Bolt (2008) and the Tragedy of Expendable Disney Child Stars

➡ The text is a conversation from a podcast about Disney movies, specifically discussing the film “Bolt”. The hosts, Matt and Thomas, discuss their thoughts on the movie, its development history, and compare it to other Disney films. They also touch on their personal feelings of paranoia and the influence of the CIA in Hollywood.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of Disney’s animation style, highlighting the movie ‘Bolt’ as a turning point. It mentions how Disney started to incorporate more realistic elements, such as hair physics and detailed backgrounds, into their animations. The text also touches on Disney’s acquisition of Pixar and how it improved their animation quality. Lastly, it questions whether modern superhero movies, with their extensive use of 3D animation, could be considered animated films.
➡ The text discusses the movie “Bolt,” a Disney film about a dog who believes he has superpowers due to his role in a TV show. The dog, Bolt, gets lost and has to journey from Florida back to Hollywood, slowly realizing he doesn’t actually have superpowers. The text analyzes the animation style, character development, and plot, comparing it to other movies and discussing the themes presented. It also questions the ethical implications of Bolt’s situation, comparing it to real-life scenarios with animals in the entertainment industry.
➡ The text discusses the movie “Bolt” and its various elements, including the plot, characters, and voice actors. It also draws comparisons to other shows like “Inspector Gadget” and “The Twilight Zone”. The text further explores the idea of the movie being a critique of the entertainment industry, particularly Disney, and possibly an indictment against Steven Spielberg. The discussion ends with a tragic incident that occurred during the filming of “Twilight Zone: The Movie”.
➡ The text discusses a movie where a dog named Bolt, who is the star of a TV show, believes the show’s plot is his real life. The writers question the logic behind the show’s production, such as why Bolt is the only dog used and why he isn’t aware it’s a show. They also compare the movie’s premise to the Truman Show and discuss other film references within the movie.
➡ The text discusses the character Bolt from a Disney movie, who is always in character, even off-screen, leading to a constant state of fear and stress. This is compared to the life of a Disney star, who is also not allowed to switch off their character, causing significant stress. The text also discusses the communication between humans and animals in Disney movies, where animals understand humans but not vice versa. Lastly, it touches on how people communicate with animals in real life, questioning whether using a different voice or tone is necessary or even beneficial.
➡ The text discusses various unusual crimes reported in Japan, such as a man mixing urine with soap in a public restroom and a nursery school director urinating in a child’s water bottle. It also talks about a movie character named Bolt, a pampered dog who experiences the real world for the first time, learning about pain, hunger, and how to beg for food. The text also mentions the concept of ‘cuteness factor’ in animals, which can influence human behavior towards them.
➡ The text discusses the artistic style of anime characters in Japan, particularly the large black eyes with little white, which is considered cute. It also talks about how animals with large eyes remind us of babies, influencing animal conservation efforts. The text further discusses a scene from a Disney movie where a hamster threatens to murder a human, which is unusual for Disney. Lastly, it discusses the use of the color green in Disney movies to represent evil, and the use of hamster balls as a safe way for hamsters to explore outside their cages.
➡ The article discusses the film “Bolt” and its underlying themes. It suggests that the film justifies the mistreatment of the dog, Bolt, and the child actor, Penny, by Hollywood. The author also mentions a theory about “superhero programming” in the film, which is a concept from a book about creating mind-controlled slaves. The author questions the morality of the film and its potential influence on young viewers.
➡ The text discusses a superhero who can perform incredible feats, drawing parallels to Tom Cruise and his daring stunts. It also mentions a humorous YouTube video featuring Cruise and Scientology, and suggests the video was originally meant for internal use within the church. The text concludes with a discussion about various podcasts, including one about conspiracy theories, and a comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions.

Ask about Illuminati sister chart in the upbeat. Is it Disney mind control? Is this MK Ultra dlux? I go dance there. We go from real to meal. I go dance there. Bohemian roll and normal feel hook is there. Ask about and I see a co Disney teacher come to everybody. A co Disney A wish upon a star A co Disney to know about to shall fall. Oh, a co Disney A new grand Pinocchio D hello, welcome to the Occult Disney Podcast, A meta podcaster where podcasters making a podcast about podcasts, about taking a look inside Disney movies.

I just want to make it as convoluted as possible, you know, for what we’re doing here. We’re actors playing podcasters playing other podcasters that are talking about Disney. Does that work? A riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery. You know how the thing goes. Wrapped in nonsense. Yes, all of that. He left out the nonsense. That was Churchill’s problem when he had that quote. Anyway, this is Matt here. It’s the paranoid American, Thomas. Hi. What’s up? You know, I’m. I’m paranoid on, like, a six out of 10 this week in case anyone wants to chart, like, my paranoia scale.

Okay, so mildly paranoid. That’s cool. Does it ever get down to one or two when I sleep? Sometimes. And like, right in those weird moments, the transition between a sleep state into a waking state, Sometimes those will be in the low fours. Okay. Yeah. I had weird dream time this morning, then slept on my hand, which was a bad move. So don’t sleep on your hand, folks. I don’t. I don’t know if anyone. Well, maybe this is just me telling on myself. I don’t know if anyone can really get to, like, a one or a zero paranoia state or if.

If you do, you’re lying to yourself, in my opinion. Okay. I don’t know. Maybe a Zen monk can get there or not. They could be lying to us all. We don’t know. Well, I mean, like, when you hit enlightenment, aren’t you just a little bit paranoid that you might lose it? You’re like, oh, man, I did all this work. I got all the way here. What if tomorrow morning I wake up and it’s gone? There’s got to be just the tiniest little nugget of that. Although, again, maybe I’m. I’m talking more about myself than anyone else.

Yeah. Next morning, it ends up being Cheerios and the morning show. But I don’t know. I guess you could be enlightened and do that if you. If you wanted to. I Don’t think so. I think. I don’t think you mean lightened and eating Cheerios. Maybe that’s like the. You know how the enlightened fellow. The stereotype is there. A little scamp that giggles a lot. That’s kind of the paranoia. Maybe if you’re paranoid, you just have to laugh at it sometimes. You know that. Or get totally bummed out, which I don’t think is the avenue we take doing this.

So nervous laughter. Nervous laughter. There we go. Laughing at your own existence. A little deeper than Bolt gets, really. I think we’ll see as we pry open the layers of Bolt. First time view. On my end, this is when. Why did this not. I think this one just didn’t cross my radar because it was not Pixar. Because this is right before I had my daughter. So it came out actually right when she was born, a year before she was born. I could have seen it, but I would see anime of Pixar. That’s it. Because Pixar was like, oh, that’s the one adults can go see.

You don’t go see Bolt. You know, I wouldn’t have known the difference between the two, to be honest. I would just see a 3D movie from Disney and just assume Pixar and not realize until someone told me it wasn’t. No, I was dorking enough to delineate the two at the time. So I was like, oh, that’s a Pixar. So that’s a real movie. This is Disney. This is crap. Which, you know, coming off of Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons and that other one. It’s not like you don’t have high expectations in 2008 going into theaters, you Bolt.

I think this was a first viewing for me too. I had barely heard of it. I definitely saw it around on the posters and stuff when I was working in the. In the apartment. But, you know, at this point we talked before that I just kind of would see the poster, assume that I knew what the movie was about, and never really watch it as I did with Cars, which I was pleasantly surprised by how deep Cars got. Bolt was a little bit different. Bolt is weird because it wasn’t really based on a lot of previous backstory.

There’s no grim fairy tales behind this. Even in cars, they kind of tell this. This, like, sweeping tale of. Of American nostalgia and the history of the highway and the history of just like the automotive industry in America. It had all this extra lore that went around with it. And Bolt comes across to me as one of the movies so far that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of specific lore that it’s standing on the shoulders of. Well, as seems to be coming a regular theme on this podcast. One person starts the movie and it gets bumped to another person which sort of starts to explain like this movie’s story.

It was going to be the next project of Chris Sanders, who was one of the directors of Lilo and Stitch. Let’s see, the plot center is going to be called American Dog, centering on Henry, a famous canine star. So that’s the same who one day finds himself stranded in the Nevada desert with a testy one eyed cat and an oversized radioactive rabbit. That part I’m like, come on, radio, oversized radioactive rabbit. We got a hamster instead. Nah, they’re all searching for new homes, all the while believing he’s still on television. It seems they pretty much finished that version of the film, but I guess it didn’t test well.

John Laster had something in his crawl because he had just put out Cars, the movie he directed. Right. And he’s like, we can’t go back to the desert. We just did that. So the whole desert thing got kicked out. You know, they’re like, some of this stuff’s too weird. Like I guess they decide the radioactive rabbit was too weird. Somewhere along the way, the plot had also come to include a radioactive cookie selling Girl scout zombie serial killer. What? Yes, we want that. Why not? He says it’s a bad idea. Who said that’s a bad idea? Chief creative officer of Pixar, Ed Catmull said that.

