#18. Pokemon, Pogs, and Diaper Disasters
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Pokémon Detective Pikachu gets reviewed by two men who are conspicuously not its audience. Sonny went in cold and reports that as filmmaking it simply isn't good — a sub-Who Framed Roger Rabbit mystery, flat performances from Justice Smith, and weirdly bad effects for a $150 million movie, with Ryan Reynolds' hand-petting Pikachu appearing to float — and confesses he had no idea why the crowd laughed when someone threw a fish into a Charizard battle. His larger point is generous: after twenty years of movies engineered to tickle his own nostalgia centers, he can't get too worked up that a film is now aimed at somebody else's, and he pegs Pokémon as a dividing line between micro-generations, having graduated high school in 2000 and missed it by a hair. Vic gives it a B, having braced for an F after a trailer that felt like sensory-overload Deadpool, and rates Reynolds' smarm "closer to Green Lantern than Deadpool." JVL declined to see it but spent 90 minutes assembling a trivia sheet so he could work as "a little sniper" behind the main battle tanks, delivering a genuinely absorbing history: Satoshi Tajiri, a high-school dropout and bug collector nicknamed Mr. Bug, launched it on Game Boy in 1996 as Capsule Monsters, then Pocket Monsters; it hit North America in 1998; it married player-versus-player combat via link cable to the collector's impulse, then minted money by releasing every title in two variants and re-releasing the old ones on each new handheld; Tajiri is worth $5.6 billion, and Pokémon Go — a Google spinoff called Niantic — did $207 million in its first month and $2.45 billion to date. Box office: Endgame holds at $63 million but is now tracking below Infinity War day over day, and Sonny thinks the three-hour runtime is killing repeat business. The centerpiece of the banter is Sonny's parenting weekend: a two-hour dance recital for two minutes of his three-and-a-half-year-old's dancing, during which six-month-old Charlie blew out his diaper into Sonny's lap and ruined his pants and shirt, followed by a second catastrophe in the car seat on daycare picture day. Vic dissects a Washingtonian piece on the VIP class system in DC restaurants, prompting JVL to declare he'd burn every one of them down, Anne Hathaway-style — "there's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne" — and the show ends with pogs, quad slammers, Warcraft's insane 89-11 foreign split, and a Brewster's Millions rules question.
From the show notes
#cdata-section -------------- In this episode, sponsored by ExpressVPN, the guys discuss Pokemon Detective Pikachu . JVL explains why he wa...
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00here we go i know you can't understand me but put down the stapler or i will electrocute you did you just talk whoa did you just understand me oh my god you can understand me stop i've been so lonely they try to talk to me all the time all they hear is pika pika you can hear him right pika pika yeah pika pika pika he's adorable you're adorable they can't understand me kid can no one else hear him i don't need a pokemon period and what about a world-class detective because if you want to find your pops i'm your best bet
Vic00:00:53hello and welcome to another edition of the sub beacon sponsored by expressvpn i'm victor manis along with sonny bunch and jonathan v last i'd like to remind you the sub beacon is available on itunes and google play just look at a podcast search for sub beacon you'll easily find us please subscribe tell your friends and leave a review it's happened again you're in you're in good voice yeah a little bit a little bit radio voice what did you do i don't know i don't know it just comes and goes i was i'm getting over out just like the gout speaking of which it's gone uh jvl how are you
JVL00:01:29i'm what's happening i'm fine uh kids have been sick it's been a long week i'm just happy to be
Vic00:01:35here i'm happy i was able to make it here coach i i uh have a question i do have an i you know normally we do question i have answer oh i have answer so you uh were talking if not to get political here but uh there was a you had written a piece oh the alabama abortion yes let's do it guys thank god we have a very strict rule against but you were talking about wayne lapierre at the house the spending spree right and you seemed incredulous about him spending uh thirty nine thousand dollars on a trip to uh beverly hills it was to the xenia yes you know what that is that's
Sonny00:02:11about six suits yeah i mean that's that's that's a couple suits and some shoes and oh he's oh yeah
Vic00:02:17and ridiculous like like uh five thousand dollars for like none of this is to say it's a good use
