Summary
➡ The text discusses a movie featuring carrier pigeons in World War II, who deliver sensitive information. The movie includes voice acting from notable actors, with mixed reviews on their performances. The text also discusses the movie’s animation style, its avoidance of human characters, and its potential message encouraging war. The text ends with a comparison of the movie’s scenes to those in the video game, Call of Duty.
➡ The speaker discusses their preference for a movie over its book version, criticizing the book’s reliance on pop culture references instead of original descriptions. They also mention a podcast where they discussed sci-fi movies. The speaker then transitions to discussing a movie about carrier pigeons in World War II, noting its unique approach and comparing it to a Soviet war film they watched recently. They end by questioning the movie’s appeal to children and its commercial success.
➡ The text discusses a movie about carrier pigeons used during the war to deliver classified information. The pigeons were crucial in winning the war, with some even awarded medals for their service. The movie, however, is criticized for its lack of depth and originality, with the author suggesting it would have been more interesting if it was based on real-life war pigeons. Despite this, the author doesn’t fault anyone for liking the movie, acknowledging its role in highlighting the importance of carrier pigeons in the war.
➡ The text discusses various topics, including the United States Pigeon Service during World War II, the potential of weaponizing animals in warfare, and the portrayal of Elvis in a recent movie. It also critiques the animation and realism in a film about the Royal Air Force’s Homing Pigeon Service, and briefly touches on the justification of certain U.S. military conflicts, specifically World War II and the Revolutionary War.
➡ The text discusses a variety of topics, including old movies, carrier pigeons in wars, and the idea of pigeons being used as surveillance cameras. It also talks about a movie where pigeons are anthropomorphized, with a focus on a character named Valiant and his interactions with other characters. The text also delves into the role of Nazi falcons in the movie, which are shown torturing captured pigeons for information. The discussion ends with a reflection on the use of such movies as an introduction to World War II for younger audiences.
➡ The text discusses Lookout Mountain, a secret location where war footage was filmed, possibly including top secret Disney movies. It also talks about the evolution of animation and CGI, noting how some aspects, like lip syncing, have improved over time but still fall into the ‘Uncanny Valley’. The text also mentions the concept of de-aging in movies and the challenges it presents. Lastly, it discusses the movie ‘Valiant’, a film about carrier pigeons in World War II, and its lack of lasting impact.
➡ The speaker discusses their thoughts on the animated movie ‘Valiant’, comparing it favorably to ‘Ice Age’ due to its detailed animation and colorful visuals. They also mention a memorable scene where Valiant’s mother regurgitates a worm for him to eat, symbolizing his coming of age. The speaker also finds humor in the birds’ military attire and the concept of a bird shower. They appreciate the movie’s 1980s action movie vibe, likening it to old school Mission Impossible. The conversation then veers off into a discussion about video games influencing real-world choices, and ends with a tangent about musician Frank Zappa.
➡ The text discusses a 1982 album by Frank Zappa, “Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch”, and its memorable song “Valley Girl”. It also mentions a scene from a movie where a character named Valiant hides among dead pigeons to evade Nazi guards, drawing parallels to human warfare. The text ends with the promotion of a successful comic book campaign, “Illuminati comic”, and the author’s music available on rovingsagemedia.bangcamp.com. The author also hosts a podcast discussing the Twilight Zone and another comparing high and low-rated IMDb films.
Transcript
Hello. Welcome to the Occult Disney podcast, where we get into wartime mice sometimes. Or wartime birds, or birds and mice. This movie has both. Hi, it’s Matt here. Over there is recent recipient of the dick and medal. It’s Thomas. You got to the dick and joke before I did. How dare you? How dare you do the dicken before me? Come on. It’s got to go in the intro. How could it not be in there? Yeah, fair enough. I guess. That’s a real thing. I don’t know. I just imagine an entire theater of kids just giggling at the end of the movie.
You know, out of all the animals that you can think of, who do you think got the most Dickens? Well, they tell you, right? They say the pigeons. Yeah. Yeah. Pigeons get the most dickens out of any animal, so. That’s right. There’s. In case that ever pops up on Jeopardy. That would be a cool episode. Yeah, sure. Why not? One of the ones with the fake Sean Connery on Saturday Night Live. That’d be good. I looked into this too. Anyway, I’ll wait. I’ll wait until we get there, but yeah, there’s. There’s some other interesting threads on this.
Yeah. So Valiant, I guess we should put out. This is kind of not quite as separate from the Disney machine as the Ghibli films are, but it is. It’s. It’s a different thing. Disney just like distributed it in the states, basically. Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. That’s the. That actually explains a few things. Okay, well, I. I guess I should just blurt out, you know, regurgitate like a message, you know, some of the. The production history here. The director is John. Excuse me, Not John. I look at the wrong name there. Jerry Chapman. Okay. And John Williams, not the composer.
John H. Williams is the producer. And these are guys that worked on Stuff like Shrek. And a lot of the crew on this was working with Pixar or DreamWorks or whatever. But the idea was to make the UK’s first CGI film. This managed to be the second kind of. But the first. It was the second that went into production, but still the first to be released. So, you know, they can get into a spit and match about which one’s first. So, yeah, it was just people, you know, Europeans that were working for American CG companies and wanted to go home, basically.
I don’t feel as bad about some of the opinions I have now on this movie. Okay, well, here’s a few other things we can qualify with. The budget is 35 million. Shrek 2, which came out about the same time, was 150 million. So this was made in 107 days on 35 million. So it was. I mean, it was like they’re not in operation. Is any of that adjusted for inflation or is this 2005 talking? 2005 money? Yeah. Okay. That’s still how I understand money. Because I haven’t been in the states since 2010. Okay. I think I mentioned a year or two ago my mom called me about my taxing.
It’s like, did you guys take a big pay cut? It’s like, no, the yen isn’t worth anything anymore. That’s what happened. They get more technically, but yeah, making less than American money. So as long as you pretend the outside world does not exist. Yeah, that’s how I tend to go about my life. Works out okay. Most of the time, not all the time. Same. So, yeah, there are a lot of qualifiers on this film, I guess, judging on how you received it. Well, what is your hot take? Let’s get that on the table. This British movie is as good as British cuisine.
Oh, okay. Not the Indian stuff though, right? The Indian stuff’s good, but yeah. Yeah, that doesn’t count. That’s. That’s what, like tiki masala or. Yeah, but that’s like the British version altered from butter chicken. So here was my. I watched the whole movie without ever having seen it before. Without looking into any of the details. I just watched it. And then the first article after I started searching, just to get a little bit of context, this is what the article says. The bravest of the brave will get their dues this week in the 20 million. Which is why I asked, you know, if you adjusted for inflation.
So as of the time of this 2005 article, I guess they’d only put 20 million into it. The 20 million Ealing Studios film Valiant, which is already being touted as a successor to the Oscar winning Shrek, one of Hollywood’s biggest animation films, and is. Soon as I read that it was just like, oh boy, I hope they didn’t, you know, no one was putting money down on that statement like this. This one did not age very well. They didn’t have to wait very long for it to spoil. I don’t know, maybe this was the spiritual successor to Shrek.
But yeah, geez, Shrek is one of the films that’s like aged the worst. I think there might. I think if you’re like 30 years old now, I guess you were a kid when Shrek was out and maybe you still like Shrek. I don’t know, but I remember all my twenties or so. Yeah, same here. So it’s like we kind of liked at the time, but by the time Shrek 2 came out, Shrek 1 looked terrible. You know, I mean, that is the Pixar thing that even when the tech was lower, like their films always look good, whereas other studios, it took them a pretty long time to catch up.
Fair point. And I haven’t rewatched Shrek 1 for any reason anytime recently, like even in the last 10 years. But I guess I’m assuming that some of the jokes and the humor and the voice acting holds up even if the CGI doesn’t or did does like just the rest of the movie also not hold up as well. I haven’t watched it in about 10 years either, but I’m gonna just guess it probably doesn’t then. You have to. You get into the third and fourth movie now you’re dealing with like Shrek’s kids and they’re running around and farting and.
