This time on Ook Club, Ben has a couple of “serious” questions for Liz, we discuss television and other mythologies, answer some subscriber questions, and share a couple of lost discussions from the Pratchat editing vaults. Plus we have some questions for you – please answer them!
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Ow Notes
- The podcast industry newsletter that Ben reads is Podnews.
- Here’s a 9to5mac article with more about Apple switching from “subscribe” to “follow” for podcasts
- The entire first series of The Watch is available to stream on Stan in Australia, and was broadcast on BBC America in the US. It has not yet been broadcast in the UK.
- The podcast who have covered The Watch is Who Watches the Watch.
- WandaVision is the first of several TV series for Disney+ set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It stars Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff, and Paul Bettany as Vision, both members of the Avengers last seen in the films Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
- Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen first became famous playing Michelle Tanner in the 1980s sitcom Full House. (It is fairly common practice to cast twins as very young characters where possible, to limit the amount of work each has to do.)
- Elizabeth Olsen’s “cult film” about a cult is Martha Marcy May Marlene.
- The article about A Knight’s Tale, by Michael Livingstone, isn’t that recent; it’s from tor.com and published in July 2020. You’ll find it here: “A Knight’s Tale is the Best Medieval Movie (No Really)“
- Here’s the Doug Jones interview compilation Ben mentioned from YouTube.
- Armageddon is a 1998 disaster movie directed by Michael Bay and starring Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi and Ben Affleck as miners who fly into space to destroy an asteroid headed towards Earth. (Ben prefers Deep Impact, which is more realistic and less fun but still great.)
- Directors Commentary starring Rob Brydon as the voice of director John de Lane ran for 7 episodes on ITV in 2004.
- Lee Jun-fan, better known to English-speaking audiences as Bruce Lee, was a Chinese-American martial artist and movie star. He was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, returning to California at the age of 18. After he struggled to land leading roles in Hollywood, he went back to Hong Kong and made several highly successful films that were dubbed into English and were big hits in America and round the world.
- The versions of the Monkey story we mention include:
- The Chinese folk novel Journey to the West (西遊記), by Wu Cheng’en
- The Japanese TV series Saiyūki, known as Monkey in English (and also called “Monkey Magic” after the chorus of the theme song), made in 1978
- The Chinese Central Television adaptation, also called Journey to the West, originally made in 1986, but with a second series released in 1999 covering bits left out of the original (this is most likely the Cantonese version Liz mentions)
- The recent New Zealand TV series The New Legends of Monkey, a co-production between the ABC, TVNZ and Netflix, released in 2018 and with a second season in 2020
- The sci-fi videogame based on the story, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PCs in 2010
- Ben entirely misses Liz’s reference to the 2004 romantic comedy film 13 Going On 30, in which Andy Serkis plays the editor of a fashion magazine and thus star Jennifer Garner’s boss. Garner plays a 13-year-old who gets her birthday wish to be 30, magically skipping 17 years into her own future.
- For an explanation of “We’re not here to fuck spiders” and other Australian slang, see the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.
- Find out more about the Llamedos Holiday Camp at their website; we’ll link to the panel if it becomes publicly available!
- The holiday camp episode of Maid Marian and Her Merry Men is “Raining Forks” from the fourth and final series, first broadcast in 1994.
- The other Pratchett podcasts featured on the panel were The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Radio Morpork and Desert Island Discworld.
- Liz’s joke that Ben deadpans is a reference to the Paul Simon song “You Can Call Me Al“.
- Elementary is CBS’s modern take on Sherlock Holmes set in New York. It stars Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes, Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, Aidan Quinn as Captain Gregson of the NYPD, and Jon Michael Hill as Detective Marcus Bell. It ran for seven seasons on CBS between 2012 and 2019; in Australia it’s available via the Stan streaming service.
- The 2011 National Theatre production of Frankenstein starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternating in the lead roles of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. It was directed by Danny Boyle, and adapted by Nick Dear to be told from the Creature’s perspective.
- Liz was leaving to watch EXPOSED: The Ghost Train Fire, a three-part documentary about a fire on a ghost train at Sydney’s Luna Park in 1979, produced for the ABC. It’s worth noting that while much of the series has been praised, it has since come under fire for some of its conclusions, especially that then-Premier Neville Wran was involved in police corruption around the tragedy. The ABC’s own Media Watch has a good summary of the issues, the review and the backlash.