➡ The speaker is promoting a comic book project on Kickstarter, which is part of the Paranoid American series. The comic, available in various formats and covers, is about Stanley Kubrick directing the moon landings. Backers can choose from different reward tiers, each offering unique items like stickers, bookmarks, keychains, and a custom embroidered patch. The speaker also introduces a podcast episode featuring guests from the Conspiracy Build podcast, discussing Disney and Ghibli movies in relation to conspiracy theories.
➡ The discussion revolves around a movie, possibly “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and its elements such as the steampunk theme, World War II influences, and the abrupt ending. The participants also compare it to other films like “Spirited Away” and discuss the popularity of these movies in Japan. They also talk about the characters, particularly Sophie, and how they relate to them.
➡ The text discusses how misinformation can have lasting impacts, using examples from wars and media scandals. It also explores the idea of hidden meanings in Disney movies, suggesting that ‘true love’s kiss’ could be a metaphor for sex. The text concludes by questioning the intention behind these possible hidden messages, suggesting they could be the result of bored animators rather than a concerted effort to insert subliminal messages.
➡ The text is a casual conversation about various topics, including a humorous interpretation of a witch character, political debates, personal grooming habits, and social media algorithms. The speakers also discuss their plans for future podcast topics, which often change due to current events.
➡ Thomas and his team are working on various projects related to conspiracy theories, including a movie and a series of comics. They have a website, conspiracypill.com, where they regularly post articles. One of their notable works is a 40-page comic available at nasacomic.com, which humorously suggests that Stanley Kubrick directed the moon landings. They also offer a range of conspiracy-themed stickers and propaganda packs at paranoidamerican.com.
➡ The text seems to be about a group who are proud of their music and feel they deserve thanks for it. They believe they’re successful even without a record deal and despite others not finding them appealing.
➡ The speaker discusses a movie, highlighting the voice cast which includes Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall, and Billy Crystal. They debate the merits of watching the film in English versus Japanese, and mention the unique way children speak in Japanese films. The conversation also touches on World War II themes in the movie, including a ‘wizard war’ and the character Howl’s obsession with beauty and magic. They end by discussing a character named Calcifer, who they liken to a fallen angel.
➡ The movie discussed has a lot of symbolism, including elements like earth, water, air, fire, and space, which are connected to different colors and locations in the film. The film also uses existing magic systems and symbols, rather than creating its own. The characters are complex, with no clear good or evil, and the castle in the movie is a mix of mechanical and living elements. The book the movie is based on is considered boring and less engaging than the film.
➡ The text discusses the complexities and interpretations of the movie “Howl’s Moving Castle”. It explores the relationship between Howl and Calcifer, the fire demon, and the implications of their bond. The text also delves into the use of magic in the movie, particularly its use for mundane tasks like cleaning. Lastly, it touches on the recurring themes in Disney movies and the cultural influences on the film.
➡ The text discusses various themes and symbols in a movie, drawing connections to ancient mythology, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, and Kabbalah. It mentions the character Sophia, representing wisdom and beauty, and her relationship with a half-human, half-demon character. The text also explores the use of numbers and symbols, the concept of shadow beings, and the influence of Japanese culture and mythology.
➡ The text discusses the themes and elements in a Miyazaki film, focusing on the use of black goop and slime, which the author suggests might be scary due to a natural aversion to such substances. It also talks about the gradual lifting of curses in the film, contrasting it with the typical Disney narrative. The text further explores the character Sophie’s pragmatic approach to her curse, which ages her, and how her external appearance reflects her internal age. Lastly, it discusses the significance of hair color in Japanese culture, and how it’s portrayed in the film.
➡ The text discusses a movie where a character, possibly a magician, is involved in a war that seems to be happening in a different realm or spiritual plane. The character doesn’t want to join either side of the war and seems to be fighting a hidden, secret war that’s invisible unless you step through a portal. The movie also features elements of magic, including a magical teleportation door. The text also compares the movie to other films and discusses the concept of origin stories in American cinema.
➡ The text discusses a movie scene where a character’s room is filled with occult items and symbols, including an all-seeing eye. The room is compared to a witch’s stall in a market, filled with magical trinkets. The movie is set in an alternate universe but references real-world magic schools and World War II. The text also compares this movie to Disney and Ghibli films, noting the differences in audience expectations and the use of symbolism.
➡ The discussion compares Disney and Studio Ghibli movies, noting that Disney films are straightforward and easy to understand, while Ghibli films require more thought and interpretation. The speakers also discuss the idea of making viewers feel smart by allowing them to figure out plot twists or mysteries on their own, rather than spoon-feeding them the information. They also touch on the idea of trust in media, suggesting that people may trust overt messages more than subtle ones.

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. So if you go to nasacomic.com, 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. 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 holofoil 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. You 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. Is it Disney? Mind control Mkochet Luxembourg I go this day, I go this mandy as above so blue Pinocchio seeks for no pleasure island where traffickers need your phone mine captain hook a lost boy Neverland saving kids from Peter Pans to sons meanwhile survived the barracuda and that nobody needs no one no I never took another breath we go from real to real go this day open me home and no more view I go business ask her back to man I say a co business teacher going to everybody.

Hello. Welcome to the Occult Disney podcast. It’s where we delve into all the secrets behind the house of the mouse. Although we are taking another trip to, well, you’re taking a trip to Japan. I just live here all the time, but it’s. How’s moving castle here today, as always. This is Matt here. It’s Thomas over there. Howdye. Howdy. And I’m still calling this little sequence the Ghibli bits because I guess we’re just doing some Ghibli movies here. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good to me. And we got some more folks here if you want to bring them in.

Yeah, we got PJ and Abby from the conspiracy Build podcast. We’ve done a couple shows over on my paranoid american podcast, and that they tend to be, like, the most awesome interviews. I also just did a recent one with PJ where we broke down the mission Impossible series as it pertains to Scientology. Literally, it’s about the disclosure of Scientology because they did operations Snow White, and it’s a whole thing. And you should go and check that video out. I was just watching the most recent one last night was late at night, so I was like, I’ll just wait for the sub to crash, and then.

And then turn it off, which is what I did. And I want to know. PJ and Abby, like, go ahead and tell people where they can find you and do the whole bit, dude. Say the thing. Yeah. Well, thanks for having us on. You guys can find us on Rumble is the easiest way. Rumble.com conspiracypilled. Or if you just go to conspiracypilled.com dot. We’ve got articles and videos and links to everything there, so that’s probably the easiest way. We’re not currently able to stream on Rumble, so that’s. We usually don’t tell people to follow YouTube, so we usually tell people to follow us on Rumble.

So they didn’t like our frazzled something video. I got hit on that one too, last week. Oh. Oh, did you? Exact word? Yeah. Okay. I had a theory on this, and I’m glad you told me that, because as soon as the whole Trump assassination thing started trending, I was like, are a lot of people getting strikes right now? So they can’t stream and talk about this? It was kind of my theory. So that’s. That’s interesting. There’s a deep dive I’m long overdue for, but if you look up the Sioux fan center report on QAnon. So. U f a n.

But they released a whole. It’s like a think tank that advocates for Silicon Valley, and they kind of have connections with government, and they’re the ones, I think, that put the f word and a bunch of other words on a list. And that list is, like, the new official blacklist, so you can thank them for, like, ultimately carving the way for all of us. Awesome. I guess we’ll push the boat into Hal territory. It sounds like everyone here’s a model view. This is, like, one thing of, like, kind of weird cultural dissonance where I completely missed the movie when it came out.

It came out a few months after I first moved to Japan. And. Excuse me. And, you know, you go see it in the theater in Japan. You’re getting no subtitles. It’s straight up japanese, which I have done a couple times, but I was, you know, way too intimidated to do that, so I saw Spider man two instead and never actually got around to watching Hal until this week. This is first time I’ve seen it. That’s surprising. It didn’t play around the house when. When my daughter was growing up. So, um, although, yeah, I was watching it, I was interested.

It was interesting how little japanese stuff is in here, which is fine. I mean, you could do that. Just. We just came off the spirited away, which is intensely japanese. And, uh, we’re about to spin into Princess Mon. Okay, again, that one’s actually, like, a historical setting. So this one’s, you know, kind of the steampunk, uh, alternate tartaria verse thing going on, so. So is it my favorite? Probably not, but, um. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Is it supposed to be during World War two, like a steampunk world war two England situation or what? That’s totally what I got from it.

Mm hmm. See, I was picking up on, like, a complete, like, alternate reality. Even where you could read, it’s like, oh, this is, like, actually in the distant past or something, you know? Like, I didn’t feel like I was supposed to tie this into our, you know, quote unquote history. Yeah, I think you’re right on that. But I also feel like Miyazaki is kind of obsessed with world War two and specifically, like, world war two planes. So the feeling of it being world War two probably is just incidental to the fact that he’s, like, obsessed with that time period, because it does feel like a completely alternate, maybe deep past, whatever.

The planes are super weird in it, but they’re super cool, too. I love the steampunk stuff. I love a good steampunk story. Yeah, it has a very specific date to it. When someone does steampunk, you can usually date it to the nineties, early two thousands. Pretty clearly, this movie is no exception on that. But I do think that there’s one thing that stood out to me that made this very world war twoy, and I’ve got a bunch of more subtle ones. But the most obvious was just the amount of effort and time they put into the zeppelins.

Exploding the whole zeppelin scene, that one really felt like world War Two era. And, like, it clearly has, like, an anti war sort of approach to it. The whole thing takes place in, like, war torn environments. But then some of the fashion is, like, earlier than that. Even. So, it’s kind of a mixture. You’re right. Yeah. Like, the hats and the women’s dresses seem like something out of Little House on the prairie more than World War Two. Yeah. Yeah. It’s more little house on the prairie too, because there’s a scene right at the end of when they’re kind of, like, jumping between these dimensions.

It has, like, this weird final fantasy kind of feel where, like, a door just brings you into, like, a greenhouse, and you’re fine for the sky, and now you’re in a field. But this field that they, like, teleport to in that sequence, it literally looks like that big field in the sound of music. It does. It does. And I said little house on the prairie partially because my daughter, who’s nine, has watched that series twice through now. She’s just obsessed with it. I don’t know what it is, but she loves it. So I’ve seen way too much of it recently.

So, yeah. Very early, the genesis of this film, apparently, was Miyazaki not being happy about the US doing the Iraq war. So in an interview, he quoted, this one would be. Miyazaki decided to make a film that he felt would be poorly received in the United States. Take that. I’m gonna make a cool animated movie. Take that. This one, I think, was pretty successful in the States, though, wasn’t it? I know Sento Chihiro spirited away was pretty successful. And then this past year, boy in the heron was very successful. But I think it was successful. It probably wasn’t successful.

Spirited away. Cause, like, I wasn’t into Miyazaki back then, but I knew about spirited away. And then when I met my wife, she’s like a big Miyazaki fan. So I’ve seen them all now because of her. But I liked howls way more than spirited away. I agree with that. I don’t know, I’m a little bit on the fence because I just saw spirited away for the first time ever last week. And then today was the second time ever that I’ve seen Howl’s moving castle and paid attention. And I don’t know, I can’t even make a call right now.