Sonny00:02:22no no no no no but it's still obscene i could i i could i could spend 40 grand you know what i would
Vic00:02:29do uh a beverly hills without that much i was thinking about that brioni bespoke that's my
JVL00:02:33dream i don't have i don't own a brioni i'd love a lot of suits that is that that is six blazers six pants and also you don't i'm sorry if you're a dandy in the way that mr lapierre seems to be uh you don't buy off the rack suits even at the xenia store i mean you have your suits i would be shocked if he buys his suits off the rack no you know
Vic00:02:55what he was like he was like julia roberts and pretty woman with larry miller you know who ordered the pizza that's give him the tie give him the tie okay that's great you like that
Sonny00:03:05i was just thinking about that sunny how are you i'm great uh my weekend involved the worst parental activity that exists it's the uh wait a minute hold on do we get to guess before you tell us what it is no you don't okay go ahead victorino worst i have worst parental
Vic00:03:23activity uh uh birthday party at somebody else's house i will guess middle of the night
Sonny00:03:28vomiting no dance recital uh it's it is so here's the true the answer is true the thing about the dance recital is there in high school it's exceptionally it's exceptionally cute when they're uh doing their dance you know especially at this age my daughter's like three and a half so she goes up and she does her little dance she's in the front row and she's all excited and that's great and it's two minutes long and the whole thing is two hours yes and you have to sit through the whole thing because there's a curtain call at the end so you get the you get the two minutes of dancing you get the two minutes of dancing and it's great and it's cute and everyone's like oh yay and then it's just boredom for for an hour and 58 minutes but it's more than just boredom it's frustration because i also have a six month old as you know the six month old was very chill for for the first half and then wanted to get out of his car seat and i held him and he was still very chill very very good baby uh for the most part uh at one point in the dance recital i'm sitting there he's on my lap and he's he starts getting a little fussy he's like and his face gets real red and i'm like oh i gotta have to take you outside drop a deuce i'm gonna have to take you outside and change you and then he calms down again and he's like rolling over to go in his his car seat he's like oh okay well i guess he's he's just tired fussy he wants to go back to sleep but he did he went right back to sleep so i was like okay this is great so the show ends curtain call everyone is very happy and the house lights go up in my my pant my pants my pants have brown oh and i'm looking at right and i'm looking at this i'm like that can't be that can't be what i think it is and and i look down and sure enough his diaper is just so i have i have you threw those things right away i hope well well it's still beth beth my wife is in the in the back room helping volunteering with the other parents so it's not like we can just leave i have to wait i have to wait uh and uh i'm i'm sitting there and i'm like well what am i gonna do i guess i'll take charlie my son to the car and i'll uh i'll change him and then i'll i don't know what i'm gonna do i i change him and i i i just try to i try i pull i untuck my shirt untuck my shirt the shirt gets ruined too and the shirt well the shirt it was it was pretty dry at this point i was able to get you know there was there wasn't crusty anyway so that was that was my weekend question yes
Vic00:05:58so this all happened you could i i forget that he's small enough that he you bring the seat with you to the thing the bucket seat yeah and and so it happened there is what you're and it just
Sonny00:06:07overflowed onto you it happened while he's in my life oh wow happened while he's in my lap yeah so that was fun did you check your hands uh hands were fine okay hands were fine that's the first thing i would do fast forward to this morning picture day at the uh the daycare center charlie's cutest outfit just really adorable you know like uh overalls on top of a nice white shirt looks like he's going for a day out on the farm or maybe maybe the beach you know sailor suit and all of a sudden i'm driving to the daycare and i hear in the back and vick was with you and i'm like charlie charlie what have you done and he doesn't say anything because he's six months old except for this that's good that's a good that's good his body is working i can't see his face because of course he's rear facing and you know he's got the shade up but i can imagine what his face looked like at this point because it probably looks a lot like it looked this weekend and sure enough we get to the daycare and i pull him out and there is poop out of his pants onto the car seat everywhere so the reason i was a little bit late getting here and the reason the show might be just a hair late getting up today is because i spent about 25 minutes at his daycare cleaning him off changing him into a new outfit thankfully it's still delightfully cute he's got this little it's
