TRAPPO's Mail Bag #7!
Ladies and gentlemen, dearest listeners, it's that time once again! Time to talk about stuff on purpose with a brand-new, hot off the press episode of TRAPPO! And this time, we're talking about you on purpose, since we're opening up TRAPPO's Mail Bag for the seventh occasion! Can you believe it? I can't. You continue to leave such astute and entertaining comments here on the blog (and the occasional email, which we very much appreciate) that we can keep pumping out these feedback episodes, and we're forever grateful for that. I honestly can't say how much we appreciate the little community we're building here at TRAPPO, and we may never become one of the big dogs, but I think we're pretty happy being the weird kids who talk about whatever catches our fancy, and apparently enough of you are happy with the show to keep the conversation going week after week, and that's pretty damned cool.
This time around, we're talking about The WNUF Halloween Special, The Reckoning (which has recently been reviewed on the blog here), Zolita, Tunabunny, Glenn Danzig's Verotika (again) and the nebulous definition of the "so bad it's good" movie, the long-running comic Tank Girl and its 1990s live action film adaptation, the recently reviewed (and recently canonized) The Spine Of Night, and the ghost of legendary musician Frank Zappa is invoked. That's all just scratching the surface this week, since the mail bag was bursting with listener feedback, so let's not waste any more time and just get down to business. You can listen below, or find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Anchor or Spotify, so choose your own adventure and join us on this fascinating journey.
That's it for this week, but the conversation doesn't have to end there! You can keep things going by leaving a comment below! Tell us what you think of this week's episode! Recommend some new music or movies! Share some of your family recipes! You can also send us an email if you're feeling a little more verbose, and don't forget to visit our official Instagram feed for the complete experience! And we're also running a pair of polls for recent musical releases Jupiter's Purse by MATTIE and Crease by Kee Avil, so head on over, give them a listen, and vote while you still have time!
Thanks for listening!
I've never read any Tank Girl comics, but I have seen the movie once, and I don't recall it being very good. I guess Lorrie Petty was pretty animated in her role, but I don't want to imagine anybody boning one of these creepy kangaroo people. Was it very faithful to the source material? It's been a long time since I saw it, so maybe time has been kind to the movie. I do remember liking that Howard The Duck movie when I was a kid, but I haven't seen it in 20 years, so if I watch it now I'll probably wonder what the hell was wrong with 8 year old me.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like one of you guys had a miserable time shopping at that comic store when you were a kid, so why did you keep going back? I wouldn't have accepted that kind of treatment from somebody who worked at any store, even when I was growing up. Just go somewhere else, man. People can be dicks, especially to kids. It's a damn shame. I always try to be nice to kids whenever I interact with them, because I remember what it was like growing up and being treated like a nuisance to every other adult I met, feeling like nobody took me seriously. It's a bad feeling, and I always try to keep that in mind when I'm talking to kids.
I do have to take issue with recommending "Freak Out" by Frank Zappa as an introduction to the man's music, though. It's big and convoluted, a little too weird at times to be a good first album for Zappa, I think. "Over-nite Sensation" fits the bill as an introduction much better in my opinion. It's more mellow, friendlier, and a tighter record overall. If you want to ease somebody into Zappa's world, that's the way to do it.
I don't know much about Frank Zappa, except that while watching old SNL a few years ago he popped up as the host back in the 1970's and it was the most awkward stuff, although to be fair a lot of that old SNL is pretty poorly paced with a lot of dead air, but this episode was definitely off, and I'm not sure why. Maybe he just didn't get along with the cast or whatever, but he was not good in any of the skits, and he kept mentioning to the camera that he was reading his lines off of cue cards, and I'm not sure if that was actually written on the cue cards because somebody thought it would be funny, or if Frank Zappa just kept saying this because he thought it was funny. Either way, the epiosde was awful, and I didn't really know who this guy was before that, so I googled him after and he's got so much music out there its overwhelming. I could have kept digging to find something to listen to, but with that much stuff out there my brain just kind of said "NOPE" and I clicked away. If Rolled Tortillas thinks Overnite Sensation is a good place to start, I may give that a shot.
ReplyDeleteI have a music rec for you: On The Widow's Walk by The White Buffalo. He's a country/Americana artist who has a pretty big YouTube presence on his official page, where he does a lot of impromptu live performances and stuff like that, and he seems like a pretty cool guy on top of making some solid music that still flies under the radar for most people. Cool show.
Halloween was always the best time of year for me. Trick or treating and wicked costumes, playing pranks in the dark and screwing around with my friends, coming home with a small mountain of candy and feeling like a million bucks. One Halloween when I was nine, my older sister let me sit with her while she watched Fright Night 2 as long as I gave her a third of my candy. She was 14 and she was always too cool and introduced me to a whole bunch of badass stuff back in the day. By the time the movie was over, we'd eaten most of my candy and I told her I had to see the first movie immediately, and she said we'd have to wait until next week because it was checked out at the video store, and she kept her word because that next weekend we were watching Fright Night and eating pizza. I know she was technically babysitting me but it never felt that way. She wasn't my babysitter, she was my sister and she was badass. Still is, as a matter of fact.