I’m totally on the fence. They both have such cool aspects to it. This one, I felt was a little bit more cohesive as a story, like, spirited away was like, I’m still trying to figure out some parts of that one, but this one, maybe to its detriment, it, like, wraps up nicely, like, the very end of it. It almost reminded me of wizard. The Oz. Wizard of Oz. Where, like, it’s this long movie, and they go through all these things, and all of a sudden it’s like, oh, okay, we’re done. Everyone’s happy going home. Like, everything just, like, neatly folds.

It does have a very abrupt ending. I was tired watching the ending. I was like, did I miss something? But it just ends pretty quickly for a two plus hour movie. It, like, ends within, like, a minute. Yeah. My favorite part. My favorite part is when she. She kisses the scarecrow, and then it breaks the scarecrow’s curse because she’s the scarecrow’s one true love, but he’s, like, not mad that she’s in love with howl. And then he’s like, yeah, I’m just gonna go back home and end the war, you guys. Well, at least he gets to stop being a scarecrow.

That’s a big step forward, even if, you know, you can deal with a little bit of. A little bit of heartbreak, broken heartedness. Yeah, it’s worth it in that case, for sure. Yeah. For me, I think spirited away, so kind of baked into my life. Like, you know, Hal’s just a new interloper that I just saw, which is very good. But again, I live in the mountains of Japan, so I walk around. It looks like spirited away, whereas it doesn’t look like this movie, I guess, in terms of crap you see around in stores in Japan, Totoro is top place for Ghibli.

You’re going to see Totoro stuff everywhere. Probably after that, it’s probably going to be sent to Chihiro and Kiki’s delivery service and then maybe some house stuff. You do see house stuff around, so it has maintained a bit of a foothold. But, yeah, it’s just kind of interesting. I mean, because they’re all perceived as mainstream films in Japan, right? But it’s different levels of popularity, I guess. Well, I might. I might be wrong about this, but it almost seems in Howl’s moving castle, Howl himself isn’t really the protagonist, and he’s not even, like, a good hero or antihero.

So, like, the one person that you relate to the most is Sophie, the main character. But how marketable is, like, the old lady silhouette or just the young girl with no, like, wacky surprise or anything? Maybe I would. Yeah. Tell me like old lady Sophie, like, old lady Hentai is probably all the rage in the right part. I guess that’s why, say, Kiki’s more popular as far as merch goes, because, you know, you got. You have the little witch doll or whatever and the cat and that sort of stuff where this. Yeah, this has. This gives you a scarecrow and an old lady.

Yeah. This will surprise. At least Thomas will be surprised. Five minutes. And I switched to the dub, actually, for this one. That’s crazy, because I actually watched the subtitled version start to end on this one. Oh, that’s funny. No, I’ve got five minutes. And I was like, you know what? Actually, this movie has so little to do with Japanese. And then I looked up the american voice, the english voice cast, and I was. Jean Simmons was the old lady. That’s a j e a n. Yeah. My wife asked me at the end of the movie, she’s like, who’s Gene Simmons? I’m like, the dude from kiss.

She’s like, it’s a voice in this. I’m like, there’s no way Gene Simmons was in this. So I got an IMDb and I was like, oh, j e a n. That type of gene. Okay. Lauren Bacall was the witch of the waste. Oh, she lived in there ten years after. It’s wild. Okay. Billy Crystal is calcifer. So, you know, it sounds like Mike Zakowski now. So. Yeah, I usually do tell people, watch the subtitle version. Watch it in Japanese. This one, actually. Yeah, this one I just kind of like, you know, I don’t. I can it made.

Since it looked kind of like England, european y. It was like, maybe it makes more sense in English. So I broke my own rule for. There’s, like, a slight hipster tone to the way that you’re approaching your life. Yeah, yeah. I think. I think Billy Crystal is. Calcifer’s, like, the reason to watch it in English. My wife likes it cause of Christian Bale, but who’s howl? But I thought that Billy Crystal was pretty, pretty entertaining. Wow. See, I’m almost positive the first time that I saw this, back when it came out, I saw the. That version that had all those voices.

Because now that you say Billy Crystal, I can’t get some of, like, the intonations out of my head. Yeah. Yep. Well, like I said, the thing I think that for me, that where the dubbing usually goes wrong is the kids voices, because kids in Japan speak in such a specific way. But since this doesn’t really have kids, it’s got the one boy who’s a not. Doesn’t act much like a japanese boy. Anyway, so the little wizard dude. Right, right. Like, I’ve been called actually myself and another podcaster friend of mine who also, well, we’re co workers, actually.

We both live in Japan. But a lot, a lot of sentence. And people say a sentence in Japan, then end with an mmm. Because there’s a sound in Japanese that you can only put the end of things. So people just punctuate with that sometimes. We were called out on doing that a lot now. So by a guy who said, now he’s picked it up from us. So the virus is spreading. Zero. So that was kind of a call to sack I just walked myself into. So only watched dubbed. I can’t watch anything with subtitles. It just takes me out of the story and I’m just like, reading.

And then I’m seeing, you know, when you read something and I hear the words out loud in my head, in my own voice, and then I’m like, it just doesn’t work for me how much animation the first time, it kind of maybe does make sense to do it, dove. But yeah, not this one, but some of the other ones. I would definitely say just hearing the flow of the voice when, you know, maybe the story and you don’t, maybe you won’t be as distracted. But especially the way kids talk is so different. So it’s kind of fascinating because I usually hate kids and dubbed Miyazaki films, whereas I like them in the subtitled ones.

Fair enough. I find Chihiro kind of annoying in the dubbed version where she’s pretty cool in the subtitled one. Well, I wanted to follow up on some of the world War two aspects of this one because that was usually when I’m watching these movies, at a certain point there’ll be a lens that clicks. And for me, it was kind of this lens of watching this as World War two. And as that started to fall into place, I didn’t get the best impression of Hal because Hal, he kind of comes across as, like, this perfect aryan being that’s obsessed with the occult and perfecting magic.

And he makes a few statements that sort of, like, made these unfortunate, like, they fit perfectly into this. That if how is the perfect aryan specimen? He also makes the statement about, like, if I can’t be beautiful, then I don’t want to live like a very dramatic statement. But I don’t think I could encapsulate the narcissism of eugenics in such a perfect way. As saying that, like, if I can’t. If you can’t be beautiful, I’d rather you be dead. You know, if your genes can’t be pure, it’s literally when his hair goes from being blonde to black.

Like, it’s just that it’s as soon as he’s not the perfect Aryan, it actually, first it goes from blonde to, like, a bright orange red. And the origin of bright orange red hair color, it is predominantly within, like, the. The Jews, right? Like, there, they have, like, the curly, bright red hair. So it almost like he went from being aryan to jewish, and then he’s, like, super upset, and then it turns to black. That scene doesn’t make any sense to me. He comes down freaking out because his hair has changed color, but then he can change it magically anyway.

I don’t get it. Yeah, it was. I feel like that you’re. You’re right, though, Thomas, that there’s something more there. Like, I don’t want to take too big of a stretch, but it’s almost like Miyazaki’s kind of like, maybe we did like, the old arrangement we had in the axis. Maybe we were. Maybe we’re still kind of pro. No, I’m just joking. There’s another deeper one here, too, though, because during World War Two, there were, there was an actual wizard war going on. So I guess, like, part of the underlying message of this howl’s moving castle is that there’s, like, a draft for witches and warlocks to get drafted into military service in order to fight for their respective sides.

And howl’s kind of, like, commenting about how all these warlocks and witches and wizards are getting, like, swindled into fighting their own kind. And the wizard War of World War Two was Alistair Crowley and Rudolph Hess, I believe. And they were actually doing, like, real, like, it was almost like a Kendrick Lamar Drake rap battle, casting, like, spells on each other. And it, like, ironically ended on Hess’s birthday, I think, like, it gets really crazy and deep. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Crowley and Hess while watching this wizard war in Ghibli. We did an episode not that long.

Well, it was probably a year ago, but it was the idea that Aleister Crowley was, like, at the causal moments of world War one and World War two. He’s literally on the Lusitania heading to America to be a propagandist for Italy or for the UK against Italy and Germany or whatever. And that’s when the Lusitania, then after that, gets attacked, and then he goes to Russia and Germany and all these places right before World War two. And then just goes up to the alps and disappears. There is, like, this weird occult thing happening. He’s literally in these places for the six weeks or six months that his rituals take in every case.

So it’s pretty wild. This is like Bohemian Grove meeting before the Trump assassination, right? Yeah. So, so basically how Liz is, like, hot. Hess hot. He’s hot. Absolutely. Yeah. Hugo Boss. He’s the new hot fly threads, everything. And he literally lives in this huge mechanical war machine castle that’s fueled by the power of Lucifer or. Sorry, I mean calcifer. Right. Well, there is. I didn’t know which order we wanted to go into, but, like, with Kelsifer, there’s a very. There’s a lot of luciferian connections. And I don’t know if we wanted to go through it in, like, order and start somewhere or whatever, but we’re doing it.

We’re just doing it. Okay. So with Kelcifer, I noticed that there’s these scenes where they call them the star kids. If you go onto, like, the fan wikis and stuff like that. So you’ll see a few different scenes where these star beings come down and they get into a circle and they look like paper cutouts. And I was very curious about this. I started counting him on every scene just to make sure it was the same, that there was a specific being count. And it’s eleven the entire time. Until you see that Calcifer is the 12th one.

He’s like the 12th zodiac sign that’s missing. And then there’s a scene where they literally come down like fallen angels, like fallen stars. And that’s where howl literally invites the fire demon. It is a fire demon. That’s what he says. He invites this fallen angel demon into himself, and that’s what gives him his heart. So I don’t know, like, the red hair thing. I know that I’ll just mention this because everybody talks about nephilim and red hair. So I found that instant connection kind of funny that you’ve got this fallen angel being, like, this half fallen angel, half human being that has red hair for a minute.

But, yeah, there was definitely a zodiac connection, I think, there with, like, fallen angel stuff and a big sun God symbolism. When we’re introduced to Calcifer, there’s a big, like, either like a bronze or a gold sun directly behind him. Right. Well, that actually is the other interesting part, because I got to this really in a weird way. So hear me out. But when I first saw the movie. It’d been a decade since I’d seen it, right? And the big blob lady, the wicked witch of the waist, she comes into the shop, and she introduces herself.

I thought she said the Wicked Witch of the west. And I was like, that’s interesting. I never understood that, like, watching wizard of Oz growing up, like, what that was supposed to symbolize west, east, north, south. And it’s not that she’s the west, but it is, because I looked into it, and there’s this thing called the Vatsu chartra, and this lines up with basically where the pentagram comes from. It’s the five elements. So you’ve got earth, water, air, fire, and space. And you’ll see that these chakra things line up in another way, which is a cardinal direction one.

So I looked this up, and west, actually, is Saturn. Alien. It’s pointing towards Saturn, and east is pointing towards the sun. So you’ve kind of got this diametric, you know, sun worshiper, helios worshipper versus Saturn worshipper, side of, like, the left and right hand path. So there’s a lot of weirdness there. But I also found out that this entire thing lines up exactly with the colors above the door and the colors above the door that teleport them to different areas change. And it also lines up with the pentagram symbols of the five elements. Oh, I didn’t even think to do that.

