➡ The Paranoid American podcast, which also publishes comics, has launched a new comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the moon landings. The comic is available on Kickstarter, where backers can choose from various rewards, including digital and print versions, variant covers, and exclusive merchandise. If the Kickstarter campaign is over, the comic can be purchased directly. The podcast also discusses Disney and Japanese culture, specifically Studio Ghibli films.
➡ This text discusses the collaboration between Disney and Studio Ghibli, a renowned Japanese animation studio. Disney, seeking prestige, distributed Ghibli’s films without altering them for American audiences. The text also explores cultural nuances in Ghibli’s films, such as the significance of names in the film “Spirited Away”. Despite some involvement from Disney, Ghibli maintained creative control over their films.
➡ After the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, the Beatles attempted to make a movie, which turned out to be a psychedelic disaster. There’s a rumor that the Beatles wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct a Lord of the Rings musical starring them, but Kubrick was too busy with other projects. The speaker is working on a comic that imagines what would have happened if Kubrick had agreed to make the movie. The speaker also discusses various other projects, including a podcast and a new comic available on Kickstarter.
➡ The text promotes a 40-page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions, available on nasacomic.com. It also advertises ‘paranoid propaganda packs’ from paranoidamerican.com, which include stickers about various conspiracy theories. The text also contains lyrics to a song, possibly related to the comic or the conspiracy theories.
➡ The text discusses the complexities of the Japanese language, particularly the use of kanji, hiragana, and katakana. It explains how kanji, the most difficult to learn, has specific meanings that can change based on the character used. Hiragana is simpler and used for Japanese words, while katakana is used for foreign or new words. The text also explores the concept of river gods in Japanese culture, suggesting that a new god is created whenever a new river forms, and these gods continue to exist even if the river dries up.
➡ The speaker discusses his personal connection with Spiderman due to a similarity in names. He also talks about his experiences with kanji, a system of Japanese writing, and how even young children in Japan have a better understanding of it than he does. The speaker also mentions the popularity of Kit Kat and KFC in Japan, and how these brands have successfully marketed themselves in the country. Lastly, he discusses the cultural differences in celebrating Christmas in Japan compared to the United States.
➡ A girl and her parents are moving to a new place, which her parents frame as an exciting adventure. On their journey, they take a detour to an abandoned amusement park. The girl has a strange feeling about the place, but her parents are intrigued and decide to explore. The story also touches on the concept of spirits in objects and places, a common belief in Japanese culture.
➡ A family on a road trip stops at an amusement park. The parents start eating food they find and turn into pigs when it gets dark. Their daughter then has to figure out how to turn them back into humans and escape the park. The park is filled with strange signs and symbols, and the girl encounters many odd and confusing situations.
➡ The text discusses the cultural differences between Japan and America, focusing on the honor system and public bathhouses in Japan. The speaker shares their experiences of trust and honesty in Japan, such as leaving money for vegetables at unmanned stands and leaving belongings unattended without fear of theft. They also discuss the concept of public bathhouses, which are common in Japan but unfamiliar to many Americans. The speaker explains that these bathhouses can be places for relaxation and socializing, but also have a darker side in some areas.
➡ The text discusses a complex journey in a spirit world, where a girl must find an old lady named Baba and get a job from her to return to the real world. She learns about the rules of the spirit world from a character named Haku, including the need to eat spirit food to stay visible. The story draws parallels to Alice in Wonderland, with similar elements like magical food and peculiar characters. The girl also encounters a spider-like creature who generates heat and energy for a bathhouse, and she learns about various cultural and supernatural aspects of this spirit world.
➡ A young girl enters a new dimension and starts working in a bathhouse, taking jobs from the local creatures. She quickly rises through the ranks, dealing with various challenges including cleaning a large, smelly monster. The bathhouse is run by a powerful woman who has a taste for finer things and employs a boy named Haku to do her bidding. The girl manages to reverse some of the negative effects in this world, turning pigs back into people.
➡ The text discusses a movie that combines elements of Japanese folklore and original ideas from the creator, Miyazaki. The movie, which seems to be a children’s fairy tale, includes a haunted amusement park, a magical spell, and a character transforming into a dragon. The movie also has an environmental message and a test that the main character must pass to save her parents. The text also discusses the differences between the original Japanese version and the English dubbed version, suggesting that the tone of the children’s voices in the Japanese version is more authentic.

Hey, thank you for watching listening to another episode of whatever you’re listening to. Paranoid American podcast, the cult Disney paranoid programming, sound Science. There’s a bunch of them, but whatever it is, I appreciate that you’re listening watching this right now. And if you really want to support Paranoid American, if you didn’t know this, in addition to being a podcast, we’ve actually been publishing comics since 2012. So over a decade, while I was still at Disney, has started this company to publish a little book called Time Samplers. And it’s exploded into 60 different titles at this point, and the biggest one just launched, at least at the time of recording this, but it’s at nasacomic.com stands for never a straight answer, and it’s about Stanley Kubrick directing the moon landings.

I just want to show you some of the cool kind of exclusive things you can get by backing this thing early. If you go to nasacomic.com, comma, it’ll automatically bring you to this Kickstarter page. And you can see bam. Hit our goal at the time of recording this 100%. So it’s definitely going to be made. So you’ll absolutely get a copy of this thing if you back it. If you’re listening to this in the future and this page isn’t here or brought you somewhere else, then likely you can just buy it right now so you don’t have to skip all this and just buy the damn thing.

But here’s a couple little previews of artwork. Here’s different variant covers that are for offered. This top left one, I actually have imprint. I got a couple of prototypes printed up just to make sure that it would look good. It looks great. Looks amazing. Full color gloss pages. It’s got a nice hefty weight to it because it’s 40 different pages of all unique art that you haven’t seen before. There’s also going to be a variant cover. There’s going to be a foil, hollow foil cover, and then there’s a little postcard print that anybody that gets a physical copy of the comic in any form, they’re going to end up getting this postcard size print here.

Here’s some different artwork samples from the three different artists that contributed to this book. And then here’s the important part, the rewards. So by backing this project, you’re going to get to pick some different kind of reward tier. The entry level one is this digital deluxe, which has the entire book in digital form. You’ll get a PDF. It’s also going to have an additional eight different pages that aren’t in any of the print versions just because they were maybe somewhere a little too spicy, maybe some were a slightly different art style. But I’m going to give all that the digital deluxe along with some wallpapers and some mp3 s and stuff.

If you want the print one that I was just holding up here, then the entry for that one is $15. With that, you’re going to get that little postcard print I mentioned. You’re going to get a trading card, you’re going to get a bookmark, and you’ll probably get some other stuff. Because I always throw in extra freebies and ask anyone that’s bought anything from paranoid american, I hook it up with lots of extras. If you want the variant cover, which is only available in this campaign, there’s a $19 tier for that. It also comes with an extra sticker.

If you want the holofoil, then that one is 29. These ones are going to be super limited. Like these won’t exist outside of this campaign for the next 30 days. So if you are listening to this in the future, sorry you missed out. You might be able to snag one in an upcoming campaign if there’s extras. But if you really want this hollow foil, and you should, you can get it right now for 29. And then we’ve got a couple other tiers after that. We’ve got a 55th anniversary special for $55 that has the main cover and the foil cover and a sticker sheet and some other goodies.

Here’s the best value. Basically, there’s a dollar 99 cosmic conspiracy tier, over 40% off of all the different things that are included. So this one’s going to come with the main cover, the variant cover, the hollow foil cover, three or four different sticker sheets. It’s going to come with sticks plus stickers. It has the trading card, a bookmark. It has a custom paranoid American. Room 237 keychain. And I think the highlight of this is it’s going to come with this custom embroidered Stanley Kubrick patch based on the Apollo Eleven design. And there’s a. Keep scrolling down, you can see all the other extra reward tiers.

All of the different items are going to be described in more detail. And I want to show you this patch right here, the three inch embroidered iron on patch. You can put it on your molex bag. You can put it on, you know, anything. Hats, backpacks. This is the first time we’ve ever done one of these custom patches. So I’m really excited about that. There’s also a custom fake moon landing playset that you can select as an add on when you go to check out. So speaking of, let’s say that you’re sold. You want to get a copy, you want to help support paranoid Americana.

If you haven’t used Kickstarter before, the easiest thing to do is you just click on this back, this project button on the page. It’s both at the very top of the screen and it’s at the top of the page. So you can click either one back, this project, and from here it’s going to be like a typical checkout. You’re going to select which of these different tiers you want. Again, I highly recommend this dollar 99 cosmic conspiracy combo. It’s going to have every single thing that the campaign has to offer that’s exclusive to this NASA book.

You click on that, you pick the country that you’re in, and then you just click on the pledge button. There’s one extra last step where it’s going to ask you if you want to do any add ons. If you want to throw in like a trading card pack or another keychain or anything else, you can get some huge discounts on the backlog of paranoid american comics. But let’s say you’re done with that. You click continue, and then finally, if you don’t already have a Kickstarter account, you’ll be prompted to make one. You can link it to Facebook.

The rest of the flow is just like any typical checkout online. So I really appreciate if you would take a look. Please just back the comic back nasacomic.com anyways, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Ask about Illuminati since the charting is it Disney mind control? Is this mkochete? Go Disney, go to shut on a star video. I go dance there as a bomb. So Pinocchio seems burn on pleasure island, but traffickers need to fall in mind. Captain Hooker, lost boy, Neverland saving kids from Peter pans to sons meaning survive the barracuda and that nobody needs no one.

No I never took another breath. Bird, prince, the angel of death has come. We go from meal to me I go this day, me hoping no more feel I cook this ask her back to the movie a co business teacher come to everybody a good business. Hello, welcome to the Occult Disney podcast where we are taking a world tour as Walt Disney distribution did to Japan with Studio Ghibli’s spirited away, or as we call it around here, Nochihiro. I think it’s a better sounding title. Hi, this is Matt here sounding like a frog. Sorry. Y’all feel for my classes yesterday who had to listen to me read a test to them in this voice.

Thomas. Paranoid Americans there. What’s up? I’m going to unofficially call all the Ghibli movies that we’re doing if we were to put them in a collection, it’s going to be called the Ghibli bits. Yeah, sure. That sounds about right to me. So, yeah, we were talking last week about, oh, do we do these? And for me, one. Yeah, in Japan we have to do these as popular, if not more so, than Disney films. In Japan, there’s a couple like Ghibli theme parks. Nothing like Disneyland size, but, you know, Ghibli museum to Ghibli theme park, all that sort of stuff.