Yeah, you know, I guess my other take now too, just kind of freestyling a little bit. But Valiant would be one of the better movies that they could show you in school and someone in the faculty could be like, technically, I guess that’s educational and like you get the pass. But if this were your weekend out or if this were the one movie that you actually got to go and see in the theater, unless you just were really British and really wanted to like feel great about it, I don’t know, man. I would have, I would have been disappointed.
But again, I didn’t see it when it came out. This might have been very serviceable 3D and like eye candy. But watching it now, I was just. It was with a very critical eye and I don’t know, not as interesting as I was hoping. Well, I mean, no one ever liked it that much. Not adjusted for inflation. 32% rotten on rotten tomatoes metacritic, 45 out of 100, which isn’t the most damning scores you can have, but they’re not good, you know. Okay. No, yeah, yeah, I think. I think I’m in line with those. For the. For a rare instance when I actually agree with the general ratings.
Yeah. I guess I’m thinking I would call it, like, slightly lower in mid. That makes it, what, a 4 out of 10 or something? But that. That feels harsh. I don’t know. 4.5, I guess that’s what the Metacritic said. That seems. Well, I mean. And also, no one should really care what our rating is because we’re kind of like decoding it and discussing the symbolism. But yeah, I mean, for. Also, I know a lot of people watch this or listen to this and they’ll go out and they’ll check out the movie if they had overlooked it, especially for giving it rave reviews or whatever.
So I guess this is one of those ones where. I don’t know, unless, again, if you really love pigeons or World War II maybe, or you really love British people, then those three reasons. Maybe spend your time actually watching it. Yeah, I mean, things that I thought were good about the movie, I thought the soundtrack was pretty good. Although they were just taken, I guess, British, you know, orchestrating like rah rah British songs. Right. So maybe it wasn’t so original, but soundtrack was serviceable, so that was fine. Most of the voice acting is pretty good now.
Valiant himself was Ian McGregor. I was like, McGregor doesn’t know how voice act. The prequels kind of showed that. I guess the Star wars prequels, because he wasn’t voice acting, but he was on green screen and he was flat. Right. So he’s pretty flat here. And I like him in a lot of movies, so I thought he was, like, not good at voice acting. Yeah. A case of having a big name, but not necessarily, like the. The voice acting skill that goes behind it. But everyone else is. Tim Curry is great, right? As the. Is he a Nazi general? We’re not sure because we never quite see.
Tim Curry was great. You know, John Cleese just comes and does. John Cleese. That’s fine. The answer is yes, by the way. Absolutely. They’re Nazis. Yeah, they are, but they just like. It’s like there’s a flash of red, there’s a. There’s a, you know, iron cross. But now it’s like Bones. Yeah, it’s like just little changes. Yeah, of course they’re Nazis, but it’s just like we’re science trying so hard not to fully turn over that rock in this movie. You know, it also, it leans in harder than I would have expected. It is. That’s another one of the things where I was like, okay, that answers why they show the cadavers of these dead pigeons stitched up with like, it looks like some like Josef Mengele kind of experiments that were going on.
But here, I’ll just blast out the British hit list here just so we don’t have to just wallow in it. What do we got? Ricky Gervais is Bugsy. You can usually tell when he’s voice acting in a movie. John Cleese is Mercury. Olivia Williams is Victoria. John Hurt as Felix, the old seagull at home. Jim Broadbent as Sergeant Monty. Hugh Laurie as Wing Commander Gutsy. Rick Mayall as Cufflink. He was in the Young Ones. That pretty much covers, I think, the, the names that I recognize. At least when you say that, usually you can recognize Ricky Gervais.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s kind of become a bad thing, I guess. I, to be honest, I’ve never been that deep in Ricky Gervais. I haven’t seen his movies. I’ve just seen like a little bit of the British Office. So I’m, you know, I don’t really know him all that well. I, out of all the voice acting, I do think that his matched like that, like an animation style voiceover. He’s done several. Right. So, I mean, I would count him as a voice actor, sure. He says, are you enjoying him or not? What is it? There’s another movie I recently came across where he was doing that, but that’s that.
I’ll just drop it because I can’t remember. And is it, is it really even voice acting if you’re just doing yourself, reading the lines and then like now you’re the character? I don’t know if that qualifies as voice acting the same way. I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not trying to be like a stickler on this. I’m just legitimately wondering because voice acting. There’s the version where like, like Phil Lamar, is that the guy from Mad TV that does like a million freaking voice acting roles now? And each one has its own unique sound and flair and like a.
Backstory. Whereas Ricky Gervais, at least in this movie, it seems like it’s just Ricky Gervais. Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, for any star or especially one that’s in the limelight, you know, they’ve made their public Persona, and chances are, you know, behind that, they have to put that on. It’s still a little bit of acting. My weird example for that is Jimmy Fallon, who I’ve. Again, I haven’t seen his movies. I don’t watch the Tonight show, so I actually don’t really know his public Persona. However, in university, I worked for the university union for a day.
I was, like, driving him around, took him to lunch and stuff, and he was like this chill guy. And then I hear he’s hyper crazy. Why? You know, I’m like, oh, that’s not the guy I met. I mean, you got to turn that on for the camera. Right, Right. Of course, now he’s supposed to be a monster. When I met him, he was fine that day, but he was also, what, 25 years old at the time. So maybe you’re running the Tonight for a few years, you become a monster. I don’t know. So Anyway, back in 2000, he was pretty chill.
He hadn’t had his gold juice yet. Yeah. And has gold juice yet. There we go. But, yeah, I guess we should just put out the. What’s the plot of this movie? A lot of the movie is that there were a significant number of carrier pigeons in World War II that delivered all sorts of really sensitive information. And the whole premise of the movie is we’re following this last battalion of pigeon messengers that are in the Royal Air Force, or more specifically, the Royal Air Force’s Homing Pigeon Service. All this being real, by the way, except for the word and the name Valiant itself.
Valiant is sort of a fictionalized, A combination of a bunch of these different carrier pigeons that all actually operated in World War II, and they’re fighting against these falcons, which is also true that the Nazis trained falcons specifically to take out these carrier pigeons. So this is sort of a proxy war that we’re seeing. We’re seeing the British fighting the Nazis in the air, but only in the context of carrier pigeons fighting these falcons that are trained to take out the carrier pigeons. And spoiler alert, the Nazis lose. Really? Oh, okay. Well, I mean, there’s a number of asterisks at the end of that statement.
Exoterically, I’d say the Nazis lose. As far as the narrative of the war goes. Yes, that’s how it goes. And the movie. Yeah, that’s. That’s the spoiler. Now, I’m trying to go with Was this an artistic decision? No, it was a money decision. There are, like, no people in the film, which is just weird. I think there’s one or two shots with people. But, I mean, of course, in 2005, the thing was, oh, people are really hard to animate in cgi, so they just didn’t bother, it seems. I get that. I also. I also feel, even with that technicality as an excuse, which is very practical one, I also feel that keeping people out of this allowed them to have these, you know, ambiguously Nazi falcons.
Because the second you’ve got an actual human being in there, it’s like, did they just animate a Nazi? So, I don’t know. It helps remove it from the actual atrocities of the real war going on. And it lets it be like this perfect proxy. And I guess the underlying. I’ll just cut right to my biggest thing is, like, subliminally, this is, hey, kids, it’s cool to join war. You’ll become, you know, famous. And it’s. You don’t really get that hurt. Something might just knock you around a little bit. But it’s kind of like a really nice intro.
Like, you know, my first war. Yeah. No, near the end of the movie, I have a note that everyone gets little moments of quiet personal reflection like that on the front lines, you know, because there’s time for that in war. The other thing, maybe because it’s 2005, CGI and stuff, I just. I was having flashbacks to Call of Duty a lot watching this movie. You know, I’m like, hey, that farmhouse is the first level in Call of Duty, isn’t it? Hey, this is the D Day level. I mean, I was just like, sometimes, hey, people are like, it looks like a PlayStation game.