I should have corresponded those with, like, the eastern star colors, because they. It has four of the primaries that are in that. Well, then one of them changes. So I actually wrote this down. You’ve got blue, which, according to the Vatsu chartra, is water, and the blue water portal takes them to an oceanside village. You’ve got red, which is fire, and that takes them to the palace, the war. Then you’ve got green, which is their symbol for air. And that takes them to the wastes, where the air is all corrupted and dirty and whatever. And then black is space, or the spirit realm.

And at some point after Howl does a, where he moves his castle and transforms it with that big spell that he draws on the ground. You’ll notice after that that the blue is gone. And now you have a yellow symbol instead of the blue, yellow being earth. And the yellow is what takes him to the sound of music, open field, this beautiful earth setting. So there’s a lot of lining up with the whole vaatu Shatra thing. And what I noticed in this movie, like, apart from, I feel like a lot of movies like this, like, you read the book, Abby, so you can back me up on whether I’m right on this or not.

But, like, it felt not like Harry Potter, but it felt very much like, you know, a wizard kind of four kids novel that was turned into a movie. And a lot of those times they create their own magic systems and they have kind of creative flow with it. And in this one, it just felt like they were sticking very strictly to different wiccan symbolism. Like there was not a created magic system, it was just an already existing magic system to a certain belief set that they just kept bringing into the movie over and over through different symbols.

I barely remember the book because it was so boring to me. I watched the movie first, and generally I like to watch a movie first because if I read the book first, I’ll like the book, and then I’ll hate the movie for being different than the book. So I read the book second, and it was just so english and bland and it didn’t have the Miyazaki feel and. But it did feel very, I don’t know, childish. And I think it leaned more into like, the Baba Yaga house with chicken legs feel than the, like, I think that’s what is it? Nordic? I think.

So then what? The movie took things in, I think, a much more occult direction. Not that baba Yaga isn’t a. Also demonic, but I’m just looking a note here noting that Calcifer is much more of a demonic figure in the book. Because I was kind of curious, because, you know, it’s more like daemon, like D A E. It could be good, it can be bad. And I was curious, I switched to see if they said kami, you know, or something, which would be the God in japanese, like many gods. And they don’t do that. It’s still, I think it was still demon.

So demon Anakami for sure. World War Two, right. So we gotta have commies in there. But it looks like Miyazaki went along with the book and tried to go straight along with, this is the more western version of a demon we’re looking at with Calcifer here. I was just curious, can we count that as a japanese one? But this is not. It still fits into Miyazaki’s animism that shows up in all of his movies, though, this idea of, you know, good and bad demons and kind of figuring out who they are. So this movie’s like blurring the lines constantly where even the witch of the waste kind of becomes a sympathetic character by the end, which is, I don’t know, a little weird how much that, like, Sophie brings her along, and then they have this heart to heart moment.

She’s just. She’s, like, the only reason she’s not pure evil at that point is that she’s just demented. She’s demented. So it’s kind of like people feeling sorry for Joe Biden despite whatever he did, because he’s old and demented. No, I’m looking at the other differences. Just, it says how loses the rackish womanizing aspect that was a significant part of his character in the book. Madame Suleiman apparently is much more villainous in the book. Again, all the characters in here are various shades of gray, which is including with hair color. Oh, I did want to throw out also with hair color.

I mean, we’re used to Anastasia seeing whatever hair color, so. But, you know, in Japan, everyone’s got black hair, so you choose what you dye your hair as. So. And a lot of people do. I mean, there’s a lot of ladies I know as being, like, blondes in Japan, but they’re not. They’re dying their hair all the time, to the point where you’ll see a lot of little old ladies on the street with purple hair for whatever reason. Purple hair. Orange hair looks kind of punk rock, but it’s like this 80 year old woman, so. Which.

Yeah, you know, when we see old Sophie, I mean, I was almost wondering that, like, put purple hair on her, and that would look perfectly normal in Japan. Well, it’s funny because they used to, at least I’ve heard people derogatorily refer to old lady as, like, blue hairs because I guess, like, the eyesight starts going and whatever. But there’s actually a very real future that we are now moving towards where it’s, like, an intentional blue hairs in the retirement homes that they’re actually putting blue dye into their hair. We already got them here. Yeah. And, Abby, you mentioned something, too, that I kind of had it curious as soon as the movie started.

And when you said the castle in the book is more of, like, a baba yaga chicken leg kind of thing that feels more organic and living. And that was one thing I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Is, is the castle supposed to be, like, an actual living entity, or is it purely mechanical? It seemed like Calcifer was its, like, soul that. That calcifer was moving it. But the chicken leg thing, I mean, a chicken leg house is supposed to be sentient on its own. So it’s. It’s. It’s weird for. For me. It’s weird in the movie that the whole thing is steampunk except for the chicken legs, right? Yeah, it does.

I mean, Kelsore is the God and the machine in the movie, but in the book, is it ever talk about it being sentient in any way or. I. It’s been a long time. Yeah, I just honestly, even, like, even right after I read the book, I didn’t retain much of it. It was just so boring. Not very good. I mean, Miyazaki definitely took something that nobody, like, everybody I know, a ton of people obsessed with the movie, and none of them are going, you should read the book. Like, I’ve never heard somebody say that. So I think he just took a property that was kind of bland and then brought his life and magic to it, which, you know, he’s good at doing.

Well, there’s a note here that it is. The film’s castle may be seen as a parody of the machine seen in the movie. So I guess that’s where you throw some chicken legs on at the end as your punchline. And to make it, I think it’s supposed to be in the gray area where it’s like, this is vaguely organic. I can’t quite tell if this is a thing or not. Sci-fi reference. I’m just thinking of how they characterize the TARDIS and Doctor who, where I think there’s an episode where the TaRDIS is, like, in love with the Doctor or something.

There’s also a line in the movie that Sophie’s talking to Calcifer, and Calcifer says, if I die, howl dies, too. So that also implies. And I was thinking, does that mean that Calcifer is also the soul of howl and that, like, howl is a human homunculus golem shell, and the house is like, a house golem shell, and the castle fair is actually animating both of them. I wasn’t clear. I actually like this about these ghibli movies where I can’t tell if it’s my, like, american culture that’s preventing me from understanding at all or if it truly is just, like, so surreal and abstract, because I very rarely feel that regular, like, Walt Disney movies are so, like, you know, they don’t really jump between white and black so much.

Like, usually there’s a very clear aesop fable style path that you can clearly see in front of you. They don’t leave it ambiguous like these. Do you have an inner Billy crystal controlling you? It ended up being a lie, though, right, that Calcifer said, if you throw water on me and kill me. Kill the fire, you kill howl. But in reality, when she threw the water on him, it just revealed that he had Howl’s heart that needed to be returned to Howl to complete. Is that what happened? I was a little confused on that part too, because I couldn’t tell if Calcifer had so infused with his soul.

Because you get that scene when Howl is young and he invites the demon, the fire demon, into himself, and then he brings Kelsepher back out. I couldn’t tell if that was saying that they’re so interwoven that Howl couldn’t live without that connection to that demon, or if he was just holding onto his heart because he was trying to keep it away from the wicked witch of the waste or whatever, who seemed to believe she had claim on it. The only thing that really made me think that Calcifer was more evil than they want you to, like, take him, as in the movie, was when he had that exchange with Sophie where he’s like, I need something from you.

How about your eyes? And she says, no, and lets him have a piece of her hair. And he says, look how much I did with just your hair. Imagine if I had had your eyes or your heart. And he has Howell’s heart. That felt very Crowley, though, because like in Crowley and magic, it’s bodily fluids and bodily parts, and the more there’s levels of power to them. So if you look at like, the sacraments that Crowley did, like low level ones are breast milk and then high level ones are blood and semen. So it felt like that.

Going back to what you were saying, thomas, about the different Crowley and Hess magic system that was going on in world War two. I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure the Germans were into weird body magic, too. Weird body everything. True. You did say something about, oh, sorry, go ahead, Matt, that’s fine. You can go on. I just had this little note here. You did say something about Howl’s connection to beauty and his obsession with it, which felt very aryan. I couldn’t figure out a lot about the symbols that he drew to do his spells, but I did find the symbol that he used to move the house and then therefore transform it into something beautiful.

He’s got selfie cleaning his house for the first half of the movie, and then you find out all he has to do is just give it 5 seconds of a time. It’s this, like, gorgeous house. The only symbol that I recognized in the, in that spell was the phi symbol, which is a lowercase greek symbol that is used by the occult to mean beauty. So, I mean, it’s just another example of, like, maybe some of this stuff is made up, but over and over and over again, it seems like there’s, like, real symbols being used throughout the world.

There’s two things in this movie, too, that it’s starting to get creepy on me on, like, how persistent these. These two themes are on all Disney movies now, even including Ghibli movies. First one is the obvious one, which is like, Disney proxy. And this is usually a kid gets plucked away from their parents. I don’t. Sophie’s a little hard to fit into this because she’s technically 18. So it’s not the same as, like, a seven year old getting kidnapped or lost or separated from the parents. But technically there is, though she’s still a kid. And I don’t know, the kids backstory.

Backstory is like a whole other thing. But, yeah, that’s one of the Disney aspects of it. The other one is that, like, there’s this weird fascination in Disney movies. As soon as someone learns how to do magic and think about it like, you’re directing a movie or you’re writing a book or whatever, you’ve got a complete blank canvas in front of you, and someone’s like, okay, now add magic. Think of just the infinite possibilities that you could do with magic. And for some reason, in Disney, stored in the stone, fantasia, there’s a number of other ones.

They’re like, I’m going to do the dishes. Out of all the things. Like, you can literally teleport yourself to another dimension and, like, have a conversation with, you know, godly beings, but they’re like, I’m gonna wash the dishes. And here we have in how’s moving castle. Not only does Sophie spend most of the time, like, cleaning, but then, yeah, how’s, like, one of his big displays of magic is to clean the castle, which I was like, this is sword in the stone all over again. It’s fantasia. It’s actually his biggest display of magic, though. Like, everything else, he kind of does on a whim.

Like, he’s got a quick spell he can pull out or he can transform. He can do this, but he has to literally go outside with a line, the thing you draw yard lines on for a football field or a baseball diamond, and he’s taking and drawing this giant spell, and there’s this whole huge scene about it. So the biggest form of magic he does in the movie, you’re right, is cleaning his house. How they’re trying to communicate. It’s good magic, actually, because you’re not doing it in a battle. It’s just mundane cleaning. Pushing back the chaos.

Like, very feminine, pretty magic. So it’s okay. It’s kind of a valid point. I think it’s such a pervasive thing that it shocks me that even in japanese culture, I guess this one is western culture, though. Maybe it fits into that. But even Ghibli versus classic Disney, like, you use magic to clean up the house. Are we just so ingrained with hating typical house chores? Like our fantasies are just about how to get rid of those? Unless, I guess you’re a 1930s forties, fifties housewife, like, ramped up on meth. Then I guess you’re fine with that.

Clean all day. Yeah. Well, darn it, I lost my thought. Okay. Another thing that the Germans and Aryans were pretty big into was Mathew. So they really liked cleaning things, I’d assume. I imagine they did other spells. There seems to be a physical, like, he starts to turn into the creature and there’s a cost to him doing almost any other piece of magic. But when he does this, like, pretty piece of magic, there’s no consequence. When he’s doing his violent magic, when he’s waging war with his magic, he’s. He becomes a birdman, you know, so like a weird superhero or something.