Kids watch this. This played a lot in my house when my daughter was growing up. My mother in law and my wife are like terrified of this movie, but the kids kept watching it, so that was kind of fun. It is a little bit creepy. Which part? I think the format of this episode might be a little bit unique because now Matt’s sort of an expert on like, japanese cult, at least out of the two of us. Congratulations, you’re now the expert on like, all things Ghibli and japanese culture related and probably even anime. So I’ve got so many questions.

But the very first one, which I think is good to open this whole little episode up with, is how the hell did this become a good match for Disney? Like, there’s blood and there’s like weird. I mean, there is kidnapping and there is a kid. The Disney proxy, I guess is alive, but it still feels way out of character for Disney to have anything associated with and not through like touch tone or something. Explain it. Explain why this is even in the occult Disney list. I think a big part of it is Hail Miyazaki, who is basically the japanese Walt Disney.

So he started making films. I mean, he was animating in the seventies, but he started putting out these ghibli films in the early eighties. And I guess this is about ten or eleven films down the line. So there’s Kiki’s delivery service, my neighbor Totoro, if you’ve seen those, those are all big ones. And then Princess Mononoke really was the first anime to make a splash in like, art house theaters in the states. That’s the one I saw and I think that one was phenomenal. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. I think that one did not get an Oscar simply because they hadn’t started giving them yet for weird chop.

The 2001 Oscar went to Shrek for the first animated feature Oscar. Second year was spirited away, which came out in Japan the same year as Shrek. But since it came out America a year later, they get. They could, they put in the next Oscar year. So I did go see this in the theater. I was working in Maine at the time, and I saw the dubbed version, and that’s Disney put a lot of salt in here. John Laster, I think, was actually, like, in communication with Miyazaki somewhat. So he had a little bit of a. Not executive producer, but he gave notes for this movie.

He was like, more kidnapping. And they were like, fine, okay, more hugging, please. But, yeah, yeah. So this was kind of like Disney trying to be like, okay, let’s take this art house thing a little bit. They didn’t edit it much. This is the end of, you know, the nineties, when the Weinstein’s and Merrimack’s are taking foreign films and just chopping them up into ribbons and then putting those out into the states. So Disney was kind of championing this one a little bit as a, no, we’re not chopping this one up in a, you know, making it weirdly palatable for american audiences.

It’s just. It is what it is. So, so I guess prestige is what Disney’s looking for with this. This is kind of like a different art level than their normal movies. You know, even Pixar, it’s got a different feel to it, some blood. It’s just like a japanese version of how Pixar is to Disney. Like it’s. It’s like an extra wing or. Because it sounds like this is just strictly a distribution deal. Disney was just like, hey, we’ve already got movies and distribution channels set up with all these different retailers and theaters and yada yada. So you can just plug into that and then we take a cut.

Or is there like, actual more collaboration between Disney and Ghibli going on behind the scenes? A little bit of both. But mostly the first. They were pretty hands off with the Ghibli stuff. But, like, when I was doing some research for this, I was actually surprised how much some of the Disney people did just give notes for this film. Like, they did see cuts coming up and stuff. So I thought it was just a finished product and they took it and put it in theaters, but there was a little bit of back and forth. But Ghibli definitely got the final say on pretty much everything.

What’s the chance that we see or have there been Ghibli characters in a Kingdom Hearts game? Oh. Hmm. I don’t think there has been yet. I guess they’re probably. Next time they do a kingdom hearts, they’ll probably throw in Star wars or something. I guess that’s the plan, but, uh, I don’t know. Do you think Jim Weird’s far enough removed that it wouldn’t even be included in, like, the. The expansive world of kingdom hearts? Well, I mean, it could fit in, but there. There is, again, sort of this, you know, like, sanctity to the. To the Ghibli thing, especially the Miyazaki films.

Cause he runs off and wins oscars for most of these movies. So is he still alive? Yes, he’s. He’s retired, like eight times. I think he said he was going to retire after Mononoke, and then who’s, like, he was having friends over at his house or something, and there was like, a ten year old girl there. And for some reason that inspired him to. To make this movie or whatever. Ten year old girl. Every time I get out, they bring me back in. One of the difficult things here. And I’ll use Toy story actually, as the analogy, because you come into Toy Story and there’s a fair amount of, like, american culture there, right.

It helps to know who Mister Potato head is or what an Etch a sketch is. There’s also a lot of inventions by the filmmakers and toy Story and american audiences. We watch and we know what’s already something and what’s being created for the film. You know, we know Woody and Buzz didn’t exist before that. Spirited away is kind of the same thing for japanese culture. There’s a lot of things in here that, you know, japanese people would recognize from folk tales, things like that, but also a lot of Miyazaki creations in this film. So that is one difficult thing, watching it from the States, kind of knowing, like, what’s what.

And some of it’s very much in a gray area, too, because we’re talking about kami, you know, gods of places and things. So you just make one up for anything, really. And it fits in culturally, but it’s not something that’s pre established necessarily. So here’s an example of one of those that I. Hopefully I’m not jumping to the very end, but it seemed that a huge linchpin of this entire story hinged on the names of these characters being severed or modified in some way. And it had like, a magical spell over them, right? So the main girl’s actual name and some of this is going to be weird because it gets translated into English and then, like, I guess that some of the translation doesn’t work perfectly, but her name is Chihiro.

But once she transitions into the spirit world and she leaves the physical realm, I guess, or just the reality we live in, and she goes to this new dimension, they start calling her sen. And I had to look this up. Why the hell is her name sen all of a sudden if her name used to be Chihiro? And then. I’ll save the spoiler alert for a little bit later, but the boy sidekick, Haku, he also has this weird thing going on with his name, and she solves it at the very end. And I think you know what I’m talking about.

How much of that. Like, how much of the chihiro name and then the sen name, would people in Japan just, like, understand that? Versus. It’s like a puzzle to solve that gets revealed at the end. It might have to do with the kanji. Like, if you look at the kanji, there might be similarities, or we’re cutting the kanji in half, and then the sound changes. That’s exactly what it is. So the name Chihiro, I guess, has, like, two characters in kanji. One of them is Sen, and one of them is hero. But if you put them together, it’s Chihiro, not Sen hero, I guess.

But if you take off the hero part, which is what they literally do to the girl. So as she transitions into the spirit world, she gets this new name, which is just Sen. So they basically took the end of her name away from her. And that kind of signifies removing her physical power, like removing that part of her. And then the rest of the movie is sort of her having to make herself whole again. And when she makes herself whole again, she just gets the kanji of hero back as the suffix, and then she turns back into Chihiro in the physical realm again.

Do I have that loosely correct? That’s loosely correct, although I go by Matt, not Matthew. So I’ve tossed the, you know, for the most part, tossed the final three. Right you away. Your matt. Your name doesn’t turn into, like. Like mash. You know what I mean? It doesn’t change the phonetic quality to it. But in this case, hero turns into sen hero. Right. So, yeah, yeah. It’s not like her name turn they take with the hero, and their name is just like, which I guess makes sense because it’s more of like a gutter or just like a random noise.

Not like a name, but I don’t know. I will say, my japanese reading is not good, but that’s a pretty simple kanji, so I can recognize that one. And I’d usually recognize and think chi or she, you know, so I wouldn’t think Sen. But, yeah, there are alternate pronunciations, like, my daughter’s name is Hana, and there’s two different, completely different kanji you can choose for that name. So. Excuse me. Well, my wife went with the one we went with. It was the slightly more complicated one that’s a little more symmetrical, which is also the slightly less common one.

So kanji gets weird. Yeah. Like haku, for example. I don’t know his kanji, but I do know that haku, because I teach kids a lot. Haku is vomiting, you know, so I’m guessing his name is not vomit. And then it’s added with another kanji at the end. Right. So his full name is Kohaku, and it stands for the Kohaku river, which is the river that apparently she fell into was a kid. There’s a whole backstory to it, but, yeah, they call him Haku. And then I guess as soon as she figures out that his name is actually not just Kohaku, but his full name is Kohaku river.

So when she says, oh, my God, you’re Kohaku river, then he also gets to kind of return to the physical realm, or at least he, like, levels up somehow. It’s interesting. Like, it breaks over him. I. You know, I guess it’s. He’s not a boy. He’s the commie of the river, right. He’s literally the river. Like, he is the embodiment of the river, but the river has since dried up, so he can’t actually exist in the physical world. But he exists as, like, an entity still, even though. Which is also kind of a weird concept. Right.

So that if, like, let’s say in japanese culture, a new river is naturally formed because, I don’t know, a boulder or, like, an avalanche or something happens and a new river is formed. In theory, does that mean a new God has just been created to, like, represent that new river? Yes. So someone would go and build a little shrine next to it somewhere on that new river, too, and then the river goes away, but that God still technically exists. So on an infinite timeline, there’s an infinite number of river gods in Japan as they. A new river gets added, a new river goes away, and the river gets out of.

But the gods never go away, so they just keep building up over time. Yeah. Like, a lot of shrines are actually rebuilt a lot. When you see, you go to a shrine like this. Shrines, like 1000 years old. They might have rebuilt it seven times to the same specifications, but technically, I guess that would. I don’t know if that still enshrines the same God or we’re looking at God now. Yeah, I guess it’s a. It’s a good question. But in the case of a river, like, it’s like, imagine if it’s not just the same river drying up and then refilling, but literally, like, a brand new waterway gets created through some natural disaster or what have you.

Like, an actual new river. So there could just be. They could just be printing river gods out in Japan. Like, there seems like a loophole here that I might have discovered. Yeah. Mountains as well. Of course, it takes much longer for mountains to form and fall, but same thing there. Right? What about man made lakes? Man made lakes, I bet someone enshrines is. Yeah. Yeah. Is that all? So if you just make a shrine to yourself, can you technically become a God in Japan or is there more to it than that? Yeah, in the east, everybody’s a God.

