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Generation In-Between: A Xennial Podcast
Xennial co-hosts Dani and Katie talk about their analog childhoods, digital adulthoods and everything in between.
Generation In-Between: A Xennial Podcast
Tales from the Crypt: Spooky Nostalgia with a Superfan
Do you like your scary stories served with a sider of dark humor?
Do you prefer your narrators spooky AND silly?
If you like 25-minute stories about things that go bump in the night, you might be a Tales from the Crypt superfan.
And so is our special guest, the Xennial-adjacent Benjamin "Benny" Benya.
Join us as we talk about the legacy of a show that transformed horror storytelling on television.
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if that theme song brings back fond memories for you, then you will love our episode today, if you like your horror mixed with a little bit of camp, lots of great puns and a cackling Crypt Keeper, you might be a Xeniel and a Tales from the Crypt superfan.
Speaker 1:Hi, I'm Katie, and I'm Dani and I just messed up our script again you did. I'm just going with it. Man, I do this all the time. I highlight it. I'm in yellow, katie's in blue. We've been doing this for a year and I still read your lines.
Speaker 2:It's okay, at least. But then I'm Ron Burgundy and if you give me words I will say them, and I did not say hi. I'm Dani. You're so good. I know I'm getting better. We're back on track now, okay. Hey, I'm Katie again and you're listening to Generation in Between, a Zennial podcast where we remember, revisit and relearn all kinds of things related to our 80s childhoods and 90s teen young adulthoods and today we are continuing on with our October episodes of Spooky Things and we have another horror superfan here with us in the studio.
Speaker 1:It is the one, the only the legendary Benjamin, aka Benny Benya, who is a self-professed or I said he is expert on Tales from the Crypt.
Speaker 3:I would say it, I'd say it now. We're recording Now, I'll say it, all right.
Speaker 1:Awesome, got it. So, katie, why don't you tell us Ben's little bit of his bio that we just wrote in about three minutes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we sure did so. Ben is a hospitality manager at the At the Henniger by night and a subcontracts manager for a major rocket company Not the one you're thinking of, not the one you're thinking of. By day. He used to work at Disney and he's a huge pop culture fan, which is absolutely perfect for having him as a guest on the show.
Speaker 1:He knows Y'all don't even I don't think understand. If you know Ben, then you know he knows so much stuff about so many things, mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:Sports stuff, about so many things. Sport everything, especially wrestling. Yep, um, I'll be back later for a different episode yeah, we'll have to do one.
Speaker 1:Um we will, on 80s wrestling.
Speaker 3:Um he also knows so much about music and um he was a music history minor and and spent some years working uh at the college radio station. So yeah, he knows big ups, kasc the blaze 12, 60 am.
Speaker 1:I don't know what any of that means, but 13's 1330 now, okay, so he knows so many things about so many cool things, so, anyway, so we're so excited that Ben's here. We know Ben because he's another person that we met at the Henniger Yep. I've been bartending under Ben's lead for the past couple years.
Speaker 2:Lots of fun. I can just imagine.
Speaker 3:Lots of work, lots of getting yelled at. I think, really For real, for real, lots of that, just kidding.
Speaker 1:Okay, so Ben, are you a Xennial.
Speaker 3:So I know the definition of Xennial. I think is a couple years actually before me, technically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay so.
Speaker 3:I was born in 87.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're technically a millennial.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I feel like Ben has a lot of zennial knowledge, because a lot of the things that you're into are relevant.
Speaker 3:I was raised and inundated very early in my life on things that were already no longer topical by the time I was raised on them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I had a lot of catching up to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, them, yeah, yeah, I had a lot of catching up to do. Yeah, did you have older siblings, or was that your parents? No, I was an only child. Okay, this is. This is like years and years and years of we're driving anywhere and my dad's just gonna quiz me on every song on the radio, every everything on tv, just constantly trying to get me to brush up on my knowledge.
Speaker 2:So seeing it paid off. No one can beat you at, oh my god, wherever that place is. Oh, that was before we started recording.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we got to tell that story, yes, so like I said, ben is a fountain of knowledge, of endless information. That is very entertaining. You don't ever want to play trivia with ben because he was telling us, before we hit record tell there's a there's a brewery, uh, about 45 minutes north of where we are right now in Titusville.
Speaker 3:Um, that does trivia, has done trivia for the last several years on Monday nights and you always get rewarded if you finish in first or second place. They literally put a post up, uh, on their board. Today that's what they're revolving menu for their advertisement for Monday night trivia. That says, uh, monday night trivia, you can win prizes If Ben is not playing, which I think is hilarious. It's very kind of them, nice praise, but I hate to admit that. You know I'm trying to be humble about it. It's trivia, there's nothing humble about trivia. Like the truth is, we go I'll look at my wife, melinda, and I'll say, okay, you know, we don't have to try to win, let's just have fun tonight. And then maybe like one category and we've run the board and I said we're not losing, we're not giving this up to anybody, we're winning right now.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh my gosh, I love that, I know. So if you ever, if you ever, go to a bar and you see Ben is there playing trivia, just give up, like you're not going to win. It's not going to happen. And if his wife is singing karaoke, don't even like she'll win.
Speaker 3:That we're hyper competitive in weirdly different ways.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that. So, anyway, okay, katie, before we get into Tales from the Crypt, yes, you are not a horror fan, and there were some things that you were not exposed to when I was right, right, so have you ever seen Tales from the Crypt? I have not.
Speaker 3:Uh-oh.
Speaker 2:Ever, ever. Okay, I know who the Crypt Keeper is. Okay, yeah, because I'm alive. You at least recognize him. So, ben, I grew up in a very conservative household. Like we barely watched TV. We weren't allowed to watch stuff. So as an adult now I've gotten into like true crime. Um, I mean, I've been an adult a long time, but I well, actually actually to that point. I just started reading my first Stephen King book.
Speaker 3:Oh no.
Speaker 2:I know it's all downhill from here.
Speaker 1:I know it's all downhill from here, I know.
Speaker 3:I think I was given my first Stephen King book when I was about eight nine years old.
Speaker 1:I was like nine yeah, I've got a lot of catching up to do. It's okay because you know we talk about on this podcast.
Speaker 2:We revisit remember and sometimes we learn for the first time. That's right. And the thing Like I love it, Like once I started to kind of like be like oh, this is okay, this is kind of fun, this is kind of cool to feel scared or whatever. I'm like all in.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've just never encountered this program. There's, and I am 95 years old.