Okay, Excuse me. He was president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar. But yeah, he’s like explaining it like it’s a bad thing. You know, I, I think I’d prefer that in the movie to the hamster in a ball. Yeah. For shame that what you just described is something that would have been phenomenal. It could have been a cult classic. Yeah. Anyway, Sanders, another case where he gets a movie bumped out of his hands and then leaves and then his case goes to Dreamworks. So yeah, kind of sucks that they got rid of Lilo and Stitch guy since I.

That I still think that’s probably the best modern Disney movie. And it was also, if I remember correctly, one of the first Disney movies that acknowledges the presence of a CIA or of some sort of a secret government operation that’s hiding Elvis and aliens from the rest of the world. And you know, every other movie we have to sort of imply that or sneak it in in ways. And Lilo And Stitch, that’s the guy. Like, his job is actually just being a CIA agent. The plants misinfer. Yeah. Like, this one has that kind of stuff, but it’s all fake, right? It’s all, like, facade.

It’s. It’s the TV show they’re making. Maybe. Well, we don’t see the. We might have the. What is the CIA operation? We might have the guy in the wings telling him, you know, what to add in. We don’t know. Right. Yeah. The CIA advisor. I mean, that’s not even a conspiracy, is it? We. I mean, that’s. Now that. That’s a common knowledge. When I believed. Am I. Am I just crazy? Am I paranoid? No. Well, it’s. It started as paranoid conspiracy theories that the CIA was somehow working with Hollywood, like if it were 20, 30 years ago.

But a curious thing happened between the 90s and the early 2000s and that it almost became a flex. You would even see certain movies adding that to their promotion and their PR campaigns. It was like, hey, we got CIA, you know, assets to actually help consult with us on the script. And that’s the reason why you should go and watch some of this. I remember that was actually a selling point on True Lies. You’re like, we got to film at Langley or something slight. I don’t remember. It’s True Lies. Maybe it was. Anyway, there’s some film in the 90s where they were like, hey, we got to film at Langley because we’re up in with the CIA, you know, I mean, Top Gun, that’s the Navy, right? But it’s all like, hey, the Navy, like, you know, gave us all our planes to do this film, so that’s makes it pretty.

CIA was involved in True Lies. I’ll take back some of the things I’ve said about the CIA. There is one good thing that’s come out of them and it would eventualize. Yeah, that. That’s the one I haven’t seen in a while. That’s like the forgotten Cameron. You know, even the Abyss I think people talk about because they’re like, oh, that’s the forgotten one. And meanwhile, they like, double forget True Lies, which was successful when it came out, and. And pretty good. But just. You don’t think about it much, you know, literally Tom Arnold’s best movie. That’s hard to argue.

Yeah, okay. I don’t know. I like his part in Austin Powers. Who does number two work for? Yeah, you. You tell that Turdu’s boss. That’s a cameo, though, so I guess we can’t count it. Also, I’m just recounting jokes now. So Bolt. This is kind of the start of Disney really getting back on its feet. This movie was a success critically, financially. After this, they. They’re gonna do a little bit of an attempt at hand drawn again. That’s where you get the princess and the frog coming soon. But then it’s on to Tangled Up, Wreck it not up, that’s Pixar, but Tangled, Frozen, Wreck It Ralph, all that sort of stuff.

So this is kind of the start of. This is like The Oliver & Company of, I guess their. Their digital renaissance. Hand drawn feels like something that they return to and then the execs realize how costly and time intensive it is when they change their mind. A million dimes. And that makes them want to go back to 3D versus what we were watching my neighbor Totoro, and we mentioned there was this weird scene where a frog is just standing in the rain and hopping around. And some of those took months. Like, they spent months working on these little.

That’s the kind of thing that I believe at this point, which is 2008, the boat comes out. This. This whole range of time is basically when I. I think Disney’s like, you’ve spent how long on that scene? Nah, scrap it. Just, you know, do. Do this thing, have a helicopter fly through or whatever. The mandate would have been, I think that it would have been hard for Disney to go backwards in time on that. Well, yeah. Sanders says he claims of having no ill will towards the final project, but that, you know, never know if that’s right or not.

But he does say, like, the files are there. You could probably just reconstitute my version of the movie with a few swap outs. It would make it a different movie, of course. But, you know, he’s like, I did make the movie. And then it was like you said, kind of file swapped and changed to something different. You’d be in the desert anymore in that version. They love doing that, man. Yeah, the exact Disney execs love doing that. And I think part of it is as simple as this sounds. Part of it is just so that they can flex and tell their friends, like, I did that.

I’m the one that made that scene do that thing those stupid artists wanted to do. So they wanted to put zombies and huge radioactive rabbits. And I was like, no, put that hamster in there. Yeah. Oh, wait, no, no, that’s not the person we want. Yeah, okay. I was hearing it backwards. Sorry. Like, we’re going to put the radioactive Rabbit back in. Now, this is another one where they try and explain their animation style, but you’re like, what? So in this one, you can tell me if any of this hits. They claim it was inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Who did the painting? Nighthawks. Nighthawks, which is the. The people at the Late Night bar. You know the painting I’m talking about? Yeah. They’re in the old cafe. Diner. Right. So that’s that guy’s base. Mace. Most famous painting. They also claim the cinematography of Vilmos Zigmund, who. Who did Close Encounters. And we definitely get a couple Close Encounter shots. So for once, I did track that a few of these shots look like things he would have shot in the late 70s, you know? Yeah, I’m not. I’m not getting the Nighthawks. I understand that that could have been an inspiration on a mood board somewhere, but I didn’t think in that case.

They’re talking about the backgrounds. The backgrounds having kind of that, like, almost realistic look to him. Like, when this movie starts, I was like. Just for a second, I was like, what? Oh, yeah, this is animation, you know, because they did go for that look. And it does. It did kind of shock me when the movie started. Just for a split second. Not me. Okay. No, just because I think I was like, you know, maybe like doing three things at once. And I just went in. The movie starts. I’m expecting animation. It looks kind of realistic.

Like I said, this is a split second thing. But I very quickly calibrated what I was doing. But it did. You know, it flashed when I put it on. Well, I think it. It’s a good point that we’re now so far removed from Bug’s Life. Right? Like, we’re. We’re. Or ants. I can’t. I can never remember the. The Bug’s Life is the Pixar. But Ants is. I mean, same idea, right? I mean, same. About the same level of animation, right? So we’re so far removed from that or even the Toy Stories now. We’re removed from that type of 3D to where now were getting into playing around.

Like, we. We mentioned that one of the big milestones when you start seeing the animated humans, because before, if they didn’t look, you know, at least halfway there, they got, like, a really creepy look. Now we’re there where we’re comfortable showing humans. And the one big technological advancement I think, in this movie is like, the hair physics. So when someone moves around and they’re talking and they’re whipping their hair around, you can actually see the individual strands of hair, like interacting with each other. And so it, again, it, it’s going to speak to how close to like the realism that Disney is able to get now to where the backgrounds, there are some shots in here where they turn a corner and the lighting and the pavement and the texture on the wall and all of that, it does look real.

If you look at it for two seconds and look back away, it looks like you could have just been watching real footage. So this is the point where Pixar and Disney, like animation are now integrated. So like up to this point, I think, I mean, Chicken Little and the Incredibles look different. You know, like Chicken Little seems like a workshop session for, for Disney Animation trying to figure out how to do this. Now they, now they, you know, John Laster is actually in charge at the creative director at this point, so he’s kind of overlooking both at this moment.

So, yeah, it’s like, okay, we got the hair physics of Pixar. Toss it over to the, the Disney guys. There’s probably people now just working in both offices, you know. Right. Yeah. At this point Disney had done like a, basically a hostile takeover of Pixar by buying up shares enough to where they’re like, you guys see the writing on the wall? Just, just give us all the goods. Yeah, yeah. Well, they, yeah, it’s like we must have you at any cost because I mean, they, it was kind of correct if they had not bought Pixar for whatever exorbitant sum it was, this movie would look and feel crappier.

I’m sure, you know, this movie would be crappier without some Pixar brain trust back there for the hair, if nothing else. Right. Well, again, it just, it’s something that stands out because each movie, now that we see, we’re watching the evolution of Disney animation getting to where it’s about to become, which is, you know, now really the modern day version, the 2025 version is kind of Avengers. Right. And, and Captain America and Iron man and all that stuff. It will be on the way. No, people are getting sick of that. I mean, I saw the new Captain America.

I liked it with the first Marvel movie in a while. I went to see and liked, you know, on, well, both of them really. So it’s, it’s. Because now it’s almost expected. Right. But if we were. I mean, I guess that’s a great question, dude. Does the Avengers count as an animated movie? Because damn near every frame of that essentially has the same level of 3D being put into it as, you know, Bolt does. Yeah. The Avengers might even be a little too early. I think the actors still had to, like, wear the costumes, you know.