And this one, like, well, PC game. But I was like, I actually am having flashbacks. War flashbacks to Call of Duty, the video game. It’s actually a good point because that both of those Call of Duty in particular was very well researched. I remember. And some of those in that series were whole documentaries about how they went. And they visited the actual YouTube boats and, like, all these different submarines and all of, you know, the actual beaches on Normandy. Even. Even that. That was mine, too. I was like, oh, I remember that part from Call of Duty.
That’s when you storm Normandy, you gotta take out the guy in the huge, like, stone wall. You gotta go in that bunker. Right? I’ve been there. I’ve been in that bunker, you know, virtually. But I think that’s just a. It’s an interesting new phenomenon That I guess we’re going to start getting used to is that so many things now in media consumption are based on, like, these historical portrayals, and the closer each of those different ones gets, now they’re all the same. Like, now you’re going to keep seeing the same things over and over, especially if it’s going to be World War II related.
Well, everything. We get movies like Ready Player One where it’s like, hey, let’s go into the Shining for 10 minutes. Like, what? I kind of love that movie. I didn’t like the book. This is one of the rare instances where the movie is better than the book. In my. My opinion, the movie is far better than the book ever was. Oh. If you want to hear an enraged man talk about that movie, go back to the. My old podcast, Matt and Luke Sci Fi Sanctuary, where Luke had, like, all of his knives out for that movie.
He didn’t like the movie. Did he like the book? No, no. Telling him he would because he’s a gamer. Right. They’re like, you’ll love the book. I really hated it. And then I was. I felt like, so talked down to. I know this is a total tangent. So the best example is that in the book, there’s so many times where I’ll paraphrase, you’d be like, I walked into the room and the room made me feel like Indiana Jones. And, you know, in the. In the Temple of Doom, in this one scene, and it’s like, dude, you can’t just say, hey, think of this movie you like, okay, that, like, you’re there now.
It’s like, no, no, no, you don’t. You don’t get to just conjure up a movie and then, like, live off of the energy of that and say, that represents an outfit or that represents what’s going on in your book. You have to write it so that you’re. So that. Me reading it, I’m like, oh, this reminds me of. You can’t just set everything. And that was like, on every page. It was like. And the. The song was like. And he would mention, like, an actual song. It’s like, I don’t know that. That really irritated me. The movie did a great job, though.
Okay, my speed and we’ll get to this one are the. The Wreck It Ralph movies, which I feel kind of does a similar pop culture thing, but right with the video, I like that, you know, vibe better, I guess, for. For that particular sort of thing. Yeah. I patted myself a little bit on the back for recognizing the Edith Piaf Song, although it was not recorded till 1960, so a little bit of an anachronism there. That’s the one. Inception, if anyone, is, you know, the ones that slow down dreams. Played at normal speed in this movie.
It’s in lots of movies, so I shouldn’t be that impressed. I recognized it. This movie also starts out well, starts out with death. Two of the last remaining carrier pigeons get taken out by these Nazi falcons, which is pretty advanced. That was one of the first things too. I was like, oh, this is not like a normal Disney movie. Again, explained a little bit intense opening scene. Yeah. And then immediately following that intense opening scene where, like the two good guys die immediately, it shows this Department of Pigeon Propaganda film strip. Literally. That’s. That’s what it says on the outskirts of it.
And now, like, you’ve got this mockery of what Disney was actually creating not that long ago. Right. Like, like, like 50 years prior. They were accurate, I guess. 60 years in this case. They were actually making those propaganda films. So now they’re distributing mockeries of it. But I don’t know, they got to kind of set that template a little bit. I mean, that might be my favorite part of the movie because I like weird educational films as well. The podcast we started talking on was me talking about weird educational films most of the time. So have you.
On, on that note, have you ever heard of Walt Disney on the front lines? The disc set? Yeah, I think I have it within reach here. Yeah. Okay. Someone just mentioned it to me. You might have even brought it up to me. And we just haven’t seen it because it wasn’t all the theatrical stuff, but. Right, let’s see. Disneyland, Secret Stories of Magic. Tomorrowland. Yeah. Yeah, Here we go. Walt Disney on the front lines. Nice. So we did Victory Through Air Power, which is the most interesting thing on that disc, probably because I own it’s the reason we did it.
So. But yeah, that’s interesting stuff. I especially like weird live action educational films, to be honest. Now I do want to throw out. I liked it. My little synchronistic viewing corner I’ve been getting into more recently. This one was pretty wild. Last night was Thursday. I watched Valiant. Wednesday night I watched a 1985 Soviet movie called Come and See. Are you familiar with this at all? Definitely not. Okay. I wasn’t either. This was the podcast we were talking about. This was supposed to be a really good movie, and it was. It’s. It’s a one watch movie, though.
It’s. It’s about a Belarusian kid who finds. Digs out a gun, you know, in the middle of like. I don’t remember what year it is, it doesn’t matter in this movie, but digs out a gun, a German spy plane. Seeing him, he goes to. He wants to join the resistance, and then forcibly gets dragged into it. Since a German spy plane saw him get the gun. They take out his village and he’s going around. It’s all this fog of war, you know, no characters stay with him for long and it’s just like. You see all the blood and brutality of, like, village massacres and it’s just the polar opposite of this movie.
It sounds like it would have been more interesting, but maybe not for the same audience. And I guess that said is, do you think that this movie, Valiant, was like a rage with kids? Do you think kids actually saw this and we’re like, awesome. Because it. It almost feels like it’s playing on nostalgia for the grandparents that are watching. That’s what I’ll say. I think Grandpa, great grandpa, who was in the war, is probably taking the kids to go see this, you know? And I mean, did you already mention the commercial success of this? It was not a flop, but it wasn’t that successful.
It made the least money of a CGI film, but since it only cost 35 to make, it made 61.7 million. So it did. Made almost a double, which isn’t bad, but. Yeah, so good for that, I guess. So somebody saw it. But. Yeah. I don’t. It doesn’t say where it made its money, I think, because I’m like, is it all in the UK? Oh, here we go. Here we go. About 20 million in the UK. The US. Excuse me. 20 million in the US and that just says 42 internationally, which is kind of weird. You think you’d want to.
Although it was. Although it was not a box office flop, the film held the record for lowest box office of a CGI animated film, until this record was later beaten in 2006 by Dougal, the American redubbed version of the Magic Roundabout, which was the CGI film that went into production before this, but came out after. I haven’t heard of either of those. Magic Roundabout or Dougal. Yeah, but Valiant. We start with Valiant. He’s a tiny bird, you know, and by the end he’s looking great. He’s got a medal on, you know, he’s got these kissing his lady.
Right. I thought he was a kid originally. I didn’t even realize it was an adult. Yeah, he’s. He’s Just a tiny one, I guess. Well, come and see it as a kid. It’s a 14 year old kid at the start of the film. He looks like a 14 year old kid digging around for guns in a, you know, in a ditch at the end. By the end of the movie, he looks like he’s 50. And it’s the same actor. It’s like kind of amazing. We were, when we were doing the research for that, the, the director and the production were like trying to like, we have to be careful not to actually mentally scar this kid as we’re making the movie.
Oh, so he was actually 14 as well as. Yes, they cast a 14 year old. Like most of the actors are like not. I mean, it’s a Soviet movie too, so. But they’re not professional actors, you know, they’re people that were living in the area, that sort of thing. So a very naturalistic vibe to that movie. Again, everything is the polar opposite. The soundtrack, you barely notice it. It’s very good, but it’s just kind of ambient. And a lot of the film is just silence and sound Design. You know, 2 hours 22 minutes versus 76 minutes of this.
So it was just weird watching those movies, like back to back. I also have to assume that the Soviet would be a tragedy where this one is an obvious comedy. Exactly. Yes. The interesting thing in there is the kid, we only know if his gun works because he does not kill anyone through the entire movie. And at the end of the movie he starts having a vision. There’s a little bit of surrealism. It’s like 5% surreal and 95% war horror. Hyper realistic, but the 5% surrealism. So last shot of that movie has him having a vision.