Isn’t that. Namaste. I recognize the God in you. I mean, that’s India. But, you know, like, I don’t know. I feel like there’s different levels here. If you say namaste to somebody, sure, they get to be a God. But if a freaking japanese village builds a temple to you and worships it and you didn’t ask them to, I feel like we’re talking two different classes of gods here. Like, all things are not. There’s nosebleed and there’s backstage. You know what I mean? Right, right. So. But yeah, yeah, you’ll find just these tiny little shrines because sometimes, like you say, it’s a boulder move, there’s a new little river, and someone’s like, oh, I need to put, like, a tiny shrine here.

I mean, or you don’t want to get sent into the spirit realm by offending the new river God without putting some kind of shrine. No, not at all. I should also turn the name Kohaku is well known. Again, it’s probably different kanji, but that’s the big New Year’s musical program in Japan. National television will have a. It’s like four and a half hours long, and it’s supposed to be all the female singers versus the men’s singers. It’s the, like, black and red music contest. So. So does that have the. The kanji component of vomit inside the way that that is spelled as well? Or am I not seeing the way that that works? I’m not finding the kanji for his name, but I’m guessing it’s probably different.

And I’m just familiar with hearing that word. It’s actually all kids want to talk about. Yeah. Haku is actually written in katakana, meaning it has no actual meaning. Fun. Like, it doesn’t have. I’m just looking at the wiki here, and it has no kanji. So once you put it in his name, it has. It has the kanji. But that’s a different kanji. Sorry. So that’s a different kanji. So his name does not actually mean vomit. That’s just why here. Because, again, I teach kids, if I hear people, haku, haku, let him go to the toilet. You know, etymology in Japan means that each character or sound or what have you doesn’t necessarily have some sort of, like, a meaning to the root.

Like, some of them are just noises to differentiate or what. Yeah. There’s three kinds of writing. There is kanji. They’re the chinese characters, the ones that are really hard to learn. Those have very specific meanings. And even if it’s the same one, if it’s a different kanji, the meaning might be completely different. Those are the ones that everyone got tattoos of in the nineties, right? Correct. Yeah. Myself included. Did you get a literate one, or does it make sense? Uh, it one. The one on top says music, and the one on bottom says talent. So I get, like.

And everyone that I’ve had check is like, yeah, those pretty much mean that. Like, it doesn’t really mean anything together, but, like, the things mean the things. Okay. That’s better than, you know, having, like, butterfly whore or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, there’s, there’s the kanji, and then, you know, kids don’t know kanji. It’s too complicated to read the newspaper. You need to know, like, 2000. Is this, like, cursive? Like, is it good? Is it dying out? Or is kanji there to stay? Oh, no, kanji is here to stay, which might not be great, actually, because it’s really difficult, but, yeah, so then there’s hiragana.

These are simplified symbols. I know hiragana pretty well. That is for japanese words. So if you’re reading a japanese children’s book, it’s either going to just be in hiragana or they’ll have the kanji. And just above the kanji, the white, the hiragana. So a kid can read it without knowing the kanji. What I just saw Haku written in was called katakana, which is for foreign words, new words, like made up words. So that means his name, according to what I’m looking at here, doesn’t have any particular meaning. It is just a chopped out part of his complete name.

Okay, so, like, the word frazzledrip, that would basically be the latter of those, because it’s a new word that didn’t exist already. Right. So if you were writing that into your article in Japan, you would do that in katakana, because there’s just no way you could do that with. Correct. You couldn’t take kanji that, like, sound like those things and put them together. Interesting. Okay. I wonder how many japanese articles include that word. And if. And are those three the only options you’ve got? Like, if you don’t know those three, you’re illiterate when it comes to japanese writing.

Yes, if you don’t know kanji. Like, for me, I know some kanji, but not that many. So if I’m going to read stuff in Japanese, I’m going to focus on those hiragana and katakana parts, especially katakana, because that might be straight up English, but it’s funny, sometimes you find yourself reading it out loud and it like coffee. You’re like, kahi. Kahi. What is that? Ka he? Cause that’s what the symbols actually say. Because there’s still japanese sounds, and we have lots of sounds in English that they don’t have. And so you put together the japanese sounds, but then phonetically, you can figure out what the english word is supposed to be from it.

Yeah. Like, in Japan, everyone calls me mato. They don’t call me matt because this japanese sounds would be mato. So is that offensive to you? No, that’s fine. That’s why when I. When I asked for the video game username, I always put a motto. So. So, yeah. And all video games, it’s mato. Um, that’s fine. Yeah. Actually, watching this movie, I thought it was funny because my family name is. I mean, people usually can’t pronounce. In America, it’s a comma juice. But those are actually all japanese sounds. The old man that’s in the basement of the bathhouse in this, with many arms or whatever, I actually noticed that his name is comma g without the last sound of my name.

It’s basically my family name without the last sound. Um, so you have a personal connection with us now with the Spider man? Yeah, yeah. I have a personal connection with the Spider man. Yeah. No, um, when I first met my wife, though, that, yeah, we were trying to, like, jokingly find kanji that fit my name. And, uh, like. Like, mashu is how you say Matthew. So we were like, oh, you can take kanji that makes that mean really smelly, like mashu. So. So I was like, oh, if I ever have to use kanji, I’ll use that.

And then, um, I think she explained colleges, when we found the funny meaning was, like, having a butt problem or something. That’s how she explained it. Because English is not our first language. No, I’m not going to forget that one. That one’s going to come into, uh. That’ll be useful at some point, I’m sure. Yeah. So I can really butt stuff, Matt. No, no, no, Matt. It’s, um, having a butt problem. Really smelly. Because you do the family name first. Right? So. So I can. I can take, if I want, to transliterate the kanji, I can do that.

I mean, there’s other things you can choose, too, of course, if I don’t want to insult myself horribly. But of course you want to do that one interesting thing, because I was thinking, when basically she takes your name and then you don’t remember your name, which is kind of like our Social Security system in a way. Right? Because isn’t like, when you’re born, the all caps version of your name is. Is like the government owns it or whatever. Is that how it works? Yeah. Or that you can look up your Social Security number on some, like, open trade market and see how much your Social Security number is worth.

Or that some people even claim that that is a bank account number and that if you can figure out what bank it’s held at, you could just go and read. I don’t think any of that is true, but those things come up very often in, like, conspiracy theory 101, especially when you get into the sovereign citizen world of things where you’re never driving, always traveling. Yeah. To be clear, I really don’t think spirited away was going for that. That just, you know, came to mind as I was watching. I have all theories that I’m absolutely positive that spirit away has, like, no intention of, but I guess that there’s a word that I’ve learned recently, it’s just.

It’s synchro mysticism, and it’s just, it also means that it doesn’t matter if the people making the thing had anything to do with all of the synchro magical things that come from it. So, in other words, it’s just like a free ticket to speculate. So that’s what we’re going to do. Yeah. No, no. And some of them might be more of a hit than you think, you know, so that happens. Wire is dead, man. That’s synchronous. The system right there in a nutshell. But teaching kids when I’m. When they’re writing essays or ever. Now we’re in, like, sorry, now we’re in, like, junior high, high school students, often when they write a company name or the name of a famous person, they’ll do it in all caps, which I’ll, you know, usually try and correct that.

But there is a weird thing when you see a proper name in English in Japan, a lot of times it’s all caps. So I thought that was kind of. Kind of weird. So I was going to ask you, what age or grade level are kids when they basically, like, have a firm grasp of kanji? I’m going to say somewhere in the middle of junior high, probably. So 8th grade ish, they should be getting pretty good at it. I mean, some kanji are considered harder than others. I’ve been told, I’ve seen the kanji, so it does look difficult.

But I’ve been told a bara, meaning rose, is the most difficult kanji to write. So this mean that a typical 8th grader in Japan could just run circles around you when it came to kanji? Easily a fourth grader could run circles around me. A first grader, maybe not. I might know more kanji than a first grader. Know how to pick your fights. It was like Kramer in karate school, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Cartman trying to join the special Olympics. Of course, he got owned, didn’t he? So he did, yeah. Let’s go through a few of your observation slash questions, and I’ll see if they do fit into the japanese vibe or not.

Okay, yeah. I’ve got some chronological, sort of, as the movie goes. So if you got notes as we get into the different sections, feel free to take over, too. So it starts out, and the first thing I notice is there’s a Kit Kat bar. And I do know that Kitkat is somewhat famous in Japan for having a bunch of weird kit Kat flavors that don’t make it over here. But it was just interesting that in 2001 or even earlier, as they were working on it, that Kit Kat, was that a paid sponsor? Is it just a really big thing? Was that a way to say, hey, Americans, we’re just like you? We hydrogenated soybean oil just like you guys? Look, here’s proof.

Um, corporations are really good sometimes really good at duping the Japanese. Uh, Kit Kat just made it seem like, oh, when you go to a souvenir shop, I mean, if you go to most souvenirs placed in Japan, there’s going to be some weird kit kat in a large box that you’re going to buy and give to somebody else. So it’s just like. So no one’s actually eating the green tea kit kats in Japan? Uh, like, I’ve eaten a ton of those. Those are great, by the way. Dark chocolate ones. Those are good. No? Let’s say. So in two weeks, we’re taking a trip to my daughter’s birthday thing.

She wants to get her hair straightened out because she’s japanese. So we’re taking a trip overnight. I’ll probably get some omiyagi. We say omiyage. It’s a souvenir. Maybe I’ll get the Kit Kat, I don’t know. And then I’ll take it to the office. They’ll put it in the company, the back room table, and everyone takes one or two, so they eat them. It’s just. But it’s usually like a communal, like, take it to work, take it to school sort of thing. Okay, so get. So Kitkat, I think, is Mars has a stronghold worldwide, and here’s proof of it, that they make an entrance in the very opening scene of this.

There’s also, real quick, have we discussed KFC before? Kentucky fried chicken in Japan. Remind me, what’s. What’s the link? They have fully duped in Japan. When it’s Christmas, you have to eat fried chicken, which is because in the eighties, KFC did an ad campaign, Japan, just like they had the japanese colonel in a, you know, a Santa suit, blah, blah. And it was so the ad campaign was so successful. Now, like, you have to book your Kentucky chicken in advance if you want it, like, you know, ordered in, like, November for Christmas. Or maybe you get some grocery stores.

