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Mad Max Thunder Vendetta: Fury Dome Warrior · Dice Camera Action!

• Mat Cousineau: This is it comes down to this just for redemption. Just to like save a little bit of face here. ⁓ man. Cause now you get this wrong. We're gonna spend the next like hour and a half together and it's gonna be a little awkward. Any plans for this evening? Perhaps a game night? Game over, man. It's game over. Shut up. Play the game. Play it from your heart. 26 years ago, we started playing a little game. Now, we're all gonna sit down. We're gonna finish it. I've made the odds be ever in your face. ⁓ welcome to another episode of Dice Camera Action, a mash-up podcast about board games and movies where cardboard meets a silver screen. Each episode we review a movie. And then if you're a Cinephile, you can stick around for a discussion about a movie with a similar theme. This episode will be a tiny bit different. ⁓ we're still doing a thematic kind of mashup ⁓ between two properties. ⁓ this episode will be about Thunder Road vendetta. And we're gonna be instead of doing a sp ⁓ one movie, we're gonna do a whole franchise, biting off a whole bunch ⁓ more. We're gonna be talking about and ranking all of the Mad Max movies. So excited about that. But first, I want to introduce our guest host for the week, first time on the podcast. We're joined by a longtime voice in the board gaming community, one of the hosts of the legendary Blue Peg Pig Peg Podcast, the Blue Peg himself, and the man behind Uncle Doug's DVD bin, ⁓ Kevin McC Alexander. Whether he's talking tabletop games or digging through cinematic treasures from a bargain bin, Kevin always brings sharp insights, great stories, and infectious enthusiasm. Kevin, welcome to the show. I'm happy to have you on. Wow, I don't think I can live up to that intro. That intro was really excellent. I'm in Off the Top of the Dome. I don't know if like j I just made that up just now. That was improv, baby. Yeah, you're on it, man. I like that. I actually so I have the the moniker of the Pun peg because I have become I don't want to say notorious. That's not the right way to say for making really awful puns on blue peg pink peg. And I promise you, I won't do that here. I will not make any puns. I got really excited about the puns, and now you're just like ripping them away from me before I can even enjoy them. What can I say? I'm just no pun. Right on. So Kevin, ⁓ welcome to the show. I'm really excited to have you on. We've been kind of planning this for the couple of months probably, just sort of trying to nail down a time and and what we were gonna discuss and stuff like that. So I'm glad we finally were able to make it happen. Before we get into the the regular stuff of the episode, there is one thing that's not I guess it is sort of movie related, but Not necessarily to the rest of this episode that I wanted to kind of talk to you a little bit about just because I find it so fascinating. So you were recently one of the leads of a play that is called The Shark Is Broken, which, if I'm not mistaken, is about the the background, like the what's happening on the film set of Jaws in between takes. And is that is that sort of it? You want to like maybe give us a better synopsis than I just did? I mean, that is a good synopsis. You kind of nailed it. Nailed it perfect. So it was written by Robert Shaw's son, Ian Shaw. Robert Shaw is the actor that plays Quint, which is one of my favorite characters of all time. And Robert Shaw is one of my favorite actors of all time. So when I dream role play was happening, I was like, I gotta, I gotta audition for it. Don't know if it's gonna happen. I was doing a Shakespeare show at the same time, and I I got like pneumonia or something, and I couldn't talk. And I didn't want to go to the audition and get all the other actors sick, so I just did like a video audition and my voice was so like raspy and aggressive that apparently the director was like, you what, we'll just have that guy. Like I he is committed to this situation. So so they kind of You cat did you catfish them with your voice? A little bit. Yeah, you I gotta give him a little bit of this right here, you know what I'm saying? Like, ⁓ hey girl, let me holla at you, you know what I mean? And ⁓ so yeah, it it it is exactly that. The shark is broken. It's called The Shark Is Broken because if you don't know the jaw the Jaws lore of the filmmaking, that shark almost never worked. ⁓ because it turns out it's really it was one of the first movies, if not the first movie, that they tried to film completely on the ocean. And mechanical things don't work so well on the ocean. There was issues with like the flotation, and actually the more they used it, the heavier it got, so the less likely it was to float. I mean, it was just absolutely a disaster. So the play kind of chronicles the three the three protagonists or three main leads of of Jaws. You've got Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfus, and they're dynamic while they're waiting to actually shoot the movie. So I was so excited to to like be in this show because Jaws, I'm gonna lay a heavy one on you here, man. My favorite movie of all time. That's amazing. Yeah, it's probably, you know, in the top Top 1050. Like it's one of my all-time favorite movies as well. ⁓ I even have Jaws tattoo on my hand. Right. And I'm sure listeners who have watched the videos of of our podcast have noticed the Jaws poster in the background. ⁓ yeah, huge, huge fan of Jaws as well. This is actually a play that I'm hoping that someday I'll have an opportunity to see live in person. But ⁓ yeah, I haven't had that opportunity in northern Ontario yet. It's very funny. It's a very funny play too. ⁓ and and ⁓ the the Yeah, here I was thinking like, ⁓ wow, I'm like the Jaws fan here, but I don't have any Jaws tattoos. Like you're just coming in here, one up and me. I mean, it is your podcast, so fine. You know, one up me, that's fine. But ⁓ actually the the director of the show, one of the kind of traditions in the theater is a lot of times you get each other gifts, you know, for opening night or closing night, or you do a director's gift or or or you know, whatever. So we all kind of pulled money together because the director, every show he directs, he gets a little tattoo to remember the show. And so we we pulled money, we got him a gift certificate to his favorite like tattoo shop. And he got a tattoo of if you remember ⁓ the scene in the like the town hall, ⁓ where they're talking about, you know, the reward to go kill the shark, whether they're gonna close the beaches or whatever. You know, and Quentin shows up, he kind of scratches his fingernails down a chalkboard. On the chalkboard, someone had drawn like a doodle of the shark eating someone. He got that tattoo, that little like stick figure doodle, which I thought was so cool. That that's a great ⁓ yeah, that's a great idea. My whole my whole arm is a film is like all movies, like a bunch of my favorite movies or iconic movies and that sort of thing. It was just interesting to like choose what do I want from each movie? Do I want like the poster? Do I want a scene? Do I want a symbol? Do I want whatever? Right? Carpet from the shining, for example, is just part of the like the background tapestry of it. Yeah. In in empty spaces and stuff like that. So it's cool to like hear about how or what another person chose to do a Jaws tattoo is something so kind of unique that's picked out of the background that isn't, you know, necessarily iconic, but like you know what it is. Once the story gets told, it's pretty cool a little moment there. As a as a note of curiosity, how do you land on like, I want to get a tattoo of this movie? Because I love like Jaws, but I'm like, I don't ⁓ tattoo permanent, you know? A wife, a kid's, you know, whatever. But ⁓ tattoo is permanent, right? So how do you land on what you're gonna get a tattoo of? ⁓ yeah, they're all they're just like my favorite movies, right? Movies that I know like will live on and and be my favorites for forever. And some of them maybe aren't my absolute favorites, but they're so iconic that it's just like fits with the theme and my love for film in general, right? So even if it's not like an absolute top five favorite of all time, if it's iconic and represents my love for film, it just kind of fits. kind of thing. Like one example is that like I have the Django Unchained kind of like poster with the chains and then the two characters at the bottom. ⁓ Djang Unchained is probably like my fourth favorite Tarantino movie. Like it's not even my favorite of his movies, but that that visual is one of my favorites. That poster is maybe my favorite from his movies. And that part of the tattoo represents my love for Quentin Tarantino, even though that movie isn't specifically like You know, it's it's sure it probably is one of my all time favorites, like top thirty, forty, whatever it might be. ⁓ I haven't actually made a list, but yeah, that part of the tattoo just represents my love for a Quentin Tarantino in general, kind of thing. So it was more just like what are the areas of film that I want to have represented? What are the directors, what genres, what whatever, and then you kind of just come up with whatever. So that's kind of yeah, how it how it came to. Okay, all right. What is what's the most recent movie that you have a tattoo of? Like I 'cause I'm like, is it are these like questions that were formative for you when you were younger or like can can a new movie like are like, Man, I really gotta get a Hail Mary tattoo, you know? Yeah, the the the most recent is probably the Cabin in the Woods Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I've got the Joker there as well, 'cause that Heath Ledger performance is just will live on forever as maybe my all time favorite performance. So yeah, the the Cabin in the Woods might be the most recent, being in like twenty twelve, I wanna say, something like that. Yeah, yeah. That's a great one. I really like the Cabin in the Woods a lot. That was just such a fun flip of every horror movie trope, but making it still an interesting movie. I really I I had a good time with that one. One of the Hemsworths was in that too, right? ⁓ yeah, Chris. Yeah. The Hemsworth, yeah. The Hemsworth. Well you got a Lian. Liam. Leon? Yeah. I mean whatever. If you had to pick ⁓ Hemsworth, is it Chris or Liam? I mean Jerry. I like Jerry Hemsworth. You know that guy, I'll tell you what, he can flex his muscles or work on a carburetor. You know what I mean? Like I knows what's up. Classic J. We're gonna be talking about Chris Hemsworth a little bit later. So yeah, yeah, he does. He does ⁓ show up in these Mad Max movies. So I'm excited about that. Yeah, very cool. All right, so before we move on, let's take one second and ⁓ pay some bills. Of course, this never goes smoothly. I always have to like search for it. All right, here it comes. I want to take a quick moment to shout out our sponsor, BoardGame Bliss.com, which is honestly where I've been buying games for years. This isn't some random ad read. They're literally the only people I reached out to because I already love what they do, and I was relieved when they said yes so I could be fully genuine when endorsing them. They've got a huge inventory of games and are always super competitive price-wise, which is important to me. At Board Game Bliss, we believe in the magic of play. Board games spark joy, forge connections, and create unbelievable moments. We source exceptional titles from around the globe, so your table always has something exciting to offer. Whether you're just starting out or you're a seasoned pro, there's always a new favorite waiting to be found. Go to boardgame bliss dot com and find out why they're my personal favorite place to buy board games. Yeah, have it like ready to go to try to save me editing, but ultimately every time I try to like load them up woop during the episode, it messes up or it takes too long or like I'm awkward going in and out of it, and then I just have to edit around it anyway. It's not saving me any time at all. Man, I thought it was fantastic because like I was talking to you and then all of a sudden there was another you. I was like, Did he clone himself? How was he doing this? Is he is he Harry Potter? Like I don't understand how technology works. I can't tell you my secrets. I I wouldn't I only ask for one secret, but we'll talk about that off air. I will say this. I have bought things from Board Game Bliss and they arrived at a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. So I don't know if that's an endorsement. I don't know if they would pay me also, but I have paid them. I've given them my money. So You know, of all the of all the ⁓ places that you can buy games online, Board Game Bliss is one of them. Yeah. So a pretty good one, right? Very good one, yeah. Okay, all right. All right. So today on the episode, we're going to be kind of the standard stuff. We're going to be doing some shout outs. Kevin's got a long list of movies and games he wants to talk about, so I'm excited for that. ⁓ I'll have a few myself. We're gonna get into Thunder Road Vendetta, have a a lengthy discussion discussion about that game. And then we're gonna rank our favorite ⁓ again, we're gonna rank all the the ⁓ the Mad Max movies ⁓ right from the original, was it eighty-two, I think the ⁓ first one. ⁓ all the way to the most recent Furiosa, so I'm excited about all of that. ⁓ before we do, I have a little game I want to play. Are you down? Ooh, I love games. Yeah. Is it is it a board game? It's not a board game. Darn. Is a wait, hold on a second. I have I have scenery back here. Hold on. ⁓ perfect. Yeah. Get the Thunder Road. Now we got the now we got we I have I now have a copy of Thunder Road Vendetta for me. Yeah, and I have Maximum the Thunder Road Vendetta Maximum Chrome edition right above my My noggin here too for those watching on the on the video. ⁓ all right, so we're gonna play a game that is like one of these things is not like the other, basically. And it is using the character names from the Mad Max franchise. Now, I don't know if you know this, but just about every character that you see on screen has a name. Mm-hmm. But there's so little dialogue in the Mad Max movies that like you don't hear any of their names. And they a lot of them have really interesting and funny names. Okay. So I thought it'd be fun to make up a bunch of weird ones, jumble them up together. I'm gonna give you three names. You have to figure out which of the three is not an actual character from the Mad Max franchise. Okay, all right. And how many how many rounds of this are we doing? I have nine of them kind of lined up here. We don't have to do them all. We'll just kind of make We'll see how they do them all. I just want to know percentage wise, what's the pass fail rate on this? Is like I would guess five if I get five right, that's a pass. You know, if you get pretty exceptional. Yeah, there there are there actually there are eight. Eight of them. So four is a p is a pa is barely a passing grade, but five is gonna be I'll be impressed if you get five. Is one of a master blaster? I know that one. No, the master blaster is not not one of them. I thought that one was 'cause that's one of the few that are like just obvious. They They just say it right out in front of everybody. They're like, it's actually two people, but it's master and black. Yeah. I can't wait to talk about these Mad Max movies, by the way. But I'm excited about this game, too. This is gonna be fun. Alright, so here are the first three names. Which one is not real? Labatouche. Guzzle Grammy and Toe Cutter. Okay, no toe cutters real. Yeah. ⁓ and what were the other two? Labatouche and Guzzle Grammy. Guzzle Grammy. Like the ⁓ the music award, okay? Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna go I'm gonna ⁓ God, that's re this is really hard. I'm gonna go guzzle Grammy is not the real not the real Dar hacks thing. That is correct. All right. So at least it's not gonna be a shutout. At least it's not gonna be a shutout. That's right. So far so good. This is the top here, easy up front. Okay, here's the next one. Okay. Scrotus. That's a real one. Okay. The next one is meat flute. And the third one is Tauntaun Tattoo. All right. Meat Flute is not the real one, but I wish it was. That's correct. Okay. ⁓ yeah, I think those are the the the easier ⁓ the easier ones I I put up front to build a little bit of confidence for you there. ⁓ all right, so here's here's the third one. Toast the knowing. Toast the knowing. Toe jam. And barrel gut. Barrel gut. Toe jam or toast the knowing. See, here's here's what I think. Alright. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. So I'm just I'm trying to play a little bit of psychologist here. So I think you might I don't know how how tricky you are, but I think you ⁓ you strike me as a smart person, Matt. You're smart, you're handsome, ⁓ and dog on it, you're good enough, okay? All in one package. So I think I think you might slide a toe in there, like a toe jam, because I'll go like toe cutter, toe jam. Though you know, they're really into this toe thing. So I think that that is the not real one. It's toe jam. Okay, this one you got wrong. Barrel gut. Barrel gut is the ⁓ yeah, barrel gut is the fake one. And there's so many characters that can be named barrel gut, too. All right, okay, all right, all right. All right. Okay, the people eater. Okay. Stink Eye Roy. And rictus erectus. Okay, there is a rictus. Rictus Erectus. Alright, so there is a rict. Stink Eye Roy or the People Eater. ⁓ my god. I mean Stink, I I went to high school with a guy we called Stink well we called him Pink Eye Roy 'cause he get kept getting Pink Eye from Rastling. so I'm gonna go I'm gonna go in memory of R. I P ⁓ Pink Eye Roy. We're going to stink Stink Eye Roy is the fake one. Stink Eye Roy is the fake one. You got that one too. You're doing pretty good. Doing pretty good. All right. Here's the next one. The people eaters pretty on the nose, but I I I was like, I'm I'm gonna go with Stink Eye. All right, here's the next one. Clagtooth screw loose or corpus colossus. ⁓ my god. Let me hear let me hear those one more time. Clagtooth. Screw loose. And in screw loose it's S C R O O L O O S E. Screw loose. Okay. And Corpus Colossus. Okay, you spelled it for me, so I feel like that's probably a real one. Because you're like, I don't want him to get mixed up with the other screw that the other screw loose it could be. Okay. So we're gonna Yeah, I thought I struck you as a smart guy and I'm even just trying to misdirect you. ⁓ I know, I know. It's this this is really making me question the faith I have in our ⁓ budding friendship here, Matt. But I'm gonna I'm gonna work on it. I'm gonna work on it. We're gonna work through this together. Not Corpus Colossum, like the part of the brain, but Corpus, what is it? Colossus. Ooh, I don't I want that name to be real. ⁓ and the other one was ⁓ Meat Flute. No, what was No Clagtooth. Clagtooth sounds like Clagtooth ⁓ Guzzle Grammy's brother. ⁓ I'm gonna go I'm gonna go Corpus Colossus is not is not the real one. Corpus Colossus is ⁓ is a real character. The fake one is Klagtooth. I that was my second guess. I mean there's only I mean I had to get pretty close to the second guess. Okay. Alright, so I haven't passed yet. I haven't passed yet. Okay, so here's ⁓ here's the next one. This is tough. We got ⁓ big Rebecca. Big Rebecca, maybe one of the milking mothers. Yeah. Mudguts. Mudguts. And then That's like something you get after eating a Chipotle. That's exactly right. Which could result in the next one. Skid Marcus. So first you go on a date with Big Rebecca. Yeah. Taco Bell. And then you get mud guts, and then you end up with Skid Marcus. Big Rebecca's like, I'm getting out of here. Well, okay, all right. So all right. Loose Association. ⁓ A C D C wrote a song called Whole Lot Whole Lot of Rosie. Okay. There's a whole lot of Rebecca. Both are from Australia probably. So I'm gonna keep I'm gonna keep Rebecca. Okay. Skid Marcus sounds like I mean that that's right in line with Scrotus and Boner Erectus, whatever his name was, Rictus Erectus. I'm gonna say that Mud Butt, nope, mud belly, mud tongue. Mud guts. Mudguts is ⁓ god, that could be one, too. But I'm gonna t I'm gonna take mud guts as the fake one. I'm gonna say mud guts is the fake one. That is also incorrect. Skid Marcus. Skid Marcus is the fake one. No. So are You are three and three so far. So not not terrible. Not terrible. All right. This is not easy. It's not I think what we've established is that you should be naming characters in the Mad Max franchise. You got a real talent for this, man. Yeah, I I had and like I spent way too much time like organizing these by difficulty so that it wouldn't be easy, but also wouldn't be impossible, you know, like just making sure that if there were some obvious ones that it was paired with too difficult one like that kind of thing. Spent way too much time on this. ⁓ so it I disagree. I think you spent the right amount of time on time. It's working. Okay. Yep. ⁓ I mean I am a game designer, so you know there it is. ⁓ okay, so the doof warrior. So the doof warrior. The next one is Cheeto the Fragile. Okay. And then the third one is Clam Hammer. ⁓ bro, Clam Hammer's gotta be gotta be one. That's like, you know, Hey, listen, you gotta you get clam hammer in here. He could really he can really torque on a wrench. So clam hammer sounds like that's I worked on a construction site with clam hammer. I'm almost positive. So I'm gonna keep clam hammer. Dwarf the Dwarf Warrior. The Doof Warrior. The Doof Warrior. So mad maxi. So I'm gonna ⁓ I'm gonna go what was what was what was choice two? Cheeto. Cheeto the fragile. I'm gonna take out Cheeto, but with a D. Yeah, I'm gonna say Cheeto the Fragile is not a real Mad Max character. Unfortunately, Clamhammer. Clamhammer is the Clamhammer. How could you do this to me, Clamhammer? I thought we had something. I thought we were friends. I thought I was gonna get a Christmas card from you, Clamhammer. ⁓ you never know. You never know. Ridiculous. Okay. All right. Okay, so this is it comes down to this just for redemption. Just to like save a little bit of face here. Man, because now you get this wrong. I mean, we're gonna spend the next like hour and a half together, and it's gonna be a little awkward. Is one of the Mad Max, please at least tell me you put Mad Max in one of these. No, come on. Honestly, I thought for sure you would the Doof Warrior was meant to be an obvious one. You who the Doof Warrior is? Is that that like that guy that used to make those comedic fishing videos? No no no. The Doof Warrior is a real character from Mad Max. You're but ⁓ duh what was his name? Something goes fishing. Dwarf? Yeah, Dwarf. