What I find really interesting about that clip is right at the beginning, you can hear it in our voices. We’re just not in it.

[Emily]
Yeah, we gave up on that idea very quickly.

[Thomas]
But I think doing that was the right choice, ultimately.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So when I was an English teacher, when I would give writing assignments, if they didn’t have restrictions, a lot of the students would get stuck at the very beginning and not be able to do it. And the more I restricted them, like, “Oh, you can only talk about…” you know, that we live next to a nuclear power plant. “You can only talk about the nuclear power plant or nuclear power or electricity (or whatever). That’s the topic for this week’s essay. You have to write about [this finite area].” And then everyone could do it right away. So I think that’s the- Whiteboard is kind of a container because it’s just like, anything can be on it.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Shep]
That’s where we went wrong.

[Emily]
You know where we didn’t go wrong is inviting guests on.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
Brick was our first one with a guest, and he was a really neat guy. I really enjoyed having Daniel on. I would love to have him back on. I thought he was a kick in the pants.

[Thomas]
Well, it was nice to, after 18 or whatever episodes of us talking and throwing out all these pitches, it was nice to get some fresh blood in there to pitch some new ideas from a different perspective.

[Thomas]
Daniel, what are the pitches you came up with for a brick?

[Daniel]
Okay, so my first idea was using a brick as a visual metaphor for a crumbling relationship, like seeing, like, a piece of a brick from a house sort of just falling out of the place and the house collapsing and it’s sort of being this whole relationship drama thing. My second idea is a brick is throwing through a window of a house. So like a kid or a young adult throwing a brick through a window of an elderly neighbor or something like that as just acting up, but then ends up getting caught and there’s community service with that person. And then it’s sort of like this coming-of-age drama where it’s like they bond together and have this whole relationship. And my third thought was a future sort of Sci-Fi film where a brick is used as a murder weapon and it’s this whole mystery thing around it because bricks are not used anymore in this future world. So it sort of has maybe like a Blade Runner type of feel to it, like a future-noir type of film.

[Thomas]
That’s a cool idea.

[Emily]
I like that one.

[Shep]
Of course Emily likes that one. It’s got a murderer in it.

[Thomas]
It was a cool idea, though.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And I’m glad that’s the one we ended up going with because the story ended up being really fun.

[Shep]
Listening to these again. Sometimes I want to shout out during the clip, “I have more ideas.” So listening to these pitches, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Okay, okay.” And then he gets to this one. I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the one. Immediately.”

[Emily]
He was a good guest to have on. I think he was a good warm up to getting more people coming on in the future.

[Thomas]
Definitely. And as you’ll hear later on, we have another clip where we have a guest. We have already recorded another episode with a guest, which is that next episode after this one. No, you’ll have heard that one. Videocassette. So Videocassette, which we’re not reviewing today, has a guest. And we have a whole big list of guests that we are in the process of trying to get on the show. So definitely a thing that we want to continue to do.

[Emily]
If you know either John or Hank Green-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Suggest our podcast to them so we can have them guest on it.

[Thomas]
Send them our way, for sure.

[Shep]
They’re both novelists.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
I’m sure they have-

[Emily]
They would be amazing guests.

[Thomas]
I think they really would.

[Thomas]
That’s the first half of our first year. We’re going to end this episode here, but this is just part one. Be sure to listen to the second part of our Year One Review.

[Outro music]