Yeah. Three movies down the line, you know, Robert Dye jr. Is like, just digitally animate the Iron man suit. I’m not putting that crap on. You’re paying me 20 million bucks and I don’t want to be in the suit, you know, in my face, guys. Right. So, yeah, it does end up in the 29 by 2019. Yes. It, you know, Endgame or whatever is probably more. Has more animation going on than Bolt because it’s a three hour movie, you know. This one also allows them to do more character style animation. For example, the pigeons in this movie, instead of spending whatever weird time they did in Chicken Little and trying to make things not just look like 3D rendered cylinders made out of plastic, which it kind of does in certain points, but in this one, the pigeons look good.

They look stylized. They do have a very cartoony look and almost reminded me of Animaniacs style pigeons. But they put a lot of effort into the movements where the heads would have these sporadic, jerky, staccato movements. And by doing that, that you really did feel like they were pigeons. Like you’re. You actually saw something driving the animation of that pigeon, aside from just being like an anthropomorphic character, which is usually the more generic version that we see in Disney up until these. These kind of recent versions of the movies. Well, you kind of draw a line from the.

From the Seagulls and Finding Nemo, except they’re not as chatty. Right. They’re just like mine, mine, mine. I mean, by that point, they put. At the parks, they put those guys outside of living seas of Epcot. So that’s a great example. That’s a perfect example of the evolution that you see. If you were to look at one of those seagulls from Little Nemo and then compare it to one of the pigeons here in bowl, there’s. There’s like a evolution between those two and they almost seem connected. Like they learned what worked really well for those pigeons or the seagulls, and then brought them into this and then tweaked it so that these guys have their own characters.

And I guess another version of that too. The movie that we had just watched, Enchanted, which had, I think, the first sort of wise crack in New York plumber accent, that was in the Chipmunk, right. Pip Pip had this, like, New York style to him. Now all the pigeons have that same style too, in this Bolt movie. So I don’t. I like, I like that aspect of it. We didn’t get a lot of that in Aristocats. Right. I would have expected that in Aristocats, because that one actually takes part in the city. Yeah, yeah. Excuse me.

So movies I thought of while watching Bolt, within the first five minutes, I was just like, is this the Truman show for children? You know, which I guess it kind of is. Absolutely. Except you do like Truman, you’re like, oh, he’s a person. He has rights in a dog skates. It’s like, are you psychologically torturing a dog? If you’re just keeping on a set and making it think it’s real? I mean, think about the normal routine of a regular dog dog, right? Like they wake up inside of a house and they go on walks and like, do, you know, tricks for treats.

And I don’t know how much different would it. Are they really lying to the dog? Is this such a completely fabricated reality that the dog wouldn’t, you know, it would like, rock its mind to know what real human reality is. Like, what rocks this dog’s mind, doesn’t it? Because we’ve, you know, we’ve anamorphosized all the animals in here and giving them personalities and all that sort of stuff, which changes things, doesn’t it? I guess this, this movie makes you think of like, you know, the cartoon veil of, of talking animals a little more like, because you’re like, well, if there’s a human, this would be like, horrible, since they’re dogs.

The movie kind of plays it like it is, but, yeah, it’s just kind of weird to think about. But the worst thing, I guess, that kind of happens to this dog is that he realizes he can’t bend metal bars and he can’t, you know, do a super bark that creates these huge rippling waves that rip cars off of the earth and, you know, send helicopters out of the air, crashing and exploding. If anything, if this dog actually had these abilities, he would have went on an absolute rampage. There would be hundreds of dead humans in this dog’s wake on his little cross country adventure.

This was not a Milo and Otis or Homeward Bound operation. Right. This would have been Homeward Bounds. Definitely a movie that came to mind watching this. But yeah, I mean, it’s also, I mean, if you want to talk about other related movies, any of those Road trip movies of the, the late 90s, early 2000s, like I guess, namesake Road Trip, but there was a lot of other ones that kind of followed this same sort of format. And this also alongside the Disney Proxy, which we’ll talk about and we absolutely get here, as we do in almost every Disney movie.

But this one is also starting to shed light on another new trope that Disney keeps playing over and over. Let’s just call it a magical incantation or ritual. Let’s say that it’s a dark, secret Disney ritual for the sound bites. Right? But this is finding your place in the world. I mean, I know as generic as that sounds, this is going to become the official Disney plotline for every single movie going forward is just that you are a fish out of water and it’s time for you to find your own place, make your own mark, regardless of what everyone around you is telling you to do.

Which, yeah, I guess that that’s, you know, mixed advice, depending on situation, of course. But it’s a Disney movie, so of course everything works out fine. But, you know, we kind of think about when it doesn’t work out fine. That’s. That’s part of the point of this podcast, isn’t it? I guess I’ll start going in with weird observations. I kind of want. Well, actually, my big thing is in the climax, so I don’t know, should we go a little earlier in the movie? And this. This will be a pretty quick summary because there’s not a million different tangents.

This movie necessarily goes down. So if you haven’t seen Bolt, the movie is essentially about a TV show, I think, called Bolt. The same. I don’t know if what. Yeah, it’s called Boat. So within the movie Bolt, brought to you by Disney, they are filming a ongoing TV series called Bolt, and it’s about a dog that has some sort of scientific powers. They infused his DNA so that he has electricity coursing through his body, and this results in a super bark, which can create sound waves or electromagnetic waves that, you know, will throw cars up into the air.

He can jump through concrete walls. He can also murder some folks. He can murder, murder people. He can shoot green lasers out of his eyeballs. He can do all. He can bend steel bars somehow with his little paws. And he can jump off of cars that are going 100 miles an hour onto the ground and just, like, not have a tumble. None of that. So he’s sort. Sort of like a superman of a dog. However, this is just for the TV show, but because the director or the showrunner of this TV show is so engrossed with making this a reality that the dog doesn’t know that he’s planned this entire TV show around the dog being the only one that doesn’t realize it’s just the show.

So the dog stays in character 247 and thinks that he actually has all these magical powers. So at one point, the dog gets lured out of his movie trailer, which he didn’t realize was a movie trailer for some reason. He gets lured out of his trailer, ends up in a shipping box, and gets transported to Florida, away from Hollywood, and then slowly has to make his way from Florida back to Hollywood. And over the course of this, realizing that he doesn’t actually have any special powers, or if he does, they’re being suppressed by styrofoam packing peanuts.

As weird as that sounds, that’s kind of the logic that he puts together because, yeah, the kryptonite of these little packing peanuts. And over the. The course of this, he makes his way back to the TV set, reunites with the little girl that he starred with in this show. And that’s kind of the premise of the movie. I mean, we’ll go off in little tangents here and there, but I think I got the main strokes right. That is the movie bowl. Yeah. Yeah. For more or less, that’s about right. I guess one of the most Disney things here is that he is the only dog on the show because they make it a big deal when there’s, like, a replacement dog.

I’m like, hey, there were like three Lassies. At any point in time, they were doing Lassie, and Lassie might have been just this confused. Right? And leaving a trailer. Right? So, I mean, yeah, let’s. We’ll jump around a little bit. So when he escapes out of his trailer because he gets lured by these cats, and then right as these cats start messing with him, they open up the little sunroof to his trailer. Some guy comes into the trailer. So Bolt, like, jumps off the guy and then out the ceiling. And then that’s what starts this whole entire adventure.

And I mean, within like a day, the director, whoever is running this TV show, has a replacement Bolt. And they bring him in, and the. And the girl that’s, you know, the. The co star recognizes that it’s not the same Bolt immediately. But the point being that the resolution of this movie is that the real Bolt makes his way back to Hollywood. What happens to the replacement bolt? Is that replacement Bolt now on his existential journey of like, oh, my God, I’m not actually Bolt. I was just a replacement Bolt? What is life? Who am I? Like, where do I come from? Do we? Well, there’s a replacement girl at the end too, right? Because they keep making the show, but Bolt and the girl whose name is leaving me.

But yeah, they’re, they’re, they’ve. They’re out of fame, aren’t they? The pigeons no longer recognize Bolt, even though he looks exactly the same as the new Bolt. And I actually think this will be genius if they just had a Bolt two. And Bolt two was about the replacement dog making his way back. And then there’s a third replacement, so that’s Bolt three. Like, every single movie is just an infinite loop of the previous movie, New Girl, as well. I definitely thought that was weird where they kind of do the Twilight Zone. Let’s see your new face.

You know, I’m like, well, that is the Twilight Zone. And I mean, I do a podcast on them. I’m going to be talking more about the Twilight Zone this particular podcast today. So, I mean, you already mentioned what movies this was like. I guess I’ll mention a cartoon show, which is Inspector Gadget, which also has a girl named Penny with a dog sidekick. And the dog has all these sort of, you know, gadget like inventions, so the dog’s able to do things that normal dogs aren’t. So this movie could also almost be interpreted as a POV of brain.

Who was the dog in Inspector Gadget and the girl Penny. And it seems that there at least had to be someone on the team that was like, hey, you know that the girl from Inspector Gadget was Penny too, right? With her dog sidekick. And they were like, yeah, of course. That’s the. That’s the whole joke. Didn’t Disney produce the live action Inspector Gadget with Matthew Broderick? One of the best movies of all time, you mean? Well, I’m just saying, actually, I’ve never seen it, but 1999 film. I think Disney produced that. Yes, they did. Okay, that’s got to be on the list, man.