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ not dwarf, but dwarf D O R F. Anyways. No, the Doof Warrior is the blind guitarist, the go blind heavy metal guitarist on the back of the the the war rig, yeah. ⁓ okay, here's the last one for redemption. Dusty Doreen. Dusty Doreen. Mm-hmm. Mr. Davidson. Mr. Davidson. Come on, dude. Come on. ⁓ my gosh. How do you live in a world where you're the Doof Warrior and then this is Mr. Davidson? You'd be laughed out of Bartown. There is no way. Yeah. You're going back Imagine walking into a place and you're like, hey, what's going on? Hey, I'm Richtis, and this is Corpus, and that's Mudguts, and ⁓ what's your name? ⁓ Mr. Davidson. Mr. Davidson. All right, Dusty Doreen, Mr. Davidson, and Risdale Pell. Risdale Pell. Risdale Pell. Riz No, Risdale Pell. ⁓ okay. All right. ⁓ I'm I mean you know I'm a I'm gonna go with Davidson. I just I gotta think that like I swear I he's probably like the Mr. Rogers of like the Mad Max universe. Like he wears a cardigan and he's like a nice little shopkeeper or something, but I'm gonna go with him because I'm like he just doesn't fit in. He just doesn't he's not allowed. Well, this got a little bit awkward because Mr. Davidson is in fact a real real ⁓ character from the Mad Max universe who I don't even know who He is. I just went through like the character names and I was looking for like a Paul or like a Jerry or something kind of like super yeah. Dusty Doreen was the fake one. Wow. And Dusty Doreen could be like a hundred yeah, everybody's covered in dust in Mad Max. You know, that was good. You know, I like I said, I think my takeaway here is number one, it wasn't a shutout, so hey, thank goodness for that. ⁓ number two, you're really good at naming Mad Max case. All right. So that's a that's a pot. Listen, this it's wins across the board. I had a you know, it's kinda like when playing board games. I almost never win, I just have the most fun. So Which means you always win. Yeah, exactly. Except that my points are less. Yeah. But but who's counting? Well, I mean I am. I am. I'm not bitter. I'm not bitter. I mean, we all we all count, right? We all c at the end of the game, everybody counts everybody's points every time. Yeah. Right on. Yeah, that was fun. Thanks for ⁓ thanks for humoring me. All right, let's get into our shout-outs for the episode. You ready for my shout outs bumper? I'm gonna make it super awkward again into one of these like video things. And here it comes. No can we got And stop shouting. I'm not deaf Stop shouting. I ⁓ is that from Kindergarten Cop? That's from Kindergarten Cop, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. You know what's funny is I was listening to episodes of this podcast ⁓ because it's so great, number one. But number two, like I wanted to help, you know, I want to be kind of prepared. And I listened to it in audio format and I was like, ⁓ he's throwing in that little but you've got like a whole graphic with it. Like this one you know what? This is Top quality. I know, right? If you couldn't tell from my Mad Max ⁓ name game, I'm a professional. I'm over here pulling crusty DVDs out of a bin, you know, to make a podcast. We basically stream together two tin cans and, you know, talk about Darlington Raceway entirely too much. I tell ya. It's a y this is a whole nother world for me. I'm it's like I've I've I've left my small hometown and I'm seeing the big wild world for the first time. So I'm excited. I did you you just mentioned your dusty DVD bin. I didn't really give you a chance, ⁓ though I mentioned some of this stuff in the in your kind of intro. I didn't give you a chance to kind of introduce yourself and maybe ⁓ plug yourself and and your stuff. So why don't you tell the people ⁓ a little bit more of who you are and and and then we'll get into our actual shoutouts. I ⁓ yeah, so my name's Kevin. I am on Blue Peg Pink Peg, board game podcast. We talk about board games, relationships, and the interaction between the two and sometimes we yell at each other and it's a lot of fun. So we're just a big family over there. We used to do bi month, semi monthly, twice a month episodes, but we kind of at least for a little while we kind of scale back the amount of recording that we're doing just to kind of enjoy playing games and play. We're always playing the next deep dives and You you gotta have new content. So we're just kinda like taking it a little easy for a while. You know, we may ramp it back up or whatever. So, ⁓ but w there's like ten years worth of episodes. So, you know, go back and check those all out. ⁓ pretty much any ma I would I would think most major games that have came out from the last ten years we've touched in some shape or form if you want to hear a little bit about ⁓ And ⁓ you know, it is kinda like one of those podcastings where you you listen to the podcast and you're like, All right I know my tastes align with Christina. You know, I love Tyler Lane games. She's always got the best info. So that's going on. And I also do improv comedy. I'm in a professional improv comedy troupe. ⁓ big lick conspiracy out of Roanoke, Virginia. We do tour around to places that my car will get to. So that's usually pretty fun. That's actually where I met Rob, one of the hosts on Blue Peg Pink Pegasus, and I both did improv together. And one of my other ⁓ improv bros, dear sweet Travis ⁓ Peterry. I don't know his middle name is probably Paul. ⁓ he and I do a podcast together called Uncle Doug's D V D Ben. He and I share a non familial uncle. I know you're saying you're from up there in the great north of Canada, right? And you you don't have y'all got rednecks up there though. Like I've been to Canada. There's rednecks up there. We do, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well There's a thing in a redneck family where you have nonfamiliar relations. You just call people uncle or Aunt Sally, whatever it is. And he and I both share a nonfamilial uncle, Doug, who quite notorious around the flea market scene. And he gifted to us this giant bin of DVDs, of which we pull one out at random, absolutely at random. Yeah, why else would you cover Hudson Hawk? on a movie podcast. No one does that. And we we cover whatever movie we randomly pull out of the bin. There's always something going on. Yeah, we weirdly enough, this season we have a new owner and she is exerting varying degrees of control over the show. It's really going great. It's not a problem at all. I'm not upset about it. It's fine. It's fine. So if you're interested in movies with a little bit of hijinks, that's that's Uncle Doug's DVD Ben. Cool. Yeah. I've really ⁓ I've really enjoyed ⁓ like Blue Peg Pink Peg has become one of my one of my favorite ⁓ board game podcasts. I've really been enjoying that lately. Awesome. Discovered it probably in the last three, four months and ⁓ have kind of div diven, dove in deep di dived deep dove in into ⁓ a lot of those episodes. So I've been really enjoying that. And ⁓ yeah, when I when I reached out to I think I was talking to Christina. Mm-hmm. mm ⁓ through email and whatnot to kind of arrange this that's happening right the magic that is happening right now. She said, Well, Kevin, Kevin's the perfect dude to come on the show because he's he's he does a podcast called Kevin's not Kevin, Uncle Doug's DVD bin. So I immediately said, ⁓ like I like I like movies. So I went and I went and ⁓ listened to a bunch of those episodes and have really been enjoying that too. In fact that's how I chose the movie for this episode is like I rang up Uncle Doug. Yeah. And what a character. He was I was like I need a recommendation, you know, like you know Kevin, I want to surprise him. What do you think? And he gave me a list of like three hundred movies and ⁓ I never heard of any of them. So I said, screw it, and I just chose ⁓ Mad Max. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably probably a good ass Did he try to get you to give him a gift card? He does that sometimes. I'm sorry if he did. He's like yeah, he's he tried to tell me to go to like the closest Yeah. Like those weird ATM Bitcoin like Yeah, machines to try to know how to spend a gift card. He just he ran out of Pabst ⁓ before he went on his walkabout and he just he just needs some hey, he just needs he just needs a beer or two and he'll settle right down. I'm s I'm sorry about that. He it's cool. Yeah, it's just it was weird, like three hundred movies I I had never heard of a single one is like I I don't know how that happens. But anyways, yeah, that's that's what brought us to ⁓ to today. So ⁓ Let's let's get into our shout outs. So basically at this point we just kind of a c handful of of movies and or games that we've been kind of watching playing lately. So I'll start us off. I watched Undertone, a a movie that was, you know, ⁓ mostly critically acclaimed, but did come with a little bit of like mixed reviews with I think the general public, just because it's what it is, it's a slow burn horror movie about a podcaster. And so I have you heard of this movie? Yeah, that one ⁓ I'm interested in seeing. It's it's not it's not A twenty four that did it, but it looks like an A twenty four movie, right? Yeah, it's it's yeah, it's a little bit artsy in that way and does fee does have a little bit of that vibe, but no, I don't think it's an A twenty four. In fact I think it's Canadian made, if I'm not mistaken. ⁓ right on. Yeah, it ⁓ it looks almost too scary for me. Like I love horror movies, but like that one seems like one that I might it's got and just from watching the trailer, I'm not seeing it. Is it real jump scare? Like a lot of jump scares in it, or is it more psychological horror? It's more a slow, constantly increasing creepy vibes movie. Okay. Is it one of those where it's really creepy vibes? If you look at the camera right now, like imagine it's all black back here, like the camera's like shooting me and you just keep expecting something to come out from behind me. Yeah, really yeah. Yes, there's tension is a really good one. There's the tension is constantly ramping a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. The sound design is really, really good. It's about a girl who ⁓ so we focus on the female character. In fact, the whole thing takes place in just her house. We never step budgets we never step outside of the house and we ⁓ there's only one other character who's her mother who's on her deathbed, mm, it kind of upstairs. And she goes and kind of talks to her a little bit. And the mother's c unconscious, doesn't have a single line in the movie. But ⁓ so that kind of adds a little bit of like I want to use the word grossness, but just like not a not a gross like person, just a gross situation, right? Like it adds to the tension of the situation that she has like literally her dying mother in the house that she's taking care of of. And her podcast is about creepy stuff. Her it seems like she's always the denier or the like doubter. And then the gu the the per her co-host, the male on the co-host is the person who's constantly like believing in things and bringing things to be like, check this out, I heard about this. And then she's like, Well, that could just be that, that could just be this. And so it's kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah. A little bit of that for sure. And ⁓ but it's really good. It's about like they were an randomly, anonymously sent ⁓ ten files, ten audio files. And over the course of the podcast, they listen to them all. And a story emerges from that, and they're kind of doing some research and trying to find out what it's all about or why or whatever. And then, you know, it just gets creepier and creepier and scarier. And I wouldn't say that it's ⁓ it's not gory, it's not full of jump scares, it's just like an a complete sense of dread. Is probably how I would describe it. So not for everybody, ⁓ which is why it's getting a little bit mixed reviews from like general audiences, but critically it's very it's acclaimed and and people are really liking it. And I love a slow burn horror movie that I can just sit in the like sit in as it builds and stuff. I I love that stuff. So yeah, I liked Undertone quite a bit. That is that's one I'm I'm I'm definitely interested in checking out. I out of curiosity, ⁓ it kind of occurred to me ⁓ as we're talking, what did you think of long legs? If you like I like long legs a lot. It's ⁓ it's weird. It's so weird. When you know, and you you might relate to this, when you watch so much stuff, it's always a well not always, it's ⁓ mostly always a welcome thing when something is weird and strange and off kilter and kind of approaches ⁓ a topic in a different way. And ⁓ yeah, I I liked Long Legs a lot for that. And I thought Micah Monroe was really good. And I liked the like it felt like like a dark detective noir story, right? And then as you get further and further into the story, the more supernatural and weird it gets, and like, you know, you get into the horror elements. So I liked the pace and and the the morphing of that movie starting as like this detective story to into like this like more you know, I know, ghosty supernatural thing. Yeah. Yeah, that was kind of my thought I like because you were talking about the tension and undertone and I was like, man, the first two thirds of long legs is, you know, just a lot of like kind of tension and like spooky situations. Yeah, that slow burn stuff. I love it, man. I love it. So I thought you might I thought you might like that one. Yeah. No, I did really appreciate it. I saw that one theaters too, which always adds ⁓ you know, when you watch ⁓ you know A horror movie or a comedy, anything that's visceral, ⁓ in with a crowd, it always just adds that extra layer of of punch. Yeah. ⁓ what's something you've been ⁓ checking out? Ooh, okay. So I have ⁓ I have ⁓ a let me let since you did a horror, I'm gonna do a not horror and then a horror. So I had actually speaking of being a fan of Robert Shaw, ⁓ when I played him, I I I went through and I watched a bunch of his movies I'd never seen. And I had never seen the original. I saw the remake, but I never saw the original The Taking of Pelum 123. And man, this movie is great. Like, it's got this amazing, like, 70s vibe. Walter Mathall, it's the it is just so well constructed. It plays one of my favorite television shows of all time is like Columbo. ⁓ I love Columbo. And it plays A lot like an episode of Columbo. It's like an extended detective episode almost. So if you don't if you don't know, the premise of the taking of Palm 123 is there is a subway car that gets hijacked by some baddies. The leader of the group is played by Robert Shaw. And ⁓ Walter Mathell is sort of like the head of the subway police. And there's just I mean, there's like, is there building up to the taking of the subway car? You know, or the subway train, there's like Japanese tourists or ⁓ Japanese ⁓ officials from like their subway system, like touring the the New York subway to get like an idea, and then everybody's sort of like talking around them because they don't think that they speak English. And then well, I'm I'm don't want to spoil the gag, but it's like two minutes into the movie. So spoilers on a movie that's about forty or fifty years old. Sorry. But it turns out they like they've they've spoken perfectly good English the whole time. They've just been sort of like clowning these these guys, you know. And it just it's such a great ride. There's some legitimate tension in there. You know, like the the bad guys are like, you know, just bad enough, but also there's a few of ⁓ in there that you're like, man, I'm kinda rooting for this guy. Like he's not terrif he's not like the worst out of the bad guys. Like I wouldn't I wouldn't be mad if I don't catch him. You know what I mean? ⁓ and and kind of how it all plays out with and I won't spoil the ending, but The ending is so like Columbo. It's it's fantastic. Like and also just shout out to Columbo. If you haven't watched Columbo, it is probably top five favorite TV shows for me. It is the best detective show of all time. Forget NCI whatever and you know, all those stupid shit. No, let me tell you, here's what's great about Columbo is ⁓ you see the murder at the beginning of the episode. You know their motivation, you know why they do it. And then like that's the first and they're long episodes, you know. Like that's the first, I don't know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes of the episode, whatever, before you even get any Columbo. And then eventually Columbo shows up and he's this sort of, you know, he's insanely intelligent, but he plays this sort of disheveled bozo. Yeah. And he i he sort of disarms people with that and his lines of questioning. And then you see him unravel the mystery. throughout the episode. You see it from like you already know the answer. So it's so satisfying for you as an audience person to see how he kind of unravels. And he's always like, ⁓ wait a minute, wait a minute. I've got I've got one question. You're like, ⁓ Columbo, you got him now, dude. ⁓ there he goes again. Anyway, that's what I like about Pelham one two three. Very cool. I'd have to watch I'd have to watch that one. I didn't I didn't realize even Walter Mathaw was in that. ⁓ yeah. Like, I don't know. I grew up Walter Mathaw was like Dennis the Menace's you know, neighbor and then he was what was Grumpy Old Men. That was like really the only things that I'd seen Walter Mathau in just 'cause I'm not old enough to have watched much much of his older stuff. But yeah, I'm not sure I've seen him in anything where he's not like it's not a comedy. He I mean there's comedic lines in this ⁓ in the in the taking of Pelum one two three? You know, he he is sort of playing it a a little more seriously and there's some serious scenes, you know. It's it's a it's a action y movie, so people aren't gonna not everybody's gonna make it, you know, spoiler. highly recommend it if you haven't seen it. Go ⁓ I think it's on ⁓ Tubi right now, which you know, hey, it's a free streaming service. You don't gotta pay nothing for it. You can just try it right out. So watch it however you can. Very cool. Yeah. Taking of Pelham one, two, three. So ⁓ the next one I want to talk about very briefly is Inglorious Bastards. We talked about my tattoo earlier and how Django Unchained was the I I really like the poster and the cover of Inglorious Bastards, but it's got a swastika like right in there. So I was just like, I don't think it's not I'm not gonna do that. Yeah, I wouldn't want that tattoo. I wouldn't get that tattoo. Just even though and then I'm you I'm thinking through the scenes of that movie, what's iconic, what could you know, what but there's just so much like Nazi imagery in that movie, and that's most of what the like really interesting stuff is. ⁓ I have a pitch for you. I have a pitch. Okay, I'm listening. For