It’s not the real one. It’s not Kentucky. I don’t get the Kentucky because I think Kentucky fried chicken is terrible. But. And I sometimes have to hold my tongue about that in Japan. Like, don’t eat that for Christmas. That’s insane. But, yeah, yeah, you eat fried chicken in Japan for Christmas. Because KFC had such a successful ad campaign, I like to think that there’s a reality that we’re all working towards where everybody has a national cuisine that another nation mistakenly eats for Christmas. So you’ve got, like, jewish people in the state classically go for chinese cuisine, right? Japanese people go for kentuckian cuisine.

Maybe we’ll just call that american cuisine. But I’m sure that there’s a bunch of other weird ones that I guess if you just put the right advertising dollars in the right spot and then you just link it. Because is Christmas celebrated at the same capacity in Japan, or is it just like, a fun novelty thing? Fun novelty thing. We don’t even get the day off. I’ve worked most christmases in the past 15 years, so, I mean, it makes sense that you would have an american corporation that identifies, like, oh, that. Like, they don’t celebrate a thing over there.

We can tell them, like, that’s art. Like, we invented Christmas. KFC invented Christmas. We talk about the colonel is Santa Claus. Haven’t you ever noticed that he just kind of, like, trims his beard in the summer, and then let’s. Well, Coca Cola invented American Christmas, right? So it’s not like it hasn’t happened in the States. Although currently the KFC ad campaigns in Japan are great because they’ve cast a young japanese man as the colonel. So now we have, like, sexy colonel, you know? Now you’re telling me on it again, we might go, yeah, the movie. When we see the Kit Kat bar, I immediately was like, oh, my God.

This takes me back to almost her age. Because they were driving what looked like a Toyota Honda. It had, like, that boxy look that was pretty big in, like, the late eighties, early nineties, before things got all, like, smooth. She’s in the back, the Kit Kat bar is going, and they’re moving. And the. The parents kind of mention this thing to her. Cause she’s, like, complaining about having a change and losing her friends and whatever, and they’re like, oh, no, no. Like, it’s fun. They’re emphasizing this. It’s fun moving to a new place. It’s an adventure.

And, like, you know, that. That’s just typical NLP reframing that they’re throwing on this girl. But it also made me think that, like, a. It’s. I think it is true. It is an adventure. But also, there’s some people that grow up as kids that never move, even one time. And then there’s. They grow up and they move, like, every couple years. Especially a lot of military brats that I knew, you know what I mean? And that alone seems kind of like an interesting concept that some people are completely acclimated to moving. You just mentioned that. What? You never moved when you were growing up, which is also kind of a weird thing.

Yeah. First I moved out, was going to university. So that’s, I mean, it’s. That’s weird, but only because I had to move from New York to Florida. So I had like, one big one and then a bunch of little ones within Florida. But that was kind of an interesting experience to go through when I was like seven or eight of just like leaving everything I knew, mountains and trees and friends, and then just like flat, humid. You know what I mean? And like, weird, weird people. Like, I was no longer with my people once I went to South Florida, at least.

So I don’t know that those different things are interesting little anomalies that this movie made me think of. And so they’re driving to someplace, and then the dad decides to take a shortcut. Classic dad thing. I guess that goes beyond all cultural barriers. Is it like dads are always like, I know a shortcut. And the mom’s like, no, don’t. Don’t do that. So maybe that’s just ingrained in us. And the girl has, like, some really weird prem. There’s two really creepy foreshadowing things that kind of happen here. One of them doesn’t. I don’t think it ever resolves to something, but they, like, plant the seed because she’s like, mom, mom, my flowers are dying because she’s got, like, these pink lilies in her hand.

They keep going back to that and they keep showing flowers and different segues in this movie, but the mom says, like, oh, honey, I told you not to smother them like that. Like, that’s why they’re dying. And I just feels like such a very specific foreshadowing. Like she’s going to smother something and it’s going to die. Although that doesn’t really ever happen in the movie, does it? Um, no, I don’t believe so, yeah. She dies in her presence is like a little slug creature that was living inside of Haku’s body, I guess, and, like, causing him to bleed internally and was like, controlling, like a mind control black goo type substance.

More black goo. I mean, it’s there, right? I’m not. That’s not even a stretch. It’s a literally black goo that is like, controlling his mind and doing, like, internal damage. And they use magic to summon it out of them. And she squishes it, I guess. And then she’s told by the spider dude Kamiji that she needs to, like, wash her foot off before it seeps into her skin, which sounds like it could be a whole nother way. Like, is this like a symbiote? Is this like a venom symbiote situation? It sort of feels like it. They make a sequel.

Tom Hardy for spirited way. Yeah. So they’re driving, the dad takes a shortcut, and as they drive by, they see these cinder blocks, which I guess were from an old house or an old temple or something. And that’s when the mom kind of just casually drops like, oh, yeah. Some people believe that spirits still live in there, I guess. Are they talking about each individual cinder block gets its own little mini spirit? Or how does that work? I think they mean the house one. You will find, you know, aging population and declining population. You’ll find a lot of abandoned houses, especially as you go into the countryside.

Also, people generally do not move into a house in Japan because, yes, your house has a spirit. So if you move into a house, the previous family spirit is still there. So in Japan, it’s more like you would have tear down the house and then build a new one. Okay. So some of the Ghibli magic starts to get added at this point because the reason I ask that is that as they drive by, there’s all these cinder blocks. It’s not like there’s this one ghost that’s representing. That’s coming from all these cinder blocks that each little one has, like a little weird creature.

Like, some are different sizes and colors and it reminds me of the little, like, mushroom dudes from the mononoke. They just, like, come out of the forest. They just happen to, like, live everywhere. I’m sure they’ve got a real name that I don’t know, the little, like, white dudes that click. But it almost felt like that was an addition here of that each little pebble or each little block was like a house for another little tiny creature. But yeah, yeah, give yourself headaches about those gods because, yeah, every little thing is going to have some kind of God.

You know, you don’t damage your stuff because that’s, you know, damaging it’s divinity. Like, I don’t take my microphone and throw it on the ground. And rivers to break your brain more. Just the little trickling stream. They’ll call that a river in Japan. Like, there’s a basically what looks like a drainage, not pipe, but, you know, concrete, whatever thing. And that people refer to that as a river. If you, like, accidentally nick an underground sort of like pipe, and all of a sudden there’s a God that represents the mistake you made. Right, right. So, of course these gods at the bathhouse can be grumpy, you know? And that’s why there’s an endless amount of them coming in and out, because there are so, so many gods.

The gods outnumber us. Making a lot of sense now because. So, okay, so they, they go, they drive by, and then the dad on this shortcut, they come to a kind of a dead end. There’s like a ballast there that’s preventing them from going any further. And they walk through and it looks like a weird train station. It’s got like these gothic cathedral ceilings and stuff with these, like, large arches and everything. But then the dad and the mom in a very self aware for its own time period, because this is 2000. 2001. They’re like, oh, this is an abandoned amusement park that was built in the nineties and was like, they were building these things all over the place.

But then the economy crashed and no one could actually run these things anymore, so they became abandoned, which is weird, because if they said it was happening during the nineties, what are they saying? Like 92, 93? So the movie was written about something that had just happened, like, four or five years prior. By the time that they actually publish it and it gets out, it’s a very, very specific moment in time, considering that it was written about something that happened within the decade that the movie came out. Yeah, that’s the, you know, the japanese bubble of the eighties, where just, I mean, they’re, you know, making movies about that.

Gung ho. There’s a movie about that sort of thing. But yeah, yeah, Japan was just loaded with cash. The bubble burst. So in the. In the nineties, and when I first came in 2004, you know, they were still kind of like, la, la, la. Everything’s fine now. The economy is starting to actually kind of like, tank it a bit. So we’ll see. What was the bubble bursting like? What, what was making them flush with money in the eighties nineties? Well, after the war, they did so much production and stuff. I mean, people working twelve hour days, six days a week, which was the norm through the eighties, so everyone was overworking themselves at death, and it temporarily turbocharged the economy.

But you can’t do that forever. Also, people, since they’re working six hour day or six hour weeks, six day weeks, 12 hours or whatever a day, 60 hours weeks, 70 hours weeks. Nobody’s having kids. So the population is getting older and smaller now. Okay? So they come to this abandoned park, which apparently they’re all over the place. And the girl has, like, this insane premonition where, like, she’s just like, no, we can’t go here. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. And the mom and the dad, it’s this weird role reversal, right? Usually it’s like the kid that’s like, no, let’s stop.

I want to go to this amusement park. No, I want to go and explore. And the mom and dad should be like, no, we have to get somewhere. We’re moving. The car is full of crap. I’ve been driving for, you know, hours and hours, but instead they’re like, oh, let’s go and explore and do this. So what did you think about her basically knowing something bad was going to happen? Such an odd, specific feeling to have about a random passage. I mean, a lot of ten year olds, if they see something new and weird, they’re going to have that reaction.

So I could see her kind of having this reaction here, you know, hey, as foreigners, especially, a couple of my co workers, like, you know, bigger and taller than me, and then sometimes they terrify the kids. Just, you know, I have a bad feeling about this weird foreigner guy. So they they enter the theme park, and she does go with them because I guess she was scared to stay in the car behind with them. And as soon as they walk in, uh, at least what I noticed the first thing is this huge all seeing eye on the side of the building.

Like, it’s the biggest sign inside. Like, I guess if you’re walking into Disney World, uh, in Orlando, and you see Main Street USA, and you see, like, the ice cream shop and, like, the continental whatever, like, all the the signs that are plastered up and down the streets, it’s sort of the japanese version of that, main Street USA. I don’t know what you would call it, you know, Kanji Japan or whatever. But the biggest sign that they focus on and then they pan down is this huge all seeing eye. And it had all these kanji characters in it.

And because we’re living in the freaking future now, I could take a screenshot of the movie and paste it in the chat GPT and it would say, oh, that’s the kanji character for this. Here’s what it means. Here’s the context, like, everything. And I can even put, like, the entire screenshot, and it would read all the signs and tell me what all the different words meant. So none of them made any sense to me in the movie because the big all seeing eye sign that we see, it says salt. And then under the eye that says salt in the middle, there’s a huge sign that just says I.