And when he turns into that weird green slime monster thing again, I was watching it through a certain lens at this point and I was just like, this is Hitler getting rejected from art school. Like, this is the exact moment he turns completely toxic and he just wants to lay waste to everything around him. I didn’t even think about it that way. That’s really good. Yeah. What was I gonna say? There was. I had two different tracks I was gonna go down. I’m trying to figure out which one to go down. Matt, did you have something to say before I cut you off? No, no, that was basically I was getting at just as a bird, he, like, he’s gotta change himself into, you know, something else in order to be kill.

He can’t do that as himself. He has to transform first. You know, maybe it, like, puts his che, like, one step of distance away from committing atrocities. I did get a. I did get a certain feel about the Birdman thing that reminded me of. There’s a great book. There’s a great book called I wouldn’t have slept with you if I knew you were a birdman from outer space. And it’s basically the idea that, like, you know, it’s old, it’s John Keel. But it’s like before ancient aliens became a popular tv show thing. And it’s kind of along those lines of like, there are bird men in ancient Egypt and these fallen, either Anunnaki or fallen angel deities, depending on which.

Now we’re talking Nephilim for sure. Yeah, well, that’s what I’m saying is the whole Birdman thing and him turning more into it, it does actually line up with a lot of nephilim stuff, which lines up to, again, with him being half human, half demon. Yes. And falling in love and kind of developing this weird romantic relationship with Sophie. And that was another line, too. Is that if this is Sophie and she’s the one that represents, like, wisdom and beauty through everything, and then you’ve got this guy that’s obsessed with flaws and he can’t get over all of his flaws, isn’t that Yaldabaoth? Isn’t this Sophie and Yalda Baoth as well? Well, that’s what I was gonna say, too, is Sophia.

I mean, if we’re talking the occult, like, sophia is the greek word for wisdom, but it’s also the part of the barbelos that breaks off and births God. So it’s the female who thought without, who thought outside of marriage is my favorite way it’s put, if you’re familiar with the gnostic idea that she had a thought that birthed God and she didn’t confer with her other half about it, so it was like her cheating. It’s like how, what do they call them in Yaldabaeth? Right. So you’ve got this whole Sophia wisdom, the ultimate feminine, which is in all occult schools, you know, Sophia is the name for the ultimate feminine.

So I found that interesting right off the bat. As soon as I realized the main character’s name is Sophia and it’s about magic, I’m like, oh, this is, this is gnosticism and Freemasonry and Kabbalah and all of that. This is like impossible standards of gnostic relationships where it’s like, don’t think of anyone but me. Literally, don’t think of anyone. Don’t think. I don’t know who said that. I didn’t coin that, but when I heard someone called, she had thoughts outside of marriage, I just busted out laughing so hard. In greek mythology, too, Zeus has Athena out of his head.

I mean, literal brain child. Yeah, well, there’s a lot of connections between, I mean, gnosticism is a birth is a marriage between pseudo christian ideas and greek mythology. So the more that you read early gnostic texts, the more you realize they’re taking all of the Greeks ideas and trying to make them fit into something that seems Christian. So I’m not surprised that there’s, like, those connections between Zeus and stuff. Some people have said it’s basically if you took Plato and then sort of peppered in, like, the New Testament, it fair. Yeah. Matt, where’s the japanese aspect of all this? Or is this so western that you gave up? Well, I did switch to the dub for the first time, so that’s when I was like, we’re going with a western vibe here.

So it does have very western vibes. So more than his other movies? Like, that’s what I was surprised. And I was looking for more japanese stuff, and I just kept coming to western concepts. Even the turnip. Right? Like, original Jack O lanterns are turnips. So you’ve got, like, that witch connection there that I thought was interesting. I didn’t know that original. So the original real skeletons were made out of turnips? Well, the original Jack O’lanterns, they would carve turnips and put a candle inside of a turnip instead of a pumpkin. So the idea of turnips being old western magic has been around for a long time.

There was something. Halloween quiz for the kids I teach. It might have just been, like, a random aesthetic thing. Like, usually I don’t agree with there’s anything random in a Disney movie. So I assume that’s the same with the Ghibli. But when at the very beginning, when Sophie’s running away from something, and then all of a sudden, Hal kind of shows up and he’s like, you know, we’re being followed. But right when that happened, like, right before that happens, she runs into these two guards that how basically saves her from. And the guards have, like, a number seven on both of their lapels, so maybe noticed that 7th infantry or something.

And then they had, like, little triangles on the top of their heads. And I just. I wasn’t sure what any of that meant. And I was thinking, like, Matt will tell me. Matt will know what this means. But I saw a lot of numbers that I wrote down. I could never make sense of them. I was like, are they just. We needed a number here. But, like, a lot of times, especially in this Ghibli movie, like, things that are not important are out of focus on purpose. Like, that’s his style. So then you get, like, the seaside of the village, and it looks very much like a water painting where it’s like, there’s no detail.

Normally, you would have a bunch of detail there, but it’s idyllic. It fits in with the art style. So whenever there was. I was noticing in scenes, there was, like, black scribbles on things that you would normally be able to read, and then numbers on things that are the same size font, but the numbers are prominent. I just couldn’t find any. Like, none of it wasn’t, like, a 33 or something that stood out. It was just, like, random numbers. So I don’t know if that was just an art style choice or if I’m missing something. Yeah.

The number in Japan, I guess, that gives most people the bugaboos, is four, because it’s she, you know, or you say yawn, because she also means death. So it’s. That’s the unlucky number. So people don’t want to get married on the fourth of a month or in April in general, that sort of thing. If you’re giving a present, you would give, like, a set of three placemats or a set of five placemats, but you would not give a set of four place mats. But, I mean, that’s not something I saw in this movie, so. Gotcha. That’s, like, a rule in interior design, too.

You just never an even number. This might be a. This might be a stretch, but talking about that scene that you were talking about where she’s running away from the two near rapist guards, in the beginning, I noticed the very next thing you see is a guy who’s passed out drunk, and then these two shadow creatures step over him. And I mean, I. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about sleep paralysis, demons and how they look and shadow people and stuff like that. So there’s beliefs in all different kinds. A christian belief would be that they’ve kind of lowered, or accept they’ve lowered their guard in a way that could let things in.

That the more occult way you would say it, or the eastern way you’d say it, is that they. What’s the word for it? They let their field. No, there’s a feat. What’s the field that people talk about? The aura? I can’t remember. But anyway, like, the idea that there’s this drunk guy, and he’s kind of let his guard down, and then you’ve got these shadow beings stepping over him. I don’t know if that meant something. I thought the shadow people was interesting, that they were, like, oozing out and kind of stepping on people and stuff. I don’t know if that had anything to do with sleep paralysis or stuff like that, but it is a worldwide phenomenon.

It seems to be that when people don’t see specific deities that are important to their culture, they see them as a shadow type being. I don’t know, that was kind of a stretch, but I thought it was interesting. And is this a Ghibli thing, like the weird, black, goopy beings that morph in and out of buildings? Because this was in spirited away too. This huge. This is, like, the main guy in spirited away was this weird, goopy, black, you know, sort of shape shifting alien dude. And you’re about to watch mine. Okay. That one I’m familiar with.

Yeah. Is that something in japanese culture, though, that I’m missing, Matt? Is there something with, like. Like, black, goopy, shadow being type stuff or. I mean, there’s all sorts of. Again, there’s no God. There’s lots of gods. They’re all Kami. Some of them are goofy and weird. Some of them are monstrous. I think the ones that we see the most of is like, the eyeball kid where his whole head is an eyeball. Things like that. Long haired girls that look creepier in hell. Think of the ring or something, Sadako, that sort of thing. And, I don’t know, black goop would just kind of be, like, oozing through that.

I go back to Totoro where we have not black goo, but the. Well, kind of like the coal creatures and spirited away. And in Totoro, they’re cleaning them out of the house. So that’s something that, you know, everybody would do if they’re cleaning a house like that in Japan. They, you know, the dust bunnies would be like these weird little gods. So as far as black goop in general, that might be a kind of a Miyazaki obsession. It might be. I don’t think folk stuff in general is, but you would see that sort of thing in there is my point.

It would be an element, I guess Miyazaki just really likes. Why do people find slime scary? Well, I was wondering if there’s an ectoplasm connection, because that’s the first thing I thought when howl was, like, draining away is like, these ectoplasm spirits are kind of, like, oozing out of him or something. Like he’s holding it all in. He’s holding all this spiritual energy in that you see in connection with ghosts. And we know that he takes beings into himself. So when it was pouring out of him, I instantly thought of Ghostbusters. I’m like, is this ectoplasm? Is that what this is? But I don’t know.

Why are people afraid of Goo? Well, to answer that, I think is that the only. It has to do with, like, mucus, right. The only time that it’s ever really acceptable to be covered in mucus or slime or feel it or touch it is when you’re, I guess, like, being born and when you’re sick. Like, those are the only two times. So really, I would think that just the viscosity and, like, everything about the feeling and look of anything goopy, including weird molds like pink slimes and stuff, none of these are potentially great things for you.

So there might just be, like, a natural reptilian brain aversion to, like, weird, goopy, slimy stuff. That said, I grew up in the generation that love Nickelodeon gak. And, like, we actually spent money on slime, and I guess kids do, too. Now, slime is like, a big thing that a lot of people get into. It’s like, look at a badass. I am. I got some slime. I can handle it. When did Nickelodeon stop being cool? I mean, that’s the thing is, like, if you look at Nickelodeon now, it’s right around the foot rubs, man. I think it was right when the foot rubs started to get really intense.

Damn it. Dan ruined it. Ruined it for everybody. Dan giveth and Dan taketh away. Here’s a big difference between Disney and what happens here. It does happen here, I guess the scarecrow crow gets a kiss and turns back into a person. The curses in general just kind of seem to, like, dissipate because the witch, the witch of the waist is like, no, I can’t reverse the curse. And then just over time, it kind of reverses itself. Yeah, she slowly gets younger as she falls in love. Right, right. Because they don’t even. I mean, it’s not never even directly stated.

You’re just watching. Wait a minute. She looks different. She told her again what’s happening here. There’s no quest either. You’re exactly right. Like in a Disney movie, you’d normally have, here’s the curse. Here’s the quest. Here’s the end goal of removing the curse. And in this movie, she just accepts it really quickly, and then she just gets over it really gradually. It’s kind of the opposite of a normal Disney movie in that way. When she notices it for the first time and she wakes up, she’s just like, okay, don’t panic. You can’t do anything about this.

Let’s figure this out. And it is a really oddly measured approach to being cursed in this way. And they almost make it seem like it’s so ubiquitous. Oh, yeah. I guess this happened to me. Now it was my time. It was almost like getting chickenpox, where it might be somewhat rare and dangerous, but also, it’s so accepted that everyone goes through it at some point. Like, if someone was like, hey, man, you may never believe this. I got chicken pox when I was young. It’s like, yeah, you. And, you know, mostly everyone else. At least one out of three people, she’s kind of, like, got this african chicken pox, so that sounds racist.