your for your Inglorious Bastard statue, if you want to get one. How about the distinct way that he holds up the three fingers that outsends? ⁓ that could be cool. Yes, the German three versus the English three. Yeah. Yeah, that could work. Yeah. Or maybe the shoe in the bar. Yeah. Just her shoe or something like that. Or you know what? She she kisses that napkin. Bridget von Hammersmark, her name is. She kisses that napkin. That could be kind of cool. What do you do? Or maybe just that's a bingle. I love that line so much. Yeah. Anyways, Gloria's Pastor is my favorite Tarantino movie, and I've watched it countless times at this point. ⁓ and I watched it the other night just because it's a comfort movie and I felt like watching something. That I would just like, you know, enjoy and not think about too much. And ⁓ yeah, that's I mean, I don't have much more to say about it. Just that like if you haven't seen Inglorious Bastards, it is brilliant and hilarious and dark and full of tension. Like the way he manages tones from scene to scene is unbelievable. Like that opening scene on the Farm. Not the only time we're going to talk about a milk farm on this podcast. But that opening scene on the milk farm where he's talking to ⁓ the French the Frenchman and they're sitting at the table and he asks for milk and he lights his his thing and he's so friendly. And but like you just see the fear that that farmer is trying to like, you know, stifle and that That entire sc may be probably my favorite opening scene of every ⁓ any movie ever. And it's so good and it sets the tone for that movie. And then you get to, you know, different, different scenes where it's like a Dominica de Coco, you know, and that's a bingo. And like there's so many like great, hilarious, fun lines. And then you do the bar scene where it's just like again, the tension builds and builds and builds to the point where just like the place explodes quite literally. ⁓ and yeah, I just I just love that movie so much. And and I think I think that Tarantino, at least at the time, thought it was his best movie as well. you know, and I think I think he said it right in the movie at the very end when Aldo carves the swastika into Christoph Waltz's forehead and says, You know what, this just might be my masterpiece. I ⁓ it is so Sergio Leone made you know, the man with no name westers, which are some of my favorite movies of all time. It is so coded in in like Sergio Leone tension and style, but he kind of made it his own, which I I just I just love. You know, it like it had a very once upon a time in the West kind of feel. I don't know how like how he would say he was influenced by those films, but it just always has that kind of feel, just maybe a little bit more bloody. No Tarantino's famously a huge fan of the spaghetti western and ⁓ and you see a bunch of that in obviously in Django Unchained and in ⁓ Hateful Eight. ⁓ and even in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, just that ⁓ the his like part of a story is that Leo's character ends up doing a bunch of spaghetti westerns and you see a bunch of those posters and clearly he has a you know, a big fandom for that that like the spaghetti western genre and all that for sure. What you got? Well, I We'll be surprised if you've seen this movie. It kind of flies under the radar a little bit. It is called Midnight Meat Train. Not familiar. As a as a horror aficionado, as a tattoo holder of horror, you know, ⁓ film f I I would recommend this movie because I think it is I think it suffered a little bit from being called Midnight Meat Train. So I'm looking I'm looking on letterbox tier. Is it Midnight Man, Midnight Meatless Express, the Midnight Meatless Train or the Me Midnight Meat Train? Midnight Meat Train. Got it. Okay. ⁓ yeah, I know this guy. Yeah, it's got Bradley Cooper in it. ⁓ and he plays this sort of photographer. Yeah, people are always surprised. ⁓ Bradley, Bradley Cooper's in that movie, he's a big star. and he plays this photographer that's sort of interested in the darker side of things, right? ⁓ And he ends up on I don't I picked two Subway. Maybe it's because I I recently watched The Warriors. Maybe I'm on a Subway kit, but I picked another Subway movie. But he ends up on the sub Subway track. I just I don't want to give anything away because I think it's such a fun ride, except to say that. The midnight meat train is actually literal. It is quite literal. ⁓ there is a midnight meat train in it. I'm just gonna you know, I'm just gonna leave that where it is. It it gets into a little bit of like kind of cosmic y horror almost. Like it is it's way better than it has any right to be. It has way better than any right a movie called Midnight Meat Train has has Not to be confused with the Midnight Meat Flute. That's a different own on a Midnight Meet character, I think. Yeah. And I actually have ⁓ I I don't know if this is gonna set a precedent on your podcast, but I have a reverse shout out. I have a movie that I watch that's so bad I want to like talk about how bad it is. I've talked about bad movies for sure on shoutouts. Yeah, yeah. It's I call it shout outs, but it's just like an excuse to talk about stuff. Okay. Well I I ⁓ in preparation, ⁓ so I want you to know that I'm fully prepared for this episode. I watched all the Mad Max movies in one day. ⁓ without telling me you don't have children. Yeah, you give ⁓ enough, Nyquil, they're fine. Anyway, ⁓ I I watched all in one day and I was like, All right, I need something that's not not Mad Max. I love stupid action movies. I'm gonna check out this Jason Statham movie, The Beekeeper. Why not? I love good stupid action movie. This is this is one of the stupidest action movies. And look, I listen, hey, the transporter has a good time. Lockstock and two smoking barrels. That's great. Jason Statham, great great in those movies. What's the other guy, Richie movie? Snatch. Snatch. Snatch, yes. I've loved many Jason Statham movies. I loved the Meg. I mean, how stupid an action movie is that, but I loved it. It was great. The problem with this one, and I'm just I'm gonna I'm gonna set I'm gonna do a slight I'm gonna first tell you not to watch the movie. Okay, that's the first thing I'm gonna do. And then I'm gonna just describe the setup or inciting incident of this film. So Jason Statham plays the ultimate badass. Okay. Of course he does, because he's Jason Statham. But he's retired. He's stepped away from being the ultimate badass. And now he keeps bees. He keeps bees and he rents he rents property from Claire Huxtable, the actress that played Claire Huxtable from the from the Cosby show. I can't remember her her name. Sorry. ⁓ don't remember her name. But anyway, rents property ⁓ from her to keep his bees and they're buddies. They're like friends. Okay. So she runs a charitable organization and she gets hacked. And by a ⁓ by you know, those like ⁓ click on this link and call this phone number or we need to update your thing and they get your password and they steal all your money. All right. So she gets by the way, this company is not overseas, it's situated in the US, which is like pretty much in the same town. Right. Basically in the sa w within driving distance of where the beekeeper is. Okay. But in this world, they're not prosecutable or or or anything. You can't you can't prosecute them. For some reason, that just no. You're gonna need Jason Statham justice. So they they scam this poor lady and she instead of calling the police. By the way, her daughter is a police officer who could probably help recover this money, she just commits suicide. Okay. Not not trying to resolve the situation. I forgot about that part. Zero to a hundred. So now Jason Statham, the beekeeper, ultimate badass, has to go on a revenge spree, a la man on fire, to get revenge for Claire Huxtable killing herself. And I love I love stupid action movies. I love them, dude. Time cop, man. You know, Universal Soul. You give me a stupid action movie, I am predisposed. Blood's I don't know why I'm picking all of Jean Claude Van Damme's movies. Some of his aren't aren't so. He's Canadian. You're thinking Canada right now. Yeah. He's French Canadian like me. Yeah. Yeah. That's what that's I'm in the I'm in the zone, man. I thought he was French. But anyway, I love stupid action movies. This one the problem with it is it's a stupid action, but it's so soulless. It has no soul to it, and that's what makes it so uninteresting to watch. I swear, and I look, I'm not accusing them of using AI to write the script, but what I can tell you is it is some of the worst dialogue in Jason Statham movies don't have great dialogue to begin with, but this is like you know, he's the beekeeper so he's like, I've got to protect the hive from the horns. What are you even what are you even talking about, dude? Like, could you just say something that makes it stop trying to remember? Bad action movies are bad action movies for a lack of plot or like an underwritten plot. This is not that. This is overwritten and terribly written, right? So there's like all this dumb stuff. And my favorite thing about that movie is the hacker central. Yeah. You remember what that looks like? It looks like a like a neon club, and it's like Everybody's like there's like there's like house music going on and lights and it's like this like no, like hackers are in a freaking basement like hiding and they're like, Yeah, this isn't it is not a realistic depiction and is just like it's hilarious. It's it's bad. Don't they end up at like some at the at the ⁓ at the end of the movie, they end up at like some political like uppity party or something? I don't Yeah, yeah. It goes it goes it goes so many stupid places. Also Also in the same town. Yes, also in the same town. It's everything is a I love to you're talking about. It's like it's like a it's like a planet on Star Wars where you land on the planet and the whole planet is just that one town. The one place. Why you know, and he goes to the hacker den. I'm so glad you mentioned that, and he blows it up. We sets it on fire, but somehow it explodes also. And if you watch the CGI carefully, the flags out front go like this explosion. And then they just immediately drop back down. It is the f like you went so far as to make the flags move, at least make them move somewhere like they would. Yeah, make them disappear or something, at least. And Jeremy Irons is in this thing, and you can tell he's This I got a castle to pay for. Like I'm just gonna do this. That's a paycheck right there. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, if you want a really bad, bad, soulless, bad action movie, ⁓ The Beekeeper with Jason Statham. That's my other that's bad. Very cool. The last thing I've got here is that I played Pirates of Maracaibo for the first time ever. really? Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ so my friend Stefan Don came over the other day and ⁓ yeah, we played Pirates of Maracaibo. She had played once before and ⁓ taught it to us, and I dug it. It's like there's a couple of things that I found really interesting about it. Basically, there's like a whole bunch of cards that get laid out on the table from left to right, and these cards are like People, ships, islands, like booty, like crates is another like card type. And then your ship starts at the far left, and then you move your way across all of these cards, going either one, two, or three spaces on your turn. So you could rush. And go three every time. And then when you get past all the cards, there's like basically a an around end location where when you get there, you get like a bonus action. And if you're the first person to get there, you'll get a bonus six points. So there is a little bit of incentive to try to stay out ahead of everybody. But if you do that, potentially you're missing on specific things that you want for your strategy, depending on what you're trying to do. And there's all kinds of different ways to score. It's very much A point salady thing where you're doing all kinds of different things. You can pick up like endgame goals to say, like if you have X amount of these at the end of the game, you get whatever. So then you're looking for those specific things. You can customize some of the locations on these cards a little bit as well. So there's an action you can take where you take a little crate from your player board and you place it on one of the islands. And now when you go to that island, not only do you get the thing that that island gives you, but you also get the thing that you put there for yourself. And if you do that early enough, there's three rounds, you can get that three times. And then you can kind of s and and when somebody else goes there, they don't get your bonus that you put there. They just get the base bonus that's on that island. ⁓ so that's more or less how it plays. It's very point salady. It's ⁓ there's a little bit of engine building. and ⁓ yeah, it's it's it's really good. The and again, this is a criticism that I that ⁓ that ⁓ you know listeners of the show have heard a million times. A little light on player interaction. There are a bunch of expansions, so I assume that maybe that you can infuse a little bit more player interaction. But it it gets a pass because it's not overlong. You can definitely play it in like I mean, it probably took us two hours ish with the teach and two new players, which isn't bad. Like, you know, if the three of us had had were familiar with the game, probably hour and a half. So it's it's light it's light enough and quick enough that the lack of player in action doesn't hurt it that much for me. And the puzzle is interesting enough and the theme is fun. So yeah, I I really liked ⁓ Pirates of Maracaibo. I'd definitely, ⁓ definitely play again. Have you played? Yeah, we Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually we did ⁓ we did a review of that one. I liked it a lot too. I actually hearing you talk about it made me like, man, I wanna play. I I like Maracaibo too, but like I like, I I I you know much like everybody else, like I find that I'm ending up way busier than I probably should be. So those like ⁓ you know, light to medium weight games are really in the sweet spot where I'm not putting four hours into a game. I will say we did have a few plays ⁓ where those last few turns there was some some analysis paralysis right at the end. I always want to say IP instead of AP for whatever reason. But anyway, ⁓ this is a movie podcast. I might talk about IPs. Who knows? ⁓ but anyway I I yeah, I really liked I liked this one. I it it it didn't stay over long. It's really fun. And it is pretty variable because I if I remember right, those cards can come out in different places as you go across on different plays of the game. So yeah, and every time ⁓ every time you land on a card, most cards you kind of purchase, right? Like so you spend the the resources of the game and you take that card to your tableau, this tableau building. And then you replace that card with like a level two card. So like the board is com is changing all the time. ⁓ so yeah, the variability is fairly high. yeah, I I definitely dug it. I like the puzzle a lot. ⁓ and I think it did it did enough to overcome that like kind of heads down multiplayer solo kind of feel that I got from it. ⁓ but the puzzle was good enough and it played in in a short enough time that it that didn't like It didn't it didn't ⁓ you know, like halfway three quarters through the game, I I wasn't thinking about that. I wasn't thinking about the solo part of it. I was thinking about the puzzle and I was thinking about the next thing. And then before you know it, we're like in the end game. And, you know, that's an indicator to me that like this game transcends the fact that it's not it doesn't have any like, you know, I don't really care about what's going on with my opponents other than like, are they kicking my butt or am I falling behind or whatever? Yeah. Recently I got a game called Arborea played. Now have you played Arborea? I've not played it. I have seen it. It's very pretty. Mm. It's great art. The only critique I have of the game itself, I love the gameplay. I love the art. The board, when you first look at it, is insanely busy. Like it is a really busy board. It it's I I think I joked ⁓ with my wife I in fact I know I joked with my wife. That's why she married me. I'm Freaking hilarious, dude. But I was like, this is like tracks the board game, because there's just a ton of tracks going kind of like every every different direction. ⁓ but generally you're building out a biome, putting different little critters on it that score you points. is kind of what you're doing in the little ⁓ for lack of a better term, tableau. It's not really a tableau, but kind of like right in front of you. ⁓ and the but what I really loved about this game, and I picked two ⁓ two games I played recently that the action mechanic is what I really liked in the game. Both happen to be worker placements, but the They're both different expressions of worker placement, which I really like how I always love how you can like the permutations of how a simple mechanic can be used, I guess. But in Arboria, what happens is you place out your your dude on for lack of a better term, they're ⁓ you know, think the long tiles or long ⁓ long pieces and Tetris, you know, and they're moving across the board, you know, kind of each round or somebody could and then you pick where you want your w ⁓ your worker to jump off. And when your worker jumps off, he's gonna be able to follow that track down to then come back to your to your player board, right? ⁓ some of them come back to your player board, some of them don't. You have to you have like your big workers that can do certain stuff that you they cost you a little more or whatever to get them out. So you're you're kind of trying to figure the timing of like when you need to come off. And the other thing you're talking about player interaction. ⁓ this is not this is not access and allies. player interaction, you know, it's not like a you know Forex or a war game or something like that level interaction, but there is a little bit more in here because you have shared resources. So if you generate any resources that you don't spend on your turn, which does happen fairly frequently, they're open for anybody else who wants to spend them on their turn. You have an open market of animals that you can bring into your you know little biomes that you're creating. So it's kind of an open market that if you generate one of those animals and put it out and you don't take it on your turn, now it's available for somebody else to get. So I love that like that push pull of like, no, no, they really need an orange. I don't want to give them an orange. I gotta figure something else out. And it's it's neat components in it too. Like the little resource trackers are split so that like as you gain some and spin some, the little the little bottom piece stays where it was so you can move it up to meat at the end of the round, like for whatever you've spent. So I just thought that was such a neat solution to the way the game functions as well. Really cool art. Really beautiful. I'm looking at the pictures on BGG. The meeples are gorgeous. The board is very busy, but very vibrant and like yeah, it's eye catching for sure. And it's not once you've played like a little bit of the game, you're gonna look at the board and it's not gonna seem busy to you. You're like, Yeah, I know what all these tracks do. I know, you know. It it's it's a pretty simple game to learn. Not I I would say this is a play it maybe one if you really like it, play it maybe once every six months. It's not a huge amount of variability. I do have the expansion with it that adds like a river or something that I haven't played yet. So I don't know if that adds a ton of ton of variabil variability to it. But it was a game I liked enough that it's gonna stay in my collection. Like every time I've played it, I've like, Man, this is Arborea is a seriously fun game. Awesome. Cool, yeah. It's it caught my eye somewhere. I don't know I don't remember if it was at a store or if I was looking at something online, ⁓ but it caught my eye and I remember looking up the mechanisms and thinking, ⁓ this could be for me. But ⁓ And in the interest of visibility what do you call it? Transparency. That's what I'm looking for. Alley Cat did provide me a copy of this game, but like it was like two years ago and I've already talked about it on another podcast. So I'm I'm not already fulfilling my obligations. Yeah, I fulfill my obligations. I still like it enough to talk about it and play it. So Awesome. Cool. Yeah, I'll I'll have to see if I could ⁓ maybe track that one down. It it looks really cool. It looks like it might be up my alley. Yeah. Very cool. ⁓ you got you got anything else you want to talk