If it’s. If it’s made after an animation, then I think that counts too. Okay. Yeah, it’s not on the animated list because, I mean, it’s got early CJ. I don’t know. It’s right. It’s on that 1999 line where you don’t really know if you’re getting practical or CG at that point. I guess you’re getting a little both. But yeah, it is. When does CG become animation? Like, we’re talking with those Avengers movies. You know, we’re almost a decade beyond it. So if you really want us to Do Inspector Gadget and drop a comment. Or even better, do like the super chat thing or, or something.

It’ll be my first few because. Yeah, I mean, come on, when I was, when that came out, I was 20 years old. So like, I do understand the charm of an Inspector Gadget movie, but yeah, college age is exactly the wrong age for, for that movie. Yeah, I mean, I grew up on Inspector Gadget. That was one of my all time favorite cartoons. I, I watched the hell out cartoon. I had that cool toy with the vinyl, you know, Inspector Gadget himself, an abomination of a creation. Of course. It was a, it was honestly a great show.

Oh, and one other similarity here too is that the bad guy in inspector gadget was Dr. Claw. It was a cat themed super villain. And in Bolt we also have a very cat themed super villain. He’s even got one little cat eye. Oh, and yeah, in the villain within the show, I do have to throw out a few voices that are worth noting. That was Malcolm McDowell, you know, always a fantastic voice of villainy, Main antagonist of the Bolt TV show. Now the top two are weird for voice actors. Do you know who the two lead voices of this movie are? I know that the girl was Miley Cyrus, but I don’t know who the dog was.

Bold is John Travolta, which just seems like a really bizarre choice in 2008, all the course of this movie. Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s like, well, they just use Owen Wilson in Cars, but it seems like the sort of role you’d give to like an Owen Wilson type John Travolta. I mean, it’s, it’s. His performance was fine. It’s just like not the first person you would think of for doing this voice role. So, hey, I guess we’ll give him, you know, five acting points. Yeah, well played. And the same with the Miley Cyrus voice was definitely serviceable.

Right. It didn’t, it didn’t stand out as the, the same way as like a Jonathan Taylor Thomas line. Right, Right thing. And this was also her transition out of Disney. I think this is the last thing that she did with this company. Yeah. I was about to say this is like just hardcore synergy. It’s like, well, Bolt, you know, it’s got, it’s red, it’s orange, it’s a dog. We have to appeal to girls too. They just all went nuts over Hannah Montana. So get Miley. You know, we got one more thing on our contract. So that’s how, that’s how Bolt makes it past 3,300 million, I guess in box office.

I’ll skip right to some of the good parts too. Is that Bolt, just like you were mentioning. It’s Truman show for kids. That Bolt could also represent the story of being a Disney star of like phasing yourself out of the company, of having a sort of this jointed relationship with your agent and your mom. Your mom not really caring so much about all this. Living within this reality of agents and network supervisors and showrunners and being caught between all of these. And even when your best friend gets torn away from you, gets kidnapped or runs away, they just replace them overnight.

Which kind of shows you how expendable you are as well. This, it almost felt like a very self aware Disney movie in that way. Okay, yeah, here’s, here’s. I’m excited because I have a take this week, so I’m going to drop it out that this movie is kind of an indictment against Steven Spielberg, possibly because of DreamWorks, you know, something like that. So, like, go on. Okay, well, on, on the nicer end, at the end, when the show seems to be. I mean, they’re insinuating it’s crappier now, right, with the aliens and stuff. You get that shot straight out of Close Encounters.

But, but the thing that really got me was I said I was going to talk more about the Twilight Zone. There’s Twilight Zone, the movie, right? Are you familiar with the. The tragedy there? I mean, when you say tragedy, I loved the movie. So I’m sure that it could have been better. We’re not talking about the quality of the movie. We’re talking about the actual tragedy of the filming of Twilight Zone, the movie, which was. Oh no. Did somebody die in that mo. Oh, yeah. The first segment of the movie is Equality of Mercy, directed by John Landis.

Spielberg does the second part, so he did not direct this part. He was not there for this. And they were filming. Vic Morrow, if you’ve seen the movie, he’s, you know, like supposed to be a bigoted guy that’s being sent to lots of horrible places to, you know, whatever. Anyway, he’s in Vietnam now. He’s got two kids and there’s a helicopter coming. So one, the setup apparently did not follow safety protocols properly. They had two kids on set, not through union, right? It was like midnight. The kids shouldn’t have been there at all. And the cop, there’s a helicopter.

It’s too low. The helicopter basically crashes and the rotors of the helicopter kill all three of them. Like the two kids And Vic Morrow. So that movie is like super kind of cursed. The fact that Spielberg was involved with that really crawled on his conscience for a long time. So when I’m watching this movie and the girl at the end, she’s caught in the set, I’m like, man, this really feels like the Twilight Zone thing. There’s lots of fire, you know, endangering a child actor, probably through bad safety protocols. Because if there’s a fire on a set, they should be able to get people out pretty quickly.

Right? So safety protocols are not being followed here. Right after I wrote the note, I’m thinking of the Twilight Zone. You see a helicopter come down and almost kill her. I’m like, wait a minute. Okay, that’s that to me. And then you get the close encounter. So I’m like, somebody here is grinding an ax, you know, or trying to like needle Spielberg. Oh, you still feel bad about it? Still feel bad about it. You know, John Landis is known as such a prick. Now I guess nobody’s gonna needle him. So if they really wanted to drive it in, they would have had like a quick little Heather or Rourke cameo.

Oh, that’s Polder, guys. That’s. Yeah, that’s a different one. But yeah, that very. Remember this? Remember this? Like, I guess he. But yeah. Anyway, I’m just like having that thought, then having it instantly gratified, like twice. You know, support it on screen. Okay. I got something this week. So I. And this is the point where I mean, well, the original director of the film, once they kicked him off, he goes off to DreamWorks too. So it just. I feel like there’s weird Hollywood bad blood, like in the. In the. Kind of in the. Baked into this movie.

I like it. Yeah. Maybe this movie was made for not us, right? Maybe this really was made as a self aware thing. Like, hey, Disney, we know what you’re doing with your talent pool. Also Steven Spielberg in particular. Screw you. You’re hanging out with Katzenberg. That’s a way to rub Disney folks the wrong way. I like this take. I also have to know another film reference here, which also featured a kid and their dog trying to reunite on a cross country trip that has a few dangerous scenes in Fire Bingo. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie Bingo.

But that also follows somewhat of a similar problem. Get a farmer. I know the song. No, the kid’s not a farmer in this one. They go on a road trip and then Bingo gets kidnapped by like a dog butcher or something. It gets kind of crazy. And then Someone sets a fire in the place where Bingo’s being held and he’s got a escape. A Bingo is afraid of fire because he was raised in a circus and forced to jump through a flaming hoop wearing a tutu. So it turns into a. A huge, you know, hero moment where he overcomes his greatest fear in order to save the lives of all the other animals.

What is the vintage of this movie? You’re. It’s. It’s. You’re 90. I got it. 91. 91. Okay, let’s see. 12 years old. I’m, to me personally was 12. So yeah, I guess Bingo would have been completely off my radar at that point. Really? This would have been too juvenile for a 12 year old, Matt maybe. We did buy tickets for Homeward Bound, but we were trying to sneak into army of Darkness and it didn’t work. They kicked us back into Homeward Bound. So that ties into this movie again for plots. So, yeah, I did see Homeward Bound, but we were all angry.

Right. Because we didn’t get to see army of Darkness. You’re like, hey, Milo and Otis had way more deaths than us. Yeah. And also we are like 15, 16, right. Online, it’s like, come on, who cares? Stupid teenagers. But yeah, that’s why I saw Homeward Bound. Anyway, I eventually saw army of Darkness, but I don’t think I ever saw it in a movie theater. So that’s too bad. Let’s. You said you, you had kind of lighter notes for here, but you want to scratch one of those itches? Sure. It’s a combination of just observations and maybe some, some breakdowns we can get deeper into.

So in no particular order, the very beginning of this movie, which I guess would be a chronological order, but at the very beginning of the movie, we see this girl going into a pet store and picking out Bolt among all the other different dogs. Right. And I guess it wasn’t clear to me. Is this part of the TV show too? I assume that it would be, since the director was implying that everything this dog knows has all been on camera. It is a true Truman show situation. But it wasn’t 100% clear if that was real. Like, was that girl also shot because.

Because she goes into a pet store, picks out Bolt, puts on the collar that says Bolt already on it. And then it says four years later. And now they’re clearly in the middle of shooting a TV show. But I, I guess the implication is that even that original scene was also on camera. Maybe the reason to keep it a little ambiguous is for a Viewer like me, I didn’t know the plot of this movie at all. So for two. Two minutes at least, I was sitting there thinking, did dad take a dog and make it bionic and weird? That seems horrible.