My father got hit by a car when he was nine, so I spent my. And I thought, I just assumed everyone got hit by a car at least once. I spent my entire childhood, like, expecting to get hit by a car at some point. Coming of age. It’s a coming of age moment. Oh, go ahead. I finally got over it. I was going to go see a concert when I was, like, 14 or something, and a car lightly tapped us in the parking lot. I was like, okay, that was. That was my time. That was my time.

And then I went and saw sugar. The van sugar, yeah. That was your bar mitzvah, essentially. You got hit by a car and saw a band coming of age thing. Yeah, yeah. So Sophie had, like, also this kind of weird Benjamin button thing. When you talk about her being, like, extremely pragmatic in the face of this, which, again, is the opposite of a Disney movie, she’s also the opposite of a Disney princess. And the fact that her whole curse is just that her body reflects her age, her internal age. She’s living a 90 year old woman’s life.

She’s living as a spentris. She, you know, she works in a clean. Yeah, she works in a hatch shop and cleans and doesn’t have friends, doesn’t want to go out and, you know, keep the noise down. And she’s. And then her whole thing is just, why don’t you act your age, like, go out, have an adventure, fall in love like an 18 year old girl should do, and as soon as she gets there, she. Her outside reflects it. So, like, I do find it interesting that when she reacts differently than everybody else would, it’s also because internally, she’s, like, 90.

So she’s kind of just, like, has that wisdom of, like, I can’t do anything. I can’t freaking out. It’s not going to help. I just, you know, got a make the best. I think that it explains the gradual decline that the curse has over her. Maybe then she is. She’s starting to act a little bit more young, I guess. So instead of acting her age before she was, like, aging. Her act? Yeah, pretty much. I like how her hair is the one thing that never goes back. Like, even when she’s fully, fully restored in every other way.

The hair that she gave to Calcifer, the haircut stays silver. So she gave him her eyes. Would that have just been screwed from then on? Or would she go colorblind or what? Then she would become queen of the realm because there was such a more potent magic in that case. Is that just. Is that. Is that the most japanese part of the movie, though, Matt? The whole hair color stuff being so important? Because, like, in America, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. I think it might be. When I. When I first lived in Japan, I actually had mostly adult students, and one of the things they said in training was, do not comment on women’s hair ever.

Don’t say anything about hair. I guess because it’s such a weird, touchy subject. Again, we took a trip this past because my daughter’s half japanese. She actually got from her mom. She’s got curly hair. So we went to, like, we drove like, 3 hours to, like, the specialist who can straighten out your hair. Am I mistaken on this? But I believe that I read at some point that. But when you’re making, like, wigs and extensions, that, like, japanese hair is, like, the highly coveted version, and they’ll dye. They’ll, you know, bleach it and dye it and turn it into all different colors and everything.

But the japanese hair in particular is kind of the Lexus, or even better, it might even be like, the Bentley of, like, wig hair. Yeah. I had a high school student that recently just grew his hair out to cut it and I guess donate it or something. So all we know for sure is it’s not black hair. You can’t do anything with it. Nobody knows how. Nobody knows how to cut it or anything. But actually, that is the thing, though. It is different, because I know a lot of other foreigners. I know where they’ll go. My hair is not too distant, I guess, from japanese hair, but I do know some foreigners that will go to hair salons in Japan, and the stylist is just completely confused as to what to do.

There was another thing, too, that you said, pJ, that this movie seems to adhere to the rules of magic closer than you would expect from something that was completely fictional. I think Disney kind of does that, too. But there’s an example in this movie where there’s a couple statements made that seem like actual rules of magic. And I don’t have, like, the magician’s handbook, but they just seem so legit. One of them is that when I. I think it was Hal that says this, but he says, the mark may be gone, but the spell is still there.

And this is the thing that was, like, starting a fire, and he, like, wipes it away, and she’s like, oh, how did you get rid of that magic? And again, with my World War Two Aryan lens on it, like, it seemed like they’re talking about the swastika. Like, you can remove the mark, but the spell will still be there. And still, like, today, you can’t even mention or talk about the swastika. You know, God help you if you draw it somewhere that it has such. This crazy magic spell that it’s going to stick around for a while.

We keep them in Japan. I mean, if you look at city maps, I mean, it’s, of course, going. It’s the non inverted version. It’s the, you know, the actual. The peace one. Right. But sometimes people are shocked when they come to Japan and they just look at a city map and there’s a big swastika sitting there, because that’s where a shrine is. The kids getting back in the car. We’re going home. There was one other thing that he said that I thought was like, this is my favorite quote of the entire movie. And someone asks him, you know, how many aliases do you have? And he says, as many as I need to keep my freedom.

Like, I felt like hell. Yeah. Like an AR 15. Like an eagle is going to soar over. Well, you can go back to the Anunnaki with that, where the more names you go, the higher level God you are. So to be a real cool Anunnaki God, you need 50 plus names. Well, those. That’s, like, your body count as a God, right? Like, those are all how many names you have, or you absorb them. Like, it’s that movie society. Like, you just, like, absorb everyone and turn into this massive, sort of, like, multi generational creature. Right? So the more.

The more names you have, the more souls you’ve consumed, the more powerful you are, which, well, I would say maybe that doesn’t make you more free, but at least I guess it gives you an agency to do stuff. Agency to do stuff’s a little different than freedom. The thing I don’t understand is that he, he, he says he thinks that the war is stupid. Like, he doesn’t want to join either side. They don’t have a discussion about one side or the other being morally right. It seems like he’s a wizard in each of the countries who are fighting, if I took that correctly, like, so he was being summoned by both kings.

I don’t know. I didn’t get that. Like a good weapons contractor. Yeah, he’s good weapons. But then I didn’t understand what he was going out and fighting about. Like, if he didn’t want to join a side, then why was he? That’s the part I wanted to bring up, though, because that war is happening over the city that we see every day, and he’s going into the black door. He’s going into the spiritual realm. So that’s the part of the movie I found the most interesting, is that war is not happening in a way that anybody can see.

Like, there is a war happening. It seems like somewhere. But what I took away, maybe I’m wrong on this. What I took away is the war that he’s fighting is like a spiritual war in the air. Like, he’s like, like some people put the black space for that pentagram symbol as air as well. And so originally I was thinking, is this like a prince of the power of the air? Like, there’s a spiritual realm, warfare happening over the city that only Howell can see. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s transporting to, like, they’re not on the front lines, and he’s transporting somewhere else to fight the war.

But it kept looking like the war was happening over the city he’s in, but in, like, a different realm. And I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong on that. Well, felt like to me that he was on the side of magic and that ultimately he couldn’t figure out why magician would fight against another magician. So he, he was almost looking at it, like, don’t join either side. You guys are idiots. Like, it really should just be magicians, I assume, versus non magicians or magicians versus anti magicians. So I guess that was his side. He’s kind of like the, like, magician globalist in a way.

Yeah, yeah, no, I just, I thought it went with your magician war thing, and maybe I’m wrong again, that he was just transporting to a different area, but it seemed like he was fighting a war, like a hidden, secret war that, that you couldn’t see unless you stepped through this portal into the spirit realm. Like, he kept making the point that no one else could go through this black door. And maybe, I don’t know, was it supposed to be somewhere else? Did it just look like it was the same village, like, in a different realm or.

I feel like Miyazaki movies in general tend to be kind of elemental, like this Nausicaa castle in the sky are very like air movies. The magic mostly takes place in the air. Mono rose. Yeah, but he’s also obsessed with. He’s obsessed with World War Two fighter planes. Specifically. Like, his last movie he was supposed to make was the wind rises, and it was a semi auto or semi biographical piece about his favorite World War Two plane maker. So there’s definitely part of that. But I think you’re right. There’s something about the air, and maybe I was looking, as in, like, realm stuff, but because Totoro, Mononoke, Sentoji here are very earth based movies.

Like, the magic is all in the ground. It’s, like, in the place. So then you got Ponyo. Very water, water based movie. So it is interesting. Like, I. I mean, it might just be a good way of organizing his thoughts or whatever, but just like, okay, the magic takes place within this element in this movie, right? And in this movie, it seemed like the element was space or air or something like that, talking about those little element wheels and, like, his magical teleportation door where he could just go anywhere. It seems so cool to me just because it takes almost for granted that it just works this way.

They don’t really spend any time at all explaining it. They just show the colors spinning. And he goes in and out, and it reminds me so much of, again, like a final Fantasy video game or something, where that’s the level select, and you’re like, okay, I’m inside my big craft, and here I’m going to teleport to this place. And for that to just be completely accepted and not even in need of explanation, it seems like it’s a different sort of mentality for the audience that they made that for. Because if you were to make that for, like, an american audience, I feel like there’d be a whole tutorial screen and they’d have, like, a little protagonist explain it.

You’re not. You’re not entirely wrong, because this was actually the biggest problem I had with the Doctor Strange movie. Like, besides it, that it sucked. But, like, my problem with it was that growing up as a kid, I loved nineties Spider man and Nineties Spider man cartoons. Spider man went to Doctor Strange, and it was exactly that. It’s like, this dude’s been doing this for 2030 years. He’s a master. He knows things. It’s gonna be weird, and you’re not gonna get an explanation. So when they do a Doctor strange movie, they’re like, well, we have to have the origin story.

Cause that’s so american. We have to do it. And then they give him an origin story, and he’s a master in, like, six weeks. And like that for me, I know it sounds, like, stupid of all the things to break it like, that broke it for me as it took away that cool element of. I’ve been doing this forever. There’s no way I could explain decades of knowledge to you to. I’m new on the block, but I’m also a master. Mental dark night. It was the dark night movie, but for last, you know. Yeah, I hated.

I hated Doctor Strange. Personally, the movie, I think it’s the curse of Disney, where they’ve dumbed the audience down and now they have to cater to the dumb audience they’ve created. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. What were you saying, Abby? I liked the first one because it was so like the fractals and the weirdness. Yeah. Like, tickled my head nicely, but. But the. It just devolved. I think the need to give him an origin story was. Was what ruined it, in my opinion. You don’t need an origin story for Doctor Strange. You just accept that he’s Doctor Strange.

It’s in his name. He’s strange. It’s weird. Go with it. Like, that was the way it’s supposed to. To work. And this one did. That american accent was a little weird. Yeah, that’s true. I think he was poor casting, but that’s a different movie. I think this one did that well, though, where you just show up to Howells Castle and you’re just like, it’s weird. Go with it. We’re gonna take the door for granted. We’re gonna take the room full. Like, the best explanation you get is that you go into his bedroom and you see he’s just got piles of, like, weird occult magic books and items and stuff.

It’s just like he’s just been doing this for a long time. I also noticed in that room, like, a very prominent, all seeing eye that was like a pyramid with the eye in it moving around. Did you guys notice that? Oh, I must not have been looking at the screen. Can I share my screen? I could show it to you. There’s so much weird. We’ll describe it for anyone. That’s just listening. I might know. It was just like. There’s an eye, but, yeah, so there it is. It’s hard to see because I didn’t grab the video, but this down here on the bottom right, if you watch it, it’s moving around in there, and it’s very much the all seeing eye.

There’s a couple other eyes. This is the scene towards the end, I think, where she goes into a different part and everything’s made out of junk and trinkets. She’s in an attic or storage. And this is where she starts to become young again. Yeah, I think so. It’s after the first time she becomes young, which was when she goes and faces the queen or whatever. But, yeah, this is. This is that part towards the end, I think this is after he comes back from the war beat up, and he’s resting, so. But I just noticed a lot of eyes and stuff in there.