about before we move on? ⁓ I see ⁓ one more here. One other game, Phoenix New Horizon. ⁓ DeVere all ⁓ sent me a copy of this game as well. Well, they didn't send me a copy of Arbaria, but I was sent a copy of of this ⁓ game, Phoenix New Horizon by DeVere. But I liked it enough to talk about it as well. There's it's it's apocalyptic too. Kind of ties in a little bit with with our themes here. In the world was destroyed, some such nonsense. You've been living underground, now you're coming out. And there's a map of ⁓ the main board is a map of the US and you're trying to put out your I don't know, we call them secrets. They're like little round discs, but they represent your little military bases, and there's basically contracts that you're trying to fill as you place your little dudes out ⁓ your little ⁓ secretes out on the on the main board to populate those areas. Somebody has to put out a regenerator Which is the little energy token. A la like ⁓ shackleton base, somebody's gotta put out the solar panel before anybody can build anything. So you kind of gotta put that into to the space. And that that part of the game is fine. I like that part. ⁓ it and also a nice detail for the main board, the map, is there's just board game references all over it. There's like Essen Canyon and you know, all kinds of I see a dice tower there. I'm looking at the back. Exactly. Yeah. All kinds of fun little references on there. ⁓ but I loved again it's a worker placement. I love the action mechanics ⁓ of the game because the action board, ⁓ there's ⁓ three layers and you have to pay a resource to move your your guy up a layer, right? ⁓ and there's a lot of decisions because it's those those actions kind of get juicier as you go up, but they get more expensive as well. Plus At the end of the round, you're reset to the side of whatever level you're on. So you could take, like, say, like you move up to the second tier, you could stay on that second tier to get actions on that second tier without going to the third tier. So you're kind of trying to make decisions as far as when to move your guy up. And you might also, on a turn, you might just move them up and wait. You might go, like, ⁓ I don't want to take an action yet. I want to see what happens with maybe somebody's going to put out one of those regenerators so that then I could build the thing that I want to build. And as you get to the third tier. If you take certain ac when you take a certain action, it sends you all the way back to the bottom. So potentially you've got, I think it's three workers. You could potentially take four actions on a turn once you get to that third. So you can kind of start to build some synergy between these different levels of the action mechanics and I or actions that you can take. I thought that was just really cool and neat. Not a super heavy game, but it ends up giving you a little bit more to think about ⁓ as you're playing it. And I played it with ⁓ my friends at Sykes Brothers and they were talking smack each other the whole time. So that that just added even more enjoyment to it. So really, really enjoyed Phoenix New Horizon. I that's another one that if you haven't if you haven't tried it out, I think you probably dig. I'm not sure I ever mentioned this term before, but I kind of use it in my own head all the time. And ⁓ maybe you could tell me if it's a good thing, but I feel like it should be integrated like for my preferences. It should be one of the stats on BGG, but I call it the pit ratio, the player interaction to time ratio. Because if there's zero player interaction, it's totally fine if the game's forty five minutes to an hour. Right. If the game's two, three hours plus, like I better care what my opponents are doing because I'm gonna spend a ton of time on my phone and I do not wanna be doing that. Right. If I find myself on my phone a partial way through the game, it's an indicator. Right, right. So yeah, the pit ratio. What's the pit ratio like on on Phoenix New Horizon? I would say it plays pretty quick, very light on interaction. I mean, people can take spots that you might want to take on the action board, and people can take spots on the main board that you might need for your scoring, and they can also kind of swoop in and take the contracts or whatever they're called, you know, to score those points. So they can take those away from you. But as far as like, ⁓ I can't bump someone off the board. you know, that type of interaction. You know, like I always say like, all right, one v one, like chess or something like that is like the highest level of interaction. Yeah. This is about ten steps down from that. So there is some player interaction, but you know, if if you think about old school board games, they were all like really heavy player interaction. And I think, you know, the industry's kind of moved away from that in a lot of ways 'cause a lot of people find it uncomfortable to get you know beat up in a game or and also You know, you think about the way games are published and sold these days, it's a lot of, you know, I gotta learn this game on a f the a convention floor and if I play two rounds of it and I'm constantly getting beat up the whole time. I'm not gonna like that game. For sure. So it ends up being a lot more like, you know, solitaire but together. So it's not bad. If you you know, it's just if you want higher player interaction, you do often often worker placement games are enough. Player interaction, if the if the action selection if the spaces are scarce enough and important enough, if there's enough tension around like I'm building up towards going to this specific spot and I can see you have the resources for it, and now I'm watching you to see if you go there first. Right. Or if I should take it now because I know that you do have the resources to do it, like, you know, that kind of thing. Or Shackleton Base is a perfect example of like what A pure Euro game, but the interaction of the area majorities of the lines within that that you know, like that is like chef's kiss. You know, I just want to care what my opponents are doing on the turn. And ⁓ and if a game can do that, then then great. So yeah, if if New Resin has a bunch of like shared resources, or not shared resources, but ⁓ that was Arboria, right? But like shared contracts that you're going after, worker placement stuff. If I care enough about what what you're doing on your turn, then yeah, it's it sounds really cool. And the theme of that one is right up my alley, like post apocalyptic sci-fi. Like that is my jam right there. So ⁓ you just put two games on my list here, Kevin. What are doing? Stop it. I mean, hey, you know what? You could go to boardgame bliss dot com and ⁓ purchase probably. They probably have them for sale. I don't know. I haven't I haven't looked at it. If not, maybe they can special order it for you. But ⁓ yeah, it's what we're here to do. I actually have a tag team ⁓ is a game that I play 'cause you guys recommended it off in your ⁓ face off episode. So I just recently reviewed it ⁓ Blue Pack Pink Peg. So you know you're rubbing off on me over here, man. Cool. Yeah, I'm gonna take all the credit for you guys ⁓ playing that game. You should. I'm an influencer. Yeah, no, that's So that's my ⁓ yeah, those are my two shout outs. I just out of curiosity, I always like to find out what people have sitting on their shelf of shame ⁓ that they they wanna play next. The thing I want to play next that is on my shelf of shame, I literally have a specific shelf that has a bunch of games that are high priority for me for different reasons. Games that have been sent to me by publishers that I have to prioritize to fulfill those obligations, games that I make recently got that I'm excited to play, and just games that ⁓ that I have to play for the podcast. So what is the thing that I'm most interested in playing right now? Probably Torchlit, which is a new trick taking game from All Play. Have you heard of Torchlit? No. No, I bet Rob has though. Rob's our are Trick taking guy. Okay. Yeah. So Torch Lit is a trick taking game where there is and like I had the all play guy explain it to me very quickly at Canada Plays, the asthma day event that I went to recently. And so I haven't played it. I haven't read through the rule books or the rule book, but he did explain it to me very briefly. So I'll do my best to just repeat what he said. But basically you're in it's a dungeon themed. You're going into a dungeon fighting monsters. ⁓ it's a trick taking game. And so I have seen this. I haven't played it, but I have seen it. Yes. Okay. So essentially there's I think seven locations, and they're just like side by each, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And everybody starts off the side of the first board. ⁓ and then every time you win a trick, I think you move up the board. ⁓ and I think the first thing that you do at the beginning of the round is you take a card, you place it face down in front of you, and that's your bid. And the cards go from one to seven as well, I believe. And your goal is to have your dude land on the location where you the location that matches your card number. So if you th your it's sort of your bid, right? And you can so let's say you win four tricks. In theory, you would end up on the fourth location. Therefore, you want to put the number f a f a card, a four card face down in front of you as your bid. Okay. That's kind of the idea. But in this game, if you if your the rank of the card that you played, win or lose, if the rank of the card that you played, the number on the card matches the card that did win, you also get to move up. So you're not just guessing at how many tricks you're gonna win, you're also guessing how many how many good cards you have that you'll be able to do that. So you're playing strategically around that. And then at the end of the round, before you play your very last card, you could choose to swap it. So the very last card in your hand, you could swap it with the card that's face down. So there's a bit of a moving target in terms of your your bid. You can change at the last second. So you might hold on to a specific card as you go as well. There's there's more to it than that. Like when cards are at the end of a trick, whoever won the trick can choose. I forget what the what the the rules are, but can choose Some of the cards and place them underneath some of these locations, these dungeons. And then based on how many cards are there at the end of the round, you'll gain points for where you're sitting or whatever. So it's a you know, it's a fairly simple trick-taking game with a couple of extra layers of mechanics involving bidding and movement along this board. You're trying to things up so it seems really interesting and all play sent me a copy to cover so I'll either ⁓ play it and shout it out another episode or maybe even include it as one of the main ⁓ main reviews so we'll see what happens with that. But that's probably the game that I'm most excited to get to the table right now. I just love trick taking games so any variation or weird thing that they can do with them I'm in to check it out. Okay. All right. Right on, right on. Yeah, what about you? D you have a you have a a shelf of shame game that you're excited about right now? Always. Always, man. Actually speaking of that, I have my co host over on Blue Peg Peak Peg Brandon works for Inside Up Games, so I have all the crits and tricks and like that whole I I backed that on Kickstarter and got that whole shebang. He won't even send me free games from the company he works for. What a what a guy. I gotta back him on Kickstarter, you know. But y we're all friends. Well, you didn't call him your co host and not your friend, so that's as something. He's my co-host first. He's my friend second. Okay. It's I'm angry because he's more handsome than me. That's what bothers me. That's not fair. So I want to get those played. I ⁓ got from twenty fifth century the first czar Ivan the Terrible. And I've been reading a lot of Russian literature. So I'm just as you do. Kind of excited to try as you do, you know. I'm just excited to play this one. It is, you know, it's Ivan the Terrible. It looks like ⁓ you know, a medium weight Euro game. So I I I was just like, this is I need to get the rule book out and learn this one. And then funnily funny enough, I opened up I I I don't know, two years ago, bought a copy of Woodcraft, ⁓ the sushi game. And I just recently I busted it open, buste I read the rule book, I set it up, my wife and I were gonna play. ⁓ we played like a half a round and she's like, I'm so sleepy, I'm just gonna go to bed. And I was like, Witch up, we just I was just getting Red Craft a dice over here. Yeah. So I just collected all my blueberries and I'm ready to go. Right. How dare you. So technically I guess I've played it, but I haven't played it. So it's it's it that's probably the next game I want to get played, because it is literally very shameful that I've only played like the re the round of this game and had to pack it up. So yeah I love I never know how to pronounce a name. I think it's Suhi. Vladimir Suhi. Sushi. I don't know. Anyways, big fan. I did say sushi like he was like, you know Yeah, you're like the sushi game. I'm like, what? I thought this was a Russian game, not a Japanese game. What's happening here? Sushi. That guy did underwater cities. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. That guy Anyway, those that's my sh that's my shelf of shame right now. So I'm gonna get those played at some point. Awesome. All right, let's let's get into ⁓ let's get into the good stuff here. So we're gonna talk about Thunder Erode Vendetta. So Federal Vendetta published in 2023 by Restoration Games, designed by a whole bunch of people: Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, Noah Cohen, Rob DeVio, Justin D. Jacobson, Jim Kiefer, Brian Neff, ⁓ and Mr. Meatflute. No, I'm just kidding. ⁓ art by Mar Marie Bergeron and ⁓ Garrett Kaida. It plays two to four players, five with a with ⁓ with an expansion. ⁓ in forty five to seventy five minutes. The weight on BGG is one point nine six. ⁓ and it currently has a rating of seven point nine on BGG. ⁓ cool. So yeah, Thunder Road Vendetta. Do you want to take a shot at like have you played the expansions or have you just played the base game at this point? Nope, just played the base game. So I've played one reasonable out of the base game, but I'd be excited hear about the expansions. Cool. So why don't we do it this way? And like I don't have a ton to say about the expansions. I have played most of them at least once. So I'll do a very high level overview of what the expansions are and what they add. But why don't you just give us a quick rundown of how the gameplay is? Yeah, absolutely. So you're gonna start out, you've got your game board set up. Usually I think it's it starts with three tiles. ⁓ there's little hazard tiles on it. There's a road, ⁓ there's varying types of terrain. You got road, you got sand, and you got mud. Basically. ⁓ there's also in passable terrain, whatever you want to call it. ⁓ big rocks, that kind of thing in the way. ⁓ and you're gonna have your three cars, your small one, your medium, and your big one. On a turn, you're gonna roll your dice. ⁓ you have four dice. You can assign ⁓ you're gonna assign a movement. So let's say you have a a four pip die, you're gonna set that on one of your dashboards for your for whichever car you select, your big, medium, little, and you're gonna send it down the the track four spaces. Okay. You can Any any of the three spaces that are in front of you at any given time, you can kind of go through those. You're sorry, I'm missing I'm messing up the sequence on the turn a little bit, so just bear with me. You can select your dice, you place it on your dashboard, that's how many spaces you can move. With another die, you can once per essentially turn of the game, you can take your die and place it on your command board, which lets you kind of take four different actions. ⁓ and they're they're coded to whatever the pit value is. One of those is repairing your car. One of those is nitro, which gives you a little extra movement. ⁓ one of them's sliding, which lets you like I think it's as slide that might not be the right jargon, but you can kind of pass through. Drift, I think it is. Nope. Slam. That's what it's like. That's the jargon. Without triggering a slam, which we'll talk more about in just a second. ⁓ or you can ⁓ activate your helicopter, which just drops down Wherever you put it and shoots another car, which is awesome. So ⁓ you can do your command board, then you move your car and resolve whatever your your movement is. The slam, as I mentioned, ⁓ when you move into a space with another car, if you are the larger car, you can you set your you're the car moving and you set your car on top of the other one, you roll a dice. One die is going to tell you whether it's the top car or the bottom car that's gonna get the reaction. And another dice is gonna tell you where that car goes. So you move the car there, which can trigger all sorts of pandemonium. It really is where the fun starts. So that's kind of your slam. If you there's different hazard terrain that you can go over, which are literally tiles that you flip over. You can get ⁓ a mine which does some damage to your car. ⁓ you can get ⁓ a a little wrecked car gets dropped out, which then triggers a slam. And then the rest are just like you get slippery terrain, which like sends you in a direction that you use the dice for, you know, that kind of stuff. The end game trigger for it is a little different at two players, and we can talk about this as we get deeper into it, but at two players is a little different than at three or four players. At three or four players, the end game is triggered when, in other words, you just keep setting out more tiles and making the track longer and longer. until one person is eliminated. You're eliminated by basically getting two damage on all of your cars, or you can have a car eliminated by getting it knocked off the track or running into some of the hazardous terrain. Or if if your car ends its turn in the space with a helicopter, even your own that's that car gets eliminated. Yeah. It just gets bombed. Somebody drops a a Molotov on it. I don't know. So basically in the in the three four player game, after somebody's eliminated, at that point ⁓ the finish line comes out, first person to the finish line, you know, wins the game. And two players, ⁓ when you get to the fifth race tile, the fifth board ⁓ track tile, ⁓ that's gonna be basically the finish line. Or if the other person's just completely eliminated. And the final thing on your turn that you can do is you shoot at other cars that are near you. That's yeah, at the end of your turn if there's if there's a car immediately in front of you in one of the three spaces in front of you, you can just shoot at it. And you roll a die to see if you hit it. And the bigger the vehicle that you're shooting at, the more likely you are to hit it, which is a nice touch. And the same way with the slam, the bigger the vehicle you are, the less likely you are to get knocked around. So like if you bump into a smaller, the more agency you have, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that is kind of the gist of it. I mean, it is a pretty straightforward game. You can learn this in about five minutes. I think The first thing I would say about this game, the components and the art are are awesome. Like I I'm not I wish I painted minis because I think you could have a lot of fun painting these little cars. Yeah. Now you got the ⁓ looks like you have the deluxe like Kickstarter. Did they come with a wash or something else? Yes, they did. Yeah. Okay. They did a really good job with the with the colors and the wash. They look great. And before I had this one, I actually washed my own and they also looked great. Like it didn't take much, you know, and and they and you really should. And I don't I do not paint. I've never painted anything before I painted these things. And I just went to the store and I'm like, Somebody told me to get a wash? Is that a thing? I didn't even know was a thing. And then the guy's Yeah, here's what you need. I just did it really quickly and it turned out great. And then immediately after doing it, I'm like, everybody must do this. It should be mandatory because they look too clean. And this is like this is the dusty doomsday apocalypse, right? Like you can't have a clean car. You know, it but yeah, they look great. It does occur to me looking at the box cover, which I you know, I liked the game enough to keep it in my collection. ⁓ but the box cover was I was like, this just looks rad on a shelf. It reminds me of Death Race two thousand, which might have actually been a better ⁓ Jason Steven movie. Yeah, another