He sees a portrait of Hitler. It starts going back through time till you have like Hitler with his mom as a baby and he points the gun and decides not to shoot. So like that’s a pretty notable anti war message of some kind. Just don’t shoot anybody. You know, if you follow that, then not even baby Hitler. He couldn’t shoot baby Hitler. So the, the kid that survives a movie, like there’s a girl he’s with for a while and it’s just a fog of war thing. It’s not like she gets killed or she leaves. She’s just, she’s not there at some point in the movie, you know, and you never see her again.
I’m sure this is not an original thought, but there’s got to be another solution for time travel Hitler, where you just go back to art school and you tell him that his painting is good. And then crisis averted. Now you don’t even have to kill a baby. You buy a few. You know, with inflation, no one would care. No one would care who painted it at that point it would be like, oh, Adolf. Who? I’ve never heard of him. Oh, also the climax of this movie is, you know, breaking into the bunker and where ever all the decorations serve a plot purpose.
Right. So I thought that was kind of funny. Right. They have like, like artillery shells holding all of the different accessories that the falcons basically are using. Right. Whereas the come and see climax, we’re going to put that in quotations as them rounding up a Belarusian village, sticking them in a building, setting on fire while they’re drinking and singing German patriotic songs outside, saying, you can escape but all the kids need to stay in. So that’s how the 14 year old gets out. They mean like little children. So he gets out and then somebody. Oh, and then a woman gets out who they instantly grab to do whatever with.
Very disturbing movie. So again, maybe I’m Valiant. I might have missed a little bit of this detail, but in Valiant, there was a scene where it was implied that the carrier pigeons were light. Like they had something that was on fire and they were dropping it as they were flying through this town. And it almost seemed they were implying that they were going to be setting these buildings on fire, which would then imply that now these pigeons are taking out humans. But it was during like dramatic chase scene. They’re trying to get away from these falcons, but they’re dropping like these flaming bits left and right of them.
So he makes it convenient that we barely see humans. Right? I mean, maybe the pigeons have taken them all out. And the other, the other, I guess, thing that juxtaposes against the movie that you’re talking about is that that one is about sort of boots on the ground war and this one is all about military intelligence. If anything, this entire movie is stressing the importance of top secret and classified info and, and getting this information across enemy lines in like a very secret fashion. There’s also, I mean I, I hate to be like the hammer that sees nails everywhere, but Ricky Gervais literally playing Bugsy, literally says that he’s on the level when he’s trying.
He gets himself into a bind. He’s like, fellas, fellas, I’m on the level. So now it almost seems that this whole movie was about the passage of secret information through masons. Yeah. What is. There’s a book that came out about 10 years ago, which is talking about some of the. This disinformation spies that were sent into like Spain and Austria during World War II, like they’re behind like, you know, it’s one of those things where two people knew who they were and they were giving the Nazis false information. I wonder if they did that with carrier pigeons.
If they had some sort of way. If it’s got like, hey, if this one’s got the blue ring around it, you know, but then this message is actually meant to get intercepted. Right. The point of the. What I’m talking about is that that is what led the Nazis to believe that D day was going to be at a different place. That’s why they put so much build up, because they were getting this intelligence, this fake intelligence that worked. So when the Allies showed up in Normandy, there weren’t that many people there. You know, the defenses are not what they could have been.
The old switcheroo. Yes, yes. So anyway, it’s a fascinating story as well. I wish I could remember tell you about book. I’ll see if I can find it at some point. But it’s also a little bit surreal to do some of the background research on this and to discover how vital carrier pigeons were to winning the war. That they legitimately were the carriers of classified top secret information. Movement of troops. A lot of that too was finding disbanded troops, like someone that got separated from the rest of the pack, and now they’re kind of up the creek without a paddle, so to speak.
And they would use carrier pigeons in order to let the rest of the troops know where they were at so they could come and get rescued. There was over 32, I think, 32 different pigeons that were awarded this Dickens medal. And that represents pigeons that actually either carried a message that was important, carried a message in record time, or saved human lives somehow. And it was also kind of remarkable how fast some of these pigeons were able to get from one place to another. And I even read one article that was talking about, and I don’t know, I assume that this was all propaganda.
This was just like, oh, my God, what a miracle. But it said that there were countless pigeons that got damaged on the way there, like, were either shot at or got attacked by these falcons that were trained to take them out. But they would get to their destination, deliver the message, and immediately drop dead. And some of them were described as having their chests just completely torn open from the battle getting there, but they still made it. Like they still got the message across. And thank God you know, we beat the Nazis because of it. It almost sounded too good to be true for a lot of those stories.
But what do I know? I don’t have a Dickens medal. No, no. The book I’m thinking, by the way, is called Double Cross, the True Story of the D Day spies by Ben McIntyre. So worth a read if you’re into that sort of thing. I honestly, I thought it was probably. Well, it was a much more interesting story than what we got in this movie, which is a good old fashioned war yawn yarn. Which let’s. A good old fashioned war movie. Okay, that’s Ewan McGregor’s quote about the movie. So which is the plane? Possible without any actual violence or action.
Except Right. Maybe the final scene, if you really want to consider that as being an action scene. Although if to me it was more like an entry level video game level. It was like the tutorial level that was the final showdown scene. Oh, the Rube Goldberg machine or the mill Goldberg machine. Where like you knock this thing and then the water starts flowing and the water flow turns the windmill and the windmill makes the thing open like. Yeah, like the inanimate objects in a barn end up doing all the heavy lifting in the final action scene.
Well, Valiant’s a tiny bird. He needs a little help, doesn’t he? I guess so, yeah. If the leading line is, oh, it’s just a good old fashioned war movie that ends with an incredible machine level. Yeah, I think that’s just boilerplate on a press tour, you know. Did this movie get a press tour? I guess it’s a good question. It doesn’t really seem like it. Too many big stars. So. Yeah, just I guess the movies, like they. Maybe they got in their head. Like we’re making the first British CGI film. It’s a, like a war effort.
And they did like a war effort again. 107 days for a 76 CGI film. It’s pretty intense. Yeah. And honestly, I don’t fault anyone for liking the movie. I don’t fault them for making it. I’ve got a special place in my heart for nationalist propaganda animated movies distributed by Disney. It’s kind of like one of my favorite things. Yeah, I guess there’s just not much reason for this movie to exist. And I don’t mind the movie. Yeah, I don’t mind the movie being called Valiant. But why is the bird’s name Valiant? That’s stupid. It is kind of stupid.
And so is Victoria being his girlfriend. It’s kind of exactly what you would expect Everything to be. It would have been cooler if they named it after an actual pigeon out of the 32. I mean, maybe they did. The pigeons have like, you know, representation and they couldn’t afford to clear the name of the pigeon. No, I looked, I looked through every single one of Dickens award winning animals and not a single one was named Valiant. Although it was, it was based on the fact that there were carrier pigeons that served in the war. And another just random tangent which will never come up again in any context, so I might as well mention it here that the United States had something similar to the Royal Air Force’s Homing Pigeon Service.
The, the US’s version was called the United States Pigeon Service. It had 150 officers, 3,000 soldiers and 54,000 military pigeons. So there are some people that served in World War II and they were like feeding pigeons. That was their role. Yeah. So it’s like all the pigeons in the city then. It’s like when Reagan closed all the mental institutions and the cities ended up with a bunch of people who were not getting help. That’s what all the pigeons are in our cities now. Disaffected soldier pigeons. And I asked this question in awe. Is there not any animal that the US military can’t weaponize? Like, that’s sort of impressive.
Maybe the next thing is going to be like the New York City sewer rat brigade and we just start dropping sewer rats on the next international conflict. Isn’t that the plot of that Crispin Glover movie and that Willard. Yeah, and that was a remake of a 70s movie. But I mean, we could also say Ben. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And with a charmingly sung ballad by Michael Young. Right, yeah. Michael Jackson soundtrack. That would be creepy. Singing a love song to a, to a rat. Well, yeah, the song here, weird choice at the end. That song at the end is an Andrew Sister song.