JVL00:07:43got these little bunny ears if he could have held that in for another 10 minutes it could have been somebody else's problem if he could have just thought about me that's the thing thought about me for like 30 seconds stupid baby this is the baby equivalent of the guy who came up from the other floor to destroy your bathroom up here yes yep yes uh the funny
Vic00:08:07thing is i mean when these things happen uh uh you immediately you know you have to when you switch off your nose you stop breathing out of your nose that's what i do you go full shawshank you know it's interesting yeah think about that you gotta go like full shawshank don't breathe he doesn't he it doesn't actually smell really which is weird well it's one of these things when they get older
Sonny00:08:27it'll get earthy yeah yeah you know okay earthy yeah like the johnny walker green you know that
Vic00:08:31pd pd it's a little pd yeah rub it on your hands release the odor i like to think about our child
JVL00:08:41free listeners who hear this and just think to themselves why i'll never do this we are we are currently we'll never i will never do this how disgusting and then you know what it can happen
Sonny00:08:51here i think i think they just announced that the total fertility rate is something like 1.7 or more the reason why stories like this the reason why is because we personally are driving down the
Vic00:09:01fertility rate in this country okay anyway how are you doing i i'm doing i'm doing fine i'm doing fine do you have any special stories about pd stuff no thank goodness no i'm i i'm i know everything is wonderfully regular thank you uh uh but i did want to address this came up i've been getting emails from all sorts of people including my mother-in-law and matt cottonetti asking me have i read this piece in washingtonian by jessica sidman about the vips in dc restaurants
JVL00:09:34and how they're treated okay first of all okay first of all yes i was outraged that you didn't write this piece no no no no no no no no i how could washingtonian i was so i'll tell you what
Sonny00:09:45i was really impressed that well you can't you can't have a subject right about himself that's
Vic00:09:49mr mr face at the palm this would be like a lay bashing like part of the story and then i've done elements of this but it's it's a touchy subject and uh explain to people okay good um jessica sidman wrote a piece where she actually got workers at restaurants and and former managers and maitre d's at restaurants to talk about the different levels of service depending on what your status is in washington the class system the class system in restaurants so i mean the thing is you talk to anybody i've talked a lot you know i've covered chefs and restaurants for a long time and will all tell you on the record every customer is a vip you know we treat every customer equally and they have to but as uh the piece reveals of course this is a lie there are very it's a hierarchy and there's different levels and even if you think like it's formalized right it's in it has now been for it's not just oh that guy in the computer right it's not the manager knows me but now there's certain acronyms that appear little initials that come out that'll say like vip or whatever soigne is another one for those places has like five levels yes was that the Jose Andres it might be Jose Andres where one of the levels at like minibar for example if you're a an important person uh not only do you get the meal you get the transportation you know they will take you in a nice uber blackish kind of car to the Kennedy Center or back to your home or one guy found out that oh you know I think this is at a bar said oh this this patron her favorite meal is this particular steak uh so on her birthday we cooked her that steak or uh somebody delivered you know these special you know you know fancy food items to their house on Christmas Eve I mean I don't get that so I when I see that and you think I think oh I don't get that I get that you know I oh I feel special when you know you go out and you know it's nice to be treated you realize that there are about 10 levels above you and there's oh I mean that's a thing in life there's always you know a level above until you reach Michelle Obama because apparently in the piece that's the apex and Trump if you go to uh you know BLT Prime but or any of his properties but uh but otherwise in this town it's Michelle Obama and that's everything uh but one of the interesting things is of course it's one of my pet peeves is going to restaurants where let's say you're going with six people and five are there five are there already and they're like well you got to wait for your sixth person you can't we can't seat you until the sixth person arrives and I'm like you know we're going to eat we're going to order food we're gonna get drinks and they don't do it uh some places and that annoyed you ever tell them