Speaker 3:I suppose I'll give you a pass because in our age, where we're in, where access to information is instant and it's everywhere, you've actually touched on a franchise that lays dormant and has for over almost 20 years at this point and a little bit longer. And if we want to get into it, if you want to wait, we can. There are tons of reasons for why, many which are boring and I can try to sum them up as quickly as possible, but like as we go through it. So you know historically, shows based on a 1950s comic book okay which I brought.
Speaker 3:I did bring some some that is so cool.
Speaker 1:No, I'm excited we do have show and tell. We'll have pictures of all the fun things.
Speaker 3:Don't worry everyone ec is the name of the. You don't have to be careful, they're reprints, they're not, they're worth exactly what they say they're worth $3. $3. $6 on the next one though that was money. Because at one point that was near mint until I started reading it. But the EC Entertaining Comic Company, entertaining comic company, which was a pet project for william m gaines and his co-producing partner al feldstein. They made these comic books back in the 1940s.
Speaker 3:They were educational comics oh and they were doing like bible stories and war crimes and like, uh, law and order prior to law and order, in comic book form you had. You had eight pages to tell a short story. You'd tell three or four of them. Fifties hit. They're not really enjoying, they're not seeing a lot of the fruits of their labor. They change the name of the company to an entertaining comic and they start inserting horror stories into their comics and then they just say we're going pure horror stories.
Speaker 3:So they do the three main horror lines which would become. They would first release the Crypt of Terror, which would become Tales from the Crypt, and then they would have the Haunt of Fear and the Vault of Horror. They did science fiction comics. They had Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and then one that was just called Weird Science Fantasy, just the three different ones. And then they also had what were called suspend stories. They published, you know, churning out four, five, six titles a month in all of these lines in the 50s and prior to television being a problem, prior to video games being a problem. You know, America's youth getting their hands on these comic books made them more popular than ever, but also like the enemy of the state. So they ended up getting shut down. The comic book code, the Comics Authority code, basically was launched out of their demise, in which we can't have kids reading violent, gory, bloody. You know people getting their heads cut off on comic book covers or marketing to children.
Speaker 1:But weren't they making? Bible stories, because there's a lot of that there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but those weren't selling because I don't think the Bible gets like Frankenstein in it, you know yeah, yeah, it's not exactly the same.
Speaker 3:So for many years the franchise was known. You know many of the greatest horror legends today. Stephen King grew up idolizing the horror stories of the 1950s and these were the comics that they all loved. So there was a movie made by Amicus Films in the 1970s that had Peter Cushing in it. It's very boring, it's very dry and it's very dry and it's very British, and they did a Vault of Horror movie as well, which were all based on the stories that were in the comics that were owned by William M Gaines. Fast forward in the 80s, early early 80s, so 1982, stephen King and George Romero, who made Night of the Living Dead, who's the godfather of zombies, got together and collaborated. They both had a love for these comics and they made a film that was a love letter to them, called Creepshow.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, we forgot to talk about Creepshow when Hunt was here. That's fine.
Speaker 3:Creepshow. By the way, leslie Nielsen's first, or one of his last, rather serious acting roles before he started to become the you know he was a serious actor for a long time, but it wasn't until, uh, you know, naked gone and airplane and and uh, all of those um, um loaded.
Speaker 1:Uh, there's naked, naked nothing else.
Speaker 3:She's in a different section of the video store. Yeah, Come on back Danny.
Speaker 3:But so they make Creepshow, and Creepshow is very much a love letter to the comics. There's comic book wraparounds and it named Shroen an exit with a host a ghost host, so to speak, in the late 80s. It's titans of the film industry at the time in producing partners. Joel Silver, um, who's made a ton of stuff as an executive producer You'd find his name attached to, uh, david Giler. Walter Hill, um, richard Donner, who did Superman two. Uh, walter Hill, by the way, did the warriors, among other things that he had directed.
Speaker 3:And then the big, the big fish, the one I say for last is robert zemeckis, and zemeckis was fresh off of back to the future, which is what everyone knows. Robert zemeckis for, um. So bob zemeckis, joel silver, all these guys they get together as executive producers and they they want to pitch doing an anthology movie that again resurrects these comic books. They end up scrapping the movie and they say let's do a tv series, let's do an anthology series and let's pitch it to hbo, which is relatively new at the time, home box office channel. But hbo doesn't have to, it's cable television, it doesn't have to live within the guidelines of network tv. So you can get away with nudity, you can get away with profanity and you can get away with nudity. You can get away with profanity and you can get away with blood, guts and gore, which is exactly in the wheelhouse of what these comics are trying to tell, the story that they're trying to tell.
Speaker 3:And it premieres in 1989, runs for seven seasons, 93 episodes, and the legacy of Tales from the Crypt well outweighs the 93 episodes themselves.
Speaker 1:For real.
Speaker 3:It has a children's television show spin-off, which is it's crazy to think that the thing that was being banned in the 50s ended up getting a certified educational for children label to be produced for three seasons in the late 90s as a kids' TV show With the Crypt Keeper, with the Crypt Keeper, with the Crypt Keeper in it.
Speaker 2:Wow, you should look it up, google it. It's funny. I'm going to.
Speaker 3:I will let you know that Tales from the Crypt Keeper, which is the name of the kids show. All the episodes are on Tubi if you decide you want to watch them.
Speaker 1:Okay, now I will say I'm going to pause you for one second because and I, my mom, was like a horror fan and I was born in 1980. So I was like nine, 10 when that, when Tales from the Crypt came out and I watched it with her and we loved it. It was great. He like the Crypt Keeper. My mom like loved him because he always has like these really funny, like ridiculous puns in the beginning and end of the show, like, and it always has something to do with the title of the episode and they were great. And I, during the hurricane recently, I knew we were doing this episode and I was like I want to, I need to find some of these tales from the crypt and they're nowhere, they're on YouTube. I found them on YouTube and so I went through the first season and then I was like, well, now I want to go find like some of the episodes I remember and I just kept watching them and watching them and I'm like man, the show holds up, it's still good.
Speaker 3:The craziness of how you can't. That's just it. Accessibility is so weird because the licensing issues for where this is now. There were VHS releases of like compilations of episodes, right, but they never released. You know, in the days of VHS, releases of like compilations of episodes, right, but they never released. You know, in the days of VHS, you weren't getting home video releases of any show.