Jason Stev well the original, the original with David Carrot now. Yeah, we're not we're not doing no any well, I don't know. Maybe we do both. Anyway, doesn't matter. ⁓ I love the art of the of the box cover of this games. Now you talked about player interaction. What do you think about player interaction? This one is pretty high, right? It is very high. Yeah. You cannot this is not a game you could take too seriously. You know, there's a little bit of strategy and definitely some agency there, but ultimately like some wacky things are gonna happen. People are gonna get lose their vehicles on the first turn sometimes, just because crazy things can happen. And it's like you just have to be prepared to laugh at yourself. And it's just like you're there for the experience and not to try to like you're gonna try to win, sure, but like You're really there to just like mess with your friends and have a laugh and try to do the silliest things possible. It definitely I lost two cars in the first turn of the game one time. ⁓ 'cause everybody was bunched together. And that slam, when it happens, you know, cars are just bouncing everywhere. And when one car gets slammed into another, gets slammed into another, you have to resolve it for every single car that gets hit. That's and it can go really bad for Really bad for you when it does. ⁓ and there's also when you get damage to a car, some of the damage tokens have ⁓ stunt on it, I think. So there's a stunt dice that you that you roll, which basically is a mandatory move for you when you get this damage. And it's two different types. I always forget the difference without like looking at the the tile, but you know, essentially I think you have to move one, whatever the total value of the dice is, you have to roll the direction dice for each movement. And that's right. Yeah, I forget which is which, but yeah, it's it's hilarious. Like if you roll the like four on that on that like distance die, and then you roll the direction die and you have to move four in that direction, and sometimes that just like launches you right off the board. Or right into like a big rock or right into an opponent. And then you gotta and then you gotta resolve a slam. It's just like those are the types of things that can happen. It's hilarious. Another one of the types of damage is a shrapnel, I think it's called. Yeah. Basically you just roll a direction die and a piece of shrapnel flies off your car in that direction until it goes off the board, striking everything in its path, damaging other cars on the way. So those are the types of things that can happen in this game, and ⁓ it's it's hilarious. And it gets exacerbated quite a bit when you start including the expansions. So I'm looking at some of the terrain diff like you mentioned the terrain in the base game is either ⁓ just like road space, which is like asphalt colored, there's off-road space, which is like, you know, just like dirt colored. And then there's a muddy space, which is like slow. So it costs you two movement spaces or two movement pips off your die. To move into that space, unless it's your la very last movement from your pip, then you can move into it. But otherwise, it's just really slow to go through mud. ⁓ and then there's impassable places where if you hit this like rock or wreck or house or like mountain, you just blow up and die. In the expansions, there's toxic goo, which makes you just like immediately stop. And finish your turn right there. You can't move anymore. Okay. There's desert glass, which essentially acts like ice. So when you move into that space, you have to continue moving in whatever direction you were going. So if you came into that space on an angle, you have to go into the next space in that on that same angle, no matter how it happened. ⁓ there's also oil slicks, but oil slicks are in the base game as a hazard. So if you hit an oil slick, you just gotta roll the movement die and then you move your car in that direction and then you just keep going. And then there's also ramps in the expansion. So if you hit a ramp, you'll roll that distance die to see how far you go off the ramp. All right. Like you didn't have me sold on the expansion until you said there was ramps. There's ramps. Now I'm like, man, I'm gonna have to get I'm gonna have to get that expansion. The expansions are are totally worth it. There's also fire. So if you end up in a fire space, your car catches fire. And then from then on, every time you move that car, you also have to roll the fire die. And the fire die is mostly good. ⁓ okay. One of one of the six sides of it is the fire gets extinguished and then you're just not on fire anymore. One of the six sides is your car explodes and you die. And then the rest of them are bonus movement. So you either move one, two, or three extra spaces because your car's on fire and you're just driving faster. Right. So those are the kinds of things. Also salt flats. ⁓ salt flats lets you use the road die, which is a bonus movement that you can use if your entire turn is on asphalt. So you start on asphalt, every movement is on asphalt, and you end on asphalt. You can use that road die. Which is rolled at the beginning of each round, and it's either one, two, or three. And then you get to move extra ⁓ you know, because you went faster on the asphalt. Well, if you hit the salt flat space, no matter what type of of territory you went through, whether it's mud or it doesn't matter, you get to use that that bonus that bonus road die. Yeah. So then, you know, the those are just the territory expansions or terrain ex ⁓ you know, spaces that are in the expansion. There's also a whole bunch of different hazards that that are included as well. Two of them here from one of the expansions. One of them's called a quake, which we played this afternoon and this one got resolved, and it's pretty fun. But the quake is that you roll the direction die and every single vehicle on the table has to move one space in that direction. Which is hilarious. Like thematically it's so perfect and so funny. And then there's a sandworm, and it basically says to eliminate the road vehicle that is the furthest back on the board. So if whoever's furthest back gets eaten by the by the sandworm. So there's you know, it was there's all kinds of like stuff like that in the game. The two expansions, I guess the three expansions that I really want to ⁓ highlight. I guess two of these things are in one expansion. It's called Big Rig and the Final Final Five. I think it's called Big Rig and the Final Five. Yeah, that's what it is. The Big Rig and the Final Five. So it comes with a big rig, which is like Amazing if you're like a Mad Max fan, especially if you're a Fury Road fan, because the big rig in that is just like amazing. But yes, you have this big rig that takes up three spaces, like three terrain areas, and it sort of acts like a train and you always lead with the front. So if you do a diagonal, every like next piece in your quote unquote train follows the one before it. So if I move on a diagonal. The next one follows into the space behind it, and the next one follows into the space behind it. So it kind of like worms around. So that's how it moves. But there's three sections of it, and they each act like a large vehicle. And this rig moves slower. Like your dice only go one, two, or three, but it has all kinds of tricks. You can shoot forwards or backwards. So you have a forward arc, but you could also shoot backwards. You can drop hazards. So Drop a hazard immediately, and you don't know what they are. You just grab one of the random hazards from the supply and you drop it. So that's super fun. You can launch a missile and basically you choose the space two exactly two spaces in front of you, and then you roll the damage die. And any vehicles within one like adjacent or in that space that would get hit by that damage die gets hit. So you could like hit. two, three, four vehicles with one shot as one of your like actions. And it can do all kinds of things. And one of the things that's neat about it is that you you it basically the only way it dies is if it takes six damage. It doesn't die, ⁓ By it by hitting impossible objects. If it hits an impossible object, it just turns it into the de a desert space and takes a damage. If it spits left behind on that very last tile gets pulled. That you lose then, right? Only if it's the head only if it's the the head unit of the three. Yeah. Right. So the other three can just kind of hang off and as as you move forward or whatever. But yes, that that's the ⁓ there's two ways that it can die. One is if it takes six total damage, and the other is if it gets left behind on on a on a road space or whatever. But it's really cool. It's it's considered a quote unquote massive vehicle or something like that, I think it called it in the rules. Basically, it can slam, but it never moves. Doesn't you don't even have to roll the red like top car, bottom car. You just roll the direction die and the other vehicle always moves, which can also result in some hilarious outcomes because I played today with my boys, Charlie and Remy, who are six and nine. ⁓ I just wanted to have like a refresher game before this podcast. So we ⁓ after they got off the bus from school, we ⁓ we pulled it out and I played the big rig. And Remy slams into my back piece, okay, rolls the direction die, and he has to go forward. So he goes from my back to my middle. And he rolls it again and it goes forward and to the left. And I was in the middle of taking a turn. So ends up on my front, like my engine basically. So it has to roll again. Comes back to the middle space. Rolls again, comes back out to the backspace, like four or five times in a row. And we're just like howling. Like we're just laughing. It's the funniest thing. Especially a six year old finds it hilarious, right? And that A six-year-old's laugh is so infectious and we're just like having a great time. So yeah, the big rig expansion is really cool. And the final five part of the of the big rig expansion is motorcycles. So you have five motorcycles that are all considered small cars. ⁓ and they they can only take, I think, one damage each, but they can be repaired same as the other vehicles. And they're ⁓ they're faster and more difficult to hit. I think they're almost impossible to hit in terms of like Using the helicopter and stuff. I forget all the rules around the ⁓ motorcycles, but they're really cool and very thematic. So that's really cool. There's another expansion where everybody has asymmetric powers. So everybody starts with their own abilities. And then you can also give each of your vehicles a weapon, ⁓ missiles or launchers, or extra protection, or machine guns, or all kinds of things. So there's a big stack of cards that you can like put on each of your vehicles. So those are more for like advanced play if you really want to like, you know, dive deeper into it. One of the expansions, instead of using dice, uses cards. So you draw a hand of cards and then your cards will tell you the movement. And then you just so it gives you a little bit more agency as opposed to like the luck of the the role. So if you want to take a little bit less randomness, if you want to take Little bit more renous out of the game and have a little bit more control. That's another thing you can do. So the expansions are really cool in that way. You can really kind of like modulate the game and and kind of pull some levers kind of make it what you want. So yeah, there's lots of cool expansions. The last one I want to talk about is Carnival of Chaos. I almost had to turn around here to remember what it what it ⁓ what it was called. Carnival of Chaos, which is basically changes the game mode altogether. It's not a race anymore at all, it's an arena battle. So it's like a big circular. ⁓ and instead of having these like arrow-like like directions, it's like hexes. Mm-hmm. And ⁓ basically you're just running around this board, shooting at each other. And then at the end of each round, everybody's trying to land on a pillar, and then the pillars kind of rise. And then anybody who's on a pillar at the end of a round will get bonus points. And then you're trying to, and if you blow somebody up or if you damage somebody, you get points. It's basically a point system. And so I played that at a convention once at the full count, full player count, which is either five or six. And it was complete chaos. And ⁓ and it was a lot, it was lot of fun. But it that's a game I would probably only play at like an ex ⁓ at a con or at a party or something like that. That mode is just like complete chaos. But it's really cool. And the main villain character from that game is called Tina, which I'm sure is a nod to Tina Turner from from Beyond Thunderdome. So yeah, that I think I think that's all I'll say about the expansions. Essentially, like, you know, there's just so much modularity involved. It is a little bit of a double edged sword though, because since I've got this huge box, I've played the game a lot less. And that's just because, like, you know, anytime my kids are like, Can we play Thunder Road Vendetta? ⁓ it used to be like, sure, and then you would just grab it, throw it on the table, and then you're just ready to go. Now I have to grab this huge box, pull it out, empty the whole box to try to find the components that I need. Because it's all stacked really neatly in there. And then like and then, like, you know, one of my kids is like, ⁓ I want to play the big rig. Okay, pull out the big rig. What are the rules for the big rig again? ⁓ I haven't played with the big rig in so long, you know. So today that was a good example of that. You know, I pulled it out, it probably took us like 20, 25 minutes to like pull it out, set it all up for me to read through the thing. And then we played the game and it was done in 30 minutes. We were done in 30, 40 minutes. you know, which normally is a good thing. Like, you know, we finish a game in 30, 40 minutes, we had a great time, we laughed, whatever. But like the setup and takedown took longer than it took to actually play the game in this case. so it's interesting. Like I actually ⁓ you know, purposely this time stacked the the pieces in the box, because there's like layers, trays, right? Stacked it in such a way that like the stuff I'm least likely to use, I put at the bottom. So that like it's less of a daunting task to like pull it out next time. So ⁓ yeah, it just feels like, you know, when's when it's like, Do want to play Thunderwood Vendetta? It's like, yeah, I do, you know? But Okay, heavy list. And then I'm glad I did it, of course. It's it's a blast of a game, but yeah. It's It sounds like to me you just need to buy a second copy of the game. Like you have the base game and then you have all your expansion stuff. You know, and I'm sure Restoration Games will be happy to I bet if you went to boardgame bliss dot com, you could probably buy another copy of Thunder Road Mandetta at a very reasonable price, yeah. You you at a very re they'll get it to you in two shakes of a lamb's tail. I will say you you've really hit on like my Achilles heel with expansions because you know, if you own a lot of games You know, you it's it's very rare that you play the same game a few times in a row. Like you know, you pull something off the shelf, you relearn the game, and then you gotta relearn the expansion. It also increases the setup time. It also increases so very rarely am I an expansion person. There's a few expansions that I think are essential, like the ⁓ you know, the Feast for Odin expansion, the Norwegians expansion or whatever it is. I I think that is essential for that game. But You know, some of the prelude with terraforming Mars. You just gotta you gotta get this game going. Just do prelude. You know, I think that one's probably probably essential. But back to Thunder Road Vendetta. I think you were you were really hitting on the the nail on the head there. It's the chaos of this game that really brings a lot of the fun. And the dynamic of the people that you're playing with at the table. I played this with my my wife, my mom, my stepdad, and they are not gamers. They play some games. Generally, I've just started, I take a game over there anytime I go over there. And if they want to play, I'll set it up. I'll teach it. If not, hey, no big deal. You know, and this was it was a way for our family to confront our tensions with each other. And it ended up being so fun. But one word of caution, if you are someone who doesn't doesn't like, you know, people beating you up, don't Get out ahead of everybody because everyone is going to try to make you currently in the lead. So it is that ⁓ I don't know if you call it King of the Hill syndrome or whatever, but like everybody's gonna attack you if you're getting out the first. And you talked about there being some agency, and yeah, there's a little strategy, like maybe you try to get your small car out there front. And there are some neat decisions you get to make sometimes. Like sometimes you might go, I'm gonna blow up my own car because it's a it's in my way. And B next round I get another dice to increase the movement of my smaller car, right? Because if you have a d you've lost a car, you've got a dice left over, you can add it to your your you know console for that particular car to get one extra movement, and that might make the difference. So you could you can make some pretty neat decisions with the game, but you have to be in love with chaos to really kind of get the most joy out of this game. Yeah, you're you're playing for the chaos. That's the whole point of the game, is just to have a laugh at the weird, funny, hilarious, silly things that could happen. ⁓ and ⁓ you know, I I you know, just to to put to put a bowl on the expansions, I would highly recommend if you're if you have Thunder Road Vendetta or you're thinking about getting it. I'm not sure I would do the like full big huge box thing. I would recommend ⁓ the the big rig and the final five. It is really cool to play with that big rig. Like it is so much fun to be like driving down the center of that thing. And then all of the cars around you are like buzzing around and you're like shooting them and like causing chaos and you just feel like this big, immovable object. It's super fun. And it's also fun to like gang up on it if you're not the big rig. So like there's a lot of fun to be had around the big rig. The Motorcycles are really cool, but the highlight is the big rig, in my opinion. And I don't even know which expansion it is because this box came with all of the expansions. So I don't know what it's called, but whichever of the expansions comes with all those new terrain types. The ramps, the fire, those are the two main ones that are just a blast. But like, yeah, the new terrain types really add, you know, we talked about where the fun of this game is. It's in the chaos, those new terrain types and the new like hazards and stuff add a lot to the game and a add to that fun of that chaos for sure. We played this and i I think one came out the year before, ⁓ but Heat came out the year before Thunder Ribbon, and they were both like sort of racing car games or whatever. And everybody liked Heat. I liked Heat. Heat's fun. It's a very fun game. But I think I liked this one a little bit better because you know, in Heat. You get a you get the cards in front of your hands. And if somebody's somebody's a math whiz or whatever, they can math it out. Like they can they they have a definitive advantage. And this game, which feels disingenuous to like a race game in general, at least in my in my opinion. With this game, it's just chaos. It's wild it has that many designers 'cause I mean I guess, you know, they kind of it's restoration games, so they're gonna, you they're they're yeah. What what game was this originally? What game was this originally based on? I think it was just called Thunder Road. Was it okay, okay, okay. If I'm not mistaken. I guess I know I never I've never played the the you know, obviously the original implementation of it. So it's amazing it has that many dimes 'cause it is a very s ⁓ you know, kind of simple game. One of the things Yeah, Thunder Thunder Road nineteen eighty six, it looks like. Probably inspired by Mad Max. It looks pretty cool. Or death. Yeah, well you know what? Yeah, it's definitely this one. I'm looking at the pictures and it looks very, very similar. Yeah, so it just called it's just called Thunder Road. But in n ⁓ nineteen eighty five was when Beyond Thunder Dome came up Beyond Thunderdome came out. So like yeah, eighty six would have been they would have been working on that game and released it right in the hype of ⁓ of that trilogy. I'm ⁓ I'm also a ⁓ again, it's a fairly simple game, but I like to always criticize or compliment the quality of the rule book. This is a