After Lunch

As Hasbro begins building its cinematic universe in real life, Michael and Rob welcome Jeeg and David May to talk about how  they  would do it. Following the MCU model, each person has picked a Hasbro game or toy to adapt into a movie that then connects somehow into the other movies, all leading to an  Avengers -style crossover blockbuster. Madness or genius? You decide!

While Michael and Rob wait for  Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One  to come out, they follow up Henry Cavill's performance in  Fallout  with another Cavill spy movie, Guy Ritchie's  The Man from UNCLE .

Since we just talked about  On Her Majesty's Secret Service  last episode, now seems like a good time to revisit this conversation from Michael's old  Sleigh Bell Cinema  podcast in which he talks with Carlin Trammel about the movie and how (or if) it functions as a Christmas movie.

After some  Goldfinger  and  Thunderball  trivia that you can play along with, Michael, Rob, and Karen Flieger talk about George Lazenby's grounded and human James Bond, Diana Riggs' lovely and kickass Tracy di Vicenzo, and Telly Savalas' tough and brutish Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It's an unusual entry in the series, but is it also good? Once they settle that, the panel wraps with some  On Her Majest...

Michael, Rob, and Michael DiGiovanni talk about  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,   Star Wars Visions  Season 2,  Ted Lasso  Season 3,  Unicorn: Warriors Eternal , the  Our Man Flint  movies, Hammer's Frankenstein movies,  Peter Pan and Wendy  (2023), streaming service avatars,  Fast X ,  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ,  Silo , Disney's Stan Lee documentary, how our buying and reading of comics ha...

As Pax recovers from vacation, Evan returns to the Lounge for a bit with Michael, Rob, and guest-lounger Michael DiGiovanni. In this first half of the discussion, the conversation includes butt tattoos, underwear preferences, Joe Hill, nepotism, how horror works in books vs film, jazz trombone, William T Riker, Fourth Chair Carryover Questions, the difference between the book and movie versions of...

Michael and Rob welcome Erik Johnson and Noel Thingvall to create a fourth season of the Adam West  Batman  series by crossing it over with other late-'60s TV shows. In addition to the new guest-characters, some of the stories also include new villains pulled from comics of the day and played by popular actors of the period. 

Michael and Rob finish their  Mission: Impossible  movies catch-up with a discussion of  Fallout . Henry Cavill, Vanessa Kirby, and Angela Bassett join the series while other favorites return. But is that, plus emotional closure and fantastic stunts, enough to make this one of our favorite in the series?

This extra-sized episode opens with Michael, Rob, and Karen Flieger answering trivia questions about  Dr No  and  From Russia With Love . The questions are multiple choice, so play along as you listen.    After that, the panel returns to the official Bond film series with Sean Connery's  first  last appearance in the role. And they are not in agreement about the quality of this film. They'll talk...

Michael, Rob, and Pax experienced some technical difficulties in the lounge before they got around to thinking about anything this month. But they did get to talk about what they've been watching, including  Perry Mason , Season 2,  John Wick, Chapter 4 ,  The Super Mario Bros Movie ,  Renfield ,  Sisu ,  Strange New Worlds ,  Air ,  Fast X , Bruce Lee, Philip Marlowe,  The Black Phone , and  Star...

Michael, Rob, and Pax talk about what they've been listening to and reading, including their favorite podcasts and comics, but also Harry Potter audiobooks, Cameron Crowe's novel  Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story ,  Circe  by Madeline Miller, Raymond Chandler's  The High Window , and additional thoughts on  Rogue Nation  and  Picard , Season 3. All of this, plus a new Ask Us Anything seg...

After Michael, Rob, Jeff Somogyi, and Ben Graham talk briefly about their various experiences playing  Dungeons & Dragons  and their expectations for the game, Ben leads the rest of the party into a quick encounter with a sheep-stealing griffin. Assuming the group survives, this is the first of a series of adventures that will also see William Bruce West joining the fun in future episodes. Roll a...

Michael and Rob are joined by Michael DiGiovanni and William Bruce West to imagine a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie that includes characters from the wide array of toys, movies, and TV series that Marvel Comics has licensed over the years.