Speaker 3:You know we tend to. We tend to take it for granted now, but like no shows are available in their entirety on VHS. But then in 2005, they did start releasing every couple of months One of the seven seasons. Warner brothers had the distribution rights from hbo. Hbo had put it in syndication on like sci-fi and chiller and other channels, but all those channels had to edit for content so you weren't getting oh yeah, the full episodes.
Speaker 3:Um, in the last 15 years there's been a number of attempts at rebooting it. There's been a number of attempts at rebooting it. There's been a number of attempts at new licensing. When Bill Gaines died in the 90s he would have let anybody do whatever he wanted with his content, but his family in Tales from the Crypt Holdings is a lot more stringent. So the copyright legality of the adapted stories are all still owned by the Gaines family. They don't license it out, they don't make it available, so that falls through. Hbo still has the rights to the original episodes, but that's distribution through Warner Brothers Discovery, whose president hates media. If you didn't know, warner Brothers Discovery wakes up every day and I think everybody feels like they're already six feet under. The movies are owned by Universal. The kids show ran on ABC and CBS and is owned by a third party group so they can do whatever they want with it.
Speaker 3:The likeness of the Crypt Keeper is the only thing that gets put into any new style of production. The likeness of the Crypt Keeper on the live action.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So that's you know. It's so bizarre because YouTube is the one place where you can, the one place Find them all. Anytime anything either slips into A the public domain or B like completely unfindable in a physical media, yeah, youtube will just post it on youtube so it gets taken down, it gets put back yeah, yeah but more often than not you can find that was what I was wondering.
Speaker 2:That was going to be one of my questions, like where do I even watch it? Youtube. So I guess youtube.
Speaker 1:But I will say I think you'll enjoy it and they're sure you know they're half hour 30 minutes. Yeah, 30 minutes they're great, they're, know they're half hour 30 minutes. Yeah, 30 minutes. They're great, they're, they're, they're fun. Oh, they're scary but but also funny. My favorite episode I found from the first season was when I don't know if you'll, you'll remember because Ben also has a photographic memory, so he remembers everything. So the episode I think it was called nine lives and it was the guy who dig that cat.
Speaker 1:He's real, that cat that's it the name of the episode so the guy there's a guy who is like a mess and he's homeless and on drugs and he needs money. And so a scientist finds him and offers him a deal, like I'll give you all this money if you let me perform this experiment on you. He didn't care, he was like whatever, give him money. So what? What he did was he replace, correct, anything I'm gonna mess up, because I'll mess it up. He replaced a part of his brain with a part of a cat's brain. That gives the cat nine lives. So as soon as he finishes that, he shoots the guy to see if he lives. And he does so. He's like okay, you have nine lives. Long story short.
Speaker 3:Without ruining the whole episode, he ends up working for like a side show yeah, ulrich the undying there you go it's the name of the character and he does basically bits where every he's killed in front of everyone in a very extravagant way and then he comes back to life.
Speaker 1:but the whole, but the episode starts. He's being buried alive and it's he's like this is my last big, um, my last big one one. This is going to make me the richest person ever. And he's talking to you as he's in his coffin. Well then, at the very end, he realizes he miscounted, because the first time the cat died, the cat had to die in order for him to get the gland.
Speaker 1:So he was like oh no, and so that's the end of the episode. He's like shit, I'm really dead. Oh no, and so that's the end of the episode. He's like shit, I'm like really dead, and so anyway, yeah, it's awesome. So it's like those are, they're really good, they're, they're funny, they're sometimes kind of risque.
Speaker 3:They're what you get. A lot of them I mean every single episode, with two exceptions of the 93 are adapted from one of the EC comics. A lot of them are modern, modernized, but some of them are directly adapted.
Speaker 3:The comics are all what's called preachies or funny for a company that was making Bible comics or just desserts, meaning do bad things. Bad things will happen to you, generally in an ironic or fitting manner. So, in the sense, with Ulrich, though, he wasn't a horrible person, he was a scumbag. He was attempting to extort his circus showrunner of funds, and he had a lot of issues.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I mean, his greed cost him everything Got him in the end.
Speaker 1:But, anyway, it's good. I mean I think there's. I watched some. Yeah, there's some episodes. I don't like the one with the Santa Claus, that was. I was like I hated that episode.
Speaker 3:That's another one of the. That's probably the most infamous episode of the show. I know, I hate it. It's the one that's it Okay, it's a very, very, very popular episode. It was the first episode Robert Zemeckis directed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm on the outskirts of this and most people like it, it's technically the pilot episode. Oh.
Speaker 3:So not all you know, ulrich, the Undying Dig that Cat like that's. That's a very fantastical concept that really can't exist in the real world right it fits very much in the horror mold, but there's probably 40 or 50 episodes that could be very real yeah, it could be. That are real life situations based on irony. And then this one um, there's a woman who kills her husband with a fire poker on christmas eve, while her kid's upstairs in bed.
Speaker 3:She lives out in a desolate cabin out in the middle of nowhere, so she's got a mask in front of her kid. She goes to take him to throw him down the well. Out in the front yard it's snowing and there's radio reports coming in that there's an escaped lunatic in her area dressed as Santa Claus, and the whole episode is a cat and mouse. She can't call the cops. She killed her husband. Yeah, she's got to find a way out of this situation. And her daughter is in jeopardy. Well, the crux of this is that just when she thinks she's safe and everything's fine, her daughter lets Santa, the deranged psychopath, with an axe, in through the front door because she thinks it's santa santa, and it doesn't.
Speaker 3:It just implies an ending at that point. Yeah, she screams in it yeah, I mean the, the first season's master. It's only six episodes yeah they then. They didn't intend for it initially to be more than that. They they were just like we'll do a mini series for hbo and hbo was not like we love it, do more.
Speaker 1:And they got 87 more episodes dang so good, and I think it used to come on like sunday night that's right did it? Yeah, it was part of it.
Speaker 1:So hbo's original sunday night block that like moonlighting yeah that was all in there we, I remember sitting down with my mom. We would just sit there in my living room. I was like, well, but I think by the time I got really into it there had been a couple seasons, like it had probably the second or third season, so I was probably 12, 13, but we would watch it on sunday nights. But, um, okay, so you're a little bit younger than we are, so did you see tales from the crypt when it originally aired?
Speaker 3:yes, okay so and that's controversial to I'm sure. I got a look. I saw the look that happened there.