good rule book. Lots of pictures. I'm a picture guy. You know, that that compelling book about that big red dog. I want to see that big red dog go into a big dog house. You know what mean? And so this has lots of pictures, good explanation. Very again, you know, I don't know that I've ever played one game of this. ⁓ generally it's you play one, you'll re rack it and want to maybe play at least one more. Yeah. ⁓ just to kind of see what happens. So I do think it it lends itself to that. I think it's very, a very friendly, approachable game for for new gamers as well. Yeah, I mean I played with my six-year-old today, right? And though he's he's not like making the most the best decisions, maybe, and whatever, but like he won. He won today. Yes. Like that can happen. And he had a blast. You know what I mean? So that's like what's better than that? So you mean he's not winning Gaia Project against you, but he will win on your road venture. You sit there. You sit there and you play Gaia Project with Daddy. He's just moving stuff I know it's been four hours. You sit there. Whatever the next big game is. For sure. Yeah. Ch his older brother Charlie is more of the gamer. He's nine years old now and he's been playing games with me for like four or five years and slowly graduating. Like he plays games like White the White Castle with me. He'll play Red Cathedral. He'll play ⁓ Bus. He plays anything that doesn't have a lot of language that's just mostly iconography, like he'll play. And ⁓ yeah, the odd time he beats me at these games. So it's fun. I I bred a little board gamer and ⁓ yeah, it's great. Yeah, Rem Remy will come around for sure. He's he's liking games more and more and yeah, especially games like this that's chaotic and silly and fun. Anything he can attack his brother and cause chaos. Yeah, Remy loves that stuff. Cool. ⁓ anything you wanna add? ⁓ yeah, like usually we go through what you like, what you don't like. I mean, if you're like a serious hardcore Euro gamer. Yeah. This isn't for you. And like this is probably not for you. This is all this is borders on a party game, right? Like this is this is silly fun. You you're playing there the toy factor there. You're moving little cars around. You're imagining like cars flipping around and shrapnel flying and cars on fire and ramps and all this stuff. Like, you know, it's that's the kind of game you're getting into, right? Is there anything you don't I mean, I I don't think there's much not to like about this game other than like it might not be for you based on on what it actually is, you know? Yeah, I I think that's probably a there's not there there isn't much to dislike about the game. I mean it's it's a fun time. I think and to that credit, you look at this game on the table, you know what you're getting into. Like you, you know, you walk by this at a convention, you're like, ⁓ I know. I don't I don't need to necessarily know the rules. I know what that game is, right? Like I'm not playing, you know, an economic game, right? Like I got I got it. ⁓ yeah, I think that that's probably maybe the only critique is if you're ⁓ expressly wanna play heavy, you know, if you want to play Lazerta, this is not gonna be a Lazerta game. It's just not. Yep, a hundred percent. Cool. ⁓ so we just usually just give the a s a a BGG type score one out of ten. I'll do mine first, ⁓ give you a second to think about it. But I've got it at an eight point five, which is you know you know, f for what the game is. You know what I mean? Like ⁓ if I wanna play this kind of game or if I wanna play a silly game where I can have a laugh and and mess with my friends and just like have a good time, if I'm with the right crowd, like this is the perfect game for a specific type of situation, right? Right. So yeah, I have it rated fairly high. And you know, that's within this category of games, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? Like I probably have games that I like more than this that I play more often that would show up higher on a rank list, ranked maybe lower as an eight or whatever, right? But for what this game is doing, I have it as as an eight point five. Man, that's yeah, I really think too, you know, it it's kinda in that sweet spot where you can play it with your kids. So I think that maybe, maybe bumps your rating a little bit. For sure. ⁓ yeah, it's pretty fun. Man, I ⁓ you know, I always struggle to rate games because I always go like, Well, what's the difference between a seven and an eight, really? So in this case, I'm just gonna give it an eight. I think an eighty percent. You know, it's a I think it's above average for a game, what it is. I think the production is really good on the game. I think too, one thing we didn't talk about, but if you are someone so many people in the board game world are into the world of 3D printing and like deluxifying your components, you could go wild with his baby. You could build all the terrains out. You can, you know, design your own cars for it. You can, you know, any of that stuff that you want to do in that space, I think that this game is really going to lend itself to. I think Even the stodgiest gamer, I swear if you put them on this game, they're gonna get a few laughs out of it. So yeah, I I'm gonna come in at an eight on it. I think it's a solid eight. Awesome. Cool. So an eight point five for me, an eight from Kevin. That is Thunder Road Vendetta. Okay, Kevin, let's get into the Mad Max stuff. So, ⁓ yeah, the w the the whole franchise we're gonna talk about today. So hopefully we won't ⁓ go too long, but It's a super fun subject, and I'm a big fan of these movies. So ⁓ yeah, let's get into it. So they were released in ⁓ respectively in nineteen seventy-nine, eighty-one, eighty-five, and then thirty years later in twenty fifteen was Mad Max Fury Road, and then just recently in twenty twenty four, Furiosa was released. So they were all directed by George Miller, starring ⁓ in the It's somewhere sorry, it's somewhere in the middle of there he managed to do Babe. More on that in a moment. yeah, so starring in the original trilogy, starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner are the notable names there. And then Fury Road had Tom Hardy as the titular max, Charlie's Theron, Nicholas Holt, Zoe Kravitz, and Riley Keogh are probably the notable names there in in Fury Road, and then in Furiosa we had Anya Taylor Joy, Chris Hemsworth, and Tom Burke. And the synopsis is as follows: In the Mad Max franchise, it is a high octane engine revving, full throttle, pedal to the metal ride through the Australian post-apocalyptic wasteland, a world of gas-guzzling machines, high-speed chases, and muscle-bound mayhem. From the man who also brought us Happy Feet, Happy Feet 2, and Babe, Pig in the City. George George Miller has spent nearly fifty years delivering five films that push the practical effects and stunt work far beyond the red line. So yeah. Yeah, ⁓ kind of a a really interesting filmography there from George Miller. Dude, I love Happy Feet though. Come on, Happy Feet's a better. Like that's a good movie. I should I'm not sure if you watch that thousand times. It's so good. Your kids will love it. They'll love Happy Feet. I think they have seen it. Yeah. And ⁓ yeah, but I I have not. ⁓ I have not I don't think I've watched ⁓ the and either of those three movies. But yeah, I I am still a big ⁓ George Miller fan for what he's done with this franchise. And I don't know if you've seen Three Thousand Years of Longing. Have you heard of that one? No. It is it came out just a couple years ago. maybe before Furiosa. Must have been before Furiosa. Basically, it's Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. And Tilda Swinton is in like a swanky hotel. She's like an uppity, very serious ⁓ businesswoman. And Idris Elba plays a a genie. So literally right there in her hotel room, she bought a little lamp trinket thing in a shop, and then in her hotel summons Idris Elba, who's this genie, a three thousand year old genie. And and he basically proceeds to tell her the story of his of the different moments in his quote unquote life ⁓ over the last three thousand years. And it's a s it's a movie about storytelling basically. And it's weird, it's it's strange and different. ⁓ not for everybody, but I r I really liked it. I thought it was ⁓ I thought it was underrated and it's it's ⁓ strange enough for the for the Cinephile to ⁓ to kind of check out and and see something different if that interests you. And that's a George Miller movie? Yeah. ⁓ wow. So he he basically was like, How could I do I dream of genie but not I dream of genie? I know. Idris Elba. Perfect. Until the Swinted, yeah. Well done. Well done, George Miller. You're a genius. I'll check it out. Yeah, yeah. I I I recommend it for sure. So one thing that I I started doing recently is ask the question is there a Wilhelm scream? Are you familiar with the Wilhelm screen? ⁓ yeah. You are. I always I always listen for it in a movie. I I don't recall hearing it in this one though. Like it because it stands out. Yep, there it is. It's even in Star Wars. It's in Star Wars. It's in so many movies. ⁓ I don't I don't think there's one in Mad Max. You are correct. Yeah. I looked it up and it is not in a single Mad Max ⁓ movie at any moment. So the ⁓ sound design ⁓ team did not sneak it into ⁓ into that one. Really drop the ball. Really drop the ball on that one. It's it's a weird thing that if I was a filmmaker I'd be like I'd be in my contract. It has to be in the movie. Especially in a movie where so many there's so much chaos and like bodies flying all over the place. Yeah. So you're correct. I mean, if you're doing You've Got Mail and you put a Wilhelm scream in it's like, well, all right. Yeah. Now maybe when Harry met Sally, you know what I'm saying? Boy. Yeah, yeah, you're not gonna see somebody on a New York street trying to flag down a taxi like over here. Cool. So yeah, where I mean where where do we wanna start with this? I'm thinking maybe we just like go through the filmography. We start with the original, we have a quick quick chat about each of them, and then at the end we can kind of reveal our rankings and have a quick discussion about is that how you wanted to do that or what are your thoughts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do it that way. So we'll start with Mad Max, the original from nineteen seventy nine. I think it was Mel Gibson's first movie, or at least his first movie that like got a a wide release or like got out to the you know, the general public. I've been talking a little bit here. Why don't you start us off with your general thoughts on the OG Mad Max? Well, the thing I like about the OG Mad Max, and ⁓ without getting into any anything that might possibly give away my rankings. But like it sets it sets these slightly it feels weird to describe a movie that has as much like violence in it and even like sexual assault and other like really not so good things as zany, but it has a zany sensibility to it, like a weird kookiness to it. Like you you know, you really hit the nail on the head talking about the different character names and like the version of the apocalypse it is. And the first Mad Max is probably the least apocalyptic out of them. Like, you know, they kind of get more apocalyptic, if that makes sense, as as the as the franchise goes on. This one there's still like police officers of some law enforcement there's still civilization of some kind. Yeah. There's still ice cream shop. Yeah. So like I I think that that's probably you know probably the thing that sticks with me that and and you know that interceptor that like You know, that car is so so iconic. ⁓ you know, it comes back, you know, in in numerous ways. But ⁓ I think that's what really sticks with me with that one is how it kind of sets the tone for the franchise to come and kind of and also like how it's mad max, but like Max really it in he really he's mad for about ten of it at the end And he's barely in it in the first like forty five minutes or something, yeah. Right. Yeah, so yeah, I think there's some there's a pros and cuts. It does it does feel like a seventies low budget Australian movie. Like watching it, like you get all of that kind of kind of carry through. So ⁓ and it's you know, it's good. It's good. Yeah, ⁓ it's ⁓ it's it's it's the Mad Max movie is the first one and it sets the tone, but it is is now if you look back, it is the least Mad Max movie. You know, because if you think about if you think about what makes a Mad Max movie, you're talking about crazy cars, you're talking about crazy outfits, people like wacky characters. There's a little bit of that stuff, but it is the movie with the least amount of those things. And of course, the the part that it does fulfill, especially considering its budget and the resources that they were able to, you know, the lack of resources. I should say, and what they were able to pull off with that, the action and the car stunts are are still fully there, right? And that's probably the main thing that makes a Mad Max movie. But secondary to that, you've got the crazy outfits, the crazy characters, and the crazy cars. And though there's a little bit of that stuff in it, it's definitely the the Mad Max movie with the least of that stuff in it. I don't know if you agree with that. You seem to like have a little bit of a reaction there. Yeah, but I'm gonna hold off on that. I'm gonna hold off on that. Fair enough. As as we get into the rankings. I would say too You might know where you're where you're going with this, but yeah, okay. Watching that watching the original Mad Max, I'm like, there is no way that safety was taken seriously on that film set. Like it is Yeah. There are some stunts and like some driving in it and just stuff you're like It is unbelievable. Yeah. The first two are just Yeah in that category. Yeah. I think the first one is serves as a decent like origin story. Yeah. You know, it it wasn't it wasn't it's not like, you know, when when modern movies are made now knowing it's a franchise, you know, when they do when they do like an Iron Man or something. Right. They made that movie knowing this is an origin story, the whole thing. When when Mad Max was made, it was not made as an origin story. It was made as a movie. Now it kind of serves that purpose. You know, it doesn't for me wasn't and maybe it's just because I saw like out of all the movies, I think the first one is the one I saw last. Yeah. Or no, maybe maybe not. Maybe not like it's it's the one I saw last of the original three, for sure. Like the first one I ever saw definitely was Beyond Thunderdome, just because I was I was born in 84. It came out in 85, right? ⁓ and by the time I watched it, I watched it because Mel Gibson was in it and I was just a Mel Gibson fan into my teens or whatever. So I was already I had already seen two and three. And a part of the reason of that is because at the time, you know, especially prior to like IMDB existing and letterboxed and whatever, I didn't know what was what or which was which, like Mad Max is first, is Road Warrior, which is which. And I had heard that Road Warrior was the one to watch. It's like the best the best one of the original and blah, blah, blah. So I watched that one. And then I probably, you know, then I'm like, okay, well, I may as well watch the original too. And ⁓ just stunt wise and story wise, I don't think it quite lives up to the second one. And so I always had the first one as like in the shadow, I guess, of that of the of Road Warrior. Yeah, well, I mentioned I watched all five of these, you know. Chronologically. That's an interesting yeah, that's an interesting date. It was funny, my wife, she's like, ⁓ Mad Max. I yeah, and but she had never she thought Road Warrior was Mad Max one. Like she thought that was the first Mad Max. She had never seen the original. So like a lot of people I think kind of feel that way. You know, and the last thing I'll say about the original Mad Max is if you wrote that movie in twenty twenty six, you know, it's ⁓ John Wick, it's every other revenge movie. His family's getting killed in the first ten or fifteen minutes. And then the rest of the movie is him getting revenge, right? Like that's the story. And this this just like, you know, you got the bad guys and they're going after some of the other cops, and then he decides he wants to quit being a cop and travel with his family, but the bad guys just happen to find him. And then like with twenty minutes left in the movie, that's when his family and his poor dog. Poor dog. You I'm always worried about the dog. ⁓ gets murdered, you know, and gets it and and like just gets run over by a motorcycle. Like I'm pretty sure it would have probably just sprained her ankle. We're gonna you know, unless it like, I don't know, they backed up over or something. But anyway, him and his hi you know, his family gets killed ⁓ at the end and then he goes on his revenge spree. And you're like, if that movie was written in twenty twenty six or any time, you know, in the subsequent la or last twenty years, that's how that story would play. So I do think it's Remarkably unique from that perspective. That's true. Very loose feel to it, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Yeah. It's not structured in a in a typical vengeance movie, because that's ultimately what it is if you look at the main plot points. ⁓ but it's definitely not structured ⁓ the way that you would expect it to be. Yeah. but but you're right, the the stunts, ⁓ especially Toe cutter's death at the at the very end when he gets run over and and that big collision. That's some wild stuff to be happening with practical effects in 1979. Like that is like unbelievable stuff. And if I remember, he plays a Morton Joe, right? So like, you know, all this years like he's like, you what, I'll I'll do another movie with George. It's fine. problem. Whatever. Yeah, it turns out he didn't actually get run over. ⁓ in that scene. Yeah. Cause he he re Yeah, he came back to the yeah, he was still alive. So that's pretty cool. I was really worried about him. ⁓ cool. Yeah, so that's ⁓ that's some of our thoughts on ⁓ Mad Max. ⁓ let's move on to Road Warrior, which ⁓ I think will probably be closer to the to the top in our rankings. We'll see what happens there. But this I thought the s the stunts ⁓ especially and the the action choreography and everything that happened. So good. on the roads in this again in nineteen eighty one, eighty-two or whatever. And you mentioned that you listened to our face off episode. We talked a little bit about this, the you know, of of like, you know, like kids or people watch these movies today and they're they're probably not as impressed. And I have to remind myself when I watch older movies to be like, this is crazy. This is crazy what they they're like there's there's no CGI here. It didn't exist, you know. For any of this to happen, they had to just do it. You know? And it's wild what they were able to put. One of my favorite stories about that. It's not it's not about Mad Max, I'm sure they have a hundred stories like this, but In ⁓ Days of Thunder, the really bad crash that happens to Cole Trickle. ⁓ he you know, when they shot it, they basically put a bomb in the car to explode so that it would roll like six hundred times. Apparently and they put a guy in it. They put a stunt driver in it. And the stunt driver apparently got out and he went, I don't know how if I can curse on this, so just just bleep it out if you need to. But apparently he got out of the car and he just goes, Yeah. Like he was just sounds about excited that he got blown up with his car. So these stunt drivers are really doing these stunts. You know, occasionally they would use models or miniatures or something like that. But you can always tell it on screen. And there's not to my eye, I didn't see any of that in Road Warrior. The stunts are at the story is probably the most cohesive of those early Mad Max movies. You know, he he's trying to get some gas, he goes to, you know, gas town. You know, he's got the guy in the helicopter that kind of takes him there. You've got the ⁓ gosh, what's Homongous? What is his name? Count Homongous or something like that. Who's like the big bad with the metal mask? And you got Vez. And ⁓ fun fun fact with ⁓ this movie, have you ever seen Weird Science? Yes. The bikers at the end of Weird Science, Vez, the the main, you know, biker not with the metal mask is reprising his role from Mad Max in Weird Science. ⁓ that's cool. Same same same actor, whole nine yards. So that's really cool. So, you know, they're kind of surrounding Gas tell trying to get this big tanker full of gas. I think they call it gasoline in this franchise, right? ⁓ and Mad Max is trying to get it, you know, who escapes, who doesn't, you know, murder, all that sort of stuff. So And and you know, the big escape