ReplyDeleteThat comment really took me back. I still haven't seen that WNUF Halloween special, but I've got SHUDDER and it's halfway to Halloween, so I think I'm gonna get on that this weekend.
You need to check out an album called "The Buried Storm" by a band called Darkher. I discovered this music by accident last week, and I bought it immediately, and I've had it in heavy rotation the whole time. It's so damned cool, and I can't quite put my finger on why. They're not metal, but they're not really anything else, either. I don't know exactly how you label their sound, but there's some metal elements, some dark folk stuff, some drone, and I don't even know what else. People throw around the term "doom" to describe certain kinds of music, and that feels really close here. Doom is what hangs over this whole album, like a dark cloud. The lead singer has a beautiful voice that can convey such sadness and ferocity and tenderness, and there's some killer orchestrations here. Where The Devil Waits is definitely the stand-out for me, but I love this whole album. It's kind of astounding. I know one of you isn't such a big fan of people just throwing that word around (and I don't like "Evil Angel" either, so I get it), but for me, at least, "The Buried Storm" is a-s-t-o-u-n-d-i-n-g, and if you don't agree, that's totally cool.
Just know that you're objectively wrong.
I was introduced to something new by a friend a few weeks ago that I think is pretty cool. It's an album (I guess that's what you still call it, although who really knows these days) called "The Entombed Wizard" by a band or an artist named Umbria. I don't know what the hell this is. I mean I like it, I really think I like it, but I don't know what you call it. It's like some kind of fantasy movie soundtrack, but without the movie. It's really cool, and it feels like it's telling a story, but I'm not sure what that story is. I just got around to listening to it today, and Umbria has other stuff out there that I might listen to soon, but I'm wondering if you guys have heard of Umbria? What do you call this stuff? Fantasy? Is that a musical genre? I know it's a a genre of fiction, so does that carry over to music, too?
ReplyDeleteYouTUbe's insidious algorithm pushed a music video called "Return from Theta 2099" on me the other night so I gave it a shot while I was clearing out my inbox. I had no idea what the hell this stuff was, but sometimes you have to be adventurous, and I guess maybe I was in the right mood for it, because I thought it was pretty cool. It's trippy space music, sounding like UFOs whizzing around in outer space. It reminded me of something out of an old science fiction movie. I wish I could remember the name of the artist, but I wasn't logged in so I couldn't review my watch history. I'm pretty sure that's the title, but I can't find it again, and I don't remember the name of the band, so maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. I really wish I'd been paying closer attention at the time, since I seem to be drawing a blank here, so this comment might be completely worthless. Whatever the hell it was (or wasn't), I thought it sounded cool at the time, though maybe a little simple, like something you might be able to come up with farting around on an app maybe.
ReplyDeleteI remember liking that Tank Girl movie when I was younger, but I had a real weird dream where I was watching Johnny Mnemonic, the Keanu Reeves movie where he was smuggling data with a hard drive in his brain and was being hunted by some Yakuza assassin with a laser whip in his thumb, and Ice T, who was in both movies, was playing his giant kangaroo man character here and nobody seemed to notice. It was really something.
What the hell happened to Lori Petty? She used to be all over the place, and recently she's dropped off the face of the earth? I don't know if I've seen her in anything in like 20 years. The world misses you, Lori Petty. I maybe it's just me, and the rest of the world's forgotten all about her. I used to have a huge crush on her when I was a teenager.
Didn't that Sylvester Stallong "Judge Dread" movie come out around the same time as Tank Girl? Maybe it came out a few years earlier. I wasn't too familiar with the Dread comics until later, but I still remember the movie being terrible. It had Rob Schneider yelling and flailing his arms through the whole thing as the garbage comic relief sidekick, and that alone was enough to sink the movie. The Karl Urban "Dread" movie that came out a few years back was much closer to the original stories, and a lot of fun to watch. Too bad it didn't do better in theaters, cuz it would have been cool to see that turn into a franchise. I know Urban would come back to that role at a moment's notice. It would be cool to see Dread fight Judge Death and his crew on the big screen. Or even on Netflix. I'm not picky.
ReplyDeleteI am a huge fan of Deadline! I’ve been slowly collecting the original run for years, and I’m only missing a few issues, but they’re turning out to be pretty hard to find, at least in solid condition and at a reasonable price. But I hit the local flea markets and conventions regularly, so it’s just a matter of time.
ReplyDeleteI have a collection of the Titan color Tank Girl reprints in addition to my b&w paperbacks because I just think it’s really cool to be able to see Jamie Hewlett’s art in full color. I prefer fidelity to the source material, but that color work is cool as hell.
I agree that the Tank Girl movie is actually pretty good, maybe ch better than I expected. It feels too “90s”, if that makes any sense, which is a bit of a problem, but the story is appropriately anarchic at times and Lori Petty is all in as Tank Girl. I would love to see a more faithful adaptation someday, but I have a feeling that’s a pretty hard sell to anybody who might have the money to finance the project.
“Who wants to throw away fifty million bucks?”
Probably an animated adaptation would be the best way forward. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime, but stranger things have happened. Also Stranger Things has happened. This season kicks ass so far. I can’t wait to see how it ends!