Or really cool, depending on how cool. Well, the end result is cool. But you start thinking of, you know, rocket raccoon. Like, what is he, a squirrel? Torture, Whatever. Raccoon. His name’s Raccoon. What? My brain’s exploding. Okay. Yeah, that was a big plot. Part of Gary and Guardians. The hedgehog character, it’s right on the tip of my tongue. Yeah, yeah. Also the. This initial scene when the girl and I like that idea. Maybe it’s ambiguous on purpose so that if you’re unfamiliar, you kind of walk into it. But it was weird that she immediately put a collar on the dog that they just adopted and it already says Bolt.

Don’t you usually Meaning that they had the. The name of the dog already prepared? So no matter what dog they were going to pick that day, its name was going to be Bolt. So either this is a very specific, you know, reference to predetermination, right. Like this dog was always going to be called Bolt. It was always going to be selected as the one, or this was all done in a Truman show way where they already knew the dog was going to be picked out because this is part of the TV show. So I don’t know.

I don’t know what if this evidence is one way or the other, it seems to lend credence that it was all shot Truman show style. Well, that’s. That’s the problem with this having an animation disconnect with reality or just a film disconnect with reality. So actually I did. Now you’re mentioning, like, yeah, probably is the TV show. When I was watching the movie, I was like the director later choose the dog. It’s five years later, they’ve been doing the show. Like, I just assumed that was real, partly because I’d never seen the movie before. But now I’m like, well, as I mentioned, it’s insane that they only have one dog.

You know, you’d want to have a few backup dogs. Also, are they suggesting this dog is not trained? The replacement dogs clearly trained, because right after the take, it runs off to its trainer. Right. But is Bolt himself not trained? Because he would remember that. Right, Right. And I don’t. I can’t tell if this is like, plot armor or chinks in the armor, or if there’s something unique about Bolt as the dog. In particular, that Bolt’s the only Truman, right? Like, if Truman got hurt, do they bring in a replacement Truman that knows that it’s a show and he’s just there to act as if until they find the original Truman again.

Yeah, it’s like the Dick York, Dick Sargent swap out on which or something. Right? And the other. I guess the part where this differs from the Truman show is that the Truman show, everybody except for Truman knew that it was a show, right? In this case, everybody except for Bolt knows. But that’s not the show like the Truman Show. You watching it from your couch at home, you’re like, this is so crazy. This guy doesn’t realize on it, he’s on a TV show. But if we’re watching Bolt and if we’re in the Disney universe, right, and we, we’re on the couch and we flip on.

Oh, let’s watch Bolt. This week. It didn’t seem like the plot line was like, and this dog has no idea that this isn’t his actual real life. It was just trying to get a compelling performance out of a dog doing just like a standard fair sci fi superhero show. Also, did they not yell cut when with the old Bolt? Because the, the, when you see the later scene, it’s a very standard, you know, shoot or whatever. I mean, watching an animated movie. But they do the scene, yells cut, dog runs off. It’s like, wouldn’t that have been happening for the past five years? I mean, that just means both stupid, easier, more efficient.

If the audience can’t tell the difference, then I really don’t know what the original motivation was for this Bolt to be treated Truman show style. I mean, I’ve got my conspiracy theories about it, but I mean, from the surface level, there’s no real rational reason that this dog needed to be treated like this. No, no, not at all. Because you’re like, oh, that means he’s in character 100 of the time. Who cares if a dog’s in character? You want a dog to run and hit a mark and hopefully it’s trained to do that. You know, that that’s the character.

Well, and they emphasize this part where after one of the scenes is over, Bolt goes into the trailer and Penny goes with Bolt. And Penny’s trying to play with him. She’s trying to throw like a squeaky toy, this little carrot squeaky toy that he grew up with. When we see him in the first scene, she’s throwing balls at him, but he can’t play because he’s in superhero mode. And they just finished shooting A scene where they’re being chased by bad guys on, like, these cyberpunk dirt bikes and helicopters flying through the air, shooting missiles at them so he doesn’t feel like there’s ever a moment when some bad villain’s not gonna burst through the door.

Which means that this dog is in a perpetual state of trauma. Right. And I wonder again if this was a self aware Disney movie. This is basically talking about a Disney star. Like, the Disney star is not allowed to turn off their character. If this is Miley Cyrus, for example, instead of her being Penny, if she’s Bolt, this is her not being allowed to turn off Hannah Montana. And the amount of stress and trauma that that would cause somebody to not be allowed to turn that switch off. Well, that makes it an interesting inflection point then, because like you said, the last thing she did for Disney, she’s getting to use a real name so she doesn’t have to be Hannah Montana in this movie.

Right. So it’s maybe it’s like the role of Penny, like, it gives her like, the valve, you know, it’s like, okay, well, you’re still in the machine, but we’ll put you out of the spotlight. It’s Bolt now. You’re in this movie. You’re helping us sell this movie to girls, you know, and then be on your way and do Wrecking Ball or whatever. Yeah, this, what, this one last thing. We just need one little piece of your soul and then you can have the rest of it, whatever’s left of it. Right. But yeah, the Bolt character itself, yeah, it’s, it’s.

I mean, this is an overly convoluted production of the TV show Bolt, you know, not the movie, but the TV show bulge is like, it doesn’t need to be that convoluted. You know, like, no one would be impressed when they have the behind the scenes electronic press kit explaining it. They’d be like, why are you doing that? That’s stupid. Why are you torturing this poor dog? Why are you gaslighting a dog? You’re gaslighting a dog to make this show. Which again, I mean, aren’t you technically, like, not telling all animals that they’re in a movie or a TV show? Because they don’t care, probably.

And if they do care, then we’re being real horrible to all the animals, aren’t we? Because I don’t think anyone ever sits a dog down and tells it that it’s going to be the star of a show. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe they do there’s another weird part of this too. If we just want to poke at some of the gaps or maybe there’s something hidden in the gaps. But the first initial scene and which is really action packed scene, it’s like a Mission Impossible style chase scene where they’re going on highways and jumping around cars and there’s explosions and everything, but essentially they are running away from all these different guys.

He does this super bark that throws like 20 cars up into the air and they flip around and they crash and all these guys, like humans are essentially dying. If you, if you believe what’s happening is real. There’s a guy in a helicopter coming at you and you cause a mind to blow that helicopter up. The guy flying the helicopter is no longer with us. Right. Well then he strolls over their corpses, doesn’t he? The bodies are on the ground. I mean they’re, they’re, you know, they cover the faces, they look like robots, but it’s just implied they are people.

Right. And, and at the end of this, then even if we don’t get a cut, the scene ends. Right. So what’s going through your mind in this scenario where you just outran a hundred bad guys that were coming after you and now what, you’re just gonna hang out in a trailer? You’re just waiting for them to come and get you? So. Yeah, the dog would be in this weird perpetual state of fear. Yeah. And again, he has intelligence to speak, at least to other animals. This is a Disney movie where the humans and animals cannot directly communicate, of course.

It’s just all the animals can talk to each other. So we, we have been tracking you. Who can talk to who in what movies? Right. It wasn’t. Snow White was the only one that could actually talk to animals or whatever. Well, the animals couldn’t talk back, could they? They just kind of communed. Right. Well, the, the theme is that, oh man, I wish we could pinpoint. I’m sure we can if we go back and watch our own episodes. But there’s a very specific point. Disney movies used to rely on this trope of, of human beings communing with nature and having a two way system where we give our humanity to nature in a way and then nature gives us something in return.

And sometimes it’s facilitated by communication where we talk to them and they talk to us. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the person is so in commune with nature that they can directly talk to it. But then at a certain point, humans become left out of that equation. Humans become the bad Guy. Where animals can understand and hear what we’re saying and they can talk to each other in our language, but we cannot hear them. And they make that very explicit in this movie, where they’ll show Bolt saying something or yelling, and then when they zoom out and they show a human with an earshot, they just hear a dog barking.

Yeah. So in this movie, it’s like there’s entirely the world of human communication. There’s entirely the world of animal communication, and they do not mix at all. Saw, with the one exception of you’re a good boy. You know that’s the only real human animal communication this movie, right? Is that gaslighting? If you tell your dog they’re a good boy all the time, then yes. Or not. Especially if they eat your slippers. Right. You’re not actually a good boy. And then their minds are just blown. Yeah. I don’t know. Should. What. What’s the voice to talk to your dog with? Do you have a dog voice? It’s usually just not as bassy.

Because sometimes if it’s basy, the. My dog acts, like, extra submersive. You know what I mean? Or, like, she’ll just, like, submit immediately. Almost like she’s in trouble. Okay, what if you play Count Basie? Then what happens? Yeah. And then she just cries. Yeah. Yeah. No, I. I have found, like, you know, a lot of people talk to kids with a kid voice. I teach a lot of kids, and I very intentionally just talk to them using my normal voice, which I don’t know. Especially as a person, it seems real condescending to use a voice, even if they are too.