at the end where he's driving again the big rig. We bring him back big rigs. That's pretty awesome, man. I there's so much to like about Rogue War. Also iconic, absolutely iconic shot, ⁓ where he's walking away, you know, from the wreck, holding the sawed off shotgun with that blue healer dog with him. It's like that's every like that's my that's how I think I am. Like I'd say I'm like that's how I'd be in the apocalypse instead of just dead 'cause I can't take care of myself, but like I think that's how I'd be, you know? Yeah. ⁓ it's definitely the when I I feel like see this a lot in TV shows where like the first two, three, four episodes, sometimes even the first full season, the creators are just figuring out what they are. They're just figuring out what this show is. And then they hit their stride, right? And they figure out what really works, right? The office is a really good example of that, right? They weren't they weren't overly focused on Michael in that first season. And then they figured out he's the funniest character. Let's make him the main character. you know, you get the Simpsons is another great example. The first ⁓ season and a half or two or whatever, we're all focused around how bad Bart was. Bart was like you know, whatever, and then Homer would choke him and that was hilarious. Well then they figured out that Homer You know, and his dynamic is like the funniest thing about that show. And then they focused on him. I feel like George Miller figured out what a Mad Max movie was during or or ⁓ post the first movie and into, you know, Road Warrior and started to put together these iconic scenarios, iconic vehicles, iconic characters, and really just like Go all the way. You it did he didn't half ass anything. You know, he he was gonna go all the way with with how crazy a character was and how much you know, how crazy a vehicle was. Let's put a helicopter in it, let's put a feral child with a killer boomerang, like all these like s like so like unique things that could only exist in this universe. And this is where he really stepped into that stuff. I love that boomerang scene where like the feral child chucks the boomerang that he uses a metal glove to catch and then the guy tries to catch it and just chops off his fingers. It's so good. So wacky, man. There's so yeah, there's so much to like in Road Warrior and like pacing is good. It's by far the best written best written of that original trilogy for sure. They kill the dog. I hate that. Let's not do that. Stop killing the dogs. ⁓ you can kill the people. Just let that that dog was a great performer too. There were a couple of times where the guy that plays the whirly gig ⁓ operator, like and the dogs messing with him, you could tell he's like legitimately a little afraid of that dog. Like he's like I this dog is he's high strong, you know what I mean? So they weren't messing around. They brought in they brought in a real performer with that. with that dog already and then even that location we'll talk a little bit more about locations in ⁓ in ⁓ excuse me in ⁓ the now I've got like so many words in my head Thunder Road, Thunder Dome and beyond Thunderdome we'll talk about ⁓ some ⁓ you know locations but that gas town is just like really cool, right? With the bus that moves and like just the world building is so good. Especially again for like a movie with low budget made on a shoestring, just figuring it out as they went. I yeah, the I think what they accomplished in Road Warrior was phenomenal, especially for the time. Yeah. Big big fan of that one. Yep. Okay, let's let's move on to maybe the most interesting Mad Max movie, Beyond Thunderdome. So Beyond Thunderdome. Basically at the beginning I think he gets what is it? It's been a while since I've seen that one. This movie I adore this movie. The plot of it is so bonkers. I'll give you just the five hundred foot you know, so he's ri he's driving a caravan with camels. He gets his camels stolen by the Whirley gig operator again. It's I think it's the same performer from From Yes, which apparently not the same character. Yeah, different character. The movies are all sort of like loosely, you know, in the same world, but they're not they're not loosely they're not really connected in that way. Yeah, it's weird. So he gets his camels and stuff sold. They get taken to Bartertown. He follows them to Bartertown. He's trying to get his camels back. Tina Turner's character, Auntie, hires him. Bartertown. If you don't know Bartertown's This is what I was alluding to when I talked when I was mentioning locations. I think Bartertown is so cool. It's the best. It's the best. Because you've got Bartertown and you Underworld. And in Underworld is where all the energy is produced for Bartertown, which is methane from Pig Poop. So they process Pig Poop to power Bartertown. And and Underworld is ran by Master Blaster. and you go, Who's Master Blaster? Well, Master Blaster's actually two people. It's a little person who rides on a big person. That's Master. And one is Master and one's Blaster. ⁓ Tina Turner's auntie, who runs Barter Town, is is insulted by Master Blaster, asserting that he runs Barter Town. So once him killed, once Blaster, the big one killed, so the little one who's the brains of the outfit, you know. A sort of a a Lenny George situation from a mice and men, right? Yep. Just as tragic, if you ask me, frankly. Wants Max to kill him, he says, All right, fine. And then he doesn't kill him. And then he gets exiled on the wheel. And then he goes to the island of lost children. ⁓ and this is when the movie falls off the rails for me. It just goes and then like some of the kids want to f they they have this pseudo religion around this adult, Captain Walker, who left. Who was a pilot, and they go in search of him, and Mad Max goes to save the kids and ends up in Barter Town. It is and the it and ⁓ spoiler, hey, I'm just gonna ruin this movie. ⁓ that he helps all the kids take off in the plane with the the whirly gig operator. I guess presumably there's an there's a voiceover, so they all survive. Mad Max gets left behind, and Tina Turner's character has him surrounded. Kakillum just goes, Ain't we crazy? Leah. Anyway, I'll see you later. Shaggy Man, Raggedy Man, Raggedy Man, Raggedy Man. That's what she calls him. Raggedy Man. It just leaves. I lo I love I love Beyond Thunderdome. It's so weird. It's so weird. I like it. I'm a big fan too, and like I think it's it's underrated, if I'm honest. And I agree. But but I love it for completely different reasons than I love the rest of these movies. It's not the same thing. The Tina Turner songs. Tina Turner, these like you don't need another hero. So good. Killer. One of the best songs from any soundtrack. And Tina kills it in this thing too, man. She's great. She's a great villain. Yeah. Yeah. She is a great villain. Yeah. The pitch for this movie, like how much cocaine were they doing when they pitched and wrote this movie? Some. I'll tell you, not none. Some, not none, none. Yeah, exactly. Don't Thunderdome, man. Yeah, it's a blast. I think the world building in this is some of the strongest in the franchise. Barter Town is so cool. And then the underworld too, like the concept of all that is super fun. It's wacky. It's zany. It's all the things you want out of a Mad Max movie. It's so silly. And then the obviously the the titular Thunderdome scene is amazing and so much fun. Yeah, it's it's ⁓ it's a movie that is extremely flawed, especially when you think about it too much. But that first half, especially like before he goes to the island of lost children, before all that stuff happens, it's like some of the strongest stuff in the franchise. And then it falls off the rails quite a bit, in my opinion, when it gets into like all the kids and all that stuff. ⁓ yeah. It loses it loses the thread a little bit for me. So for that reason it falls a little bit, but like it's like it just gains so much goodwill with me in that first half. I still I still look at that movie really fondly. Yeah, big fan. I think it's kind of the way Episode three of Star Wars is it's like you're like, this is really good. Why are there little teddy bears? Why do we suddenly have teddy bears? What are these? Come on, ewks, really? But then you love it. Yeah, once you it's like a thing where you once you get used to the idea and you're like, okay, it is what it is. And then like and then you get used to it to the point where like okay, ewes are just normal now. Right. Because you're so used to it that like now if you watch Jedi, it's like This is great. This is super fun. Like, what's wrong with this? Why didn't people like this, you know? But it takes that time to get used to it, I think. But but that there's a difference between like Jedi, where they injected a really silly childish thing into it, but it was still well written. The plot was good. It was still well made and everything. Whereas Thunderdome, I think like the writing and the story and the plot kind of falls apart. Are you trying to tell me Beyond Thunderdome is not as good as Star Wars? I will not accept that. All right. Yeah. It's better than some Star Wars, I'll tell you that. But we won't go there. We won't go there. We can agree on that. We don't want to dunk, we don't want to yuck on anybody's jump. No, let's let's not go there today. all right. So now that that is the original trilogy. And then 30 years later, I'll just come out and say it. George Miller comes out and makes maybe the best action movie of all time. Yeah. Like it's in the conversation. You c you could argue with me that it's not the, but it's it's in the conversation. And I think it's as close to a masterpiece, a perfect movie that you can get. You know, it's it's it's hard to put into words. How amazing it is. It just blows my mind. It's like unbelievable. I don't think it's a spoiler to say this is going to be my number one. And I rem and you said to me earlier today, we were messaging and getting ready that your list might kind of ruffle some feathers. And my only thought was like, you know what? As long as we can agree on number one, I'm not gonna I'm probably not gonna argue with you too much. Boy, okay, okay, we'll see where this goes. I I objectively think this is one of the best movies ever made. I saw this in the theater five times. That's how much I liked this movie I went back twice, I think. Yeah. Went I f I saw it the first time and then I like I was like I told my wife I was you have to come see this movie. And like her and I both were just like wide eyed watching this thing. The practical like the stunts and it's not it's a super simple plot. You don't need more than that. It's a spectacle you like the characters Charlize Thuron is just fantastic. Just re-watching it, I was like, I love everything she's doing. Like, it's just so, so good. You know, and it's it's just it's it's just Carmegeddon. It's two hours of Carmageddon, and you just can't, you can't top it. It's so hard to put into words how great that movie was. And like the you saw about the world building. The world building is fantastic, you know. You got this weird Citadel World where, you know, a Morton Joe runs it. He's got his weird kids. He's got these brides. He's got, you know, ⁓ the the mommy milking mothers, yeah. Yeah, and like weird, you know, the all these food sources. The idea of these battle rigs that traffic the wasteland so they can get their their goods from one community to another and like how shaped and interesting those communities end up being, like All of that is just really, really, really cool. I love it. I love it. It's great. Yeah. It's it's probably a top five movie of all time for me. I was of like a fringe Mad Max fan. I like liked them. I thought they were really good. I was like really impressed with the practical effects and all that stuff. ⁓ you know, but I wasn't like a diehard. I wasn't like a ⁓ George Miller, whatever, you know. Maybe at the time I didn't even know George Miller's name until Fury Road came out. I'm like, ⁓ yeah, same ⁓ it was a d the same director. ⁓ the guy's name is George Miller. Okay, cool. Like that was probably the the vibe, you know. And then like now George Miller is like, you know. maybe one of my favorite directors. And ⁓ and primarily for one movie. Like, you know, there's there's I I'm a huge fan of a couple of the others, but like this movie is unbelievable. You talk about world building, I I think that that's one of the biggest strengths of this movie. You know, y you're absolutely right. The Citadel is really cool. And like I w I rewatched it last night just because like I wanted to like refresh the the the the the world building and just the general vibe of the franchise and I'm like This is the one I have to watch. I want to say, like, I watched them all within the last year. Because one of my favorite podcasts is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I don't know if you're familiar. They do so it's called Blank Check because it's about directors who had early success in their careers and were given a series of blank checks to do whatever passion projects they want. That's literally like the opening line of their podcast. Mm-hmm. So they'll do mini-series covering directors and they'll go episode by episode and and discuss in two, three, sometimes four hour conversations about each movie. And they did George Miller about a year ago. Whenever they cover a director I'm really interested in, I will kind of do the whole thing with them, quote unquote. Like I'll watch each movie and then listen to the whole episode and then whatever. So I rewatched all of the Mad Max movies in the last year. And ⁓ Yeah, I I I wanted to r just watch some th one of them at least, you know, in the in the days coming up to this podcast, and it had to be Fury Road. It's it's just by far my favorite. And that opening one of the opening shots after the crash, they show us that kind of courtyard at the Citadel where all the people gather and where the like platform comes down with the big rig on it. Like the mole people with human meat in the the holes are down there. Yeah. There's some weird artist stuff in there, man. Wow. Yeah, but there's just a there's a shot where you see the crowd of people below and that platform is either coming up or going down with a big with the big rig on it. I think it's going up at that point. And you just kind of zoom out and you see the Citadel in the background and then the crowd and then that platform with the vehicle on it. And I'm like, this is just like this is movie making, you know, at the highest possible form of movie making. It's just like so great. Like we haven't even gotten to any of the action, any of the like characters yet really. We haven't met anybody. It's just like it's so gorgeous. It's so beautiful. The colors are vibrant. Yeah, and then like there's so many just iconic sequences in this movie, right? Like even the opening ⁓ the opening sequence where he crashes his ⁓ his car and it flips like a million times and then lands right in front of the camera. Is so cool. And one really neat thing about that scene, I was watched a ⁓ making of Mad Max Fury Road 20 minute thing on YouTube. Highly recommend you check it out. It's fascinating. And there's a whole bunch of them, actually. One of them is specifically just about the cars. Some of them are about the action, some of them just about the general. But, anyways, they were talking about that scene and the main stunt coordinator. If you remember in Road Warrior, there's a guy on a motorcycle and he hits a car at full speed and is supposed to jump off the motorcycle, clear the car, and go flying across. And instead his shins hit the car and he breaks both of his legs in that scene, I think. But his shins hit the car and he instead of just flying through the air, he flips through the air. He does like two full 360 flips through the air with two broken legs, I think it was. At least one broken leg. That same guy is has been George Miller's stunt coordinator and was the main stunt coordinator on Fury Road. And he's the one that drove the car for for two ⁓ for the bookends of Fury Road. So he did that crash. He was in the car when that happened. And they loaded a big hydraulic press, basically. like an explosive press on one side of the car and then he would turn just at the right time, trigger that thing, and then the car flipped and flipped and flipped. So that guy did that scene and then he did the big scene at the end where the big speaker machine with with all the like ⁓ speakers and heavy metal guitar player and all that, when that crashes into the big rig at the end, he was driving that vehicle as well. But I just thought that was fascinating that the guy from like Road Warrior that broke his legs on that crazy stunt. was the main stunt coordinator and did a bunch of the stuff in Fury Road. But yeah, so like that opening scene is super iconic. Like him running through the Citadel away from the war boys and then jumping and then grabbing onto that hook thing and like it's so visceral and you're like looking down going, Whoa, like that's freaking so high and whatever. I don't know. The the pole cats is something that like we have to talk about. It's Some of the like to think about that to think of that, like George Miller said he was watching a circus performance where they had poles like that and he's like, I'm gonna put that on a car. It's gonna be the coolest thing like that ever existed on a screen. And the and the touches are like the counterweight is I think it's a transmission out of a car or it's an engine, one or the other. Is like the counterweight to pull them back the other direction. It's just so cool. Like such cool touches like that that they kind of make throughout the you know, the movie. So Yeah, I love it. Yeah, and every single stunt in that movie is real. Every car, every pole cat, every like when they're when when Tom Hardy ends up upside down hanging onto one of those pole cats and his head's almost touching, like that's real. They did that. Yeah. You know, they probably didn't do it at quite the speeds that that it looks like because some of the stuff sped up and there's whatever other effects in there, but like they did all those things. And yeah, it's just mind blowing. I looked it up real quick because I I remember watching at one point I think I had the DVDs or the Blu rays or whatever and I watched all of the special features and the making of and all that stuff. I don't have that anymore because the physical media just isn't a thing anymore. But I wanted to look it up. And in the production for Madden Max Fury Road, they built exactly a I don't know if you know this, but I have a giant bin of DVDs. Do you? Okay. That I w that we pull movies out of randomly and Uncle Doug's DVD bin. So in our world, physical media still exists, but that's mostly 'cause we spent our time with the flea market. Yeah, I highly doubt you'd be able to find a copy of Mad Max Fury Road on D V D. Maybe on Blu-ray. ⁓ But yes, they they built, like physically, literally built a hundred and fifty unique drivable vehicles for Fury Road. Man. Eighty-eight distinct designs. So war rigs, the the doof wagon is what they call the big one with all the speakers, the motorcycles, the like the car with the like tank tracks on it. Yeah. The double stacked like Cadillac. Yes, that one's so cool. So cool. And ⁓ a Morton Joe's like bug that has like a monster, the monster truck bug that he drives around. There's just so many wicked vehicles that just like blow your mind. ⁓ good news you can get Mad Max Fury Road on DVD on D stellars and ⁓ well there you go. Is there also a VC ⁓ not a V C R but a can I also buy a D V D player to go with that? I got I'll send you one, man. I got two D V D players. I got two D I got a D V D V C R combo, man. ⁓ well there you go. That's actually ⁓ I have original as original, they're not the original three, but the without the George Lucas added stuff, copies of Star Wars. No way. What is that worth? ⁓ probably I mean, you could probably get ⁓ Reasonable. The ones that are really sought after are Laserdisc, I believe, because that's like the highest quality that you can get of those close to original cuts of the movies. But they say that the theatrical cuts of those are actually gone to the wind, but whatever. They're in some vault somewhere. It'll turn up. Yeah, it really is a shame that when you watch that original trilogy, that there's all that weird CGI stuff that sticks out like a sore thumb. Some of it I like, you know, I you know, I don't need that. Like the Jabba stuff is really rough. Yeah, like where he steps on his tail, you're like, Yeah, but like there's some there's some stuff in there, it's fine. That's fine. Yeah. Just you could you compare that to the practical effects of Fury Road or like any of the Mad Max stuff and it's like really practical there's just