JVL00:12:26we're a party of five and then when your six shows up hey we had a friend come join us please bring
Vic00:12:30another chair over no I I can you do that I know I mean something you hack the system could hack the system no I mean look I mean so they do that at Joe's but I'm pretty sure I was I was actually
Sonny00:12:41kind of surprised to read that about Joe's because I've been to Joe's I go to Joe's all the time for lunch Joe's is a is a is probably Joe's seafood seafood and stone crab and prime steak uh but I I go there pretty frequently and I'm generally the first person there and I always get seated like before the rest of the party because you because you go there pretty frequently well maybe that I mean maybe that's it but I think it also might just be a lunch thing
Vic00:13:03versus dinner maybe but I mean I I've gotten that sometimes maybe I remember maybe I'm a VIP you could be although what's the ultimate VIP at Joe's is the curtains right you they draw I don't want a table with curtains anyway you know but they say apparently that the highest level is the full comp meal right which is very rare although I've gotten that a couple times and I'll say Daniel Ballou is probably the most generous and there's no quid pro quo I just want to say that there's no quid pro quo yeah well I mean
Sonny00:13:29you know me yeah uh I and now a message from our friends at Daniel Ballou yeah I I thought French chef ever I thought I thought the whole point the the comp meal thing I was a little bit surprised by because uh my understanding again my very my very naive understanding of all this is that they will do that sometimes for fellow chefs like as a professional courtesy like if a chef goes to another chef's that's on the house yeah but isn't the whole point of having VIPs who come and get lots of stuff that they will pay a lot of money like isn't it like I understand like the professional courtesy aspect of it but it doesn't make any business sense to me to have like these people who come over and get these lavish meals and then give them the food for free why
JVL00:14:16why would you do that influencer status right it's just like the fire festival stuff we're gonna comp Paulina Porto not Paul I mean she's now 80 years old but you know comp some some girl from Emily Ratajkowski right uh because we'll lose money on her because everybody will know that Michelle Obama is here but then there are other
Vic00:14:35people who are just plain generous uh you know I remember talking to in fact that when I was talking to Daniel Ballou about I was going to some other restaurant I was mentioning I forget which one it was it was like repair or the blue duck tavern it was actually in New York and he and he said it goes oh you're going to Charlie Palmer did you tell Charlie that you're going and I said no I didn't tell him I don't know Charlie and then he goes you did not use your power and I said what power is that and then the light bulb went off no so anyway Vic realized
Sonny00:15:01Vic in that moment realized that he was not actually Daniel Ballou's friend it was just
Vic00:15:05the power he was after but no he's very generous and and just for being generous and others are not other places I've never gotten you know not even a free dish and you go there all the time but anyway that was I thought that was very interesting it reminded me of our time at Morton's you know back in the day and then you know when I finally uh would they ask me for my business card and that was it and then and then the rest although your theory JVL was that they recognized me and not you because of my glasses and my Asian appearance I believe that was the
Sonny00:15:36theory no they recognize you because you talk to everyone this is the thing I do Vic is yes this is what people have to understand about going out with Vic is that Vic is a glad hander and this is I this is not a this is not a criticism this is this is great this is one of the reasons I love going out to eat with Vic is because he's running for class president he's he is constantly he's talking to people and asking about he's actually interested in people I am he's interested in people which is I want to know he's not which is well I'm just interested in being popular okay it's both either it's both either way either way the point is a like people remember Vic because Vic puts in the effort to be remembered and that is that is that is why it is it's great to be