Speaker 1:It was the 90s I was just doing the math katie, katie did. She would have loved to experience all these things. It was just her parents were not allowing that at the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my parents were very much of the. If you want to experience something, be prepared to handle the consequences of those experiences, it's the 90s.
Speaker 1:That's kind of what we identify, you know nightmares and things like that.
Speaker 3:They exist.
Speaker 1:Same.
Speaker 3:If you're a child, your brain's going to manifest, but I saw most of the episodes in their original run when I was a kid. Okay, and what happened was there was my love of it where it really built from. You know the era of VHS. We had VCRs, and what a VCRs do they record things You've got a blank tape six hour tapes, right.
Speaker 3:So one Halloween night in uh, either 91 or 92, hbo ran a six hour marathon and it was basically just episodes from season three. I mean there were a couple others, but it was basically just all the episodes in season three in sequence, which I wouldn't learn until much later in life. And I kept this tape for, and I kept this VCR for a decade afterwards, even in the 2000s. It wasn't not getting rid of the VCR. I would just watch this tape because it was also the only way I had the physical media to watch episodes so I could watch those.
Speaker 3:I mean those 12 episodes I could probably say every word of if I was pressed to do so, because it's just, it's in your mind, it's stuck at all times.
Speaker 1:So you were pretty young, you were like eight, as you said.
Speaker 3:I was. I was probably four or five when I was exposed to it, to be perfectly honest yeah, but the early 90s we're talking 91, 92, I would have been four or five.
Speaker 1:But then watching through.
Speaker 3:The show ran through 96.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, then you were a little older. It's really crazy because the shows the peak of popularity and the peak of eyeballs watching this show and this product and seeing the Crypt Keeper become a crossover. He's in Casper. I was showing that the other day it's behind the bar. He's a cameo in Casper.
Speaker 1:It's a kids movie. He was everywhere. He was in beer ads, right he was in Bud Light ads. That's right.
Speaker 3:There's Bud Light ads that people still sell them online. Join me for a cold one. With him holding up two beers. He was a crossover icon.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But that is mid-90s. That's when they canceled the show. Yeah, and the reason for canceling the show is insane. They did it because they wanted to do two things. The executive producer said we want to transition this back the way we wanted it, which is a standalone movies oh, we'll do movies, um, and they intended to do a trilogy of films but that got. I don't know how much time we have that got blown up the the first, they did a movie called demon knight, which is one of my favorite films of all time.
Speaker 1:Yes, I remember Demon Knight.
Speaker 3:I have here the novelization of Demon Knight.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 3:Which was not an easy find, because there's not a lot of copies of something like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, where'd you find it?
Speaker 3:Many years of searching eBay and Amazon and then haggling with someone to sell it to me. That's more than I've ever paid for a paperback in my life. That's just I mean that's like $35, which is not a lot, sure, but it's a lot for what is clearly a $4 paperback.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:So demon nights actually a very enjoyable film. People love demon night, myself included. It is fun they did a second movie called Bordello of blood, which was about vampires in a brothel and dennis miller was in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, and the movie.
Speaker 3:Was it bombed? Yeah, spectacularly. For many reasons. They put it out in august instead of like october, and it wasn't even the best vampire film in a brothel that year yeah, that was the same year that from dust till dawn came out spoiler free amazing film I know um.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've seen that yeah yeah, but I mean, uh, after that had happened. The other reason that they wanted to cancel tales from the crypt is they optioned up a different series. They said, okay, we've done 90 episodes of the horror comics, let's do the science fiction comics now. And they did a season of a show called perversions of science and it's also on youtube if you want to look it up. I did not know that this has no home media releases ever. Really it's dreadful, oh it's bad it's really bad.
Speaker 2:The name is terrible.
Speaker 3:Well, the highlight.
Speaker 2:I mean.
Speaker 1:I wonder if people ever find it, thinking it's going to be something else.
Speaker 3:It's intended to be that way, because you know this is a first run, 10 pm on a Sunday night on HBO.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:So you know you can watch that, or you can watch Skin and Axe, like that's your options at the time they did a digital rendering of a very well-endowed fembot, was the post Sold? That was their cryptkeeper of that show.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 3:And she was voiced by Maureen Teefee, and the only thing she's known for is being the little shut-in girl in fame who ends up busting out of her shelter on a midnight of Rocky Horror. That's the only thing she's known for, and she's in that.
Speaker 1:That show's really bad. It's 10 episodes, what's it called?
Speaker 3:Perversions of Science.
Speaker 1:In case y'all missed it listeners, look at it. I'm gonna totally google that we're done.
Speaker 3:Katie's like I'm not good luck getting through the 10 episodes of that I just want to.
Speaker 1:I just want to just want to see one. Okay, so you were young. So so what was it that when you first saw it that you loved so much, like, were you already into horror at that young age?
Speaker 3:the first time I can remember watching horror movies, I was four and my parents. We watched a double feature. It was Friday the 13th Part 4. And Night of the Demons is just the two movies that they happened to put on back-to-back. Shouldn't have watched either one of them. Nightmares, night of the Demons.
Speaker 1:Did it scare?
Speaker 3:you. There's a scene in Night of the Demons where this girl rips this guy's tongue out while she's making out with him. And I'm four years old. I barely understand the concepts of anything that's happening here. So I think for years I went to sleep and if I was like feeling scared that night or upset about a boogeyman or whatever, I was like forcing my jaw shut Because my thought is, the first thing you're going to try to do is make out with me about my time.
Speaker 1:Who knows, Foundational memory man. I remember the first time I saw like Freddy Krueger movies and light more on Elm street. I was terrified to go to sleep because he comes and kills you in your sleep and the one scene where he comes up through the bed.
Speaker 3:Forget that no there there's a culture in in the Tales from the Crypt episodes that's familiar because they got tons of big name stars.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the other thing. They have lots of cameos, not just on screen, but behind the camera.
Speaker 3:I mean, there are episodes directed by Tom Hanks, arnold Schwarzenegger, michael J Fox, but they also got tons of popular directors. They got a lot of people maybe before they had just hit it big. Seventh season's the last season is not good. Uh, most of the episodes are very bad and as a cost-cutting measure, they filmed all of it in london, but in doing that they also got like um ewan mcgregor and daniel craig, before they had ever really done anything like you're talking about obiWan Kenobi and James Bond.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Before they were.
Speaker 2:Before they were, decades before they were even those things. That's so cool. So then, the Crypt Keeper is he like a narrator, or does he literally show up at the beginning and the end?