no comparison to a good practical effect. Just like yeah. ⁓ Yeah, I mean I don't know how much more we want to talk about Fury Road. I could go all day. How about we talk about Furiosa? Furiosa, yeah. So Furiosa is an interesting one. Also, ⁓ like first of all, bombed at the box office, which is really, really crazy. And like I it's it's hard to believe that people didn't come out in droves after Fury Road. Like you looked at the trailers for Furiosa after Fury Road and you're like I have to go see this in theaters. Like I have to. I don't understand what happened. It's really shit. I don't either. I I rewatched it again for for this and I was like, this movie is awesome. I think it's great. And listen, I'm not I'm not, you know, ⁓ trying to ⁓ tr to to be too on the nose with this, but I think sexism played a lot of part in it because they're like it's a a ⁓ female led action movie. Yeah. And then maybe some of that had to do 'cause The movie's awesome. The performances the young actress that plays like young Furiosa. She's so good. And like that opening action sequence, she's getting like snatched up. You know, her mom's chasing the guys. She's got the sniper rifle. Like she's picking people off. The only I do have a quibble with this movie, and it's I don't I don't like Chris Hemsworth as a bad guy. Like I just agree. I I d it's not like I think he's a bad actor. I don't think i it's this is a total personal bias. He's just too much of a good guy. Like he's, you know, muscular people can't see past that. Yeah, like I can't and he But the nose, they did the nose thing. They did a no ⁓ yeah, they he's so hideous. Yeah. Ugh, disgusting. Gross. Right? Like for whatever reason, I just had a hard time seeing him as as a bad guy in this, which is unfortunate. I do think that That portion at the end where like she's finally got him and she's like, you know, touring with him a little bit and and that's so pathetic. He's so pathetic. And it just goes a little longer than it needs to, I think. But like those are minor absolutely minor quibbles. This movie is is awesome. Like the action sequences are great. Like you get more of the world building because you see like the bullet farm and like you know, Gas Town really fleshed out and like, you know, it has more of that kind of zaniness to it. Yeah. It's it's really good. It's really, really good. Yeah, I'm ⁓ I'm on the same page as you I think. I love Chris Hemsworth as a villain. I think I think he was great. I loved that character. I thought he was amazing and ⁓ you won't convince me otherwise. But you are you are entitled to you are fully entitled to your opinion even if it's wrong. ⁓ but I'm a big fan of that performance. And I think the movie is really solid. Like right up until they kind of yada yada yada a war. There's like a whole like 40 days and 40 nights of war or something like that. There's a line. and so they kind of yada yada that war. Sorry, I'm just looking for something here. And then after that they sort of just have that denouement of her like chasing him through the desert. And then it kind of like ends a little bit on a whimper. Yeah. But like other than that, I didn't dislike that last twenty minutes. In fact, I liked the composition of it all. It just felt like we we there was a weird time jump there that That kind of threw me off a little bit that it that didn't fully I don't know, it just didn't it didn't fully work for me. ⁓ but otherwise the rest of the movie I thought was fantastic. Like that op that opening desert chase scene with Furiosa's mother chasing the two goons is such a beautifully technically like paced out tactical chase. Sequence, I thought it was so brilliant. The stuff of them like, you know, stopping just over a ridge and then her grabbing the sniper rifle and then like taking the wheel off and the gas and like all this little tactical like you know games that they're playing with each other to try to lose one another. I just thought was so cool and so smart and like it just it's just always cool to see somebody be really, really good at ⁓ be really good at something, like ⁓ what do you call it? Like ⁓ savant? No, just like ⁓ when somebody's really good at something, it's just ⁓ there's a word for I'm good at everything. Yes, yes, like ⁓ the whole Kevin of it all, you know? I wish that was true. Competency is the word I was looking for. It's like it's competency porn, right? Like when you watch Jason Bourne tactically put together something and grab his stuff and like carefully walk through a place and avoid cameras and whatever. And you just watch somebody be so tactically competent at something. And I and there was some of that in that scene that I just I was just eating it up. And yeah. And then we meet the Chris Hemsworth character and ⁓ yeah and and the big thing with this that I thought was really good was it expanded the world. It was like the we had the one really great I mean, maybe two really great action sequences. The one that was just like this the staple of like the war rig going down the highway. And then we got like the the big parachute like squid thing and the motorcycles and like so we got a lot of really cool stuff that you kind of want out of the Mad Max movie. And then we got the Bullet Town sequence where they kind of go down into that canyon and all that stuff was fantastic. Other than those two sequences, it wasn't the like the like pedal to the metal grind house like action that we're used to seeing. I like it for a slightly different reason, which was like expanding the world a little bit, giving us a little bit more understanding of how how this all takes place and the trading between the places and and all that stuff. I kind of like was was ⁓ it surprised me the first time that I saw it. But then when I took a step back and thought, like, that's kind of interesting to see a little bit more of the world and all that stuff. ⁓ but you're right, the the performance from that little girl was amazing. And Anya Taylor Joe, I think, really pulled it off too. Yeah. As a young Charlie's Theron type. That's tough. Yeah, that's tough because ⁓ Charlize Theron was so good yeah in that role. So it's really tough to come with it. And one the things that I liked about it too, as a prequel to Mad Max Fury Road, is like ⁓ just as an example, like how characters are in the first one or the second one. So like the very early in Mad Max Fury Road, there's a doctor that hooks up a doctor in a citadel, whatever that's worth in that particular apocalyptic world. I don't know where he got his organic mechanic. And that doctor is in Furiosa. ⁓ And he is the doctor that's with Chris Hemsworth's character, and then he gets left with Immortal Joe. So like he has a little journey through those two movies. And you can see that with several of the characters. So as a prequel, it's a really nice homage to Fury Road, which I really I liked a lot. It's a great movie. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's it's really good. ⁓ the one scene I I wanna like that I think sticks out in my head as being like That thought was really, really cool and again added to the world building and added to the character building, specifically of a Morton Joe, was the scene where Chris Hemsworth and his gang shows up at the Citadel and basically threatens them and says, like, he basically like give me all of the power or we're going to take over. We're gonna wage war right here and we're gonna take everything because we are badass or whatever. And then Morton Joe pulls this flex move and basically just yells at one of the war boys. And that war boy just dives to his death with a bomb, with one of those like sticks, I think it was, or something, and just like blows up a section of his like entourage. Like and just the flex of like telling somebody to commit suit like suicide bomb somebody in a moment like that. It wasn't a premeditated thing. It wasn't like, okay, like We're gonna go do this thing and then like what it was just like in that moment, I told the war boy to do this and he just did it. Did not question it. And like that's such a huge flex, and I love that that moment. Not only does he like he lets Chris Hemsworth's crew pick the war boy. He's like, pick one of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He picks the guy and he's like, All right, you know what to do. And the guy, like, you know, sprays his mouth with the stuff and says, Witness me, and like jumps off. I am wanted in Van House. Yeah, that's so good. Yeah, all that stuff is so cool. And ⁓ yeah, I just loved that touch of ⁓ the character building of of a Morton Joe and what he's capable of and the amount of power he wields over these people. Like just so cool. Like I just remember thinking like that's such great writing. Like such great writing. All right, should we ⁓ any other final thoughts on Furioso before we get to our our our rankings? Now ready to let's rank these bad boys. ⁓ so you just want to start at five and work our way down? Yeah, and I think maybe we'll do let's do our two and one together. Cause once you know the two, you're gonna know the one. So you know we might as well do them both together. So ⁓ yeah, absolutely, man. ⁓ why don't you why don't you kick us off? All right. So my number five is the original Mad Max. It is my least favorite, but I still I still enjoy it a lot. Like keep in mind like ⁓ you know, if we're ranking these, we usually use like a five star thing. I still have that as a three star. Like I've very much enjoyed it. And ⁓ I'm a fan of it, but it's just my least favorite of these really good movies. Nice, nice. I well, this is Probably gonna upset you. If you see Fury Road, I'm just ending this and we I like I'm not even I'm not I'm not putting it out, I'm not publishing it, and I'm try I don't even know where you live, but I am coming for you. Come on down, we'll play some games, it'll be fun. No, it's not it's not Fury Road. I actually I put Furiosa, a Mad Max saga at five. And that wasn't surprising. Personal rankings. So again, let's take that all into consideration. I'm not saying one movie's better. I'm saying these my personal rankings. And I cannot rate a Mad Max movie any higher that does not have but like a small cameo from Mad Max. I hate to be that pedantic. There is. But he has one little cameo at it. Well, that's what you said. That's what you just said. Yeah, I know, that's what I was saying. Like there's not enough Mad Max in this movie for it to be ranked above five. It's gotta be at the bottom of the list. Not I think this is a great movie. Arguably it is much better than movies that I ranked higher than it. But we were talking about a Mad Max movie. If you had said Furiosa, I'd have been like, okay, that's it. But you put Mad Max saga in there. I'm sorry. I gotta put it at a five. I'm gonna be that guy. That's fair. You know? And you you talked about the reason it bombed is maybe had a little bit of like sexism in it because it had a female lead. Fury Road is just as much about Furiosa. I would argue more about Furiosa. And I think Furiosa might even have more lines and more screen time. And you don't even realize that watching it until like way later if you really think about it. Yeah. So if they called if they had called Furiosa just like, you know, the Thunder, the vendetta of the Thunder Road. You know, and then if you had call given it s just some random title. Master Blaster or Meat Meat Flute, whatever. Right. And then just like didn't really tell people. I wonder if it would have performed a lot better. It's just a thought. Yeah. ⁓ all right. My number four is ⁓ Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. You know, we talked about it already. I think the first half is like excellent. And then the the second half or the last act really falls apart for me, but I still have so much fun with the world building in that one and the especially the first half. And that Thunderdome itself and Tina Turner. There's just lots to love with ⁓ with that movie. So that's my number four. I am coming in with a number four of just Mad Max. The original Mad Max is a number four for me. It's got more Mad Max in it, so I like that. Other than that, like it's you know, it's a little kooky. ⁓ it's not the best movie. It's really uneven, it's really loose. ⁓ but the action's solid and it lays the groundwork for what's gonna come later. So yeah. I gotta cut I gotta come in at number four on it. It just doesn't there are many of these Mad Max movies that I would I would watch over and over again. This one I would be good if you're like, hey man, don't ever you know, you can't ever watch that one again. I'd be like, okay, fine. I don't like it's the least fine. It's the least rewatchable of them all for sure. Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. Cool. Okay, so my number three is Furiosa, the Mad Max Saga. So yeah, I liked it quite a bit. I had it at ⁓ four stars, I think is where I have it. I just had a total blast with it. I thought it was really interesting. I loved Chris Hemworth. I think that's a big that's a big point of contention for a lot of people. It's like if you if you like if you're on board with him as the villain. And what he's doing there because he's definitely doing a lot. So I definitely understand if people like don't jive with that. But like if you do jive with that, that movie sings. And if you don't, I can totally see it kind of falling for for a lot of people. So Furiosa Mad Max Sega is my number three. And I'm coming in with a number three of Road Warrior. Man. This is these You know, you pick any given day, these three might be able to change their their ranking 'cause Road Warri so good. Like I again, I talked about I love the pacing of it, the action, like the practical effects, the the just just no concern for safety. We're just gonna do these stunts and whatever happens, happens. It's fine. We're Australian. We don't care. I would love to see a list of injuries, you know, for each movie in this franchise, because I bet there's I bet you there's lots. And I like waivers were signed. And this is the first Mad Max movie too, you know, obviously it's the second one or whatever in terms of chronologically. I started to like like some of the characters or like Yes. You know, enjoy what they were doing with the characters, like the bad guys, you know, big muscular guy with an iron mask and never see his face. The bikers are, you know, weird and like, you know, you the people that live in you know, the gas town or whatever. You've got the you know, they they don't trust Max. You've got wick weird, quirky people in the town. And I I just I I I I just really started to like you got the whirly gig dude. Like you just kinda start to like the characters in the movie and kind of get what the franchise is about. So I think this is a strong, strong movie and it's gonna come in at a three for me. Yeah, it's my number two. So yeah, it's it's my it's my second favorite of the Mad Max movies, primarily for yeah, that that world building is great. I think that's like that became a major priority for George Miller, I think, between the first and second one. ⁓ because the first one was a lot more similar to like, you know, a modern day 70s. Obviously, it still wasn't exactly modern day, but like you had governments and you had organizations and you had like streets and laws and police and stuff. And ⁓ so I think when he went to to do Road Warrior world building had become a major priority for him. And that's when he started to get really just have a lot of fun with locations and with characters. You know, whether it's the feral child, the like the helicopter guy, the the you know, the the main villain whose face we never see, but we do see his butt cheeks quite a bit. ⁓ yeah. You know, like these the characters really stand out. Even I forgot about butt cheeks in that movie. Maybe I need to rank it up a little higher. There's a lot of butt cheeks in that one. Yeah. So yeah. The Road Warrior, the second the second of the Mad Max movies is my is my second favorite Mad Max movie. All right. And number one is Number one's Fury Road. Yeah. It's ⁓ it's one of my all time favorite movies, period. It's ⁓ It's a movie that I I walked out of the theater just shaking, just vibrating, being like, I cannot believe what I just saw. And yeah, immediately went back in and saw it, you know, a few days later. That movie came out ten, eleven years ago now. I've probably watched it at least that many times. At least once per year I've watched that movie. It's yeah, it's amazing. It's I watched it last night and it still absolutely blew my mind. It's like every time I watch it, I I can't believe what I'm seeing. It's just so incredible. The crashes and the the stunts and everything is practical. That's one of the things that just like Every time I watch it, I'm like watching for details. I'm watching all the little things and I'm seeing new things and I'm like cannot believe what they were able to pull off. And if you ⁓ I'm actually ⁓ partways through reading, I don't remember what it's called, but it's a it's a book about the making of Fury Road. And I'm only in the first couple of chapters, handful of chapters, but this movie was an absolute, complete nightmare to make. ⁓ the amount of labor that went into it. Again, a hundred and fifty vehicles, like unique vehicles were made. ⁓ eighty eight unique designs of vehicles. ⁓ you know, the amount of work they had to put in to just pull this off in the desert is is incredible. So yeah, Fury Road, one of my all time favorite movies, probably top three, four, five movie of all time, period. So yeah, had to be my number one. I agree with you. Road is so good. That's why it's my number two. It's my number two movie. Again, saw it five times in the theater, really loved it, but I had to r for all the reasons you said, it's so eloquent. I had to rank Beyond Thumber Thundert. What is wrong with you? You can't even say it. You can't even say it, Kevin. Beyond Thunder and the reason and listen again, this is my personal rankings. And it was number one, it was the first Mad Max movie I've seen. And it is just so weird. It is just so weird. You talked about like when he goes to the island of misfit children, like, you know, that movie it falls. I'm like, no, it's just starting. Like I I like how weird that is. Like, why does he end up there? He punches a teenager, like, girl it for some reason. Like, it's just so weird and like the the the the the pig poop town. Like I dude, I just I gotta make it number one. And Tina Turner, ⁓ my god. She's like one of my favorite villains. The original songs she wrote for that movie are so good. I just I love Beyond Thunderdome. There is no time that you could say, I'm gonna put on Beyond Thunderdome, and I'd be I won't watch that. Like they're bungee fighting in the Thunderdome. We didn't even talk about that. And it makes no sense that they decide to bungee fight other than like it's fun. And people are getting like stabbed that are on the sidelines and nobody moves. Like oopsie stabs. People just get accidentally murdered. Dude, I love I love it. Has Mel Gibson's most mullety mullet before lethal weapon. ⁓ my god. I just there's so much to love about Beyond Thunderdome. So that's why it comes in as my number one mad Mac Kevin! I'm so mad at you right now I had to have Katherine O'Hara yell at you from beyond the grave. I complet I respect your opinion, but I completely disagree with you. But hey, if if you love it that much, so be it. If I were gonna get a Mad Max tattoo, it would be a Master Blaster tattoo from Beyond Thunderdome. That's that's a choice, my friend. That is a choice. That's trouble. Well, this was a ton of fun. I'm so glad you decided to ⁓ to join me on the podcast. Thanks, ⁓ thanks, Kevin. Is there anything you want to say to the Dice Camera Action Faithful before we sign off here? No, man. Just thanks for having me and thanks for hanging out. Had a great time. Really appreciate it. Get some games played and ⁓ watch a watch a couple flicks, man. For sure. Are you going to Gen Con this year? No, no, not this year. Okay. ⁓ yeah, I'm gonna be able to make it this year. I didn't last year, so yeah. I'm I'm asking a lot of the people that ⁓ I only know online as an opportunity to maybe meet some of these people face to face. So ⁓ Right on. Okay. Well, good enough. Thank you again, Kevin. This was this was a lot of fun. And folks, if you're enjoying the podcast, please take a few minutes to rate, review, subscribe, whatever platform you're listening on. ⁓ you could follow me on Instagram at dice camera action pod. And if you want to give any feedbacks or comments or would like to suggest a movie game pairing, email us at dice camera actionpod at gmail.com. Again, thanks, Kevin, from Blue Peg, Pink Peg, and Uncle Doug's DVD bin for joining me on Dice Camera Action. This was ⁓ Thanks, man. Take care.