Vic00:16:14around Vic I well thank you Sonny uh I would say people want to know about like oh how do you become a VIP that was what I was going to say chat with these people pick one place if you're in a business where you have to take somebody out to lunch or dinner often just pick one place and go there all the time just become a regular that's the first thing and the second thing is talk to these people talk to the waiters and managers hi how are you and you know just why they're nice people uh some people are they really people that I know are for goodness sakes but the uh but in other people there's a suggestion in the piece Tommy at the Palm is he a nice guy yes he put me my face on the wall I profiled him in the beacon and there's not no that was not a quid pro quo by the way that was the face was already gone and then I wrote about him that much time later
Sonny00:17:00okay we need to move on and I and I do I enjoy hearing about John the waiter of course he takes
JVL00:17:05trips to like Montana he doesn't like he does like manly things absolutely I bet I bet John really values his time and interactions with Vic at a real personal level oh my god he's always so excited to hear what you have to say and hear about how your life is going question question
Sonny00:17:24JVL what did you think about this story it made me want
JVL00:17:32to burn everything down no I for me the takeaway from the story is rich people who can afford to go out and eat expensive meals go out to eat expensive meals at which point the restaurants give the rich people who can afford anything things for free it is it is everything that is wrong with our decadent capitalist system and it made me think of perhaps my favorite my favorite moment in cinema in the last 15 years where a young Anne Hathaway leans in and says there's a storm coming Mr. Wayne because you know what all of these restaurants and all of these people I would
Vic00:18:13burn them to the ground weren't you just in uh Paris uh a couple weeks ago with the uh other uh
JVL00:18:19what is it the uh the yellow coats the orange coats uh yellow jackets in fact they torched a
Vic00:18:24restaurant a fancy French restaurant was that before or after they burned down they were in
Sonny00:18:28France so of course it was a fancy French restaurant uh Sonny you mentioned the Dark Knight Rises and that that that scene with Selina Kyle who at the end of the film winds up with the
Vic00:18:39billionaire at the fancy French restaurant because she realizes that the system works unlike and I bet they get great service and I got they bet they got great service yes I I would enjoy it I would say the only thing that's a shame is there are a lot of places that I used to be a regular at and they just don't go anymore like the Bombay club and places just because I don't work at the standard anymore Smith & Walensky Smith & Walensky's is gone yeah by the way if you had your name plate there JVL at Smith & Walensky's don't tell me and it never got us anything oh I got lots of great stuff from there anyway uh Smith & Walensky
Sonny00:19:13Wine Week Wine Week was great that is like the decadence of of modern society right there
Vic00:19:20me during the day that was really a low point anyway just to explain to people what
Sonny00:19:23Smith & Walensky Wine Week is so basically there are two two weeks a year where Smith & Walensky which is a very nice steak restaurant has this thing called it doesn't doesn't yeah not in DC anywhere has a very has this great special where if you go and you buy a lunch for ten dollars you can sample uh a selection of wines but there's no limit on the sample and the pours are basically regular pours so this is crazy so we we would always go on Mondays at the weekly standard now because yeah because uh on Mondays you don't really do very much on a magazine that closes on a Friday it's just like that's not that that in the good old days before the internet needed to be but the the the the waiters and waitresses would tell us about Fridays which is when most people would go because most people's you know lazy day is Friday and it would just it was like a vomitorium no no no restaurant people would just be like people would just drink like three bottles
Vic00:20:18of wine there was a story that a couple actually had sex in a booth on during wine week uh but there is actually there used to be a wait why didn't you guys ever ask me to go with you how much would you drink would you would you actually would you actually considering your disdain in general for this sort of lifestyle that Sonny and I leave I used to go to Smith
JVL00:20:37Lewinsky's with you all the time you're talking about this you're talking about 15 years ago yeah well and you guys were going to wine week without me
