Retro Spectacles

Retro Spectacles continues "Good, Good for Its Time, or Good for My Time?" with Mitcz's pick: The NeverEnding Story. Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 fantasy is remembered as a whimsical childhood staple, but a rewatch reveals something much heavier. This is a movie that opens on a grieving, bullied boy and spends 90 minutes putting its heroes through loss after loss. The practical effects hold up better...

Retro Spectacles kicks off a new series, "Good, Good for Its Time, or Good for My Time?" with Teddy's pick that also doubles as a Fourth of July celebration: The Sandlot. Mitch saw it for the first time a month ago with zero nostalgia attached. Teddy grew up watching it on cable until it felt like he owned it. The question: does a beloved coming-of-age classic hold up when you strip the nostalgia...

Spoiler warning: this episode goes deep into every plot point, twist, and ending of Toy Story 5. Retro Spectacles closes out the Toy Story franchise deep dive with a full spoiler review of Toy Story 5. After weeks of deepening skepticism across six movies, both hosts walked in expecting to be underwhelmed. Pixar pulled it off again. Jessie takes center stage in the franchise's most parent-oriented...

Retro Spectacles nears the finish line on the Toy Story franchise deep dive with the spin-off that broke Pixar's streak. "Lightyear" (2022) opens with a title card: "This is the movie that Andy fell in love with in 1995." Teddy and Mitcz reject that premise within minutes. What was pitched as "Andy's Star Wars" landed as something far more somber and introspective than anyone expected from a Buzz...

Retro Spectacles continues the Toy Story franchise deep dive with the sequel nobody asked for that made a billion dollars. Toy Story 3 closed the book on the Andy trilogy with a Best Picture-nominated goodbye. Toy Story 4 survived John Lasseter's Me Too departure, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack walking off the project, and a near-complete rewrite to deliver something tonally different from every...

Retro Spectacles continues the Toy Story franchise deep dive with Toy Story 3, the trilogy closer that almost became a very different movie before Pixar reclaimed Woody, Buzz, Andy, and the emotional finale that defined the end of the Andy years. Before Lee Unkrich’s version became a Best Picture nominee, Disney’s Circle 7 Animation had been developing a Toy Story 3 about a malfunctioning Buzz Lig...

Retro Spectacles continues the Toy Story franchise deep dive with the 1999 sequel that almost never happened. Disney wanted a cheap direct-to-video sequel. Pixar said no. Then somebody accidentally deleted 90% of the film's files. Then John Lasseter scrapped the script and rewrote it in a weekend. And somehow, "Toy Story 2" emerged as one of the greatest animated sequels ever made. Toy Story 2 was...

Retro Spectacles launches its first-ever franchise deep dive with the animated classic that started it all: Pixar's 1995 "Toy Story," directed by John Lasseter, starring Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, Jim Varney, John Ratzenberger, and Annie Potts. Mitcz & Teddy break down how Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas for pennies, the infamous Black Friday screening that nea...

Retro Spectacles continues the palate cleanser with Part 2 of the albums that shaped Mitcz & Teddy's adolescence. Teddy's pick: Rage Against the Machine's 1999 album "The Battle of Los Angeles." After his father died suddenly of a heart attack when Teddy was 11, nothing at home sounded like what he was feeling until Bulls on Parade came on TV. From there, Teddy traces how Rage Against the Mach...

Retro Spectacles hits pause on the deep dives for a palate cleanser. Before the next series kicks off, Mitcz & Teddy each picked an album and related songs that had a huge impact on their adolescence. In Part 1, Mitcz tells the story of the summer before 7th grade when his best friend Kevin handed him Dead Kennedys' 1981 EP "In God We Trust, Inc." with a punk mixtape on side B: Subhumans, TSOL...

In the final episode of our inaugural series about Hidden Gems (movies Mitcz & Teddy feel deserve more credit), we both picked comedy films from a year packed with hits : 1999. First up, Mitcz picked the Matthew Broderick & Reese Witherspoon MTV Film "Election" about an exceedingly ambitious high schooler trying to win it all and a teacher - played by Broderick - who has one chance to serv...

The penultimate Retro Spectacles series opener "Hidden Gems" episode is here with a bang! But what's a hidden gem? We think you'll agree with our picks today, but we define them as art (in this case movies) that we think got lost in the shuffle but are much better than the lackluster fanfare they received at the time and continue to have today. First up is the last film Peter Jackson made before h...

The Retro Spectacles inaugural series "Hidden Gems" reaches its 3rd installment today. What's a hidden gem to Mitcz & Teddy? Simply put : art (in this case movies) Mitcz & Teddy have determined are much better than the size of the audiences they originally captured. In this episode, we go back to a pre-Transformers Michael Bay hidden classic THE ISLAND about a pair of escaped research faci...

Retro Spectacles continues the deep dive into "hidden gems" - the movies Mitcz & Teddy have determined are much better than the size of the audiences they originally captured. In this episode, we dive into the 1999 action revenge (dark comedy?) Mel Gibson film "Payback", about a man who will stop at seemingly nothing to get back what was stolen from him. We also go deep into the world of the 2...

In this first episode of Retro Spectacles : Mitcz & Teddy decided to kick things off by each picking 5 movies they consider "hidden gems" - movies that we feel like didn't get their due, and/or have gone under the radar despite being every bit worth their runtime. Starting off, we paired up two all-time classic psychological horror films. Teddy's pick was the 2002 Richard Gere film "The Mothma...