Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

I'm not sure that it's business of yours, but I do like to waltz with a log driver.

Tracie and Emily welcome six-time Webby Award winner Aaron Reynolds (of Effin Birds fame) to the podcast this week to share his deep thoughts about the animated short The Log Driver's Waltz. Created by the Canadian National Film Board in 1979 and aired between gaps in children's programming (because there were no commercials!), this three minute animation ran so often that it became burned in Aaron's brain. He thought that meant the song was just what he uses to tune his ukulele and introduce Americans to Canadian culture. But, as he discovered during the conversation with the Guy sisters, The Log Driver's Waltz has also had an outsize effect on his understanding of comedy, romance, and masculinity, and it gave him permission to be unexpected.

You can find Aaron at EffinBirds.com

Check out The Log Driver's Waltz here:

https://www.nfb.ca/film/log_drivers_waltz/

Throw on your headphones and go birling down and down the podcast! It will please you completely!

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

Find the Guy girls on social media:

instagram.com/guygirlsmedia

fb.com/dtasspodcast

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

Okay, Joan Wilder, write us out of this one.

On this week's episode, Tracie revisits the 1984 film Romancing the Stone. Both Guy girls loved this film in their childhood, enjoying both the romance and comedy of seeing Kathleen Turner's Joan Wilder go from hapless writer to confident and capable badass. Baby Emily, as a budding writer, especially loved how the storytelling made it clear working as a novelist translated to practical life skills.

While the film is just as fun and easy to enjoy as it was 40 years ago, the feminism written into the fiction is only for white women. Joan Wilder is a dynamic, proactive, and delightful character, but Colombia is nothing more than a stereotypical backdrop for her story. Every character in Colombia--other than the white love interest played by Michael Douglas and the bumbling white villain played by Danny DeVito--are either menacing, drug dealers, or background villagers. And Joan doesn't actually need her love interest to save herself and her sister by the end.

Still, there's a lot to love in this film, as long as you remember that Colombia is a real place full of real people, and not just the flattened set piece full of cardboard cutouts used in this film.

Throw on your headphones, keep an eye out for Devil's Fork, and listen in!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.splicetoday.com/moving-pictures/the-romance-of-imperialism

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

Find the Guy girls on social media:

instagram.com/guygirlsmedia

fb.com/dtasspodcast

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

And if I don't see you: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show, based on a screenplay by Andrew Niccol and starring Jim Carrey, was praised for its pop culture prescience because it came out just before the explosion of reality television. But as Emily argues on this episode, that cultural commentary misses the point. Reality TV may be the storytelling backdrop of The Truman Show, but the fantasy world that Ed Harris's Christof creates for Truman without his knowledge or consent gets to a deeper social and cultural issue than having cameras everywhere. This film offers a pop culture allegory for abusive control that calls itself love--to the point where many who have escaped from high control religions see themselves in Truman. (Also, product placement is never seamless!)

You may not be able to cue the sun, but you can cue up this episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

What The Truman Show Reveals About Its Characters

The Truman Show, Mormonism, and the Philosophy of Questioning

When Does Truman Figure It Out?

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

When I was a little kid and I got scared, the Rain Man would come and sing to me.

Join us this week as Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1988 film Rain Man, for which Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar for his nuanced portrayal of autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. This comedy/drama, written by Barry Morrow and directed by Barry Levinson, was singled-handedly responsible for introducing autism to American society, it also prompted Raymond's verbal tics to enter the pop culture lexicon as comedy shorthand and left much of our culture believing that autism is synonymous with math savantism.

While the film was careful to show Raymond's dignity and had at least one medical professional point out that his neurodivergence is a difference in psychology ("His brain doesn't work like other people's"), it also conflates "improvement" with Raymond acting more neurotypical--as if autism is something that needs to be cured. (In addition, Tom Cruise's Charlie Babbitt is a jerk who keeps yelling at Raymond which can't be good for his mental health.)

We agree that you are an excellent driver. Please listen along while you drive excellently.

Content warning: The film uses the R slur for disabled individuals, which we discuss in the episode.

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

"It's like we say in St. Olaf—Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy."

On this week's episode, Tracie and Emily prove that you can go home again to beloved pop culture from the 1980s, as long as you're talking about The Golden Girls. The episodic adventures of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia weren't written with the Guy sisters in mind (they were in elementary school when the show debuted in 1985), but they loved the snappy comedy, the relationships between the four women, and the comforting knowledge that every problem would find a solution within 22 minutes, plus commercials.

Emily also found comfort in Betty White's portrayal of the constantly underestimated Rose Nylund, whose sweet-but-dim persona allowed her to make some of the most biting commentary of any of the characters since no one expected it. As someone who was also consistently treated as "sweet" because of how she looked, White's example taught Emily how to use being underestimated to her advantage.