Speaker 3:The beginning and the end. He's in the wraparound segments. He narrates Got it Only because I'm being a nerd and flexing the nerd muscle. He does narrate one episode of the show.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Which is the very last episode. It's also the only animated episode of the show of the main series.
Speaker 1:Okay, I did not know that.
Speaker 3:And it's one of only two that's not based on the comics. It's called the Third Pig and it's a very macabre retelling of the Three Little Pigs. Oh, I love pig, and it's a very macabre retelling of the three little pigs. Oh I love um the crypt keepers, voiced by john cassir uh, who had one star search in the 80s. He beats in that, by the way he was a comedian yeah, he's a stand-up comedian.
Speaker 3:He did voice impressions, but he's obviously he's. His whole career is associated with being the crypt the crypt keeper, of course um, and the crypt keeper himself was you know, it's not cheap. You talk about it now when you talk about behind the scenes. They had five puppeteers to work the crypt keepers hands, legs and then three just to work the facial movements of how the technology worked.
Speaker 3:He was designed by, uh, kevin yeager, who's the same designer of the chucky child's play puppet so, uh, if you didn't know this, this is a fun fact for you of the Chucky Child's Play puppet.
Speaker 1:So if you didn't know this, this is a fun fact for you, the Chucky doll and the Crypt Keeper doll both have the same eyes. I was just going to say they both look like they have the same eyes. Look at them. I see it now.
Speaker 3:This is my Hawaiian. This did talk at one point.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, I love that they did two of these. They did one in the suit and then one in this hawaiian outfit. I love ben starting his show and tell and this is amazing. Yes, okay, I'm excited to see this guy because it's got cryptkeeper and electrocutioner chair this is a motion activated device love it on because the batteries I did put new batteries in it.
Speaker 3:I got this off a woman on Facebook Marketplace about a year and a half ago. In its original box the box had been water damaged to high hell. I said does it work? She said yeah, it works. I was going to buy it from her anyway. I met her in the parking lot of Del Taco on Wickham and Sarno, I know the one. It's the one. Del Taco, it's the one A good day's meal and a Crypt Keeper. Oh my God, it does light up, I love this you ready for it?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Got to give it a second.
Speaker 2:It's thinking.
Speaker 3:Yeah, normally it shakes.
Speaker 2:Oh my.
Speaker 1:God, that's so great, do you think?
Speaker 2:they can hear the laugh? I hope so. I don't know. Oh my God, that's so great, I hope. Do you think they can hear the laugh?
Speaker 1:I hope so, I don't know, put your mic, do it again. Yeah, yes, yeah. So good, oh no, he's not shaking, he's not going to shake for us. Oh, come on, I love it. Okay, yeah, we got that one that one definitely got picked up.
Speaker 3:But, um, what you would normally do is, you know, he would shake and move and, uh, in the electric chair. So I mean they made so much like crypt keeper merchandise. At the time this was a topper for um, you know, like the christmas candy canes that have like 10 reese's the plastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I have little toys on top like that.
Speaker 3:One of those, this script keeper. There's also one as Elvis, which I don't have because it's like $55 now and I can't I just can't justify that cost.
Speaker 1:That's so great.
Speaker 3:And then the last little bit that I brought the covers tattered. This is the world of tales from the crypt. This is world of tales from the crypt. This is a dnd tales from the crypt game.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is the dungeon master's guide to play dnd if you wanted to play dnd in the tales from the crypt world that is so many things in one, all in one, like they knew who their audience was. Oh, for sure, right, you know it's so funny because the crypt keeper is like, he's like a icon. Now I feel like I can't think about halloween from the 90s or anything spooky without thinking of him and katie. Okay, so you've been pretty quiet. This episode you're absorbing I'm absorbing going through your brain I'm learning. Are you excited?
Speaker 2:I'm excited I actually do want to watch these. Okay, cool and we're getting close to Halloween, yeah.
Speaker 3:And I could easily give you like a here's 10 episodes to watch.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's do that now Tell it. Well, let's not, maybe not 10. Tell us your top three for somebody.
Speaker 2:Like which one?
Speaker 3:which one would be the very first one I should watch. I'm gonna type it too yeah, um, I mean, oh boy, okay, you're a theater person, so I'm gonna be.
Speaker 2:I'm just gonna be nice uh season five.
Speaker 3:Okay, I think it's the first episode of season five. It's the death of some salesman, not the death of a salesman. Death of some salesman. Okay, there are two actors in this episode. Uh, one of them is Ed Begley Jr. Yes, playing a door-to-door swindling traveling salesman. He is absolutely just a hustler.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 3:And the other actor playing every member of a rundown, not-so-simple, simple farm family. He plays Ma, he plays Pa and he plays the daughter. It's Tim Curry.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. Tim Curry has come up in every one of our episodes for the past month, every spooky episode.
Speaker 2:No, because it started with Labyrinth. I think Labyrinth is spooky though. Oh my god, is Labyrinth spooky.
Speaker 3:I mean, you do have a lead villain named the Goblin.
Speaker 2:Thank you. So every time I say that she's like well, that one doesn't count, but that kicked off our spooky season. Okay, okay, all right, whatever. But Tim Curry was talked about there, and then we talked about Legend. We talked about Legend. Which I haven't seen, but apparently I need to because he's hot, he's hot as Satan Just saying I'm there.
Speaker 3:You don't get many hot.
Speaker 2:Satans? You really don't, Although Hades from Hadestown is really hot, oh, I haven't seen that yet. So maybe it's a thing, but that's either here or not there, either here or not there.
Speaker 1:Tim Curry is very popular I'm there.
Speaker 2:I'm there, I'm going to watch that one.
Speaker 3:That would be a top hundred episodes.
Speaker 2:Give me one more.
Speaker 3:I'm going to give you one that you wouldn't think. It's season three, cause, again, it's one of my favorites and you're in theater, so I'm giving you this specifically because you're a theater person. It's called top billing.
Speaker 1:Ooh.
Speaker 3:And it stars John Lovitz, bruce box Lightner from Babylon five and John Aston, who's the original Gomez Adams and it is about Lovitz is a struggling actor and Bruce Boxleitner is not, and despite the fact that Lovitz thinks he has more talent and ability, he can't seem to get a part because he doesn't have the look.
