Verbal Diorama

Last year, Super Mario Bros celebrated its 30th anniversary. It was a fairly muted celebration, but its acknowledgement for the most part came with the release of the new Super Mario Bros Movie , an Illumination animation starring Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy & Jack Black, with many websites also acknowledging the movie that came thirty years before. It's well documented that this is a movie w...

As a movie about movie making, Bowfinger leaves no stone unturned in its ruthless attempt to expose filmmaking in Hollywood, and just like this podcast, how difficult it is to get any movie actually made. Granted, it is slightly harder when your action hero doesn't know he's in it... It mocks the range of cliched Hollywood personas, from the waning diva to naïve ingenue turned sexy starlet. It pok...

Star Trek ran for three seasons on NBC before being cancelled in 1969 due to low ratings. It was after this that the show went into syndication, that its popularity started growing, and it developed a cult following. Due to the original series' popularity in syndication, Paramount Pictures began to consider making a Star Trek film as early as 1972 and by 1975, a film version of Star Trek was annou...

After finishing Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi , director Rian Johnson had a brief window of opportunity to make another movie, and decided to go back to an old idea from the mid 2000s, based on the Agatha Christie's murder mysteries and the Choose Your Own Adventure books he loved reading as a child. Wait a minute - I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about this episode... Taking cue...

West Side Story's origins as a Tony award-winning stage musical based on Romeo and Juliet meant it was ripe for a film adaptation. Stage director and choreographer Jerome Robbins was set to co-direct with Oscar-winning director Robert Wise; it would be written for the screen by Ernest Lehman, retaining the beautiful score, songs and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Wise would dire...

The Italian Job (1969) is the epitome of what would become Cool Britannia. It celebrates its 55th anniversary this year, and has lost none of its Britishness. In fact, for the quintessentially British cult classic, they had to have the cool car of the 1960s youth - the Mini - for the quintessential British heist. Setting the film in Turin also gave them the bonus of having access to Fiat's locatio...

After Night of the Living Dead , George Romero branched out, not wanting to be typecast as a zombie movie director. It was a tour of the Monroeville Mall that put the idea in his head, of a satire about consumerism. He would quickly have a rough idea in his head, a follow-up venture into the world of the undead. Romero and his producer Richard P. Rubinstein started the process of procuring US inve...

Release the Kraken! Twice! Clash of the Titans had been an idea since the late 1950s, with writer Beverley Cross writing a treatment in 1969 called Perseus and the Gorgon's Head . At the time, producer Charles H. Schneer and legendary animator Ray Harryhausen were working on other films, and so what became Clash of the Titans would have to wait until 1977 to start pre-production. It would eventual...

64 years ago, The Flintstones became the first ever animated prime time sitcom in the US, and 30 years ago, the live-action film was released. A live action adaptation of The Flintstones first came about in 1985, but it wouldn't be 'til Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment acquired the rights in 1992 that the project started moving forward, but by that point eight writers had already had a crac...

The history and legacy of Shakespeare in Love is long-winded and complicated, but how is it that a movie can be wholly and completely tarnished by one man? I don't know. It's a mystery. From its beginnings as a project for Universal starring Julia Roberts, to it being shut down after spending $6 million and losing Julia Roberts, to being resurrected in the worst possible way by actual real-life vi...

After making The Mummy and The Mummy Returns , Stephen Sommers wanted to make a small movie; no monsters, no action, no visual effects, just something simple, but then he started thinking about all the Universal monster movies he loved as a child, and came up with a collective story of three monsters, connected by one man - Van Helsing - but not the Abraham Van Helsing you knew.... Gabriel Van Hel...

Great Scott, it’s the 250th episode! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads, and if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to get the history and legacy of Back to the Future ! It's a story of how Romancing the Stone , Coca-Cola's takeover of Columbia and Double Indemnity came together to make Back to the Future a possibility. Back in the days when Ronald...

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...