But it’s in that weird, you know, electro R B jam version. Like what? And that’s the first time in the movie it does that. Up to that point it is just kind of like an orchestral score. Right. So. Well, because we beat, we beat the Nazis. So now it’s time to sort of usher in the new way. Now we gotta, we gotta deal with the Cold War. And the way that you fight the Cold War is culturally. Right, right. Just a bit early. It’s kind of like the Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen that where they’re playing.
It’s like showing Memphis in the 50s and it’s like playing trap music or whatever. I didn’t hate it. You know why? And it wasn’t. That part was not endearing to me. It definitely was odd. But it was absolutely helping a newer generation relate to Elvis because now they think Elvis was dropping fat rhymes and, you know, or even that, I guess would be dated. That’s like dating into like 90s. But yeah, he was like, like in a trap house or something. So that’s the, that’s the way that you continue these legacies on. It’s not necessarily if they’re being true to their original form.
And that movie biopic pushes so hard. We know Elvis was fighting for the people, right? Like, there’s scenes where he’s like, just telegraphing civil rights. Just, look, look, he does it. So I don’t. I mean, I don’t really know what the real Elvis was up to in regards to that. Likely didn’t care all that much. But yeah, the movie just like pushed. I. I had fun watching that movie, by the way. That’s, you know, I, I wouldn’t. It was a fun watch. It was a fun watch. It’s a movie that makes weird choices. They make him seem like he’s Martin Luther King, but just a white version and dance.
Yeah, yeah. So weird choices. But again, you know, just like this movie, let’s. Let’s try and tweak it for the masses. Right? I mean, that’s. There was another really odd dynamic in this movie that they. I don’t have a better suggestion. So I don’t want to just be like, non. Like just criticizing it, but it was an observation where the Royal Air Force homing pigeons show up in order to recruit from the other pigeons. And they’re kind of showing off and they’re doing these flying formations and doing barrel rolls and stuff. You know, like typical Blue angel type stuff that would fascinate some kids.
Like, oh my God. Wow, that’s so cool. But see the difference though is that a human seeing another human flying a plane and doing this stuff, that’s pretty incredible because I can’t fly already. Like, I can’t even do anything close to what they’re doing and handling the technology and like, all the training and just the, like the, the intuitiveness in order to be able to do this and not freak out. But if you’re just a pigeon showing off in front of another pigeon, it’s not like you’re doing Blue angel stuff. You’re just doing gymnastics and that’s kind of lame.
And there’s this whole Scene where it’s like, oh, my God, look, they’re doing all these formations. But I was just watching. It’s like, can’t you all do this like that? You just practice long enough. It’s not like you got to go and get a fighter jet and, like, risk your life. You’re not going to risk your life by just trying what they’re doing. So I know it loses a little bit of the. The recruitment angle, I guess. Yeah. Well, at the end of the movie, as Valiant is going back across the. The channel and just like, you know, furiously plopping his wings around.
And is that aerodynamically correct? I don’t know. I guess I. You know, I like the electromagnetic. Electromagnetic version of a bird flight. You, as you ask, was that correct? Well, they specifically hired somebody that was one of these Royal Air Force carrier pigeon trainers that. That was involved in a bunch of the operations in World War II to work on this movie for both anatomical correctness and just to make sure that they were getting things, like, somewhat cohesive and that they weren’t stretching any of the information too far or low. So I don’t know if that was for better or worse, but it does seem as though some of the movements, even as I was watching it, it felt like it was missing some of what I was always kind of trained to do when you’re doing animation, which is you imagine every character.
This is oversimplifying, but you imagine every character is like a circle. But, like, if they jump, there’s. But you’re supposed to, like, elongate the circle. And if they land, you’re supposed to squash the circle and give it this extra dynamic motion that makes it feel larger than life. And a lot of the character movement in this movie lacked all of that sort of cartoon physics. And probably in part because they literally had a. Like a. Essentially a script supervisor. It was like, nope, pigeon doesn’t look like that. You know what I mean? Like, oh, God, maybe it looked weird because it was realistic.
You know, it didn’t look cool. It looked weird. So, yeah, there was a very uncanny valley. I mean, at the time, I’m sure it was stronger. Now you’re just like, oh, yeah, PlayStation 2 game. Yeah. By the way, I kept saying 106 days. It is 106 weeks, which is still short production time for a CGI anime movie. Seven times longer. Quite as. Yeah, not quite as insane as what I was putting out there. Still. Still short. I mean, because a Pixar movie is like, what, at that time, it was four or Five years in production for a Pixar, so it is still short.
But yeah, random hot take, maybe even bordering on ignorant observation that I wrote down as I was watching this. But out of all the military conflicts that the US has been involved in, it seems that the only two that have been outwardly justified from almost like every objective angle was against Germany and against the British. Right. Like out of all the one those are ones seem to be the most free from controversy in terms of being justified. World War II and the revolutionary War. See, I was sitting here wondering if you were meaning the War of 1812 for that where the British kind of showed up because the Revolutionary War, you could argue they’re revolutionaries.
Right. So they shouldn’t be doing that if you wanted to. Whereas the War of 1812, the British literally just showed up and you know, we had to start blasting them and they burned down Washington and then I started blasting. They mostly won that war, the War of 1812. I think they basically like it was a supply line thing. Right. I mean, I think that those, the, those two examples are probably the most historically relevant though. Like has there been a Disney or animated movie about the War of 1812? Has there been a movie about the War of 1812? I can’t recall anything that’s a very.
We kind of. I decided to forget that one for whatever reason. Maybe it wasn’t interesting enough, I don’t know. Or we’re just. We’re trying to smooth over one of our greatest allies now, I guess. But yeah, I mean the, the. So even if 1812 was another justified. Even though that was. Would have been more of a self defense situation more than us being an aggressor. Right. That was us on the defense. Yeah. Rubies about the War of 1812. Oh, look at this. Bugs Bunny. No, the Buccaneer. Okay, there we go. That’s a 1930 remade a few times.
Oh, the list is real short and I don’t recognize most of the titles. Nope. That means that there’s a gap out there in the market waiting to be filled. That’s right. I could do it real quickly here. Brave Warrior, the Buccaneer, 1938. The Buccaneer, 1958. Captain Caution, First Invasion, the War of 1812, Last of the Buccaneers, Mohawk Mutiny, Old Ironsides to Muska. We shall remain finished. That’s all the. That’s what WikiLeaks, the script for Buccaneer must have been pretty hot if there was one remake and then like a sequel even it sounded like was in there.
Yeah. Ooh. The 1958 one stars Yule Brenner and Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson. Okay, I’m interested. And, I mean, I don’t know the answer to this, but I have seen enough Game of Thrones to make an assumption that carrier pigeons are not a recent invention. So carrier pigeons technically have been possibly involved in any war in which pigeons were around. Yeah, you do have to wonder what pigeons are up to these days. I mean, if you got them trained, you train the next generation, as we see in this movie. You know, they’re watching in the city, aren’t they? Well, those.
Yeah, those ones aren’t even real anymore. I guess this might even feed into that idea that maybe we wiped out all the pigeons in World War II through the United States Pigeon Service, and now all the replacement pigeons are actual surveillance cameras. Yeah, that could be the case. Look one in the eye. See if it. You know, if it focuses at you or not. Pigeon in the eye. It’s funny you mentioned that, because there’s a couple weird scenes in this movie where they’re trying to imply a romantic relationship developing between Valiant and Victoria, who is a nurse pigeon.
But they. I guess maybe in, like, a humorous way. But whenever they’re staring into each other’s eyes, since they’re pigeons, they keep, like, randomly looking in all other directions. So there’s even a moment when they’re. They’re kind of, you know, like, face to face. It almost, like, looks like it’s going to be a first kiss. But even as they’re talking to each other, Victoria’s eyes just keep, like, darting around as she’s talking. And it kind of takes me out of it. It’s almost like, how do you even know if you’re getting consent here? She’s not even making eye contact with you.