I probably could have spent a lot more time looking for trinkets, but it just seemed like a collection of, like, voodoo and different. There was a lot of stuff in there. Imagine having to be the animator that had to draw all those stupid trinkets. You know what I mean? And there’s someone. Someone out there is listening. Like, what would you mean? You didn’t pay attention. That’s where I spent my whole month on. You probably could, like, I’m just looking at it now, and I’m seeing tons and tons of stuff. I’m seeing, you know, sun and moon symbolism and all kinds of triangles and all seeing eyes and.

Oh, and spirited away. There’s a voodoo. There’s a voodoo board in the left corner. There’s tons of stuff. Girl does that. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. It’s all kinds of magic trinkets. It reminds me, I. I was in a, like a yemenite, I was in Bolivia, and I was in a massive covered market. And you go toward the center of the market and you get into the witch stalls. And that’s what it feels like in his room is all these magical trinkets everywhere, in all these booths. That’s the part of the movie that feels the most occult to me, is being in his room.

This goes back to my original point, though, is that in a movie like this, you have it set in an alternate universe with alternate technology, in a timeline that doesn’t technically incorporate world War two, but there’s tons of world War two references. And then all of the magic and all of it, I could tell. I could probably spend hours and hours trying to dig through it. But I didn’t have the time to do it, is that none of the magic is made up for the world. It’s all references to voodoo, wicca, gnosticism. Like, it’s references to things in our world.

So, like, you’ve got an alternate world to tell this story, but then you’ve got the overt message, the anti Iraq war message. You’ve got the overt symbolism of World War two and then the overt symbolism of, like, real world magic schools. So I found that, like, blending interesting. I wonder if that’s what kind of ties this movie together, because on this podcast last week, we were talking about treasure Planet, which also has a weird alternate reality, alternate timeline, you know, alternate physics. And in that case, it kind of brought us, it was kind of hard to identify a little bit, I think, with the movie because it was so removed from what we know is reality, whereas this one seems to pull that off a little better.

Like, it. It doesn’t feel as wrong somehow. No, it’s cohesive. Maybe that is because of, you know, things like. Like, you know, I haven’t studied voodoo much, but I’ll probably at least subconsciously recognize a few things of, oh, that’s kind of voodooish. Or that’s. That’s kind of like, you know, like gypsy magic or something. Is that the touchstone, though? Like, think about it this way. If you’re bringing people into an alternate reality in an alternate universe and you want them to have a reference back to their world, like, this is what you see in every fiction ever is.

Like, they’ll have euphemisms or idioms that literally would never make sense in the universe. There’s actually a book, sorry, total side tangent here for a second, but there’s a book I love that constantly makes note of this, where the main character is living super far into the future. Nobody knows 1990s earth culture, but he loves old earth culture. So he says idioms all the time that nobody understands. And it’s funny because. Because that is how it would be 500 years in the future on a different planet. Nobody would understand our sayings, but yet everybody use them for granted.

So the audience recognizes it. So, like, in this way, it’s that it’s like everything else about this movie is alternate universe stuff, but then you’ve got all these little touchstones that bring people back to understanding what the story’s about, whether it’s through World War Two references or real occult symbols. I was wondering, when I was watching this one, if there is a Ghibli version of Fantasia. And I mean that. And, like, we’ve pitched Fantasia as being the one movie that cast the spell that brings the Disney universe into the real world and manifests it. And even if it wasn’t commercially successful, and even if it’s not anyone’s, like, first thought, when you say, think of a Disney movie right now, a lot of people don’t think of Fantasia, but Fantasia was the thing that felt like this big magic spell.

And you see cameos of all these characters and all these motifs that come back in spades in the movies that come from for generations. Is there something like that in Ghibli? Because it wouldn’t just be the first movie, just like Fantasia wasn’t the first Disney movie. But you’re right. Every Disney movie references Fantasia, even if it’s in the tiniest little way. Yeah. One thing with Disney is when he started doing the films, you know, fantasia, what, the second or third that he made, he was coming out of the gate, like as Hollywood’s top animator. So Miyazaki had to work his way up through the, you know, the ranks.

He. He worked for a 1236 different studios before starting Ghibli, and he’d already made several movies by that point. The first actual Ghibli would be Laputa Castle in the sky. I would probably say Totoro would be the closest to his fantasia. That’s the imagery that stuck the most in Japan. That’s kind of the most personal one. It’s a weird movie because it’s, like, subtly based on an extremely tragic event where these girls went missing and died or something, which is not clear watching the movie. It’s a very sweet movie, but it’s got this weird darkness under it, which seems to be true for a lot of jibly fantastical stuff with a lot of weird darkness, like.

Like more real darkness than a Disney movie where. And not just your Chernabog villain. You know, we get, like, weird, subtle, kind of bad, maybe, kind of not. You know, you. You might defeat the witch of the waste, but now you’re going to have to take care of her because you vanquished her so. Or had got her a situation to get vanquished, you know, or you just have his absolute depressing, for no redemptive reason movie, Grave of Fireflies. But I think you’re right with Totoro, though, because isn’t that the logo now is the face of Totoro is like the logo behind studio.

I would agree that that’s probably the one that would be, like his fantasia. The first movie of his I’d ever heard of, and it seemed like to be a big american commercial success. Out of the gate was spirited away. And I feel like that kind of back sold his catalog to people afterwards. But Totoro does seem to be the one. Like, you go to Walmart, you’ll see a Totoro backpack, you know, like they’re everywhere, so. Or a plushie or whatever. Yeah. And you see, I mean, in Japan, you’re going to see Totoro just about as much as you’re, if not more than Mickey Mouse, so.

Right. You’re also going to see dry my and ampoma a lot, but which you won’t see in America. It’s interesting contrasting these with classic western Disney movies and then going to Ghibli and then going back to western and going back to Ghibli again because these with like, the weird coincidences pop up and also like how stark the differences in what the audience would be expecting. I couldn’t imagine the person that always gets the Disney Vault movie the day it comes out and has the clamshell case and everything. And then you pop spirit away in from you pop Howl’s moving castle in front of them.

It just doesn’t feel like it fits in the same household, let alone the same library. At least if you were talking about someone literally being trained to like Disney movies from scratch. Yeah, well, Disney has such broad strokes of the plot. I mean, obviously we find lots of devils in the details, right? That’s the point of this podcast. But, you know, a Disney movie, it’s very broad. No one’s going to come out of a Disney movie confused as to what happened in that movie. You know, even when it starts, you pretty much know where it’s going.

Whereas a ghibli kind of expects more of you. It expects you. It’s like, I don’t care if you’re going to be confused for a while where Disney movies never going to do that because they’re like worrying about the bottom line, if it’s, if things right, well, and they’re trying to make it perfectly digestible and like, you know, dissolves in its time released and it’s got like all the bells and whistles, the lowest common denominator stuff. But it’s also kind of funny to me because Disney tries so hard to be all ages friendly to now where people are like, oh, that castle kind of look like a dick.

They’re trying to convert our kids absolute. But then if you put on like a Ghibli movie. And it’s like, oh, he’s literally a fire demon that’s driving this castle. And, like, you know, they’re gonna wipe out all these people. They don’t hide any of the sort of dark magic and, like, the, like, literal demons inhabiting people. Yet someone will watch, you know, Tarzan and be like, Tarzan’s actually about Lucifer taking over the soul. But are there any, like, tickets around Ghibli movies? Like, get Ghibli out of our schools. Don’t let your kids watch Ghibli. No, I think.

I think it’s just because it’s over, right? Like, I think that you can get away with more when you’re just upfront about what it is. Like, hey, this is a movie about animism and fire demons and good demons versus bad demons. And it’s like. Like, then you have a movie that’s like, oh, this is a kid movie. But again, it’s got dicks in it, or it’s got this, or it’s that. Like, the subversive message is like, I think what actually makes people mad. And it’s funny, though, because you could put a studio Ghibli movie in front of a child for the most part, a lot of parents would and not think twice.

Even some of the same parents who are thinking, what’s this Disney movie gonna push on my kid? Like, it’s interesting. Is it in some ways a distrust of something that’s doing something subtly as opposed to doing something overtly? Like, you trust someone more when they’re just who they say they are on their face, even if it’s a little bit bad than someone who pretends to be really clean and is subtly bad. I think there’s almost a perceived disrespect or con, like, condescending tone when you kind of, like, tone it down that way, even if it’s subconscious, right? So when you’re saying, like, oh, no, everything’s good, and this means this.

And here’s the clear plot line, that if you break that facade at any point, you’re just like, wait a minute, you thought I was an idiot? Or wait a minute. Like, you’re like an idiot. If you never break that facade, then you’re just. You’re happy to watch it. But if you never even try and present it that way, then it almost makes you feel smart. You’re like, oh, I didn’t have to have this explained to me when I was PJ and I were talking about doing game design before we started recording. And one of the aspects of game design was that it’s this magic trick and it’s that the players never really, at this point, at least in 2024, they don’t really have games where the player literally invents their own path and their own solutions, the solutions that you’re coming up with.

Someone figured it out, except in weird cases where they find glitches and doing speedruns and stuff. But one of the holy grails is that designing like a puzzle that the player thinks that they figured it out for themselves and they didn’t get clues from anywhere. Because the second you make somebody feel smart when they’re consuming your media, you’ve got a friend for life. You know, if you do that in a game, it’s a little bit easier if you can do it in a movie. Like, if you figured out user role suspects who Kaiser Sose was beforehand, I guarantee you that was probably one of your favorite movies.

And you would like, tell it to everyone because, like, it made you feel smart at a certain point. And whereas we’re talking about these Disney movies, they don’t really make you feel smart. They might make you feel morally superior, but it’s not the same dopamine hit. Yeah, I mean, good mystery writers understand that what you’re supposed to do in a mystery is not make it unsolvable. We’re sorry. You are supposed to make it unsolvable, except you’re supposed to make the person watching feel like they could have solved it. Like, that’s like that ultimate dopamine hit of like, I was right there when they told me.

And it’s like they give you just enough information that maybe you could have figured, figured it out, but, like, realistically, you probably weren’t going to. Like, that’s the ultimate dopamine hit. And that’s why when you lie to people in a movie, perfect getaway is the ultimate movie. Where they do this, they use an unreliable narrator in the cheapest way possible. Or when you make it too obvious, it’s not nearly as fun. So we love the illusion of free will. That’s what it is though, right? I mean, this is why, like, I think I don’t particularly enjoy Agatha Christie novels.

Cause it’s always obvious that they’re giving you that last piece of information as they reveal it. So it’s just kind of like the whole time you’re led to believe that if you do all the interviews, you know, you could solve who the killer is, but you never can and it’s too obvious in those books. So I’ve never liked them. Whereas other ones, like Jillian Flynn, does it really well where it’s like she puts something in there just subtly enough that if you pick up on it, you can solve it. But it’s like most people are just, like, right there on the edge of getting it it.

And then that reward is really good. So I think you’re right in that my frame of reference here is Scooby Doo, where they do that. Yeah, I don’t read as many books as I should, but it’s kind of the same premise where they. They just keep giving you red herring after red herring, and then right before the reveal, it’s like, oh, look, we just found, you know, this. This deed that has the shoe keeper’s name on it, and then all of a sudden, they reveal that that’s the guy. Scooby Doo is Agatha Christie for kids. It’s the same exact same exact premise.