While much of the more risque comedy sailed right over their oblivious heads as children, Emily and Tracie learned a number of feminist and socially progressive lessons along with the delicious snark and silly St. Olaf stories since show runner Susan Harris intentionally set out to make a subversive show and the four lead actors were all committed to gay rights, anti-racism, and feminism in addition to being gifted comedians.

While not everything in The Golden Girls has aged as well as the four main characters, it is one of the rare 1980s pop culture phenomena that is both of its time and very much ahead of its time.

Thank you for being a listener. Throw on the headphones and listen again!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/09/30-years-later-golden-girls-still-most-progressive-show-television

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/aug/02/golden-girls-tv-sitcom-enduring-joy-dorothy-rose-betty-white-blanche

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1074829590

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

You cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it. Ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love...

The (relatively) recent news that Stephen Colbert's show was cancelled put Emily in mind of the fate of Stephen Fry's character Gordon Dietrich in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is why she decided to revisit this pop culture mashup that took Alan Moore's graphic novel response to 1980s Thatcherism and updated it with early 2000s American angst over Bush-era government overreach.

The result, written by the Wachowski sisters and directed by their protege, James McTeigue, in his directorial debut, offers hope through beautiful storytelling, empowering feminism (even if the film doesn't exactly pass the Bechdel Test), and a partial breakdown of the psychology of fascism. Moore, who famously hates every adaptation of his work, specifically hates this film because it makes the fascist Norse Fire government look stable, when part of his cultural commentary in the original graphic novel was pointing out the inherent instability of authoritarianism. Rewatching this classic film in the current social environment did reinforce Moore's point to Emily, considering how generally competent everyone in the government appears to be in this movie.

Still, the message of hope and resilience in V for Vendetta is a welcome one, even if the pop culture revolution isn't exactly like the real world.

Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so why not throw on your headphones and listen to the episode?

Content warning: Mentions of torture, attempted sexual assault, and pedophilia

Mentioned in this episode:

Dominic Noble Lost in Adaptation V for Vendetta

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

Hockety pockety wockety wack! Odds and ends and bric-a-brac!

In revisiting this classic Disney animation from 1963, Tracie found that the charm she remembered from her childhood wasn't nearly as charming this time around. While the comedy of Merlin, Archimedes the Owl, and Arthur (known as the Wart) was still humorous, the film feels more like a series of unconnected events rather than any kind of storytelling. The only named woman in the story is Madam Mim--although looking for feminism in any kids movies from the 1960s, animation or otherwise, may be a fool's errand--but at least she's a wonderfully subversive pop culture witch who is fun to watch. But the oddest thing about the film is Merlin's ineffectiveness as a teacher. His instruction does nothing to help Arthur pull the sword from the stone. In fact, the wizard is a terrible and irresponsible tutor.

Even with these uncomfortable realizations, there's much to admire. Even though The Sword in the Stone was made during Disney's low period, the animation is lovely and there are several parts that made Tracie laugh out loud. Just make sure that's really a squirrel before you fall head over heels in love with him!

To and fro, stop and go, listening to podcasts makes the world go round!

Mentioned in this episode:

https://disnerdmoviechallenge.com/blog/review-the-sword-in-the-stone-dmc-38

This episode was edited by Resonate Recordings.

Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thou​​ghts by visiting us on Patreon or find us on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/guygirls

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response.

"To die would be a grand adventure!"

Emily is delighted to welcome her dear childhood friend--and lifelong Peter Pan enthusiast--Jenn Book Haselswerdt to the podcast this week to discuss Steven Spielberg's 1991 film Hook. Although this fantasy film suffers from a lack of editing as well as some lazy 90s pop culture stereotypes regarding fatphobia and distracted dads, Jenn explains how magical it felt to see this love letter to Peter Pan in the theater as a child.

While the storytelling gives Peter a number of strange opportunities for romance (which is partially a vestige of J.M. Barrie's personal antipathy to romance and his period-typical view of women as jealous), Jenn finds some delightful feminism in the film, especially in the form of Peter's daughter Maggie. The 7-year-old girl never backs down, even in the face of Dustin Hoffman's campy turn as the evil Captain Hook.

Jenn and the Guy sisters also talk about the deeper meaning the Neverland myth, considering the fact that Peter Pan was based on Barrie's deceased brother who never had a chance to grow up. Together, they wonder why pop culture has embraced the concept of a boy who never grows up and what it means to be a child who is never and adult, as in the original story, and an adult who was never a child, as Robin Williams' Peter Banning is at the beginning of this film.

Your adventures aren't over! To listen...to listen to this episode would be an awfully big adventure!

You can find Jenn on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sunbonnet_sue_is_tired/

We are Tracie Guy-Decker and Emily Guy Birken, known to our family as the Guy Girls.

We have super-serious day jobs. For the bona fides, visit our individual websites: tracieguydecker.com and emilyguybirken.com

We're hella smart and completely unashamed of our overthinking prowess. We love movies and tv, science fiction, comedy, and murder mysteries, good storytelling with lots of dramatic irony, and analyzing pop culture for gender dynamics, psychology, sociology, and whatever else we find.