Well, the note I got is the hot pigeon is not hot. Olivia Williams. Sure. But this pigeon. No. Yeah, it’s. It’s hard to make pigeons hot. Although Animaniacs, I think, might have gotten halfway there with a pigeon. Well, no, I guess that would have been a hen. Okay, I might be revealing too much about myself here, so I’ll stop. Well, I was just Throw out the Joan Carrick cats from Heathcliff’s Girlfriend. Yeah, that’s. I don’t. That’s the. That’s the funniest anthem for Anthromorphophis. Sorry, I can’t say the word. That’s just my gold standard of, like, what were they thinking? I like it.
Yeah, that occupies a definite tangible space in your brain. Forever. That’s just my signifier. Anytime someone tries to make an animal cartoon character look hot, I’m like, there’s this ridiculous version, right? Which doesn’t make sense. I’m mostly okay. My notes are down to things like Valiant takes it up the cloaca and Jesus and French is spooky because it will fries you. Okay? And he does, literally, he takes it up the cloaca because he goes in and he sees Victoria for the first time. And she’s like, I got something to give you boys. And they’re all like, ooh.
But then she whips out this ginormous hypodermic needle that’s bigger than Valiant is. It is literally bigger than Valiant. The. The needle itself is about the size of his leg. But, you know, he’s kind of a trooper for just taking that, just I guess to show off. And the other ones don’t get it. So was this even an important thing that he was needing to get if no one else got it? Maybe they get in the, you know, after the scene. You would assume they get tracked down eventually. They’re. They’re in the military. Purple Liquid. Yeah, I had a couple of notes on very loose notes, but again on Bugsy, either being a Freemason or maybe more accurately a Cowan.
A Cowan is like, like a false mate. Someone that claims to be a Mason, but they are not because he pre. He was full of bird. So. Yeah, sure, right. And he seems like he would lie about that kind of thing. So he’s kind of this Cowan, but he literally is playing a. It’s kind of like a three shell Monty style game, but it’s only two shells. And as soon as he like lifts one up, he kind of like, they catch him cheating. And in order to get out of the cheating, he blurts out that line.
He’s like, fellows, fellas, you know, I’m on the level, gents. And you know, then he starts talking about how he stands for freedom, but as soon as the situation heats up, he hides behind a pillar in this Traufiger square. So I don’t know, I thought that was interesting that he was saying things that didn’t really make sense. Like he was saying he’s on the level, but he’s not on level. He was literally lying to them because he was cheating. And then he immediately goes and he enlists in military service, but then immediately tries to get out of the military service.
So he does seem that he’s kind of a scumbag. Like, if anything, he might be a Bad guy in this movie a little bit. And he’s smelly, apparently. And they keep saying he’s the stinkiest of the birds. Well, and I think that’s probably why his name is Bugsy is because he’s always got bugs flying around him. Right, right. And he claims that’s because he likes freedom, but I think it’s because he’s French. I would have cast the black crows in this movie. I guess those are crows that we need pigeons, don’t we? I haven’t looked through.
Did you have something on. On your notes? You wanted to dive and do a bit? I’m bam. The role of the Nazis in this movie, which are the Nazi falcons. Again, this movie is about how secret intelligence and information warfare was just as important as any of the. The ground warfare of the infantry. And what they show these falcons doing is once they capture one of these pigeons, they’re basically torturing them. They’re. They’re putting them through mental torture. They’re trying to extract information, you know, tell us what the message was. Where are you going? Like, all this info.
So this very much feels like, I mean, you know, NASA. This is sort of what the Americans and the Allies got out of Germany, like, after they, quote, unquote, won the war. These techniques that they’re showing the Falcons refining, this is sort of the spoils of war. This is the extra, you know, boost that we got to our economy and everything. They got to do all this extra research. And it is kind of nuts that even the falcons are basically doing this. This proto MK Ultra sort of programming to the captured POWs. See, that’s why I see this movie happening.
You got great gramps. You know, See, little Timmy, we got all these ideas from the Fritz. Not the Fritz, what, whatever. From the Germans before we, you know, smacked them or not, before we hired them. Yeah, this is like the last. You know, I wonder if 2005 is, like the last moment they really could have made this film. Because once you have all the veterans, you know, getting old, there’s just. It is a weird thing to watch even 20 years later. And that’s why I said this movie might live on as a great film that they put on when maybe the age group of the audience is a little too young to learn about actual World War II, but you can kind of get them into it.
I don’t know, May. This is a weird world, but I would have. I would have appreciated this if this were shown to me as like an entry point in World War II. Yeah, I am thinking you know, Victory Through Air Power, which we covered, is of course, like, even more dated. Right. It doesn’t make sense after 1945. But if I really wanted to give someone a flavor of World War II, I might go for that instead. Just because it’s so obviously propaganda. Oh, this one tries to hide it slightly. You know, after I watch Victory of Air Power, I’m like, I want to.
I need to buy some war bonds. Like, are you telling me that if I get war bonds, you can build another plane and that extra plane is going to save another 50 you know, people. Just because I got a war bond that’s going to be worth like, three times its value in 100 years from now, or at least I pass on to my grandkids on their birthdays or something. And we can win World War II again. Right? Well, as we watch in 2020, whatever. It was incredibly informational, though. And I had learned recently about Lookout Mountain.
Have you heard about Lookout Mountain before? There’s a Lookout Mountain in Georgia. So I’m guessing that’s not what you’re referring to. Right. So I can’t even remember where this Lookout Mountain. I think it’s closer to the northwest. But it’s a top secret. You’re gonna. You’re gonna be surprised at this mountain range or a mountain that they basically created movie studios inside of, and they were shooting lots of top secret war footage, either training or who the hell knows? And that there’s evidence that Marilyn Monroe, I guess, had a top secret clearance to go there. Rumors that Stanley Kubrick had top secret clearance to go there, but they were legitimately shooting some sorts of movies in here.
So it doesn’t shock me at all to consider that whatever we got to see in that Walt Disney on the Front Lines collection that you mentioned, you’ve got, which includes the Victory Through Air Power, but those are the ones that made it out into the world because they were made for the world. But there were also top secret Disney movies likely created that the rest of the world has never seen. They’re in a vault somewhere, and they’re probably, I don’t know, like, you know, here’s what it looks like when you’re. When the. And you’re in the trenches and the guy next to you’s face gets blown off.
Here’s what it looks like. And it’s like Mickey pointing out all the different, like, you know, trauma areas or something. Like, here’s a kill spot. This seems like a very real thing that could have existed. And after all the weird things that, you know, that we actually did in prep for the war. I mean, having someone make some really gruesome Disney versions of warfare doesn’t seem that far fetched. So Lookout Mountain. That’s dumb. Maybe. I don’t know if that counts as a dumb because a dumb has to be deep underground, but yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess deep in a mountain is technically underground, right? I don’t know.
I don’t know. Does the. Is the mountain count as ground if you’re standing on it? I suppose. Landslide, I guess. We don’t call it a grand ground slide though, do we? We do not. Yeah. Anyway, we’re working out. The intricacies of the English language is always fun. I had another. I don’t even know what scene I was watching, but I. I had this note where this movie, you can clearly see some of the gaps in the animation. The CGI itself. Like you made a great point that I guess I hadn’t considered before that Pixar movies do tend to hold up a lot better than early DreamWorks movies or even any other like non Pixar CGI movies.
Open season, take your pick, right? A lot, a lot of them don’t hold up as well. But in, in part of that too is like that Uncanny Valley aspect. And there was one part of this that I was watching that I immediately was thinking, oh, they can do that so much better now. I. Oh, it was the lip syncing. So in some of the previous CGI movies we’ve seen so far, like the lips kind of like the mouth opens while the other person’s talking, but you don’t get the same. Like the faces don’t emote and sometimes the actual mouth and the shape of the mouth as they’re saying words didn’t always look great and sometimes not easy.