Vic00:20:44really you would take five hours to go drinking well no I wouldn't have had five hours to go
JVL00:20:49but I would have like sat and had lunch with you guys for 90 minutes uh you were not around
Sonny00:20:53I remember checking this is this is always the that's the problem though it feels very judgy when you're sitting there drinking wine after a glass of wine after a glass of wine and somebody's sitting there not drinking glass of wine don't want that very judging actual responsibilities
Vic00:21:04of the magazine there was like there used to be a there was a throw-up stain in the garage in that old building that was mine from one week um now I just go to places like like Sonny goes
JVL00:21:15I'm a regular at the the poke place poke bowl yeah they treat you really nice here do you get
Vic00:21:19extra scoops of protein for free it's humbling it's humbling the manager knows me I'm not sure if I get that extra scoop I kind of uh got a little something else I'll do whatever that's fine but uh yeah so that's where I go now because I'm kind of a poke man oh what what's that wow okay that was epic over the weekend transition Pokemon I mean when are you gonna get to use poke again Pokemon detective Pikachu almost beat out Avengers end game at the box office Avengers kept the top spot for a third week uh with 63 million and Pikachu did about 55 million and in third place was the hustle with 13 million box office thoughts Avengers has now
Sonny00:21:59crossed 700 million domestic you know what else Avengers has done is dip below Infinity War on a day-by-day basis it is dropping like a stone really really that surprises me because I thought
JVL00:22:12there was a lot of goodwill built up I think I think it was very very very front-loaded I mean
Sonny00:22:16look it had a 350 million dollar opening weekend whatever it I think it was incredibly front-loaded so some of this was inevitable um I do think it still gets past avatar but I think it's going to be closer than we thought it was going to be don't think it gets to three billion dollars uh I mean look this is all kind of this is all like on the margins at this point because the movie is already you know gross twice as much as it needs to to turn a profit I mean this movie's this this movie's making making tons and tons of money um but it is it is slowing down much faster than I think people thought it would uh and I would not be surprised if it is in second place to John Wick next weekend or this weekend this this this coming weekend so maybe people are coming around to my view that it is only minimally satisfying maybe I mean I again I think I think it's just ex I think it was extremely front-loaded I think everybody who was going to see it wanted to see it that first weekend could the three-hour run time have something to do totally I mean you see it once and you you don't really feel the need to sit through it again I mean I'm not sure I know
Vic00:23:22there's plenty of people who have obviously seen this multiple times but I personally asked my kids if any of their friends because they said all their classmates they've all seen adventures end game I said do you know any of them who've seen it more than once and they're like no but you know it's long it's three hours yeah it's a big time commitment what about the hustle is that a good number for the hustle 13 million I don't I don't know what the budget was what is the hustle the
Sonny00:23:42hustle so the hustle is lady dirty rotten scoundrels basically it's uh Anne Hathaway
Vic00:23:47and Rebel Wilson oh right okay yeah which I originally thought was going to have the name
Sonny00:23:52dirty rotten scoundrels like scram scoundrel that's your let's but no scoundrel is but that's
Vic00:23:58right I mean wasn't that the whole I have no idea no I was supposed to be similar well the tagline
JVL00:24:02was something like was something like dirty and rotten or scandalous I know but it was a play on
Sonny00:24:09that to make it very obvious yeah that this movie nobody wanted uh and nobody nobody went to go see that happens a lot um yeah okay uh was it was tied to dirty rotten scoundrels uh nobody wanted
Vic00:24:22to but no uh did did did we all see did you see Detective Pikachu JVL no however I uh I did spend
JVL00:24:3590 minutes last night reading a ton of Pokemon history and assembling a giant sheet of Pokemon trivia so that I can contribute to the general discussion you're pulling your so you're again once again you're pulling an 18 with us no no I'm not going to pretend to to have seen I thought about that I thought about coming in and be like yeah man that Pikachu's hysterical he's like a
Vic00:25:02G-rated Deadpool but but I decided not to you decide not I decided I didn't want to see it