Speaker 3:And this is brought up over and over again. This is brought up over and over again, and he finally goes on auditions for this off, off, off, off, off, off, off, off off Broadway production of Hamlet that's being directed by John Astin, who is insane, he's unhinged, he's an amazing part of it. You ever, you ever want to work with director and think they're a nightmare. Work with John Astin in this episode and he goes to audition for him and Bruce Boxleitner goes to audition for him and Bruce Boxleitner goes to audition for him just to prove that he can get the role over him, because he has the look and he does get the role, but without any spoilers. Remember, it's Hamlet.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:So the jealousy puts Levinson to overdrive. So while it's based in some level of reality, the ending that preach, preachy is just so over the top, you know, balls out insane okay, it's really fun.
Speaker 2:I'm excited.
Speaker 3:I will give you one more, one more, one more that was only two, yeah the finale of season six.
Speaker 3:Okay, which also means it's the last great episode of the show called you murderer, and it's very specifically you comma murderer, which is also a play on words. This is like robert zemeckis's magnum opus. He had just finished doing forrest gump, which was lauded more than anything for a lot of the technological and and cinematography advances zemeckis had made. To have Forrest in with, you know regular people of the time JFK and such and it was flawless at the time to see on cinema. Now we don't think anything about it. You Murderer stars Humphrey Bogart, except that Humphrey Bogart is very obviously dead for many years, and it also has Isabella Rossellini in it.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:As a wonderful callback, but the whole episode is a love letter to Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart. Done from Bogart's point of view, great episode.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Great episode, okay, fantastic and really just a showcase for zemeckis to say look at all this technology I can use, yeah, the episode also has. The beginning of the episode is a forrest gump parody, where the crypt keeper you talked about his puns he calls himself fearist gump and he offers you, uh, would you know if you'd like, uh, something from his box of chocolates oh my god, yes that's awesome I
Speaker 3:freaking love it he offers it to alfred hitchcock, by the way, because that's, that's. The other punch line is it's, it's. You know this show is in the same vein as alfred hitchcock presents and the twilight zone. Yeah, oh yeah so it's, but for a modern age, you know not to knock those. They're classics. Tales from the crypt has a lot of things that have held up because we like monsters, we like Mad Men, we like mayhem, we like boobs, butts and gore and you're getting all of it.
Speaker 1:Well, there you go, it's true.
Speaker 3:Societally. You didn't get all that stuff back when, but now you do.
Speaker 2:Now you get it, now you do. I love it.
Speaker 1:Boobs butts and the 80s kicked the door open and then tales of the crypt held it open for another decade. That's right. I love that, freaking love that okay.
Speaker 3:So that's some of your favorite episodes. What are?
Speaker 1:and you said season seven, not season seven's rough. What's your absolute least favorite episode?
Speaker 3:it is a season seven episode. It's called kidnapper. The kidnapper, um, and it's steve coogan, who is mostly known for comedy okay you'd recognize him if you saw him. He was in Tropic Thunder and he did a lot of other stuff, but he's narrating the whole episode about how he desperately wants to spend time with this girl who walks into his secondhand shop.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And so she's pregnant. She has nowhere to go. He takes care of her, but she has. She is I'm not going to say she's friend zoned him. She's made very clear this is not to be any kind of relationship and he cannot get past that. So he hires like an underground syndicate to kidnap her baby.
Speaker 1:Oh geez Lovely.
Speaker 3:So that the baby can be out of the picture and it can just be the two of them, because he feels like that's when they were closest together. It all goes awry and she's more miserable than ever. So he goes and plans to kidnap someone else's baby and bring it back as hers. It's just, you know, the thing is there's and there's a number of episodes to do this. A lot, some episodes are just very miserable and you're waiting for the comeuppance and even though the characters get it, it's not satisfying because a lot of it was kind of just upsetting to begin with and that that, for me, is it's. He's not likable. She's not really all that likable either. Nobody in the end of the baby maybe, is like I don't know, it's just you don't have anyone.
Speaker 3:You're really rooting for the whole episode and you're like, okay, well, he got what he deserved, I guess. Um, but it also just that whole thing doesn't really fit in the crypt. Narrative you know, yeah, that's just not that I should be this critical like nobody does nobody, nobody gets, you know, nobody gets a head. Not that I should be this critical like nobody dies nobody, nobody gets. You know, nobody gets a head cut off or anything like that right it's all, just yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 3:It feels like an episode of uh special victims unit like nobody dies in the whole episode no weird hmm no okay, that is weird.
Speaker 1:That is weird, um, all right, so now I can't wait to ask you this, because you already gave us some, but I know there's going to be some more fun ones. So tell us some like super obscure facts or trivia about Tales from the Crypt, because I know you probably have endless amounts.
Speaker 3:There are some pretty obscure ones. I brought up the Crypt Keeper's Eyes and Chucky's Eyes. People read about that. That one's really well known.
Speaker 1:And then, once you say it, you can't not see it. It's obvious, it's totally obvious.
Speaker 3:Crypt Keeper looks like a decrepit Chucky doll.
Speaker 1:There's no way to see that, and he would probably even sound like that.
Speaker 3:In the original pitch reel for Tales from the Crypt onto HBO. Boardroom of executives for HBO. This is a real story. When the producers came in and they pitched Tales from the Crypt, they showed them the reel of the first season and you know so. They're seeing blood, guts, gore, profanity, sex violence and all these things you can't show on TV. And one of the board members immediately objects at the end of it, says you can't show that tv. And one of the board members immediately objects at the end of it, says you can't show that on tv. And the response he got from people pushing to put the program on tv was well, it's not tv, it's hbo, which, as you are aware, for decades was hbo's slogan. Yeah, that slogan was born out of a tales from the crypt pitch reel.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. That's where the slogan came from it's not TV, it's HBO. I love that.
Speaker 3:Tales from the Crypt also had. In the midst of the comics and the spinoffs and the children's show, there is an extremely short-lived maybe eight episodes, maybe fewer game show. What that was like legends of the hidden temple oh stop, it's called secrets of the crypt.
Speaker 1:Keepers haunted house oh my god, what network was that on?
Speaker 3:I think that was on either abc or cbs as well I have to look that up um. You can probably watch a couple episodes.
Speaker 1:They're real cringy but the the goal was, was I have to look and get in.
Speaker 3:So campy and dumb, I love it One of the grand prizes, by the way, was an entire volume of encyclopedias. It was it's very specifically cause I'll never forget John Casir. You know reading pitches like Gralia's new book of knowledge. I'm like, ah, you can. You can say it any way you want, to say it, like it's still 26 books. I don't want.