And then under that there’s a sign that says something like a thousand eyes. I’m like, what the hell? Does any of this. Why is there a huge eyeball sign that says salt and then a thousand eyes? What does any of that have? Are they just random characters they just threw in there? Aesthetically, the salt might have something to do with touting, like, the bath water, because you’ll often find signs that onsens hot springs like that talks about the chemical makeup of the water in that area. So they actually might be touting like, a certain kind of salt is in this water, which is good for your skin or something, just as a conjecture.

So here’s all of the descriptions, which may or may not have been totally accurate. But the biggest sign said salt in the middle, inside the iris of the actual eyeball. And then under that it said had a kanji character, which either means eye or look. The next sign that was right under that also had a big letter that said I, a sign that said eye strain or fatigue. Another one that said beautiful and exceptional, 3000 eyes, overextended route. And then another tiny little sign that said Buddha arrives. So, I mean, it’s just like a, like a smathering of random stuff, or is there a theme there that I wasn’t picking up on? I think they might be suggesting that the chemical makeup of their water is nice enough that it will make you more beautiful, it will heal your fatigue, and you will become great again.

I’m thinking that’s kind of what saying, because it will translate weird. I should read my fort. The fortune I have in my. If I haven’t done it before, I have my weird fortune and my, in my wallet that I, from, like 20 years ago that I keep because it’s just so weird. It’s like, transliterated, like twice. So, yes, I used to love, there’s, there was a website, I know it wasn’t japanese. It was mostly chinese, but it was called Engrish. Oh, yeah, I know that. Yeah, that was one of the funnest ones. And an awful lot of it is japanese, by the way.

So great shirts, man. Like, and I think, like, so let me ask you that. If someone’s wearing, like, this crazy, offensive shirt, hey, where the hell did that shirt come from? Was like, are they making that knowing that it’s a hilarious, like, mistranslation and that people can get away with wearing it because it’s like a hilarious. Or is it unironic? Are they, like, accidentally using the worst phrases ever, like hard r’s and, like, f words and all kinds of weird things. Like, is everyone in on it? It’s just like kanji on a shirt’s cool in the states, right? English on a shirt, it’s cool in Japan.

And hey, go fuck yourself, baby on the shirt. They don’t necessarily. You might see a like 65 year old woman wearing that shirt. And I’m pretty sure she’s not being ironic. My daughter has a few of these shirts where it’s like just like one word that, like, doesn’t make sense out of context. You know, like sincerity. It’s like, what? Or, you know, what are some truly bizarre ones I’ve seen on shirts? You know, sanctity, you know, things like, just weird things. Like, why does the shirt even say that doesn’t make sense. Well, here’s another example of just like a random word that didn’t make sense to me.

The bathhouse that. That she ends up going to, right, that Sen goes to, it has the word oil all over the place. Or the kanji for oil. Like, are they bathing in oil again? That might be a chemical makeup thing. I wonder if it has something to do with the geothermal thing because the hot springs are usually based around like, you know, volcanic deposits or shoots or whatever. Whatever that how that works. Okay, so there might have been some theming that I just wasn’t picking up on, but so before they get to the bathhouse, the first really big moment happens in the movie.

I guess it’s like the defining moment is that after they venture, the parents smell food and actually, can I. Let me rewind two minutes. When you were looking to I culturally, and they have a specific shot for this. Probably whats more important is they cross a little trickle of water, which, like I said, is a river in Japan. And that is culturally the threshold into the spirit world for Japanese. Okay. I didnt even notice the little trickle that they walked over. Im sure I saw it, but it didnt register as anything significant. So I guess just them crossing over, that tiny little trickle that had more importance than the parents finding this, like magical food.

I guess that’s what triggered the magical food. Like one of those video games when you walk through that, that freaking door. And like the bad guys just spawn immediately. So they walk in a little trickle of water. And now the demons are spawned inside the level. Yeah, the Yokai. They can be good or bad. That is thing. Demons is not an incorrect word to put on it, but you have to take in the very old form of the word where there are good demons and bad demonstration daemons or whatever. So and so her parents, there’s all kinds of weird rules that I don’t necessarily understand.

You just have to, like, accept it when it comes. And I don’t know if that’s japanese or if that’s ghibli. But, like, for example, the parents, they find this food and there’s no one around and they’re, like, looking for people and they’re basically like, oh, well, we’ve got money. Like, they literally say, it doesn’t matter, we’ve got money. That’ll fix this problem. Paraphrasing a little bit of, like, if we can just eat this and if someone comes out and they’re upset at us, whatever, whatever, they’ll charge it to the card, you know, like, we, like, we’re hungry enough, we’re just gonna eat this food.

They start eating. The girl goes and explores, and when she comes back to see her parents because apparently if it gets dark or, like, after the sun sets, then the magic comes out. I’m not really sure if that’s a japanese or Ghibli thing. And then that happens. The sun sets, it gets dark, and when she finds her parents again, they’ve transformed these huge pigs that can’t stop eating, and they just keep eating all the food. And the essential premise of the movie from that point forward is she needs to save her parents, convert them back into humans, and get the heck out of here.

But as soon as they turn into these pigs, I’m just like, there’s no going back from that. There’s like, this is. This is over. You know, this is done. So for the owner family, it’s not the case. Spoiler alert. How much of that is japanese and how much of it is Ghibli? Like, all of it. Well, one, the parents are mildly dumb, but the honor system is weirdly well and strong in Japan. You’re not going to stop and find a gigantic feast lying on the table in an abandoned park. Maybe you don’t want to eat that.

That is stupid. But there’s, like, vegetable stands or there’s no people there and there’s just a bucket and you take the vegetables and leave the money. A lot of Saturdays during my lunch break, I walk by this. It’s like a bookstore. And there’s the main bookstore, the cafe, and then three doors down. Not to reference that band or anything, but it is a literal three doors down is a small used bookstore slash cd store. So I’ll go there on my lunch break sometimes get, like, really cheap cds of, you know, weird crazy stuff. I got the Beverly Hills, Billy’s 1965 album last time.

Not a soundtrack. It’s them singing the songs in character. Anyway, there’s nobody at the counter there. There’s just a sign saying, go to the other store to buy your stuff. So you. I could easily just, like, you know, grab and just. No one does that in Japan. Pretty much. No, especially not in the countryside. It doesn’t sound real. Like, I feel like you’re lying to me or you just don’t know. Like, you just don’t understand how Japan really works just because in my american perspective, like, it just doesn’t exist. There’s. There’s no honor system, you know, I was once a week or not more than once a week.

Sometimes I was walking around at, like, 1030 at night last night with a Gibson guitar on my back, so I wouldn’t do that in America. Yeah, that’s. That’s crazy. Maybe one day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no, it is crazy. You can’t even park your car somewhere that’s, like, slightly not a great area. Lock all the doors. Like, put tint on, have a little sticker that’s like, please don’t, Ruhdev. Like, someone will still smash into your car and steal all of your stuff. So I guess that’s not the same thing in Japan. Yeah. I still remember when my dad and I went to see the movie city slickers.

That’s when we came out and had no radio. No more, you know, in the car. But, no, no, Japan just. It’s. It is weird like that. Like, I remember I first came to Japan, I thought it was weird that someone would, like, leave their phone or whatever on, like, at the mall food court. You know, they go to get more water. Somebody just, like, leave their phone or whatever I like on the table, and they come back and it’s still there because no one’s going to take it, so. Okay, so the little trick, they’re not. They’re not.

They’re not thieves. Let me put it that way. The parents are not committing the sin of thievery. They are planning to pay for it. That in Japan, what they’re doing is legit. The gluttony part is there is their problem. Right. But the gluttony doesn’t set in until they become pigs, which feels like entrapment in a way. Like, you can’t magically turn somebody into a pig as they’re eating and then be like, oh, what a pig? Like, I don’t know. That’s kind of a. Like a self fulfilling prophecy. Like I said in the west, aren’t these fairy rules? When you eat the food of the fairy world, you become part of the fairy world.

That’s kind of rules here, I guess so. A little bit, yeah. It just. It’s weird that they were willing to pay. The honor system is prevalent in Japan, or at least it’s, like, a knowledge thing, and that it wasn’t like they were gonna show up and eat food and, like, dine and dash. Like they were. They were ready to pay for it. But throughout the movie, when the girl inquires about her parents and one of the bars which we’ll get into on this, too, I don’t. I have to understand the different. The baba and the zomi bar, whatever, but they basically say, oh, your parents got what they deserved.

So I don’t understand. What did they do that was so wrong? Just being dumb, I guess. I mean, the crime of being stupid, I guess all. Yes, the crime. Being stupid, I think, actually is pretty much correct. So here’s the. So, okay, parents turn into pigs. It gets dark. She tries to get back to the car, thinking, like, let’s get out of this weird, you know, amusement park world. And that’s where that little trickle that, I guess you said it was the threshold for them entering this weird spirit world that’s turned into a full blown massive river that she can’t get across.

So now she’s trapped on this island, essentially, with a bathhouse and has to go and work at a bathhouse in order to escape the island. Oh, this is the part where I should turn. I was saying, oh, maybe it’s over a volcanic deposit, which would be an onsen there. The other one is, if it’s just a public bathhouse, it’s not necessarily the nice volcanic water. It’s just, you know, people 50 years ago didn’t necessarily have a home bath, and that. That actually what is called a sento. So, like. Like, the first two, you know, sento chihiro is the name of the movie.

So, in Japanese. Okay. I mean, this. This is the perfect time. You can explain this aspect of it to me, too, because, again, it’s kind of a pun. It’s also. It kind of means bathhouse chihiro at the same time that it’s like Sen is chihiro. It has a double meaning. I like that. I get it. I’m trying to understand a bathhouse in general, because I guess I’ve always known about this concept of, like, natural baths and, like, public bathhouses, but as an american best country, in the world. By the way, I never grew up in a place that didn’t have a bath attached to the house, like a private bathroom that you locked the door one person in at a time kind of situation.

So there’s two ideas of a bathhouse that I’ve learned about. One of them is, like, I guess, the classic, ancient version, bathhouses and all sorts of, like, Japan included, where maybe everyone didn’t have hot water or running water at all. So there’d be, like, a communal bath area. But then there’s also, like, the, like, the sexual bathhouse connotation. Are those the same thing? And some places just made it dirty? Or, like, is. Does that exist in Japan too? Like, do you have to. If you just go to a bathhouse, you have to make sure you’re not going to, like, the wrong kind of bathhouse.