If I want to feel smart, it was encyclopedia brown. Then you’re like, oh, I’m a genius for figuring this out. Things can’t look up at planes. Oh, my God. Yeah, I guess I’m more on your speed of mystery books, to be honest, but I’ve read some Sherlock Holmes. That’s the OG for all this stuff. I guess. I guess I’ll just throw out more and more as I do these media podcasts. People ask for quotes. I wrote down three quotes. I guess if any of them hit, why don’t people notice terrible monsters? Okay, that was a good one.

Maybe because it’s in a bilateral dimensional space where he’s through the black door or whatever. That’s why I did, like, summon Calcifer with your heart. That sounds about right. And, oh, only idiots believe what they read in the papers. Yeah, that seemed like a little bit too much truth directly stated, especially if he really was making this about the Iraq invasion. It’s like, only idiots believe what they’re being told by, what was the major one? The nuclear weapons thing. This nigerian thing that was filtered through Italy. And then we were told that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons.

It’s like, I never even listened to that explanation. Be perfectly honest. So we covered it recently. Basically, everybody now accepts that there wasn’t the weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction. But when you look into the origins of it, it was just a CIA psy op from the beginning. Like, we only filtered it for a few weeks. Yeah, that’s what it was. They filtered it through Italy so they could point at them, but it was the CIA feeding it to Italy. Fed it back to them anyway. I mean, the joke back then in the military, I remember I was in the military when this was all going on, and the inside joke was like, of course he’s got weapons of mass destruction.

We’ve got the receipts. That’s good. I like that. And, you know, even the first golf war, what was that? That was like having a diplomat’s daughter tell a story or something that people believed, at least for two weeks, which is whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that’s you. You can. That’s the thing, people. You can do something stupid that. Why would anyone fall for it? Well, they only have to fall for it for a week or two, and then, you know, 20 years later, we’ll be like, wow, that was stupid. Well, this is that same premise of that.

If a newspaper puts, you know, Matt, comedy’s murderer on the front page with big picture of you and, like, the big title, and then two days later, they print it on, like, page twelve below the fold and eight point fawn, and they’re like, oh, by the way, we retract that. You know, Matt’s not actually a homicidal maniac, but, like, no one reads. That’s not the image that comes to their head when they see your name. Is that what the whole Richard jewel story is about? Where he was the. The bomber for, what, a week? And. But that just ruined his life, even when it was clearly not him.

Yeah. Not the best 15 minutes of fame he wishes he was. Yeah, yeah. That’s not a good 15 minutes to have, for sure. But, I mean, yeah, for. For any war. Just trick them for a week and you’re good to go. It doesn’t matter how history reads it. It makes for a better story, doesn’t it? 20 years later and, you know, there’s a Lusitania as well. I mean, there’s tons of those. So. Yeah, yeah, I’m mostly through my notes. Other than weird, snarky asides, do you guys have any other big pushes to make on this one? My last question is just.

Is true love’s kiss in these movies and Disney movies just a metaphor for sex magic in this movie? It would almost seem like it, but I don’t know. So I have, within our fan community, developed an undeserved reputation for reading really gross sexual books of monster varieties. And the couple that I’ve run across recently is this idea of someone under a spell turned into an inanimate object. And the only way that they can stop being an inanimate object is if somebody has sex with that inanimate object. And it just makes me wonder about. Is that what it’s always been whenever there’s a curse in a movie and then true love’s kiss breaks the curse? Is that a metaphor for something different? Well, here it’s only like halfway, right? It’s a one way true love kiss in this movie.

So it’s not. She’s doing them a favor, which, I don’t know, that makes it sound, you know, a little snow white, though. I mean, now we have to cancel Snow White because the unconsensual. Yeah, that was a Disney creation, I believe, because when we covered Snow White, the original story didn’t. Didn’t rely on the prince at all. If it’s a Disney creation, then I think Abby’s onto something, that we’ve accepted this into our culture because of an occult magician, like, kind of. I mean, think about it this way. The most famous kiss scene, not anymore, but for a long time, it was in the movie Vertigo.

And I say the most famous because even though most people won’t recognize the reference, they’ll recognize what everybody has copied since then. So in Vertigo, this is during the Hays code, they couldn’t show sex and stuff like that. So when they want to insinuate the main character has sex, him and his girl kiss on a beach while the waves crash and the waves crashing are representative of them having sex. And people understood the metaphor basically going like, we would show. We would show a sex scene here, but we can’t because of the haze code. So we will do this.

So in a Disney movie, it’s even more strict where it’s like, this is an all family friendly thing. So if the idea is sex magic insinuated by a kiss, like, who it’s coming from would make me think that you’re not off on that. Even just totally kept doing that because north by northwest, final shot, same sort of thing. Psycho was one of the first movies to come right to the line where at the beginning lay in her dew. It’s like, oh, they’ve just water was the symbol that Hitchcock used for sex. So in psycho, there was an insinuated rape scene that was not there, obviously, because it’s a shower instead.

But, yeah, I think you’re totally onto this Disney sex magic thing. And it doesn’t help that Disney has so many claims about them injecting, like, sex, you know, subliminal messages in all those movies, to be honest, we’ve seen all of them, I think, at this point, that have had the biggest rumors behind them. And, like, I’m a true conspiracy theorist, believer, ultimate cynic. You also have to take my word with greatness, all because I worked at Disney for ten years, so maybe I’m an inside plant. I’m trying to steer everyone, you know what I mean? But I feel that the only ones that really have true, true merits it is maybe the Dick Castle in Little Mermaid and the little thing that rises.

Although the part where the priest gets the boner is so subtle that you already have to know what a boner would look like in that context for it to have any effects. So I don’t know if showing a kid that scene and not telling them, like, look at the guy’s crotch. Okay, you see, when this comes up, that means this. And that’s only half, like, unless you’re sitting there explaining it, it goes way over the head. So I feel like that’s liminal aspect maybe not there. The Dick castle. It’s funny. I still don’t know. If you just show.

If you put like, the Dick Castle poster in your kid’s room growing up, do they turn gay? Are they like a sex craze? We have 165 days on the calendar that are gay celebrations. So I think, case in point, that the subliminal dick castles work. The other one is the word sex maybe comes up in Lion King. Although I think it’s SFX. I really am on the SFX camp. But even, let’s say it was sex. Like, what does that do a seven year old for like, one frame? If they pause it, they can read the word se.

What, do they not have a dictionary? Can you open a dictionary up? And now you’re also going to be sex create. So out of all the examples and the Aladdin teenagers, take off your cloak. All of those. The only two I think I give credit for are the Dick Castles and the rescuers movie where they show the, like, the topless woman in one of the windows. You know about this one? I forgot about that one. Yeah. That, in my opinion, is the only really overt subversive. Maybe it created a serial killer out there at some point because they don’t know why they’re always, like, looking for naked ladies and windows.

Because they, you know, that was their movie they watched all the time. That’s the only one that is overtly, like, okay, they did something naughty there, but it seems like they don’t deserve all of, like, the sex magic sex, you know, connotations that you. You could put on literally any other thing and get way more sex out of it than any Disney movie. Well, going back to Abby’s point, though, the only thing I will say is, like, I don’t think that if you start a trend, you have that everybody following the trend even knows what it is.

So if. If Disney was putting a subtle reference into Snow White a long time ago or into something a long time ago, and that became a trope like that could be a different story like that. Everybody’s following the trope doesn’t mean that they even know what it was an original reference to. But, yeah, I get what you’re saying. You start with nine horny old men in thirties Hollywood build off of. Keep repeating that. Yeah, yeah. But in the stories, yeah, you can certainly find lots of things for that. But as far as the animation details, you know, any, any thing weird in animation, it’s likely just a couple animators, you know, taking the piss out of things, you know, having.

Of having fun, seeing if they can, like, you know, fit it in there. Yeah. They’re bored of their jobs and they want to just see what they can get away with. I believe that more than I believe. Like, there’s a conceded effort to put, you know, SDX in the air or something like that. Even if it was intentionally that. It’s more like what you were saying. I bet you can’t sneak this in because it’s hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I could absolutely see people doing that. Is that a penis on that castle? He’s like, yeah, dude, every little girl in America’s got on their bedroom wall right now because I pulled a prank.

Yeah. I only had a couple other parting ones. I’m glad that, PJ, I think you’re the one that brought up the wicked wisdom. Which of the west instead of the waste? And that fits too, because it was the witch from the west that couldn’t make it up the stairs because she was, like, too fat and out of shape. Right. It just seems like, yeah, I guess out of the two, that would have been the wicked witch of the west. Mm hmm. And then she also, she had, like, a Hillary Clinton sort of tinge to her as well, because in order to conjure up the energy to make it up half the stairs, she had to huff this big cloud of pink mist, which I assume was just like, she just grabbed the baby out of the freezer and just, like, huffed it immediately.

Yeah, pretty. Pretty much. I won’t say it because, you know, that’s. That’s what I got. Those are, those are most of my notes. I was just checking the actual Japanese for her name, by the way. I was saying, seeing if it was the same. You can’t make the same mistake with west, with her arici no majo, which is which of the wasteland. And you couldn’t mix up with west. So that is only a translation thing. I didn’t think that it was intentionally west. I was just trying to explain how I got on the path that took me to understanding where those colors and stuff on the door lined up, but yeah.

Oh, yeah. I guess the one point I was thinking of what you were just mentioning was making the power players clearly, what is it? The queen or whatever is making every. You know, like, you may be a power player, but you’re dragging your ass up my large staircase. You know, like, you need to bow down before me a bit. So ultimate flex. That that should actually be part of, like, almost all political office, I think, is that they have to go in debate, but it’s after climbing, like, 500 steps, and then they gotta do it like the rocky.

Rocky climb. Yeah, they do the Rocky. I gotta drink some raw eggs. And then they. Debate was like one of those tough man competitions where they have to, like, 3 hours of, like, mud and getting shot at or something. Abby, who is your friend in congress? That’s that. I was gonna say he’d be excluded, but he already got voted out, so. Madison Cawthorn. Madison Cawthorn. He couldn’t do it. Yeah. I’m not sure I’d say we’re friends. I know, I know. But you knew. But you knew him, but you met him in life. Yeah, yeah. Or he’s given mushrooms and start the debate 2 hours later.

That would be the most important. You know what? C SpAn would be a lot more entertaining. I mean, that was essentially one of the MK ultra programs that they were trying to take Castro out with was to fill his news studio with LSD so that when he went on the air and he did, like, a news update to the population, he would just be ranting like a maniac. Yeah. And they thought that that would just completely dispel anyone’s, like, faith in him as a leader, and they would just immediately overthrow him. I guess that and the gay bomb would have been the two funniest timelines that we never got.

Like, the other one, too, was thallium in his shoes, so that when he put his shoes on, it would make his beard fall out, because they also felt that the Cubans were so obsessed with machismo culture that if a man lost his beard, then he would basically become a woman. Little do they know. They, like, we’re actually doing that on purpose now, and it’s, like, a good thing actually elevates you in society. Maybe not with thallium, but maybe not with thallium. Yeah. Be like, shave like a normal person. I think we should just bring back beards being the norm in culture.