Speaker 1:But look, that was expensive.
Speaker 3:Yes, it were Right, Encyclopedias.
Speaker 1:Crap. That's how we used to have to do papers. I was trying to explain this to my kids one time, and they just looked at me.
Speaker 1:I was like I had to go to a library, you better hope that that library has five pages on the thing you're about to write it to be recent, because they came out with new ones every few years and, like the ones in my house, were from like 1970 and they were not helpful and so my kids were just like what? Like, yeah, I was a member of microfiche where you had to go through the stupid anyways.
Speaker 1:Um, okay, but there's something else I thought of. There's a Crypt Keeper Christmas album that Ben plays in the bar.
Speaker 3:Have yourself a scary little Christmas.
Speaker 1:It's so good.
Speaker 3:I own multiple copies of that. If you want a copy, I'll gladly make you a CD of it.
Speaker 2:I would love that Me too. Me too the pun.
Speaker 3:So here are the songs that are on it. We Wish You'd Bury the missus is on there um, instead of otanenbaum it's mo title bomb, and he sings about how uh, it's mo title bomb, mo title bomb. You did embalm my dad and mom. And then you learn. You learn that he had a sister and a brother. Um or he claims he does, in some weird distant cryptkeeper lore that he has a sister, kate, and a brother tom, and and those names for many years never resonated with me as also being a pun. He's the crypt keeper, so his brother's name would be tom keeper, like a time keeper, and his sister would be kate keeper like a gatekeeper I hate it so much.
Speaker 3:It took, it took so long. So he does that. He does. Uh, should old cadavers be forgot? Um, uh, juggle bills, which is about Santa going broke. So he barbecues his reindeer To the tune of Jingle Bells. Deck the Halls with Pots of Charlie, bits of Bruce and Hunks of Anis. That's just like a Cannibal song to Deck the Halls, but it's all very light and irreverent and fun and my wife hates it. Absolutely hates it and we'll have to listen to it sometime in the next six weeks, right yeah yeah, absolutely hates this song though oh, we forgot to say speaking of christmas.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, we did. We are all in a christmas story, the musical, and ben is playing gene shepherd, himself the narrator of the whole show, and he's gonna be amazing if you hate the way stories have been told to you in the last 45 minutes of this podcast, you might not like the show. Correct no, you're going to love it. But if you've had so much fun, then you're going to love it Anyway.
Speaker 1:I wasn't trying to end the episode, I just had to throw that in there, cheap plug. Yeah, yeah, all right, any other trivia or obscure facts, cause I know you have endless.
Speaker 3:This is my favorite thing about tales from the crypt.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 3:The show, the physical media show and the comic. Everything has never ended of its own graces. It has been canceled every single time. It was canceled when it was a comic book the Amicus films. They were going to make a third one. They never did. The TV show canceled. They were going to make a third feature-length film. Technically there's a direct-to-DVD movie that they threw wraparounds on, but it has nothing to do with and was never a crypt film called Ritual. It also stars Tim Curry and Jennifer Grey from Dirty Dancing.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:But not worth watching at all. And the Crypt Keeper segments are at worst campy no excuse me at best campy and at worst racist. Yeah, he does. It's a Jamaican Crypt Keeper.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 3:And it's real bad.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 3:So don't watch it.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 3:But then the animated show ran for two seasons, then got canceled, then got picked up for a third season by a different network and got canceled again. And then the game show got canceled too. I want to see they never just gradually ended their run, I see.
Speaker 1:It got canceled. Every time People are just like no more. I do remember the cartoon, but the game show I have to look up. I know you hate cartoons, Katie, but you might have to look it up, I might have to.
Speaker 2:The game show sounds great.
Speaker 3:It is educational. The first two seasons of the animated show are still. What's weird is the first two seasons are still based on the comics. The third season, that newest one, is all original stories and it's very, very late. There's an episode called all booked up. That is basically about a kid who doesn't want to do his book report.
Speaker 3:And in the third season, the crypt keeper. He's animated, he's very green and blue and has yellow. He's different looking, um. But in the third season he doesn't just do the wraparounds, he's like constantly a pivotal character in the episodes as well and he plays the librarian. So when the kid comes to the library to check out books, it's uh, I think it's huckleberry finn. Uh, the man in the iron mask and frankenstein are the three books he has to choose from and he doesn't want to read any of them. So then the cryptkeeper gives him this mystic book that opens and opens a portal and tries to suck him in. And when the kids like crying for help, he's like, oh help, the book's sucking me in, the cryptkeeper, as the librarian's like, yes, good literature has a tendency to do that like just letting this kid fall to his fate. Then he goes through all three books and he learns a bunch that's not in the movies, right, and all that. Yeah, it's educational it tricked me.
Speaker 1:I love I thought I was just having fun.
Speaker 3:That is so great see see karta katie they're not bad.
Speaker 2:I didn't say they were bad it has value yeah, what do you want to ask ben? Oh gosh. Well, I wanted to ask about the episode, so that was really really good. Yeah, so have you found any other franchises, um, I guess in horror or just in real life, that you like as well as this one? Yeah, okay um.
Speaker 3:I love the child's play franchise I love the chucky movies um, a lot of that. And then the television show and even though it's off the rails most of the time and and way far gone, a lot of that comes from the fact that the series creator, don mancini, has been with it throughout its run and that he has, you know, everyone he casts in these movies and episodes of this show are family. He's got adam academy award-winning people like brad duroff and nominated people like Jennifer Tilly, who just follow him through all of this and are amazing actors playing loopy killer dolls. It's so stupid, it's funny. But I would put up a lot of stuff. I mean, I have a room in our house. It's a man cave to most people, but we call it the crypt yeah and it is dedicated to horror science fiction media um nice
Speaker 1:it's really cool, troy. When we walked in there last year around this time, troy was like oh my god, this is so cool and like, because troy has his own lore, but like not ever like he. He doesn't get to display as much as ben does, and it's like he was like it's supposed to be a guest room.
Speaker 3:There's technically a futon in there.
Speaker 2:It's really cool. Do people like to sleep in there though?
Speaker 3:The lights are off, you can't see any of that stuff. It's all psychological.
Speaker 2:But it's there.
Speaker 3:And he also has a bar in there too, I mean he has a bar in there, so if it comes right down you can knock yourself out.
Speaker 2:Like the whiskey, it's not there.