Like these are freaking pigeons talking. So you can only animate a beak so much to match up with like a person talking. This one got really close, so they actually matched a lot of that. But it also seems like this is one of those things in Uncanny Valley that even if the technology pushes us way beyond where we’ve got now, there’s probably just always going to be like, it looks good, but I know that that’s not real. And I, I wonder if like we can even ever get over that. Especially when it comes to a pigeon talking.
Is. Was. Would there ever be a realistic enough version of a movie where pigeons talk that you can suspend your disbelief and get over Uncanny Valley all at once? It almost seems like it’s. It’s Impossible. Well, it’s like in a live action movies they do all the de aging now. Robert De Niro and the Irishman and Tom Hanks in here and it’s like, well, right. The best you’re gonna do for that sort of thing is like, you know, there was the last Indiana Jones, like, oh, I guess, I guess that looks good. But you’re not convinced that that’s the young version of that.
Actors, like, I guess that looks good. That’s like the best result you’re gonna get, you know? Yeah, I feel like they kind of ruin it. Although sometimes the alternative is like they just get someone that doesn’t look anything like them. And then like I’ve. That’s happened to me so many times in movies when I get to the end and it’s like, wait, the guy they were showing an hour ago, that was him younger. And it’s like different body types, different face structures, different, like different everything. I don’t know, maybe I’m just. Maybe I’m just. That’s the other side of the coin, isn’t it? I guess so, yeah, if you don’t want to have that.
The de aging that obviously get better too. But the same thing is that the uncanny valley aspect and maybe not everyone cares about it because I also noticed a lot of people fall for AI generations a lot easier. But it’s only if you’re not used to seeing like all the telltale signs. I mean that was the hook behind the movie Boyhood, right? Like we filmed it over 15 years, so everyone ages naturally, especially the boy. Right. Because I mean the actors, you just add a little makeup, take a little off. I was watching a Twilight Zone for, for that podcast and you know, on Blu Ray just they have a 36 year old man with just like trying to make him look 70.
It’s just like the worst makeup ever. Like it was probably fine on a Catherine Ray tv, but on Blu Ray it looks terrible. Oh, you, you just mentioned the Twilight Zone. And I just. This is on a slight tangent or an absolute tangent, but you know I’m good for Twilight Zone tangents. I was looking into the writer that wrote the book Watcher in the Wood, the one that we watched recently on Dark Disney, Florence Engel Randall. And I was reading this on her wiki page. Maybe you already knew this, maybe you even brought this up when we did our episode.
But she said that she wrote a short story in 65 called the Watchers. And the Watchers was about a dystopian society where violence and murder become a form of entertainment. And that it basically was all about people exploring these violent acts on a stage as if it were a performance, but they’re actually doing like real violence. And anyways, the concept of this, the short story called the Watchers, was adapted to be a Teleplay in the 85 reboot of Twilight Zone, but wasn’t included. But that this has actually been cited a few times. And it almost reminds me of the purge of Running Man.
But this is before any of those existed. This is 1965, so I don’t know. A lot of working. No. Yeah, we’re in 64 with Twilight Zone. We’re about to finish the original series. But there are so many episodes where we come across and we’re like, is this the first time the sci fi concept was filmed? You know, like haunted dolls? Or like it was Earth all along? That sort of stuff. Like, is this the first episode for that? And I wonder if people watching it at the time knew how like monumental, how long lasting and profound a lot of those episodes and stuff would be.
Like the Twilight Zone out of any other sort of like television series seems to have held the test of time better than almost anything else from that time period. Yeah. Yeah. Really? I am. I’m just thinking valiance, like it’s 20 years passed and you and I were like, what’s this Valiance movie? You know, for things that are not standing the test of time. That great? Yeah. Again, I don’t know if this one would ever make any of my lists. It wouldn’t even make the worst list. Which is probably even worse than not making the worst list because it means it didn’t make as much of impression.
If anyone ever though was like, man, did you know that they had carrier pigeons in World War II? I’d be like, bro, you gotta check out Valiant. Like that’s kind of the peak point in which I would ever recommend this movie to anyone. It’s a pretty specific one. Like I said, I, you know, sometimes mid is. Is you just don’t recommend mid in any way. Right. So when a movie’s very mid, like, is this. I’m thinking of other. Like I mentioned Ice Age Open Season. Have you ever seen those? And I have. Honestly, I haven’t seen those since they came out.
And I remember not disliking Ice Age. I saw Ice Age a little bit more like 10 years ago. I’m like, I think Valiant. I think I like Valiant better in Ice Age. It’s got more detail in the animation. It’s a little More colorful. Ice Age just has that super PS2 look to it, you know, like, whereas this at least looks like it had. Well, they were doing the backgrounds well, you know, they’re trying to make those accurate and stuff. So there’s a little bit more than Ice Age. I think the best scene in this movie was when.
And I guess this is why I thought Valiant was a child. And I guess I still think Valiant is a child because right before he leaves, he sees his mom and his mom’s like, oh, have something to eat before you leave. And she kind of regurgitates this worm that sticks out of her mouth and it’s like, you know, smiling at him and stuff. He’s probably like 17, like just, just at the line where you can enter, you know, I guess, I mean, you know, like only baby birds eat the regurgitated food from their mama bird. So they, I mean, that is the bird coming of age.
Yeah, I guess once you go to war, once you read Catcher in the Rye also. Why am I saying 17 years? Pigeons just live a couple years, don’t they? They’re. They’re not. Or they get hit by a plane or something before that. But yeah, birds notoriously don’t. Small birds don’t live that long. Even now, though, even now, having watched it and talked about it with you, I’m not convinced if it was a short bird or a young bird. And it almost seems that because. Because when the beginning of this movie, they have these Royal Air Force carrier pigeons come to town and they’re all like, everyone’s fawning over them after they do the big like, display in the sky and stuff.
And you, you can see that they’re trying to recruit the rest of the pigeons. Hey, anyone that thinks you got what it takes, you know, come in and volunteer and sign up. And as he’s doing that and he’s like, I want to join, it just reminded me of all those stories you hear of like, these 15 year olds that snuck their way into war and like, got a fake ID just so that they could go and, and fight the Germans or whatever. Like, it kind of came across as, oh, this is a literal 15 year old that’s gonna lie and get themselves recruited just so they can get into war earlier.
Yeah. Oh, one, one more thing I just thought was weird. Like, all the birds are getting naked because the, the General Falcon goes to take a shower and Valiant has to disrobe in order to get through the, the gun barrel. Right? So I was like, I just thought that was weird. I mean, it made sense, I guess, but I was like, it’s kind of a weird voice. Well, yeah. They aren’t wearing any clothes anyways. Right? Like at no point, they’re all wearing. They’re wearing combat petites. Victoria’s got the blue jacket. Apparently they did want to put something on the birds.
Just not in any kind of puritan thing, but just so you can tell them apart a little more. Which I still found difficult. Right. Well, I guess I’m to be more specific. Before Valian and Bugsy joined the military, they’re just naked. They’re just regular birds that don’t have anything on. They’re not wearing anything at all. I guess Valiant has like a hobo satchel with him. But Bugsy doesn’t wear clothes at all. But then, yeah, there’s a shower scene at the end, but it’s like, what, what is the privacy shower curtain there to hide? Because the only thing that the birds were putting on were basically military insignia to just differentiate their rank and from each other.
But there’s no. Maybe it’s to keep the whole room from getting wet. Fair point. But also, I mean, bird showers. Wouldn’t it just make more sense if it were a bird bath? Yeah, Yeah. I wouldn’t. Yeah. Getting your feathers wet. Not Can I? Is that fun? I doubt it. I don’t know. I’m not a bird enough to ask Big Bird. The, the most redeeming quality of the entire movie to me at least, is that. Not in a weird way, but the shower scene and then the lead up to the final showdown, which even though it’s just like a Rube Goldberg machine taking all the action, it had all of the makings of a 1980s action movie that I would have caught on like TNT during an afternoon when I was younger.