But that’s my personal philosophy. So I haven’t had a pet in a while, and I don’t remember what I did when I had a dog, so I don’t. I don’t think I have voices for animals now. Yeah, it’s like the baby voice. And we don’t need to gaslight our dogs into thinking they’re babies. Yeah, I think I told on this podcast, but I saw a new teacher do that a few months ago and just get the. The best response ever, you know, from a really snarky kid. So. Did the kid respond with the same voice? Well, okay.

I occasionally throw obscenities in this podcast, so. No, no. The new teacher goes up and it’s. It’s the hellion kid I mentioned before. He’s the one that’ll show up and build a gun out of paper and a rubber band. Nice. I like this kid. Yeah. So he goes, oh, what’s your name? You know, like in that tone. And then he just says your name is fuck you with double barreled middle fingers. I had to walk out of the room because I was laughing too hard like Japanese kid. Yeah, great. I was like, I cannot be seen in front of either of them, like laughing hysterically at this.

So I will go into the next room and do that. See, now I’m just imagining a Japanese version of problem child. Oh yeah. I mean, I’m like, I’m sure this because he’s like I said this kid can build things when he shows up. So he’s gonna have his own volcanic island and be a James Bond supervillain in the future. I’m like, pretty sure have your own pad. Yeah, we’ve, we’ve got enough islands in Japan. You can find one to build your super layer on if you want. Hear that? Or he’ll, he’ll just start cutting girls skirts on trains.

Well, yeah, I, I’d like to think he’s smarter than that, but yeah, he’s also extremely malevolent. So, you know, who knows? Yesterday the, the news was just filled with, with urine based crimes. There were like two in the headlines yesterday. That’s like, you know, we probably have those here, but they’re just so many more tragedies that the fun urine ones probably just don’t get the national attention they deserve. Yeah, it was like man arrested for mixing his urine with the soap in a public restroom at a convenience store. That’s the headline. How did he get caught? It must have been quick.

It must have been that the person right after him immediately reported it. I guess we’re having our, our, my. The Japanese crime ticker is becoming a regular feature here. Man arrested after calling emergency more than 4,000 times in the past year. Okay, that’s fun. X bang. Yeah. Here. A man arrested for mixing urine and a hand soap and drugstore toilet in Hokkaido. I want to figure out how they actually. He quoted as saying, I did it to cause trouble for people. Was this a pleasure crime? I don’t know. The drugstore had previously reported incidents of discolored hand soap.

A store employee was paying attention to customers using the restroom and noticed the hand soap changed color after this guy exited the toilet. So this was like his hobby, just showing up at this drugstore. He’s not a convenience store drugstore. And mixing his. And peeing into the soap dish. I don’t want any listeners getting any ideas from this. These crazy Japanese ideas. Okay. The other one is a nursery school director Peeing in a child’s water bottle. But it doesn’t say if the child drank it. But. What? Yeah, just to teach them a lesson. He would. He was trying to scare the boy into doing what he wanted.

Okay, that’s. That’s trauma based stuff. Yeah. The Japanese version of MK Ultra is a whole nother level. Yeah. This is a standard nursery school in the subur, so. So, yeah, although it was newsworthy, so I assume that it’s still at least irregular enough to make the news. Right? I. I think I covered the most amusing of the current crime ticker there. Okay, okay, well, so. So after Bolt gets out, after he bolts this the set, he ends up jumping into a box full of packing peanuts and then gets packed up and immediately delivered to New York.

We’re just going to imply that a dog would be totally fine traveling, what, like 6, 000 miles in a truck in order to get all the way there, and then does it again. Right. Basically travels in a U haul all the way back to Hollywood at a certain point, but. Oh, and then when they open the box, the dude just like, totally slams a box cutter in there. I’m like, that could have ended both real quick. Well, no, I mean, so maybe Bolt does have superpowers. They just show themselves in slightly different ways when he’s removed from the movie set or wherever his, like, source of energy is.

But they. He ends up in New York where he runs into these sort of street talking pigeons. Right? And then the pigeons lead us to a cat, and the cat is kind of a mafia boss, but the a. Or at least as a goon, the cat’s like a mafia goon who’s charging these pigeons food in order for him to not kill them. Right. So he’s kind of exploiting them for protection in a weird way. So Bolt’s first interaction with the real world outside of Hollywood is immediately by dealing with gangsters. Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s the thing that, you know, they.

The trope of you go into the city and instantly end up in the worst part of town, right? Well, yeah. And then he goes from Hollywood directly to Central park, essentially. Yeah. Because the first thing is, hey, y’all into sniffing a. That seems, you know, that’s what the dogs do around there. Right. Which isn’t what happens on the Hollywood set, I guess. And then as soon as. As soon as this happens too, they. He starts experiencing the real world where he can’t run through a fence, he can’t run through a wall, he can’t do his, like, super bark.

And also he realizes when he jumps off of a car, he hurts his paw and he’s like, what’s this red liquid coming out of my paw? Because he doesn’t know what blood is, meaning that he’s been so pampered his entire life, even doing all of his own stunts that he’s never really felt. But, I mean, we saw in the opening intro, he’s jumping off of cars, going very fast. Right. Was that all cg? That wasn’t green screen or anything. They imply that this was all very practical effects. Yeah. I’ll take a toll. There’s a story what Brendan Fraser, doing those Mummy movies apparently, like, has physically d.

Beat him down. Like, you know, he can’t. He. You know, by the time he’s doing the third one, it was for money or something because he’d already broken his body during the first two. So Bolt should probably have some notable miles on him by this point. I don’t want to go on too much of a tangent, but now I want to see a version of the Mummy, but it’s Brandon Fraser as the whale, and now he has. He has to go and defeat the mummy as the whale. I’m pretty sure that would make the second and third movies better because at least it’d be like, that’s a weird choice to make.

And it wouldn’t just be like throwing everything at us on the screen for no particular reason. Which would be my review of at least the second one, when we had the reference in this movie to Bolt hurting his paw and not knowing what blood was. We don’t actually see the blood at any point. He. It’s kind of like the way that he holds his paw up. It’s facing away from the camera, so we don’t see the red liquid. And the cat that he’s with is kind of has some little snarky remarks, like, yeah, that liquid’s supposed to stay in your body.

It’s, like, supposed to be on the inside, not the outside or whatever. But I was wondering, how many other Disney movies do they actually show blood? And there’s a decent amount. There was way more than I was expecting. And I don’t mean gore because we’re obviously talking about Disney animated movies, but there’s a number of them where people get. Or animals usually get slashed by a claw and they’ll have, like, a little red spot or I think in the Little Mermaid, I think that one of the humans gets injured and you see, like, a little splash that goes across their skin.

So anyways, the far more instances of blood in Disney animated cartoons than there are of, say, guns. But here we don’t get it. Although I am like, what is. What would a dog’s perception of blood even be? You know, like, it’s. He’s not bleeding much. It is a scratch, it seems so. It seems like he would barely notice it, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Well, they’re obviously driving in this concept that this dog is experiencing reality for the first time. But it would be weird, too, that if, say, Truman never bled, right? Like, that would be part of not being able to deliver an actual performance is not knowing what pain or discomfort is.

He’s feeling hungry for the first time in his life. I mean, I guess we can believe that, but I don’t know, you maybe wake up in the morning and be a bit hungry. So it is kind of weird. That’s. I guess I just have to keep pushing in, like, oh, he’s outside of his weird bubble now, where the hamster is in the bubble now. Okay. And also, I guess another note too, is that the dog doesn’t know how to beg, so the cat has to teach bowl how to look pathetic and how to tilt the head and open up the eyes and.

And just make him look, you know, like people would want to give him food. Like, oh, poor little dog. But this is sort of inherent. This is the only reason that a lot of these dogs even exist still. And most animals that interact with humans, the larger your eyeballs are, there’s almost this weird cute factor. Even babies. And I think some of the theories of this are that animals that tend to remind humans of human babies when they’re small usually evoke that same reason that you give the little baby voice. Oh, what a little dog. Like, giving that little baby voice is because it’s reminding you of a baby.

These big, you know, eyeballs. And the amount of white compared to the. The black in your eye, like that ratio, all of that has this very specific cuteness factor. And the higher the cuteness factor, the less chance of a human just absolutely slaughtering you for no reason. Oh, yeah. I mean, Japan, they knocked that into overdrive in manga and anime, right? And you know, if I’m doodling on the board for one of my classes, I’m like, sometimes I want to cuten it up. I’ll make the eyes bigger. Here’s a weird thing, though. You mentioned the black to white ratio.

And there is a thing in Japan where a lot of anime characters that are supposed to be cute looking have like very large black eyes with just little bits of white in them. It’s like kind of the opposite black and white ratio. That’s. That’s often considered cute here. Well, there’s. It’s a weird balance. And also the Japanese are just weird in general, but there’s a balance here because if you just got a tiny little dot in the eye. Well, now it’s like a bdi. And it doesn’t have the same cute factor. It all depends on the artistic style here.