Speaker 3:I love the Friday, the 13th franchise, even though it's historically one of the most derivative franchises. Not just of its source material, but of itself. It's just copy-paste.
Speaker 1:Every film is the same film.
Speaker 3:It's just copy-paste. I love the Nightmare stuff. I've gotten to love Halloween more, um, but I talk endless shit about halloween that's my least favorite of those franchises. I I'm not a halloween well, that's one where the producing partners stayed through it. You know, mustafa khod did the whole series, but everyone who made the films just scrapped what happened in the last film. So there's no continuity whatsoever and there's like time riffs and I'll.
Speaker 3:I'll draw a picture when we're done and you'll see what I mean People people who know me really intensely know how much I love drawing this line graph.
Speaker 1:So okay, well, I'm excited, we'll put a line graph, don't worry. Our next guest that we're having next next time is he is a horror fan like you and he's coming on to talk about how the 80s and 90s slasher films have true crime, real life like true crime connections. So I'm see, I don't like true crime, I like fake stuff. Katie's excited because she loves true crime.
Speaker 2:I'm dreading it. I will clarify I don't love that crime happens.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:I know, I know, I know, I know, but I'm fascinated.
Speaker 3:There's a fascination with the actual, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because you see these things in movies and television. Correct but then when you actually hear about it, you're like this is wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. It's like, like I said, I like that, which is why I think I'll enjoy this show Tales from the Crypt. I just love like a good story that sucks you in and is told well.
Speaker 3:And the best thing is, if you find an episode or two that you're watching and you don't enjoy it, it's over in 22 minutes.
Speaker 2:Right, that's also very good. Not a huge commitment level there, you don't have to.
Speaker 3:You don't break a sweat. Yeah, being like oh well whatever, I guess that wasn't my favorite one. I'll go to my next one, but it's Because they're short.
Speaker 1:Because they're short, you're just like, oh yeah, let me watch. That's like during the hurricane I just watched, my laptop died. I'm like, OK, well, I guess I'll take a break. I was going to. Oh, I know I have one more question, because we've been talking to him for an hour, so we'll catch you. We also forgot to say that Katie's AC is broke. It's hot as heck. I'm not excited about it.
Speaker 2:We're at the studio, so it's not at my house, thank God, because children and pets. But yeah, anyway, it's hot in here.
Speaker 1:Katie was saying she's like oh, we got to love that we have a guest on and the AC's Rogue Hunt came on last time and a giant cockroach jumped out of the kitchen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just like out of nowhere. I was like wow people are really going to want to keep coming back to my place, yeah oh man, it's florida. What are you gonna do? Falls will? Yeah, I don't know you have. No, don't tell our next guest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know that, I don't know. Anyways, okay, my fate, my last question for you, ben, because you have so much fun tales from the crypt items, um, and then if you have anything you want to add, please do, because I know you have your little notes um, my, my notes are inconsequential.
Speaker 3:That was just a list of that, but that was a list of episodes to remind myself if I forgot anything um, what is your favorite piece of tales from the crypt?
Speaker 1:memorabilia that you own?
Speaker 3:uh, that's super easy. Okay, it's very, very easy for me to name. So, uh, I own, and I own a lot of tales from the crypt memorabilia I know and I think up until that six hour vhs got destroyed over time. The answer easily would have been that an unlabeled tape that holds so many memories that my parents let me record like that was really something.
Speaker 3:Um, some years ago one of my best friends, uh, who I worked with at disney name, was connie um. She's a fantastic artist. She hand-sketched a picture of the Crypt Keeper for me on like 8x10. She just did a pencil drawing of the Crypt Keeper and I got it framed and kept it on my wall and then when I went to go, we went together to Spooky Empire one year to go hang out and meet celebrities Back before a lot of the con scene had become almost unlivable with the amount of people that go now. We went and I talked to John Kassir for like 45 minutes because I was nerding out. I don't like to do that with celebrities, but people will pay thousands of dollars for taylor swift tickets and I'm like 75 to talk to john cassir for 45 minutes let's go amazing.
Speaker 1:I'm a fangirl over. We've talked about that in past episodes. I am. I would anybody that I loved I could pay 75 and talk to for 45 minutes. Yeah, it was nerd out he, he autographed it um. It was the piece I brought with me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, she was like, of all the things you don't, you're not gonna bring any of your posters, your limits. I'm like, no, this is. This is much more personal. So it was really, really cool. If I ever meet him again, I will bring with me my mother made this and I'll show it to you at some point Kind of a demon night drive in uh theater background art piece that she made, uh a couple of years ago. And if I ever meet him again, that's the next thing I'll have him go sign.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. So yeah, that's so nice, that's so special, like you got to meet him, plus your friend made you this thing. It's it's probably weird sometimes thing that he's signed no no, that's the.
Speaker 3:That's the good thing it doesn't rank as high as like sign my personal flesh or something like that, you know exactly Exactly.
Speaker 2:That's very cool, though. Well, thank you, ben for coming on. I think we've already got like a zillion spinoff ideas for when he's back and the AC is working. We promise, and we're going to keep Ben for a couple more minutes for our patron episode, for our bonus bonus if you're not a patron yet, you can find us on Patreon $8 a month, because we're 80s babies. So is Ben.
Speaker 3:Easy money $8 a month. That is two trips to the vending machine, come on.
Speaker 1:Come on, guys, we got to keep Katie's rank going so we can have HB.
Speaker 2:All right, yes, exactly, but we were saying like recently we upgraded our domain and our website and we were able to use our patron money for that, so that was really helpful. So actually goes to the podcast and helping us get it out there. So thanks, ben, for being here. Hopefully we'll have you back. Do we have a little witty line at the end? Oh, you have one?
Speaker 1:All right, let's hear it All right until next time. Keep it creepy, boils and ghouls. He said that on episode.
Speaker 3:That'll make more sense to you. That'll make a lot more sense to you.
Speaker 1:Ben looks at.
Speaker 3:You'll know.
Speaker 1:Because Katie's like what. This is when we need to have the video, I know.
Speaker 2:Everyone keeps telling us when are you guys going to have video? We'll get there when the AC is fixed, first of all Because we're too sweaty and gross right now.
Speaker 1:But also he always has fun. Goodbyes like that and that was on one that I just watched, so keep it creepy boys and ghouls. All right that, and that was on one that I just watched, so keep it creepy boys and ghouls.
Speaker 3:All right, that was not All right, all right.
Speaker 2:Somebody let a horse loose in here. Bye guys, Thanks.