It’s got the, the blonde buzz cut bad boy that kind of looked like a Dolph Lundgren, except it was obviously supposed to be like a Nazi hawk. And he’s, you know, he’s like jacked and he’s huge and overbearing. But it, it had all those makings of, you know, something that. Like a, like a 18 episode or something. Yeah, yeah. I need old school Mission Impossible. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Had an old school Mission Impossible vibe, which I, I like. I, I do like the newer movies, but. And they, they as they’ve gone on, I guess they do a little bit more of the actual subterfuge thing.
But yeah, the first couple Mission Impossible movies were just like explosions, right? Which I do like. The. The smaller scale sometimes, which I guess this movie is, you know, Being All Birds is not that giant scale. It’s not the most epic film. But again, maybe that’s because I’ve played Call of Duty so much. So I just feel like I’m hanging out in locations I recognize, which. That is weird. Like you said, that’s a weird mental thing for our generation to have now. Like, I’ve been to fake World War II and it was fun. Well, another way that I’ve seen this play itself out is that I used to do a lot of competition shooting, like three Gun and stuff.
And you’d. I mean, I would always meet up with other aficionados and enthusiasts, and a lot of times I would ask them, like, oh, what made you get that particular model? Or, like, what is it about that one? And if it’s anyone younger than me, the answer is almost always like, oh, that was my favorite in Call of Duty. Or this is from, you know, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare or something. This was my favorite one that I would use. And I guess no shade. I mean, I understand, like, if you almost feel like you’re already familiar with the operation and the look and everything and.
But it is weird to be like, I. I got this real world thing because of the video game thing. Yeah, no, I’m thinking of like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. It’s like. Well, I. My controller was a Les Paul, so I should get a Les Paul, which is probably. No, that’s a great. That’s an awesome, awesome example too. Yeah. Which as a guitar, that doesn’t make any sense. Also, my guitar tastes change from month to month, so you gotta watch out because my guitar wants to kill your mama. Oh, no, I have. I have a line of guitar defense, so I’m good to go.
Frank Papa reference. Yeah, I recognized it. I couldn’t place it. It’s like, I know I’ve heard that somewhere. My Frank Zapp was mostly freak out. We’re Only in it for the Money and Overnight Sensation. Those were the ones we had on vinyl. Oh, man, I can’t. I can’t even remember the name of it, but it’s like a witch hat in the ocean or something. And it looks like a sailboat. Anyways. Yeah, past that. I’m like, I probably recognize the COVID but I couldn’t tell you. He was prolific. I think he had like 80 albums, especially when he started getting into the jazz stuff.
Yeah, he put all the live stuff and like, here’s me just randomly soloing for two hours. Of cd. It’s like we took out the songs. It’s just me noodling, which hey, I don’t dislike that, man. I would rather listen to that than some of the other stuff that you could put on. Yeah, I guess the weird thing with Zappa is just I find that I like him best when he’s playing with like half assed musicians rather than kick ass musicians. Like he’s someone that maybe needs a few limitations. Since we’re on the Zappa tangent, I will recommend listening to Robin the Boy Wonder by Bert ward.
It’s on YouTube. It’s before the Mothers of Invention, but it is written and produced by Frank Zappa. It’s got another name on it like I think, but that’s because he was under contract at the time. But apparently he did write and produce Rob and the Boy Wonder Burt Ward. You cannot tell if he is in on the joke or not. So I recommend that for everyone. There’s also good finish thought. Oh, there’s also Adam. There’s a song by the Riddler. Frank Gorshin did a song. Adam west did a song. There’s all these weird pop songs from the mid-60s that that the Batman stars did.
But yeah, Robin Boy Wonder is the big recommendation and I use that time just to make sure that I got the name of this album right. And this is out of the million albums that Frank Zappa drops 1982 release. It’s called Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. And the COVID is just like a parallelogram and a triangle. But I always loved like oh yeah, I guess that kind of is that. And that was the one where he dropped Valley Girl, which maybe not is the most sonically best song that you could ever hear from Zappa, but it definitely is something you hear at once and you’ll never unhear it again.
Better or worse, I think he had his daughter sing out in one version of it. And it was also recorded at the the coolest recording studio name ever which is the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Oh yeah, that’s great. Oh, I just saw others app albums I listened to Lather the Yellow Shark were some lather ones. And Uncle Meat. Yeah, those were the other ones I got into. So now that we’re talking this much about Zappa, does that mean we’re finished with Valiant? I think so, yeah. I guess Just final note is that there is a scene in which Valiant has to hide among the dead cadavers of dead pigeons that are all strung up and stitched and their eyes are all like looking in weird ways because they are dead.
And this kind of feels like if, if you were continuing to draw the analogy between this and the human warfare that was actually happening, this is kind of a gruesome scene. Like he’s literally hiding amongst dead cadavers in order to get by the Nazi guards. Yeah, in, in a cleaned layer. I mean, just as in it wasn’t dirty. Where you know, usually like again, come and see, he’s doing that in a pile of mud, you know, which looks much worse. I was played for slight comedy. And Valiant. Right, where it’s played for absolute horror. And come and see again, interesting watching.
I don’t know what the age group was, but like you could probably show this to a fifth grader or definitely a sixth or seventh grader, someone middle school could absolutely handle. But it has all of the same correlations. And there, there is even one scene when the pigeons are kind of throwing shade at humanity when they’re, they’re talking about all these horrors of war and some one of them says, did we start this? Like it’s a rhetorical question. It’s like, no, because the humans started it. And he was like, did we make those or those? And he’s pointing to all these artillery shells.
But then, and I think this is Bugsy. This is Bugsy trying to justify him going awol, like abandoning his unit. And he’s basically saying like, we didn’t start this war, we shouldn’t have to fight for it. And then Valiant says, well, we didn’t make Trafalgar Square either. But what happens when they start dropping the bombs there? So now the pigeons are like, we have to finish what the humans started, otherwise they’re going to wipe all of us out. And I know that kind of a profound note. Yeah, My note at that part is, if you can fly, why not fly free? Don’t get dragged down by politics.
So maybe that’s. Maybe it’s on bugs inside there. Yeah. Just get out of it all, man. Well, I guess as we wind down. What’s going on in your late November? We just launched a campaign for Illuminati comic at Illuminati comic. Com. It got fully funded in less than three minutes and it’s already raised over 20 grand. So this one’s been a hit and we’re probably going to end up making this one extra special. Now it’s going to be in full color. It’s going to come with all sorts of extra goodies and prints and add ons. So if you want to get in on all the cool stuff happening, go to illuminati comic.com and snatch a copy.
Because if you can get it before the campaign’s over, I think it ends the second week of December. If you can snag one of the copies before then, you’re going to get like a huge package full of extra stickers and prints and all kinds of cool stuff. So definitely check out illuminati comic.com I finally started using the second box for Shameless self promotion. So I got my music here@rovingsage media.bangcamp.com if you want to hear some sounds I make from binaural beats to psychedelic rock to electronica Talking podcast I do talk about the Twilight Zone every week on Time Enough podcast.
Look that up. And Films and Filth. We look at the highly highest and lowest rated IMDb films and that’s where we just talked about come and see which actually it might come out after this episode in podcast land, but probably before it in a YouTube land. So which is fine fellow citizen. Join us next week as we get into Chicken Little. Learn about the full history of the Bavarian Illuminati. Adam Weishaupt Al Jesuits, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and more from the 18th century to modern day. We expose it all. That’s right, it’s the Illuminati comic from Donut and Paranoid American.
Get yours now@illuminati comic.com yeah I scribbled my life away driven the right to page will it light to bring give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real, the real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of interrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional. Hey maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the course they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out then I light my trees blow it off in the face.
You’re despising me for what though calculated and rather cutthroat paranoid American must be all the blood smoke for real. Lord give me your day your way vacate lay way to round they hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits a thankless you well fuck the niggas for real. You’re welcome they never had a deal you’re welcome, man. They lacking appeal. You’re welcome. Yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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