But this is one of the theories that I’ve come across is that the reason why animals that look cuter are usually not exterminated the same way that, like, vermin would be. It’s usually if their eyes are large, then they remind us of babies. So that come. That comes up with animal conservation. Right. It’s. It’s harder to get people to, you know, preserve a bunch of snakes. I guess just goes to speak that this is not a learned behavior that Bolt needs to go through. Bolt just being a puppy, as long as you’re not growling at somebody, you’re already kind of in beg mode.

Right. So I’m actually trying to look for a good example of the. The Japanese version of that. I’m talking with the black and the white. It’s. It’s really bizarre looking like the first. I’m used to it now, but the first several times I saw it, it was kind of off putting. So I. Yeah, sorry. I’m not coming up with the results for that, though. At the moment, there’s a scene where Bolt gets caught by animal control because he thinks that he’s going to do a super bark and basically, like, blow him off the plant. Like, basically murder this poor guy doing his job.

When it doesn’t work, though, he snaps them and the hamster says, don’t worry, I’ll snap his neck. So here in a Disney movie, this might be the first time that we have a direct threat of somebody snapping a human’s neck as part of doing, like a. Like a heist. Yeah. Did Oliver and company have any of that sort of stuff? I’m just trying to remember. Aristocats. I’m just trying to remember if there’s anything else that really did that that were. That were missing because I seemed like it would have happened. Violence. But I don’t think anything as specific as I will unequivocally murder you.

Yeah, yeah, Nemo. They’re just trying to escape, so they’re not trying to kill the dentist or anything. Incredibles. They make decisions that could lead to the death. But this one is an outright like, you know, threat of murder. This is Right, right. In a court of law, this could actually get you into some legal ramifications. Yeah. Although from the human perspective, it’s still just. There’s a yappy dog or something. Right? Yeah. When he, when Rhino attacks and he’s like, ah, in the ball. Oh, what a cute hamster. You know, with, with a green eyed man or whatever that does happen.

There’s a scene where he’s like, he’s like, you know, talking smack. And then it shows from the human perspective and they just hear hamster just going like it’s just making the hamster noises. Right. Hamster attack of the cutes. That’s it. So, yeah, I guess it’s the most imminent threat of death from an animal towards a human. Because I was just saying Incredibles was like, oh, well that wasn’t, that wasn’t animals though, so that doesn’t count. Here’s another interesting trend which I, I had to go, what about he’s a toy. But Woody threatening seems to come pretty close to that.

I mean, does Woody say I’m going to snap your neck? He. Well, he bends his own neck Exorcist style and then makes the threat. So it’s. That’s at least full. The full effect of the threat does feel like that strong to me. Fair enough. Although it leaves more new interpretation than somebody literally making the claim that would end your life. Also, that’s a human like toy, not an animal. So it might not fit the, the Matrix. It might be creepier too if it’s a toy that’s threatening the. Because now we’re talking about like puppet master. Right.

Maybe I’m thinking levels of the creeps. Like that outdoes what we just saw in this movie. Right. And a creep factor. Yes. This is the. Yeah, so but a cute animal that’s supposed to be, you know, a secondary character, the protagonist that’s also going to murder a human being. It feels like, like Disney shredding new ground here. So what’s up with the hamster and the balls? Am I missing something? I mean, I’ve never had a hamster or anything. Do you let your hamster run around in a ball or. Yeah, he just comes out of the ball.

Okay. I guess I just haven’t had been around hamsters. Yeah, no, the whole point is to let the hamster run around outside of their cage. But if you let a hamster run around not being in a ball, they’re gonna Go and find a corner somewhere. And now you gotta like reach in and grab and they’re gonna bite you. So the ball prevents them from getting into little nicks and corners, but also makes it so you can safely pick them back up and not get your. Your hand bit and then just open the ball and kind of dump them back into their cage.

That’s the whole premise of this. Okay, then just me not being familiar with the world of hamsters, that’s fine. Just checking. Because if, you know, me not having had a pet like that or seen known someone had a pet, I’m just like, this is weird. You know? Like, the other thing too that you don’t see often in movies and cartoons when they show these hamster balls is that when the hamsters are running around in those little balls, like they’re still peeing and pooping. So at a certain point after they’ve pooped a few times, they’re running around and their little turds are like running around with them.

You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. We didn’t need to get that in the movie. Okay, we don’t see that part. But that, that happens in real life. If you have an actual hamster in one of those balls, they end up just coating themselves in urine and feces. And I had a dog, but I. I think I learned about the cone of shame from next week’s movie. Up Up. Like, I don’t think I knew about that previously, but we never had to have. I guess my dog never needed that, so he wasn’t that shameful. He did chase his tail a whole lot though.

Have we had a Disney movie where they had to wear a cone of shame? I would assume yes, but I can’t think of one off top my head. Well, next week you’re getting one, so if you haven’t, you’re about to. We’ll have a whole occult decode on Kona shame. Because I think that’s an interesting topic too, that here’s another new one that maybe we can start building on. But in this movie, it’s the Green Eyed man is the. The super villain. This is kind of like the Dr. Claw of this movie. And there is another recurring theme here of the color green representing evil.

Because green and Disney movies, you’ll see it associated with like sorcery and poisons and corruption. And usually something that would be kept more for bad guys. Like, they don’t like, usually reds, yellows and blues, and primary colors, brights and warms. They’ll use those for the protagonist. They Reserve all these nice primary colors and then green ends up being one of the. Like signifies bad or evil or magic in some of these Disney movie contexts. So even if you go back to, for example, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, when they show the poison, it’s green that comes off of it.

In the Hercules movie, it’s green that the flames are. When they’re doing like this black magic. Even though Hades, I think, is blue in that movie, the magic ends up having these like little green whiffs of smoke and stuff. So anyways, I feel that this might be a recurring theme that I just haven’t picked up on yet of green. I wonder if it’s actually baked a little bit into Hollywood production. Because, I mean, by this time we’re not really. This is. We’re transitioning fully out of film into Digital by 2008, I think. But film, traditionally, cinematographers would want to kind of avoid using a lot of green because it adds more grain and it looks kind of moldy and weird.

We were just covering the movie Oldboy, where the cinematographer of Oldboy intentionally used a bunch of green and filters and stuff to make the movie look grimy and dirty and moldy. So that movie adds a lot of green and on purpose to make it really look nasty, you know. So just in film production, it’s kind of like, let’s avoid green. So now when I need a bad guy and I want him to look grimy, I throw in some green. Well, noteworthy here because dogs, they only see, I think, yellow and blue and shades of gray. So green would be a completely foreign concept to Bolt.

Some. Maybe Bolt still is special deep down because they imply that this dog can differentiate the color green from other colors. Also, Rhino is obsessed with the Green Eyed man being these basically thugs, which are they robots. I mean, obviously there’s actors in there, but I am thinking of Bolts tearing them down on the TV show if they’re robots. And it doesn’t seem quite as violent anyway, though it’s. He’s. He’s obsessed with the Green Eyed man. And it is kind of the third eye placement, you know, that’s where you see it. So just something to think about.

We have this evil Greens right on the. Right on the third eye chakra. Yeah. So here’s an insidious observation that I’ve got about this movie, right? So part of this movie is implying. And I’m imagining that you’re. You brought your kid to see this movie, right? And your kid is learning these Aesop’s Fables. Whether you or they know it or not, they’re taking home some sort of a moral, you know, tale. Like, what. What was the reason that we just sat and watched an hour and a half of this movie in a dark, you know, box Daddy.

So this is the reason is to kind of tell people that someone that you love might be hurting you, but it’s okay because deep down they still love you. So even though we are keeping you in a constant state of trauma, and even though, like, we are your loved ones, and I’m talking, like, Penny talking to Bolt at this case, like, the real Penny actress that’s keeping Bolt in this Truman State, it’s like you still have to forgive Penny because she loves Bolt, even though she was part of this grand scheme to keep him traumatized, which ultimately led to him going on a very dangerous kind of mission across the country and almost getting himself killed in a lot of different ways.

So I think that it’s slightly insidious. I know at its surface it doesn’t seem that deep, but really, this movie is justifying the horrible treatment that the dog gets, the horrible way that I’m assuming they just discard the replacement dog, the way that the mom is just allowing her child to be eaten up by Hollywood, the same way that they’re allowing this dog to be eaten up by Hollywood. Like, all of these different aspects are here and very obvious to the viewer, and none of them are condemned in any way. There’s no sort of. Of karma paid to any of the people that are doing these horrible things, except for maybe the agent, but the agent is just getting them a great deal in interviews to talk about the stuff that they’re going through.

He almost seems like the least evil person, and he’s the only one that actually gets punished in the entire movie. Yeah, when he says that Tonight show would be a pretty big deal. Hey, the Tonight show would be a pretty big deal. He did. He’s doing his job. What’s wrong with that? Right? He’s the. Oh, yeah. He’s the only one doing a good job that isn’t actively trying to hurt anybody, that the agent isn’t the one that’s keeping this dog in the dark and gaslighting Bolt. So I don’t know. The. The morality of this movie seems a little bit skewed to me.