Or are they totally separated? It’s pretty clear where you are. At the end of March, we took a little holiday and went to one of these onsen towns. The one in. This is a very fanciful version of a real bathhouse town. But you’ll find these in the mountains especially. So we stayed, you know, there’s, like, about 15 rather large hotels with baths in them, with the volcanic water. We stayed at one of those. And we’re walking around at night and we walked to a different street. And, you know, suddenly I realized, hey, we’re surrounded by a bunch of whores.

So this is the other part of the bathhouse town. Okay, so it is the same thing. It’s just that there was, like, a natural evolution. Like, there’s g movies and there’s x movies and everything. My company. My company had a overnight, like, you know, company dinner thing. Actually, I think it was the same town, but it was a bigger, more expensive one. Maybe looked a little closer on this movie, but, yeah, I remember a lot of the middle aged men disappearing after the dinner because they were out with the women of the night in the weirder parts of town, like, two streets over.

Is that more socially acceptable, like, universally in the adult world there? Yeah, I guess. It’s like, don’t tell your wife sort of stuff. I don’t know. I haven’t taken that route myself, I will say that. But I’ve been to the bathhouses plenty. Most Mondays, I’ll take a hike out, and I’ll just walk out to one of these onsens and do that, do the sauna, all that, and then come home. And that’s kind of my day, actually. It sounds interesting. It’s such a foreign concept to me, of, I mean, I have gone to a public pool before.

I didn’t have a pool growing up, so I understand that idea. But it’s like, yeah, it would be weird. It’s just such a weird thing. Like, I’m gonna go and soak in a big hop, you know, tub of water with a bunch of other strangers or just with the rest of the people in my hoa, which is even weirder than strangers, I would think. No, my, when I first started podcasting, I was with my buddy Luke, who we work at the same company, and we would meet physically. We’d hike halfway up the mountain, record a podcast, like, at an old temple, like, in the middle of the forest, go to the onsen, run around naked, and then record another podcast of the same temple on the way back down.

So, okay, so there’s more transition stuff in this aspect. So, like, as she’s getting, making her way to the bathhouse, and I guess I might miss some of these elements here, but she’s basically told if you want to save your parents, you have to go to the bathhouse, and you have to find Baba, who’s this old lady, and she’s got a more official name than that, but everyone calls her Baba for sure. Oh, Baba. Oh is just honorific, basically. Like, great grandmother is basically not great as in, like, you know, like, like, not as in your grandmother’s mother, but she’s not so great to me.

So I’m just gonna call her Baba because she’s the take off the crappy. She’s the crappy one, okay. But she’s told the fine Baba and, oh, Baba, and get a job from her, and then that’s the only way that she can get back to, I guess, the real physical world again. And she’s told all this by Haku, but Haku also, there’s all these, like, rules. So first she starts to disappear like a human in the spirit world. She looks like a ghost, I guess, just like a spirit in the human world would look like a ghost.

So there’s, like, this implication that, like, she might disappear completely, and they don’t really explain what happens. I assume that she’s just debt dies at that point or something, but she has to eat food from the spirit world in order to remain in the spirit world. And this, I mean, to me, I was like, oh, it’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s the exact same thing. You have to eat this magical food in order to go into the magical realm. You know, eat this one, make me smaller. Eat this one. Make me bigger. It felt like that same sort of entryway.

And then once he actually does that and they get into the bathhouse, then she meets the spider dude that you were talking about, and that kind of felt like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. And just like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, it’s smoking on the hookah. But since this is a japanese dude, a japanese bug, he’s chain smoking cigarettes, and he’s got, like, a little ashtray just filled to the brim with fallen soldiers in there. So, I don’t know, I thought. Did you pick up on any of that, like, the Alice in Wonderland sort of feel to that? Now that you’re saying it makes sense, I guess it makes no face.

Kalnachi, sort of our mad hatter, you know? So there’s a lot of correlations to all that. I, you know, I would not put that beyond Ghibli, because what you’re mentioning is mostly part of the movie. That’s Ghibli inventions. Right? So it kind of makes sense that they might use that as a bit of a template, especially if they are, you know, getting a few notes from Disney while the production of this movie is taking place. What else? Haku puts an actual spell on her or helps with some kind of spell, and he says, in the name of the wind and the water within me, unbind her.

And that somehow frees her from the physical realm. And now she can fully, as she eats the food, she can enter the spirit realm. I don’t know what the rules are here. She also has to hold onto them, and she can’t make any noise, including just her breathing. So she holds her breath, but then, like, she lets her breath out and everyone can see her, but then all of a sudden, no one cares about a human, like, within ten minutes of that. So I don’t. Did I miss something? Like, how come at first no one can know a human’s here? They’ll all freak out.

Everyone will come after you. And then as soon as she goes into the bathhouse and gets a job, now it’s just like, oh, yeah, there’s a human here. Oh, well, I. Yeah, I feel like some of that’s, like, kind of applying, like, kids nightmare logic, you know? Like, even now, I wake up at, like, half wake up at five in the morning. I’ll be doing something weird with my legs that has some weird rules attached to it that make no sense because I’m not fully awake, you know? So I kind of feel like it’s that kind of thinking.

Okay. But yeah, because I’m thinking about food, so. Well, this is a shrine, though. You people would put, like, a little bit of sake or, like. Like a little food offering at the shrine. Like, other. I feel that was the closest thing I could think of to otherworldly food. But then again, this is not a shrine or a temple. This is the bathhouse. So, yeah, this is where it’s kind of gray area. Like, there are places in japanese culture you could think about, but it’s not, like, specifically that. And in the case of the bridge crossing, I think that is kind of just like, kids nightmare logic.

Because this is Chihiro’s increasing nightmare, you know? Oh, God. And I have to, man, I have to look it up as I’m talking about it. But the perfect time to bring up is it Hiro Bashara or Kido bashara, which was the. The living pillar, which is something that is in japanese culture, where they would bury a living person under a bridge as they’re building it, specifically to kill that person. So that their ghost protects the bridge itself from other bad spirits or evildoers, I guess. And then they would do this to all sorts of really important castles and structures.

Anything that needed supernatural protection, that extra level, they would just bury a live human being. And it was big on bridges. I guess that’s where it really started, was on bridges. And part of it too. The reason that I even found this is, like, really interesting is there’s, like, this human sacrifice aspect to it. So that if we’re going to build a bridge that crosses body of water, it could be risky. Like, someone might die crossing that bridge. At some point, either the bridge falls apart, or the water comes through and it drowns you or it takes you away.

So it’s like, if you preemptively sacrifice somebody to that bridge, then it will protect the next hundred people that have to cross it, or the next thousand or, um, anyway, that’s that’s that concept of what I think they call it the human pillar, which is, like, my favorite part of, uh, culture. Although I don’t think they. They don’t do it as much anymore. And I don’t think they do it quite as much. Yeah. In Asia. But there I have found incredible. I won’t go on a too deep of a tangent, but I’ve found really incredible examples of this happening modern day in the Philippines and in, like, I think in, like, Vietnam or, like, some weird little pockets where they still do it in 2024.

That if you’re building a huge, like, corporate building. Like, the CEO comes in and they do all the regular anointing, and then on the way out, they pay some, like, you know, local street urchins to go and kidnap someone and kill them on the building site and put their body under the foundation that gets poured. Because why wouldn’t you do that? If you’re about to spend, like, you know, seven digits or more on this huge building endeavor? Why wouldn’t you throw someone, you know, $200 to merck somebody and just, it’s like a. Like a pascal’s wager for contractors, I guess.

And meanwhile, you live on one small island among thousand small islands. No one’s coming after you, right? So anyways, that. That was just like, an interesting aspect of that whole, like, river thing. The other thing that happens when she meets, I’m going to call him the caterpillar guy now, even though I know he’s kind of like a spider man. He’s like grandpa of the gods. God. Grandpa. Grandpa the gods. And he’s got all these little dust mite creatures that are super strong, and they’re moving coal into this sort of engine that he’s keeping running, that’s providing, which it’s like, I guess it’s not all geothermal, you know, like volcanic energy that they’re pulling out of the earth here.

Like, there’s actually. This guy is responsible for generating the extra heat and energy. Right? Do I got that? Yeah, I guess that’s a cento. And not like onsen with volcanic. Volcanic water, because he’s heating it up again. Centos, the name of the movie. But, yeah, those are. I guess they’re not dust mites in here, but the exact design was used ten years earlier in Totoro, where they’re cleaning their. The rural house, the countryside house. And. And that is something you would tell a kid in Japan. Like, you’re cleaning out these little creatures, which is what you’re seeing.

And it’s interesting, too, because she dust bunnies. Well, she notices one of those dust bunny, uh, coal creatures. Uh, can’t hold the coal or whatever the hell it is that it’s mining. And she goes to help it, and the guy yells at her, and he’s like, finish the job. Like, bring the heavy piece of coal and throw it into the. The fire. And she does that. But when she does that, all the other dust mites get mad. And he’s like, well, of course they’re mad at you. You’re. You’re taking their job, and it was just like, here comes this foreigner from another dimension.

And the first thing that she does is she starts stealing jobs from the freaking dust mites that have been there and, like, trying to just earn their way through. So that. That’s kind of funny. And also, Japan is somewhat isolationist in that way. So I don’t know, like, you are the little girl, right? You are send to Japan, and you took some decimites job at some point. Well, that. I mean, that is an issue in Japan. Again, smaller population, they need more foreign workers. So only in, like, the past two or three years, I started noticing, especially 711s no longer tend to have japanese employees.

They’re like, Filipino or something else more and more these days. So that’s actually been a real recent change. But when this movie is made, yeah, it was pretty hard to find foreigners doing many jobs, and it still is, but it’s becoming more common now. And she quickly starts elevating through the ranks because she goes from a dust mite into a proper bathhouse employee, because then she goes and finds the old lady Baba or Obama, and, like, just keeps bugging her until she finally gets a job to work in this bathhouse. And Baba. And forgive me, because this is where it’s like my own weird brain just started making connections.