Michael and Rob continue watching their way through the  Mission: Impossible  movies with Christopher McQuarrie's debut in the series,  Rogue Nation . Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Jeremy Renner are back, but how does Sean Harris measure up as the villain? And then there's Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust. Is this the entry that will supplant  Mission: Impossible III  as our favorite? Your mission, s...

Michael and Rob welcome Michael's friend and  Kill All Monsters  partner Jason Copland to talk about Jason's new graphic novel,  Full Tilt . Successfully funded on Zoop in  an hour , the book is a non-stop scifi noir action thriller. Jason talks about its inception and the creation process, but there's also some Kill All Monsters  talk and we wrap up with a discussion of some of our favorite other...

Michael, Rob, and Karen Flieger wrap up their digression into 1967 unofficial Bond movies with a look at Charles K Feldman's spoof,  Casino Royale , starring David Niven, Ursula Andress, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Orson Welles. It's a classic train wreck of a movie, but does that mean that it's no good? We talk about what happened behind the scenes during production, critique the jokes, and t...

Michael and Rob reunite with their old friend Carlin Trammel to talk in a very spoilery way about the recent, third season of  Star Trek: Picard . This isn't part of  After Lunch 's official  Star Trek Trek  discussions, because those won't get to  Picard  for a long time. We just couldn't wait that long to talk about the season.  And again,  lots  of spoilers in this episode.

Michael, Rob, and Pax talk about what they've been watching and thinking, leading to conversations about  New Girl,   Shrinking ,  Star Trek: Picard ,  Shazam: Fury of the Gods ,  Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves ,  John Wick, Chapter 4 ,  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ,  Ted Lasso ,  The Mandalorian ,  Murder, My Sweet ,  Nope ,  The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek , former fand...

Michael, Rob, and Pax talk about what they've been listening to and reading lately, leading to topics like the intersection of faith and feminism, different approaches to film podcasting, the novel  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , Bono's memoir  Surrender , Pax's reaction to Michael and Rob's  Ghost Protocol  episode, Raymond Chandler's  Farewell, My Lovely , '90s Batman comics, and Batmobiles in...

Evan wasn't able to join us last episode when Michael, Rob, and Jody Collins rebooted Marvel Comics, so in this episode, he shares his ideas for all-new versions of Thor, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men.

Back in Episode 165, we speculated what Marvel Comics might be like if they took a year off from publishing superhero comics and focused on other genres instead. In this sequel episode, Michael, Rob, and Jody Collins return to imagine how Marvel might reboot their most classic superhero series with brand new, completely different concepts and characters. Evan wasn't able to join us for this one, b...

Michael and Rob continue their journey through the  Mission: Impossible  films with the fourth in the series, Brad Bird's  Ghost Protocol . 

Michael, Rob, and Karen Flieger take a detour from the main James Bond series to watch Italy's  OK Connery  (aka  Operation: Kid Brother ) starring Sean Connery's younger brother as a famous secret agent's younger brother who's pulled into a spy caper. Thanks to the super popularity of  Goldfinger  and  Thunderball , lots of Bond spoofs and rip-offs came out around this time, but  OK Connery  is u...

Michael, Rob, Evan, and Pax talk about what they've been watching and thinking about. Topics include  The Last of Us ,  Quantumania ,  Marlowe , Adam Driver vs dinosaurs, Bono and the Edge talking to Dave Letterman,  Pumping Iron ,  Party Down ,  Creed 3 , behind the scenes making a major Disney animated movie, villains as main characters, buying cars, engaging with ridiculous ideas, and the diffe...

A couple of episodes ago, Michael and Rob talked about JJ Abrams'  Mission Impossible III  and the TV show  Lost  came up. Michael mentioned an episode of the old  Dragonfly Ripple  podcast where Annaliese Trammel shared her thoughts on the first two seasons with her dad, Carlin. It was a wonderful bit of podcast history, but it's not easily available anymore, so we're rerunning it. Please enjoy.