Like, what is the actual takeaway lesson here? I. I wonder if they’re trying to make their out a little bit like it’s the machine, and Penny doesn’t really seem to like it. She’s like, why can’t I just take Bolt out and play with Bolt like a regular dog? Like, nah, the machine. So she is like, you know, first in line for gaslighting Bolt, which. That’s horrible. But she doesn’t seem to like it. Mom doesn’t seem to like it that much either. Right. So it’s. But, oh, you have to do it. You’re part of the machine. I do.

I do feel that if we’re gonna get, like, ultra analytical, this Penny is somewhat exonerated from this. She’s kind of excused from this because she’s being told by all of the parental figures around her, all the authority figures, that this is normal too. So again, there’s a. There’s an interesting meta story where the girl is also being gaslit into gaslighting the dog, as if this is normal and not something that they shouldn’t be doing. When you kind of get the idea that the director knows he’s being weird and the exec knows that the director is being weird, and the rest of the staff all know that they’re doing this very weird Truman show esque thing.

The only one that wouldn’t really understand the context would be Penny, the little girl, because she is kind of growing up in the same thing. She realizes that she’s an actress and she realizes that they’re all lying to Bolt. But she’s. I mean, complicit might be a loaded word, like she was raised in this being normal. Also, she’s probably getting her own problematic things here. She’s the star of a show as a child actor. They’re probably bending the rules a little bit there. Again, she almost dies on set in an accident. Feels like there should be a few more precautions there.

Hey, just to throw in another bit of my, my Spielberg thing, the set that happens on looks an awful lot like Temple of Doom. So this movie was calling out Steven Spielberg directly? I kind of think it was, in a way. At least somebody in the production had that in mind, you know, and like, they’re like, let’s make it look like his cinematographer. Let’s put this child in danger. Up a helicopter almost kills her. It’s, it’s. I don’t know, it might be coming from a guy who also has a Twilight Zone podcast, but, you know, so take it with a grain of salt if you want, but it’s.

It seems somebody was thinking about it. Well, you know, it would tell you for sure if there were some sort of deleted footage that didn’t make the final cut of the Rotor coming down and like almost chopping the up into pieces. Now you realize that it had to be that way, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, there. Apparently there’s a completely different version of this movie somewhere in the vault. So if you, if you switch out files, you’ll. You’ll have a very different movie. Although I don’t think that’s going to happen in the original version. So this is the part of the show where I bring up MK Ultra and Project Monarch and sometimes I have to shoehorn it, in other times I don’t.

In this one, it feels very. Like a very great representation of something described by Fritz Springmeier in his book that I’ve probably brought up at least 10 times now. And I believe it’s called how to Create an Undetectable Illuminati Mind Control Slave. I’m pretty sure that’s, that’s close to it. And in this, he describes something called superhero programming. And superhero programming is when allegedly they would, you know, kidnap these, these kids and put them through this Project Monarch training. And one of those trainings was that you treat them like a superhero. You have them flying through the air, suspended on cables.

They’re fighting bad guys. They’re going through all of the motions of being a superhero as part of their mental split. So after they do all of, like, the horrific trauma programming and create the different personalities, one of those personalities is trained to be this savior type figure, the superhero type figure. Because a superhero would get themselves into situations that a normal person wouldn’t, they would show bravery in situations that a normal person wouldn’t. They might think that they’re impervious to getting shot by bullets. Right? They might think that they can jump off of a large building and just fly into the air.

A lot of these would be very convenient backstories to train, say, like a. Like to program into a trained assassin. So after they shoot somebody, they think, okay, let me just go fly off this building, right? Or, oh, I’m gonna be, you know, shot. That’s okay. Bullets don’t go through me. So just having those kind of backup programs running in these MK Ultra assassins would be incredibly advantageous, Which I think is part of the reason that this superhero programming gets brought up. That’s one of the. The main reasons behind it. And that’s one of the ideas that any good MK Ultra assassin would have some kind of superhero programming alter they could tap into.

I guess the other big superhero programming guy in the. The Disney sphere is Buzz Lightyear, who, you know, he. He keeps doing, succeeding in his feats, too, for most of the movie. So it takes him a while to get out of it. Right. But he also. He shows the good part of that, the mind over matter version, where his undying belief that he is a superhero actually allows him to do some pretty crazy feats. Right? Like, he’s the one that succeeds. Right? Right. He kind of flies. He kind of does the thing that everyone thinks that he shouldn’t be able to do.

I mean, hell, why does Tom Cruise want to do a crazy stunt for every mission know? I mean, who knows what the Scientologists were telling them? You know, maybe they’re making them fly. This movie could be an analogy to Tom Cruise. Right? Tom Cruise is bull. And Scientology is the showrunner. Scientology is the showrunner. There. There is a. That’s got to be someone’s tagline for a TV show in the future. No, Tom, really, You can fly. You can read people’s minds. You can shoot lasers out of your eyes. I could see a version of. Of Tom Cruise being like, I know, I know.

Imagine my scene. One of my favorite YouTube clips is where someone has taken, like, a bunch of clips of him just saying insane stuff on a Scientology promotional video and put like, this generic Mission Impossible music in the background. And it’s. I love that video. It’s great. And he just keeps getting all riled up about how you gotta help people. And then he never makes a point, which. Which is because they’re cutting. But you assume that’s because it didn’t go anywhere, which. The mysterious about videos, I’m not quite sure who edited it. You know, if it was.

I don’t think. I think it is, like, actual cut. I believe the orig. The video that you’re referring to originally put out by Scientology as a way to, like, promote themselves a little bit. And I think it came out when he was promoting one of the Mission Impossible sequel movies. So the music that you’re hearing, I believe, was part of some of the original cut. What you’re referring to is someone chopping it up a little bit to kind of, you know, screw up the context and make it silly. But the music, as cringy as it was, I believe was part of the original Scientology released video.

Okay. And it wasn’t meant to be given to the public. I believe this was like an internal thing that if you signed up and you sat down and they were really trying to get you on that hook, they would maybe show you this. But I don’t think it was meant to be seen outside of the church. You gotta check your thetans, man. Thetans. And I’m saying it wrong. Okay. I haven’t been to the meeting, so I don’t know. That’s. That’s one of the thetans that makes you mispronounce things. Yeah, yeah, that’s. That’s our MK corner, I guess.

So if we said something gets us tagged, it was in the past five minutes, I suppose. You got anything else? I think that’s mostly it for Bolt, man. It’s. I think your analogy of Truman show for Kids is a perfect one and that it’s this self aware critique of how Disney treats their own actors and their own stars and keeps them in these Weird Trauma and DreamWorks. Yeah, it’s put on everybody. Okay, I guess we’ll start winding down things for today then. What’s happening in your corner, man? I mean, if you like podcasts, go get more of them.

Just search for Paranoid American on YouTube or Spotify or itunes or all of the places and you’ll find that I’ve got a whole bunch of other shows that’ll come up in there. Monthly Mormon Mondays, which we actually do more than just per month. We’ve also got a sound science series that I think I just put out on Rumble because we play music clips and I don’t want to deal with the copyright stuff on all the other platforms. But it’s a really fun show. We get some known musicians talking about all of their favorites. And I got another new one coming out soon.

I’ll announce that on a live stream that I’m doing on March 17th. I’m gonna end up doing a six hour live stream. You’re invited, by the way, if you’re up at any, any point of it. It’s going to be from 12pm Eastern to about 6pm Eastern. So it’ll be the entire day for me, be for you. But you might be able to make it. And yeah, I think it’s going to be on a Monday. And on that show I’m going to go through my top 10 favorite conspiracies. I’ll have people jumping in and out, a lot of different kind of guests and I’ll also be announcing a new podcast series that, that’s coming out the week after that.

So yeah, if you’re around March 17, drop in on YouTube or rumble or any of the other places that we are forced to move to in case I get kicked off of YouTube. But it’ll, it’ll be fun. Be a six hour live stream. All right. I also do A lot of podcasting other than this. That’s@podcastio podcastio.org which I put down there. What do you know? And time enough podcast is the one where I talk about the Twilight Zone. We haven’t done the movie yet, but you know, we’ll get to it eventually. We’re following the vortex theory of doing the original show almost finished, jump all the way to the future, do the peel one, then go back and do Night Gallery and we end with the 80 zone.

So the movie, it’s gonna be a little while till we get to that, but yeah, okay. Stay away from packing peanuts. It’ll be your kryptonite. Ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings and the CIA? Go visit nasacomic.com NASA comic.com CIA Stanley Hey Kubrick put us on. That’s why we’re singing this song about nasocomic.com go visit nas. Com go visit NASA comic.com yeah go visit NASA. Oh nessercomic.com CIA’s biggest CR Stanley Kubrick put us on. That’s why we’re singing this song about NASA comic.com go visit NASA comic.com go visit NASA comic.com yeah go visit visit NASA comic.com never a straight answer is a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions.

Yeah. This is the perfect read for comic Kubrick or conspiracy fans of all ages. For more details visit NASA comic.com paranoid yeah, I scribbled my life away driven the right page willing to light your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real, the real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out Nuclear bomb distributed at war Rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I like my trees blow it off in the face.

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