It didn’t deserve to be there. But at this point, we’ve got an orphaned young girl that is sent off to an island and forced to work for some madam in a bathhouse and bring these horrible, ugly monster just made out of, like, literal feces and mud, and has to somehow pleasure them or bring them some sort of, you know, satisfaction. And in return, they pay, like, incredible amounts of money. We’re not just talking about, like, oh, a good tip. Like, these are people going on super yachts, and that can afford to just tip just pockets of gold.

Endless pockets of gold. So all I could think about this entire time was just like, this is Epstein. Obama is Ghislaine Maxwell all over again. Because she is essentially the matlack. She’s literally a madam for this entire bathhouse. Everything goes through her, and she’s got all these weird, like, spot. There’s, like, spies going on, and she hired Haku to go and spy on her sister. Like, it’s all. Haku would be the actual Epstein in this case, right? Well, or Haku would be another, like. Like, haku. If we were to expand it from just Epstein to, like, include the finders and include the pizza gate, like, all those things.

Haku is kind of like a Johnny gosh where, like, he got snatched up. He has his personality somewhat severed. Right? They take half the name away, and in that sort of, like, severing and that fracturing of his name, he forgets. He gets amnesia, just like Sen forgets and everything, and gets amnesia of her own. So this is kind of like that trauma based programming where they instill a new personality into you. So in that case, Haku is like this MK ultra Johnny Gosh, that is being used to go and procure other orphan kids and bring them into the fold so that they can then kind of follow in his footsteps.

Something that might just as a draw an outline around that is, if you notice, most of the things that have to do with Yubaba is, like, victorian looking stuff. Like, everything in the bathhouse is very japanese looking, the street outside is very japanese looking. But everything, her office, her clothes, big baby’s room kind of has a more victorian western look. Yeah. And without even going into detail, it just dancing on a fine line here. But they portray yo Baba as this big nose, the money changer, and, like, she’s a bad guy in a way. So that’s all I’ll say on it.

But she clearly has this weird, like, rothschildian taste for finer things and decorous. Right, right. But, yeah, the otherworldliness of it all is still. I guess that’s, you know, it’s like a fantasy. You can do what you want, but it is. It is interesting to think about how much they would have thought about those things in Japan. I mean, there’s plenty of horrible things going on, but maybe not that exact setup. So. And her fig, I’m talking about Sen here. So she gets a job working for Ghyslaine on Epstein island. And her first big job is to basically give a bath to the most disgusting, vile monster that anyone can even, you know, like, everyone’s holding their nose, they’re all gagging.

Like no one even wants to make eye contact with this big, like, poop monster, I’ll call them. Cause essentially that’s what it looks like. And everyone keeps complaining about the smell. So I just assume that it’s like this massive. And when I say massive, it’s like the size of a house. Like, this big poop monster comes in the bath house, some kind of a weird, smelly creature thing, and then helps the dude out. She puts through it and cleans the guy. And then he has just enormous amounts of money that he starts throwing around at everybody because she was able to finally clean him.

And then he turns into this weird dragon like, creature that flies through the air. This feels like just typical japanese anime plotline. When adventure time makes fun of japanese sort of characters. This is it. It feels exactly like that. That’s another river. So the river was very dirty, and Chihiro basically cleaned the river, which Miyazaki says, like, when he was a child, they were cleaning a river and, you know, pulled a bicycle out from the mud. So that’s very, almost literally, except as in a bass house and it’s a bath, but it’s a river cleaning. Okay, I get that.

Foreshadows later that Haku is also a river. And then his dragon form is very similar, although he looks younger. And there is a note that Haku, they say, oh, he runs around doing Baba’s dirty work. Like, that’s an actual quote from this. So it does seem that he wouldn’t be epstein as much as he would be subservient to, like, the Maxwell family. So, yeah, I’m sticking with Haku as Johnny. Gosh, in this analogy. Okay, that makes more sense. I felt kind of bad saying that about Haku anyway, so I did write down the quote, though, which.

This is a disneyfied translation. Were you doing dub or subtitle, by the way? Oh, dubbed all the way. Okay. Anyway, I was doing subtitle in part because I can actually recognize some of the japanese being spoken, but becoming a sorcerer’s apprentice is dangerous business, I thought was an interesting line. Yeah. Uh, magic is definitely seen as having, like, white and black magic in some ways. And that’s my understanding, is that yababa is kind of like the bad black magician and zenib. Zeniba. Right. That, which is like the good version. I think it was just zubaba. Let me.

Let me double check that because there, uh. Oh, Zeniba. Excuse me. Okay, sorry. I thought they were both babas. Okay, I thought so too, but, yeah, so it’s so you, baba and Zeniba, which is basically the exact same person, except there’s a good one and a bad one. And one is supposed to be more caring and nurturing. But I didn’t. To me, they were just the exact same character. Yeah, yeah. Kind of two sides of the same coin, because xenobots certainly seemed capable of doing some horrible stuff. So. And I guess if you were to ignore the babas, the real evil monster, which becomes ambiguous is the no face, which also reminds me of the little dudes from Super Mario two that I mentioned that have the little masks and you jump on them.

I’ll jump back on your Alice in Wonderland. Call him the mad Hatter, because he shows up, does insane things, and then sort of becomes a sidekick, you know? And he eats people. Yeah. Right. And if he eats later. No, he spits them out at the later, if you remember. Okay, so there’s really no, like, I don’t know, it feel. It just feels, like, so less scary that none of this is permanent. Like, no matter what happens to you in this japanese folklore of this, you know, this Ghibli movie. But your parents can turn into pigs. You can get eaten by monsters.

You can disappear. But there’s always, like, oh, but it can all get reversed. Like, as long as one person comes along, at some point, they can just fix it all for everybody, which she kind of does. Like, she, at the end of the movie, she converts, like, all these pigs into people again. Right. Like she was the savior for, I guess, this one little haunted amusement park that had been trapping people since the nineties. Something like that. Yeah. I mean, not far from here, there’s a. It’s a outdoor museum, which we go to. Some big, weird sculpture.

It’s great for photos. And across the street is some large complex that clearly has been abandoned for a very long time. I don’t know what’s in there. Well, or if you do go, make sure you don’t cross any bodies of water. And you got to get out there before it’s dark. There’s a bunch of rules, apparently. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But, yeah, we’re looking at, like, you know, children’s nightmare or dream logic for a lot of the stuff in this movie, which is this how the honor system still operates in Japan is everyone’s just, like, terrified that some river monster is going to come and eat them if they don’t throw a dollar into the basket after they take a watermelon.

More like the typhoons, but, yeah, typhoons will get you. Let’s see. There was another interesting magical spell thing that happens in this one. So Haku tells her, I think it’s. Haku tells her, put your fingers like this. Like your. Put your thumb and your forefinger together and form, like, a circle. And she does that, and then he, like, hits her hand and breaks it apart, and he’s like, okay, there we’re good. Eve will be gone. And, like, when he hits her fingers, it breaks the seal. Is that a ghibli thing? Is that a japanese thing? Like, what the hell was that? I feel like that’s probably, like, the crossing the bridge sort of thing.

Just like, there’s so many weird, like, kid logic things kind of baked into this movie, which is maybe why everything is, like, not harmful in the end, because a kid making a story is usually, you know, well, now I have extra power, so it’s okay. Well, and yet this is where it starts to get a little bit bloody too, because Haku, then, inexplicably to me, turns into a dragon dog. Kind of like the story. Yeah, like Falcore. Yeah, he kind of turns into Falkor in a way, but like a bloody Falkor that has all of these paper birds chasing after him and cutting him open, I think, with, like, paper cuts.

I didn’t get that whole premise of, like, why is he being attacked by these paper cuts? Is this, like, the lawsuits coming after Epstein? Like, death of a thousand cuts? I don’t know where the analogy goes on that one. Something like that, I’m sure. Yeah. I’m saying your thing. It is a traditional eastern dragon. Koreans do it too. We watch the korean movie Dragon Wars d War, and it has this kind of dragon, no arms or legs. It’s more like a flying snake creature. So that is kind of standard folk imagery. So how and why does Haku turn into a Falkor dragon? Is that like, a river thing? Because it’s how rivers move and, like, the dragon moves.

I think that’s what they’re going for. That’s his river form. Why is that the river form again? The scum monster that turns out to be another river dragon. Right. He’s him and Falkor. Falkor. Excuse me. Him and Haku are like, the same thing, basically. Okay, so. So there’s like, a fern gully aspect to this. Like, there’s a lot of environmental. Like, the scum demon is a polluted river that needs to be cleaned up. Yeah, yeah. There’s an environmental message a little bit, I think. Yeah. Okay, so we get ferngully, and then Baba is upset someone stole her baby and just want to throw that out there.

So there’s other. There’s all sorts of, like, child kidnapping going on in this movie, and then at the very end, the Baba’s kind of. I don’t know if it’s a collusion thing or because Zeniba is supposed to be the good ba, and yuba ba is supposed to be, like, the ambiguously bad madam ba. But I guess the zeniba is like, oh, but she still has to pass this final test. And at the end, they show her all these pigs and say, go pick your parents out. And if you can’t pick them out, then they stay pigs forever.

And she says, my parents aren’t here. Like, none of them. So it was a trick question, and she gets it right. And then everyone turns into humans again. But this seems to imply that, like, Zeniba is kind of a jerk, too. Yeah. And also keep in mind, like, earlier in the movie, Yubaba does make some. Not altruistic, but she makes some non villainous decisions and actions. Right. It’s not black and white. They’re both, you know, they’re a little closer to the center on both ends. Yeah, 100%. Like, neither of them felt good, like good people, but neither of them also felt, like, entirely maleficent style bad, at least before they started remaking all the movies.

And now, you know, Crilla is sort of, like, closer to the center. Right? Yeah, yeah. So these are your charted directly there, these two. So, yeah, yeah. You’re not, it’s not good witch of the east and evil witch, the wicked witch of the west. You know, so she gets. She gets it right. Everyone turns back, her parents turn back, she goes back home, I guess, in theory, and happily ever after. And that’s kind of the movie wrapping up. Yeah. Her adventures over. That’s right. We do get the Orpheus stuff a little bit where it’s like you cannot look back as you leave with your parents.

