Verbal Diorama

In 1993, before they were acquired by Eidos, a little games developer in Derby called Core Design were working on their new action adventure game. It was an Indiana Jones-style 3D platformer; revolutionary for its time, and not just because of the immense 3D world and cleverly designed levels, but the protagonist was a woman. Her name was Lara Croft, and the game was Tomb Raider. In the mid-90s, L...

Sport biopics are usually only reserved for well known big-name sportspeople from yesteryear - people like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, James Hunt and Niki Lauda, or stories based in reality with fictional characters. What makes Fighting with My Family , and Paige’s story so different, is that not only did she achieve the WWE Divas Champion at the tender age of 21, she also won that title just t...

For Women's History Month and Mother's Day, here in the UK, silence is deafening for a spec script written in an unconventional way, that happened to get picked up by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company. Taking inspiration from silent movies from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, as well as horror classics like Jaws, Alien and Alfred Hitchcock's filmography, A Quiet Plac...

It's International Women’s Day tomorrow, and if we’re talking about someone who represents feminism, women’s rights, gender equality and reproductive rights, there’s no fictional character used to represent this as frequently on International Women’s Day than Wonder Woman . A character born from polyamory, first-wave feminism and also linked to the very first birth control clinic in the United Sta...

The final episode of Animation Season 2024, and one of Walt Disney's crowning achievements in animation: Sleeping Beauty . Doing another princess movie after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella seemed like the obvious choice, but it was also risky. Walt Disney didn't want to make the same thing again, and wanted to wow the public with yet another cinematic visual masterpiece to prove Di...

For the final fifth birthday episode, Disney could see that motion capture was quickly becoming the next big thing for animation, and they wanted in. They teamed up with Robert Zemeckis to make A Christmas Carol , and then Mars Needs Moms , based on a children's book, written to persuade a young child to eat his vegetables. But Mars Needs Moms would not only be incredibly dark for a family animate...

Sir Patrick Stewart has never had a role that could officially be described as "poop", until now. For the second fifth birthday episode, The Emoji Movie was Sony's $1 million winning bid on making a movie all about those little characters you use on WhatsApp instead of actual words, and to ensure this was completed before anyone else had a chance, it came together in under two years! Unfortunately...

Quite famously a movie that almost destroyed DreamWorks by losing $125 million, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas doesn't deserve its negative reputation as a box office bomb, and the final traditional 2D animated film from the studio. It instead deserves to be featured as one of the fifth birthday episodes of this podcast. Only five years late, too! This podcast uses the following third-party serv...

The Black Cauldron is notorious for being one of Disney's darkest and scariest movies, and it is, but there's a beauty in its darkness that's unrivalled. The score does feel mismatched in places and the characters aren't very well-developed, but there's something truly ambitious there, and the animation has moments of sheer awe-inspiring brilliance. It really is a work of visual art. But you can s...

Based on ND Stevenson's graphic novel, Nimona started life with Blue Sky Studios, and when Blue Sky was acquired by Disney in its purchase of 20th Century Fox, originally Nimona's production continued. When Disney officially cancelled Nimona , it came as no surprise to the team working on the movie. While officially the reasons for cancellation were financial, rumours swirled that Disney didn't li...

Guillermo del Toro once said “No single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio.” And this is coming from a guy who loves his passion projects. So much so that you could arguably say that every Guillermo del Toro project is a passion project, but not every Guillermo del Toro passion project gets made... It took fifteen years for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocch...

Based on Cressida Cowell's childhood experiences of living in a remote cottage in Scotland, her How to Train Your Dragon series of books was a wild success, and so naturally Hollywood came calling. The writer/director team of Lilo and Stitch came on board the project, and the whole mythology surrounding the island inhabitants of Berk, and the mythology and biology surrounding its dragon neighbours...

Animation Season returns... with one of Pixar's most important movies, and one with a prescient message. Andrew Stanton had pitched an idea about the last robot on earth back in 1994. It would take eight years for the project to materialise properly, and was originally conceived as Robinson Crusoe and The Last Man on Earth , becoming a Planet of the Apes -style humans-as-aliens reveal, before its...