That’s my opinion. I don’t think you guys want to see me with a beard. Nope. I just look like some scruffy, like, ruffian when I do that. Usually I do. I’ll not shave for a week and then, like, put in a goatee, and then it looks like I’m trying to look like Tony Stark, and I’ll give up. There’s a very rough moment. It’s almost like, a year long, where you just look completely unkempt, like there’s nothing you can do about it, because it’s. It’s kind of like the taint of facial hair. Like a taint. Quite a beard, and it ain’t quite shave.

Yup. And there’s no way, because it’s right there on your face. You can’t hide your taint from anybody. I did. I did the dirty man challenge my first year out of the military. So the day I got out, I shaved my head in my beard. And for a year, I didn’t trim. Cut any of it for any showers. I showered. I just didn’t. I didn’t train. I didn’t even trim my mustache. So it was just like, this crazy, you know, neck beard. Did you let it grow straight out of the neck? Everything, man. Everything. My mustache.

That’s when you found your wife? Well, we were married before that, but, yeah. Okay. Okay. Oh, you look like this. Get angry if I have more than two days growth on my face. So even if I’m trying to grow, it’s like, nope, nope. Go rid of that now. Sure. Yeah. I think the only beard we even see in Hell’s moving castle is the little kid with the fake beard, and I. This might seem. This might just be my own personal algorithm, which is, like, completely crazy right now, but I swear there’s, like, a meme that keeps getting fed to me on social media, where it’s, like, a little kid that wears this little wizard outfit, and he, like, runs around the inside of stores and, like, chases people down aisles.

Has anyone else seen this? Or is this something that’s being fed? It looked identical to this little kid that puts on this little wizard beard costume and, like, greets people. Like, when he takes it off he’s just, like, a little kid again. All right. It’s just a me thing. But I swear it’s out there. It’s, like, a thing that I’ve seen that people are, like, recreating it, and they’re doing it in stores where they’re at, and they just put a little kid in a big wizard costume, and they just chase people around aisles. That sounds like a wee man stunt, to be honest.

My algorithm. I’m looking now. It seems to be all theme park, Star Trek, and guitar that I’m being fed. It’s not bad. Yeah, it could be worse. That’s saying. I never interacted with Twitter much, so I never started getting tweets that annoyed me. Mine’s just Nicolas cage fan art for some reason. I have no. It’s weird. I’ve never engaged with my Instagram at all. So if I do look at, like, what Instagram wants me to see, it’s, like, the most random collection. It’s just a pure hit of their algo uncut. Yes, that’s. That’s what I get on the Instagram, for sure.

YouTube knows what I want to watch, so. Yep. Unfortunately, I guess we will land the castle for today, then. I guess it’s a movie. It’s not a floating castle. That’s a different movie. Okay. We will stop walking the castle. We’ll take a seat. Park the castle. There we go. Sit castle. PJ, Abby, if you guys want to talk about what’s going on in your scene right now, July, August. We have no idea. We just kind of ride the wave. Ride the wave. The wave is taking you to hell. Today. Make a promise about a topic we’re going to cover.

Something happens literally every time you shoot the president. Literally every time. So we very rarely say what we’re going to cover next on our show. And every single time we ever have, we don’t do it because something pops up. So, this week, we were supposed to talk about giant trees and, you know, all of that stuff. I don’t know if you guys seen that idea that, like, those, like, the devil’s big plateaus. Yeah. Devil’s tower and stuff like that are just giant ancient trees that have been petrified. So we’re gonna cover that theory. And then someone took a shot at the president or something like that.

So. Felt a little important. Yeah. Made it to Japan yet, so that felt. That felt a little bit important. So we covered that last night. I shouldn’t even say it. I want to cover the Illuminati card game soon. But then it’ll get pushed back by other stuff. But we do every Wednesday night at 07:00 p.m. we stream a show. We also have a locals channel, which is like Patreon, except they don’t censor you. So we do that. And we have a show on Thursday nights as well that’s behind the paywall. And we have a long list of things we want to cover.

We get a lot of suggestions, and we kind of just roll with it. And we kind of keep it to ourselves most of the time because if we don’t have it gets screwed up. So we have that. And then Thomas was on with me for the real conspiracies, which is a movie related to conspiracies type thing. Kind of like what we’re doing here. And those are a little bit less frequent. Those come out. I want to do them at least once a month. So we’re going to be bringing those back as well. I think I’ve got two or three people I’ve lined up to do some more episodes of that soon.

So all of that, we’ve got articles coming out on our website. We had a new one today. We’re just keeping busy and putting as much content out there as we can. So. Yeah, conspiracypill.com. what he said. What he said. Thanks for having us, by the way. This is a lot of fun. Thank you. Thanks for popping in, Thomas. What you got up? This was. This is almost going to sound comical with how many things that I’m going to try and mention here. So just get a paper or get your screenshot button ready, or I guess I’m just going to be saying it so you won’t be able to screenshot it.

But just remember, all these audio screenshots shot, then the number one big one, it’s live right now. It’s nasacomic.com. it’s a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the moon landings. It’s got the most phenomenal art. You kind of have to say this whenever you’re promoting something, so I guess it almost might fall hollow a little bit. But this is literally the most exciting comic that I’ve ever worked on. It’s got, like, the coolest artwork and jokes and everything. And it’s a love letter to both Stanley Kubrick and deep conspiracy theorists. So that you just want a fun read that’s got really good artwork that, like, pops off the page.

It’ll fill that niche. If you’re a Stanley Kubrick fanatic and you want to see all the inside references to bears and the number 237 and the types of lens that he used and Barry Lyndon, if you want all those details, that’s in there, too. And if you’re, like, the conspiracy theorist and you want to know about the monolith and the eyes wide shut being filmed in the Rothschild mansion and all the moon theories and the way they would slow down the footage and the technical aspects of the three m bead back projection technology, all that’s in there, too.

Like, it’s got everything that I could possibly fit in here was over five years of work. So go to nasacomic.com and get that one. And then here’s my rapid fire of all the other ones that are going to be coming up soon because they all just got approved, like last week, finally, after months at Kickstarter. So one of them is illuminaticomic.com with donut. It’s a full history of the Bavarian Illuminati. There is doesbigfootexist.com. dot. This is a little chick track style pamphlet on every variation of bigfoot. The historical accounts of them, it’s got links to Nephilim.

It’s got links to Teddy Roosevelt, mentions all sorts of connections to that. Satanicpaniccomic.com. another pamphlet. This is all about the history of the satanic panic, starting with Knights Templar and going all the way forward to modern day connection of death metal and serial killers and all the fun things. Titaniccomic.com. these are all done, by the way. These aren’t. I’m just, like, launching these, like, out of thoughts. These are done and ready to be kind of printed at some point. Titaniccomic.com, it counts every single conspiracy theory about the Titanic, from the insurance fraud, gold smelting, you know, taking out aster as opponent to the Federal Reserve, but also the main financier of Nikola Tesla.

All that’s in this one. What else? I got a few other ones that I can’t even think of because there’s so many of these going on. But go to all those places. Sign up for all the notifications. I’m only going to launch these after they get at least 100 or maybe 200 signups. I find that that’s the sweet spot. So once, like, 100 or 200 people sign up for notification, that means with relative certainty I’ll get five to 10% of those people will actually buy one of the damn comics. So if you want to be one of the people that buys the damn comics, you can do that right now@nasacomic.com.

awesome. Done. All right, I’ll try and laser focus my pitches today a bit since we’re talking Ghibli anime over at the films and filth podcast. We just recently covered Princess Wanoki from a gamer perspective, where this podcast will do it from the call it. Is there a prince of Mononoke game? No, but it has a lot to do with Zelda, apparently, says the Zelda podcasters that were on that podcast with us. What a one track mind they got over there at that Zelda podcast. And we also covered recently, Satoshi kon’s perfect blue. If you want to see a very different kind of anime, I also put out music.

I just about to put out folk rock, but I recently put out a collection of binaural stuff at rovingsagemedia dot bandcamp.com. the second track is called palace of the unwavering heart essence, which I was listening to yesterday on the train and fell asleep. And last week, I played it. I fell asleep, and when I was making a song, I fell asleep. So I think it’s a good sleep song. I think it’s a good sleep song. Yeah. I think I might have stumbled in the song of the summer. I’m hearing 28 minutes long because it’s unique. Joe Biden’s summer play.

Yeah, it should be. Yes. Also, the title is I made it on an airplane. I have the ambience of the airplane in the track, which might be why it puts you to sleep. I remember making. I got a friend who last year, he one of my co workers. You know, he gave me, like, old tarot books and cards that he was just trying to get rid of. So, you know, he’s of that mind. So he’s reading something. I’m just like, where do you read from the page what you’re reading at the second, which was palace of the unwavering.

I was like, yes, that worked perfectly. Thank you. So if you’re wondering, what does that mean? It means I asked a guy what he was reading, which is sometimes the best way to come up with something. Okay, Castle parked. Later, jaws. Ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings, and the CIA. Go visit nasacomic.com. nasacomic.com CIA’s made us. Stanley Kubrick put us on. That’s why we’re singing this song about nasacomic.com. go visit nasacomic.com go visit NASA comic.com yeah, go visit nasacomic.com nasacomic.com CIA’s biggest come. Stanley Kubrick put us on that’s why we’re singing this song about nasacomic.com.

go visit nasacomic.com. go visit NASA. Nasacomic.com yeah, go visit nasacomic.com. never a straight answer is a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions. This is the perfect read for comic Kubrick or conspiracy fans of all ages. For more details, visit nasacomic.com. spread the word with propaganda packs, all for just $40 shipped@paranoidamerican.com. dot paranoid propaganda packs we got facts on these speaker slaps so grab yourself a stack and go attack with these paranoid propaganda packs these huge all weather slaps will last in public for years to come remind citizens that birds are not real self immolation is an option and might make you magnetic do your part and get a propaganda pack today from paranoidamerican.com.

paranoid propaganda packs we got facts on these sticker slaps so grab yourself a stack and go attack with these paranoid propaganda packs what are you waiting for? Go to paranoidamerican.com right now and get a paranoid propaganda pack. American stickers cryptids, cults, and killers. Killers. We got all your favorite conspiracies. All of that. More on our sticker sheets. There are no american stickers. They’ll make you smiling, snicker. False friends, secret society, all of these and more sticker sheets. Explore the unique with paranoid american sticker sheets. Unearth tales of cryptids, cults, and mysteries through each sticker. These won’t last long.

Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com. spiracies all I’ve ever been. More on our sticker sheets. There are not american stickers. What the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with paranoid american sticker sheets. From cryptids in the night, the cults out of sight. Each sticker is a unique find. Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com. i scribbled my life away driven the right to pay will it enlighten give you the flight my plane paper the hides ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real, you will engage it. You favorite, of course, the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it? Well without lakers evading whatever the course they are to shapeshift, snakes get decapitated.

Meta is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see maxim out then I light my trees, blow it off in the face? You’re despising me for what, though? Calculated? They rather cutthroat, paranoid american? Must be all the blunt smoke? For real? Lord, give me your day, your way, vacate? They wait around to hate? Whatever they say, man, it’s not in the least bit? We get heavy, rotate when the beat hits so thank us, you well fucking niggas, for real? You’re welcome? 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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