So. Which she manages, unlike Orpheus, so good for her. Well, she has, she decides to go back into the Matrix. So she’s kind of like, what’s his name? Cypher Cyrus. Oh, right, right. He just wants some good steak. It’s not real steak. Yeah, yeah. Is it, Cypher? I think you’re right. But yeah, yeah, that is, you know, we basically have this weird little fairy tale here, which is caked in with a lot of japanese folk stuff, caked in with straight up just Miyazaki inventions. And that’s sort of what we have. It was. I do want to throw out.

It was really creepy. I do recommend giving at least a little bit of the japanese language track or subtitle, just a little bit of. I found Miyazaki they don’t dub very well. Like, who’s in this one? This one was amazing. I mean, it’s got Jason Marston, Suzanne Pluschette, David Odgin Steers, I mean, John Ratzenberger, a lot of Pixar guys, because Lasseter had kind of started sending letters to Miyazaki back and forth about this movie. This is among, like, the best dubbed anime movies that I’ve ever seen. Like that. Sometimes it’s hit and miss. Sometimes you just have to accept that it’s not great and it’s part of the aesthetic.

But this one was actually, like, really well done. Yeah. The one that, especially with Miyazaki movies, that it is a well done dub. But one thing that totally gets lost is the way kids talk in Japan. Well, not. Not like that. Just the tone, like a lot of times. And actually, it was funny. One of the guys I podcast was said that Luke and myself, we both live in Japan, and now it’s rubbed off on our friend Atlanta, where you’re kind of make a point, which is just something people, especially kids, but everyone does in Japan.

These little ticks that are in the japanese dub of the movie that you cannot translate because cartoon voices in America usually end up needing to sound like this, whereas, you know, you’ll get a much more understated, oh, you know, from the kids and the japanese dub, there’s just a certain tone to the voice that they always screw up in the english dubs, like across the board, basically. I’ve never seen a english dub of an anime that has kids that gets the kid tone right. It just. It sounds better when they speak in american. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I would say, like, maybe look at one of the scenes with Haku and chihiros particularly, and just watch that scene, like in Japanese, and, you know, you’ll.

It has a different feel to it. Just the time not doing that today, because it’s July 4 recording this. So I listen to american movies. There is a good point to watching. I mean, especially the first time. The dub’s not a terrible idea because you’re not reading the subtitles and you can pay attention to the visual components of the movie. But I have had students that were like, oh, I want to study more English. I think I’ll study Miyazaki movies in the english version. Like, no, do not do that. If your first language is japanese, do not watch english dub of Miyazaki.

You know, listen to Beatles. Watch some english movies. Don’t watch Miyazaki in Japanese. And go watch if you are japanese. Yeah, go watch. Go watch the magical mystery tour movie. Ever seen that one? I’m not big on the Beatles movies. I’ve seen Ringo Starr in a couple of weird movies where he just pops up because I guess he was big with Satanists in Hollywood, right? Yeah. The magical mystery tour was basically after their Epstein had died, their manager, Brian Epstein. So they were kind of adrift and they just went off with some money in a bus and some people and tried to make a movie and it’s like a psychedelic disaster, so.

But it’s pretty fun. And I also know, I mean, great segue for the next project that I got going on, which is a NASA comic. And there’s this rumor that. Well, I don’t think it’s a rumor. I think it’s been detailed in a few different memoirs at this point. But the Beatles wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct a Lord of the Rings musical starring the Beatles. That is correct. He was working on 2001 Space Odyssey at the time, so he didn’t have. And the Apollo space mission, so he didn’t have a lot of extra free time between working for the CIA and working for Hollywood, so he declined on that.

But the comic that I’m working on, that’ll be out@nasacomic.com. it kind of supposes, what if that really did happen? What if they showed up? And he was like, I love everything about this. I’m dropping everything to make this movie. And there’s, like, four or five pages dedicated to this one premise, including a whole colorful splash page that has all of the original beatles dressed up as Lord of the Rings characters. Oh, yeah, that sounds like fun. I was sitting here thinking, the one I’ve decided to start pushing, the Freddy Friedberger. Friedberger producer, was the guy who faked the moon landing, because Kubrick, well, looked good, right? So I want to give the guy who did the third season of Star Trek and the second season of Space 1999, and he killed a few other shows.

I think he’s the one that did it, because the footage looks like garbage. I feel like if there’s any truth to this at all, it’s because Kubrick was able to do a couple things in Strangelove. One of the things was that he somehow was able to piece together with the inside of, I guess, it was like, a B 52 bomber, like some sort of a top secret bomber. At that point, he was able to surmise what the inside looked like, down to the finest of kubrickian details. And so that after he released the movie, he was kind of called in by some of the high brass or CIA or someone, and they were like, how the hell did you get access? Like, how did you know what the inside of this top secret aircraft looked like? And he was just like, oh, I just figured it out from this image that was released and this and this and.

And if you’ve got one of those, and you’ve definitely got to have one of these. So he kind of, like, understood that aspect to it. And the other part was that. That scene where they’re actually inside the plane and it’s pointed down. That was all green screen at the time. And when Doctor strainlove jumps out and he’s riding the bomb, like, you know, with, like, the lasso and everything, even though now it kind of looks, you know, like, dated CGI. But again, at the time, that was so far beyond what anyone else was doing. So those two elements combined.

Somebody was impressed enough in CIA deep state, whatever you want to say. And they were like, kubrick, you’ve impressed us. Here’s a blank check. Do what you do. And at that point, he could have hired on the guy that you’re talking about. Right, right. Who then did a bad job, which was not why they would have hired Kubrick, but whatever. I guess we got to the end of spirited away, then. Did I answer all of your questions, too? I think so, yeah. No, I feel like I’m an expert, and that if I just take, I guess, two months of Duolingo, I can just run circles around you two and Kanji.

Yeah. Yeah, probably. Maybe. I’ll ask again for toy story three, but which big baby do you find more disturbing, this one or the toy story three? Big baby. Probably still a toy story three. One. This one. I mean, I’m not a fan of the big baby in this one, but I did think it was cool that the three rolling heads kind of could, like, transform into, like, this big baby creature thing. And it reminded me of a bunch of weird japanese video games I used to play as a kid on my Sega master system, which I can’t remember what it was called outside the States, but it was not the genesis.

It was, like, their answer to the NES. And there was this freaking weird ass game called Teddy Boy, which is, like, a tiny little japanese kid with, like, a hat and a gun, and he just shoots monsters. And there were these little freaking jumping head monsters that would, like, stack themselves up and stuff. Anyways, as soon as those dudes came on screen, I was like, oh, my God. This is out of that game, teddy boy. So I feel like the weird rolling head thingies are, like, a japanese and not a Ghibli thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of the basic images.

Same thing with Pokemon. That’s why there’s, what, a thousand plus Pokemon, plus evolutions. A lot of them are based on, you know, folk. Little Yokai monsters or whatever. Hey, I’ll go ahead and plug Luke’s podcast. Luke loves Pokemon. He’s a Pokemon obsessive. And every he goes and does five to ten minutes, kind of a scripted, you know, thing. Talking about where this is thing came from in japanese culture or whatever. So there’s. It’s not that popular now, but a few years ago, there was Yokai watch, which was kind of like a, you know, another. You might.

You, an american might think it’s a Pokemon ripoff to a certain extent, but in Japan, it’s like, no, it’s just another property based on, like, our folk monsters. Same with Digimon, right? This happens a lot in Japan. I mean, if you think of spirited away and just think of everything in the bathhouse as being, like, different Digimon or Pokemon, it kind of tracks. Yeah. I mean, I related to cryptids here. Like. Like, you can make a Bigfoot movie and it’s the same thing, but it’s not like you’re ripping off other Bigfoot movies because Bigfoot, like, supersedes all these things.

All the cryptids do. You can make a Mothman movie, and it doesn’t mean that you ripped off Mothman prophecies. Right. But, yeah, I guess we’ll wind this one down for today. I just plugged his podcast. What else do I have? Oh, I just. For someone that’s interested, I just put this on. Yesterday, I started a new podcast feed, which you will not hear me talking on. It’s called binaural infinities. It’s like 20 to 30 minutes, like binaural head trips. Because I was like, hey, might be useful in podcast form. You’re on a train, you’re walking, and maybe you shouldn’t walk, or maybe it’ll be fun.

I don’t know. Anyway, there’s like 2030 minutes mind trips for meditation, reading, vibing out, that sort of thing. That’s called a binaural infinities. I think it’s already up on a Apple podcast, so it’s out there for any interested parties. Of course, you mentioned the NASA comic, which is your big deal, but anything else rolling right now? Yeah, that’s the big one that’s coming up. If you’re listening to this now, it’ll either be available on Kickstarter to support. You can go and grab some cool. One of the ones we’re going to do is a morale patch. So I’ve got a little.

It looks like the Apollo eleven space mission patch from NASA, but it’s got Kubrick instead of the eagle on the front. So that’ll be kind of like a fun little thing that if you back the project as we’re trying to raise funds, for it on Kickstarter, you’ll get the batch. Otherwise, I don’t know if I’ll even make enough to sell them retail. And speaking of selling this up retail, after the Kickstarters are over, I’ll have whatever copies are left on the site. So I just had two kickstarters that wrapped up. One was the chosen one, issue two that had Alix Stein and then Scott Sam Tripoli from Tinfoil Hat XG, and Johnny, like, a whole bunch of people in it.

Mark Steves from my family thinks I’m crazy. Juan from Juan Ayala, the one on one podcast. That comic just got shipped out, and now I’ve got the remainders listed on paranoidamerican.com. i think there’s, like, 50 issues left, so if you want to snag an issue that’s available. And my adult occult series now, if you go to adultoccult.com, it’ll bring you right to the website. And I’ve got 30 copies each of the trades, two different COVID variants, and then another ten of, like, the official cover. So after those 70 in total are gone, that was it. That was the whole initial print run.

And I’ll have to probably do another Kickstarter sometime in the future to get any more made. So, yeah, those are the big ones. Just go to paranoidamerican.com. they’re all listed on the page now, and grab them while they’re still. You know, I got some in inventory because they. They go pretty damn quick, and I think I sold, like, over 600 copies. So it was a little silly to only get an extra, like, 60 made. I just. I didn’t have the flow in order to just, like, keep stocking up over and over again. So hopefully, once those get moved out, I can do another print run before they just vanish like Chihiro.

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They never had a deal. You’re welcome, man. They lack in appeal. You’re welcome. Yet they doing it still. You’re welcome.
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