John Hughes' pair of 1989 comedies Uncle Buck and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation would become integral to the production of his next screenplay, Home Alone , based on the simple idea of "what would it be like if I left one of my young children home alone while I went on vacation?" It really was a case of lightning in a bottle, with the perfect John Hughes screenplay, a young and willing dir...

The story of Die Hard starts in the mid-sixties, and the film adaptation of a dark film noir detective drama novel, The Detective , starring Frank Sinatra. That film warranted a sequel, but the sequel novel Nothing Lasts Forever would take eleven years to be written, and its film adaptation would take a further nine years to make it to the big screen, with some major changes. Gone was Frank Sinatr...

A fairy-tale English cottage set in a tranquil country garden. Snuggle up by an old stone fireplace and enjoy a cup of cocoa. An enchanting oasis of tranquillity in a quiet English hamlet, just forty minutes from exciting London. No, it's not Verbal Diorama HQ, but the description of Iris Simpkins' traditional English country cottage in The Holiday , the quintessential Christmas romantic comedy th...

Street Fighter is one of those movies that does feel lacking, incomplete, and cut to shreds, and then you realise it is indeed all of those things because of the various issues on set. Capcom’s constant demands, Raúl Julia's illness and recovery from surgery, Jean-Claude Van Damme's regular absences from set, and a constantly changing filming schedule, not to mention the MPAA requesting constant c...

A first time writer-director, in the right place at the right time, developed a story about a troubled young man, in the wrong place at the right time, as Donnie Darko became a dark twisted tale of cultural significance against a mind-bending plot, and resulting controversy surrounding its use of gun wielding after Columbine, and imagery of a plane crash just after 9/11. These factors would mean i...

Technically the first ever quadruple-bill episode (if you also count the Richard Donner cut of Superman II , which we do), as voted for by Patrons of this podcast for, on the history and legacy of Superman II, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, Superman III & Superman IV: The Quest for Peace ! The sequels to the previous episode on Superman SUPERMAN II was inevitable after Richard Donner complet...

Before Barbenheimer, there was The Dark Mamma. Two polar opposite movies going head-to-head at the box office, and both ending up huge successes in very different ways. The film adaptation of Mamma Mia! was never planned to be Universal's big summer 2008 hit, in fact it wasn't until test screenings that they realised what a gem they had on their hands. Mamma Mia! would not beat The Dark Knight at...

It's got Tarantino's trademark dialogue, Rodriguez's trademark visuals and Salma Hayek dancing seductively in a bikini... what more could you want in a crime thriller slash vampire movie? Originating as a story by future Wishmaster director and KNG EFX visual effects master Robert Kurtzman, which he planned to direct as a low budget horror film, that all changed when he enlisted a then-unknown Que...

We'll tear your soul apart.... From the depths of hell comes body horror, an exploration of sexual desire, lust and gratification, and the pleasure pain theory, as hedonistic Frank Cotton solves the Lament Configuration and receives a gruesome demise, only to be accidentally resurrected. Hellraiser is unlike any other horror movie of its time, not just for its content, but for the risk New World t...

They're here... Some of the '80s most influential and popular films wouldn't exist without Steven Spielberg, and Poltergeist is one of them. But its origins aren't from ghost stories, but in UFO sightings, and it would be Spielberg's hesitance to do a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind that would lead him down the path of creating a pseudo sci-fi horror sequel called Night Skies , itself...

Be careful what you wish for... Wishmaster might not be up in the realms of horror classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th , but for a low budget cheesy '90s horror fantasy, it has serious horror pedigree. Directed by visual effects maestro Robert Kurtzman, executively produced by Wes Craven and containing cameos from a whole host of screen horror legends, Wishmaster revels in i...

Steven Spielberg quite famously refused to take on a sequel to his iconic shark movie, Jaws, (as referenced in last week's episode on Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge . But when it came to a sequel to his iconic dinosaur movie, Jurassic Park , covered on this podcast in episode 57 back in August 2020 , Spielberg returned to the director's chair, despite having just set up the studio DreamWor...