JVL00:25:09either but I did because I'm gonna be like a little a little sniper while you guys are the main the main battle tanks I'm just a little sniper sitting back here with things like uh Satoshi Tajiri was born in the town of Machida
Vic00:25:21near Tokyo okay thank you uh Sonny you saw I'd rather you just be quiet frankly I saw then do that evergreen tweet I I so you saw a detective I saw as a child who was nicknamed Mr. Bug thank you and I saw I didn't want to see it but I saw it because that was the show I'm sorry if I only
JVL00:25:38had two children I might have been able to see it too yeah I'm sorry I'm sorry aren't you getting
Sonny00:25:43paid for the show finally Sonny how about a review uh so the interesting thing about Pokemon Detective Pikachu is it's the sort of movie that if you actually went and absorbed lots of Pokemon knowledge beforehand it would actually probably be much more entertaining than going in and seeing it cold like I did uh it is it it's it is a fascinating film because it is uh it is entirely a nostalgia grab right it is it is entirely aimed at people who grew up with Pokemon watched the cartoon or played the game or whatever um and there are lots of little things that are happening on and off the screen that uh or I guess on the screen that that I assume are very entertaining to people who are super into it like lots of you know restaurant names that have Pokemon puns or whatever in them and lots of you know totally missed that nobody nobody uh nobody really explains what any of the Pokemon's powers actually are you're just kind of expected to know it so for instance uh when I'm watching the film and there's a battle between uh a Pikachu and a Charizard the big lizard dragon thing at one point somebody throws a fish into the ring and a couple people in my audience laughed and I was like I have no I literally have no idea what's going on right now just no idea whatsoever so this is why I think it's actually a very interesting movie to watch as somebody who who has has no familiarity with it because as just as a piece of filmmaking obviously it's not very good the story is uh is is like a sub who framed Roger Rabbit it's about a kid who's trying to
JVL00:27:21he was it's adapted from a spin-off video game and the story's not good yeah uh so I I was a
Sonny00:27:27it is it a kid's dad has been killed he was a detective he has to go to the city the big the mega city whatever the pokemon city is called uh and figure out you know clean out his apartment figure out what happened and he shows up to the apartment and there's a pikachu there who he can talk with now I guess my understanding is that in the world of pokemon you can't actually understand creatures they just say their names so usually this pikachu would just be saying pika pika pika pika but instead he's talking like cute instead he's talking like ryan reynolds and this is very weird this is very upsetting for the the child the the teenage boy man whatever winston what's his name winston justice smith not related to will smith though I kind of figured he was considering how terrible he was that's how he must have gotten this job uh the the they they joined forces the pikachu can talk to the pokemon the the the kid can talk to humans and they they're going to solve this mystery there's all sorts of stuff going on here that I don't understand there's a there's a thing called a mewtwo yes a mewtwo which is like a godlike pokemon that can like make people switch bodies and uh bill nighy wants to transport his mind into the the spoilers by the way bill nighy bill nighy wants to transport his mind into the mewtwo so he can combine all of
Vic00:28:50people and all of the pokemon in the city into one being which that is also a classic um movie tv villain move which is my body is ailing I must transfer myself into some other body no
Sonny00:29:04so anyway I don't know man uh the movie the movie's not good the the acting is not particularly good the special effects are like weirdly bad there are these moments where uh uh mr smith is trying to like pet his pikachu and his hand is like kind of floating above it like the the cgi just isn't very good uh it's kind of surprising because this movie cost 150 million dollars to make well they had to build that whole city 150 million dollars built a whole city for this rhyme rhyme city so anyway but like I also have a hard time getting too worked up about it being bad because I feel like we have spent the last 20 years of cinema right having films that are aimed directly at our nostalgia pleasure centers the comic book movie the reboots the retreads the remakes these are all things that we were familiar with growing up marvel comics dc comics you know which we enjoy because we know these oh hey there's yeah right get smart uh what was what was the guy Richie uh the man from uncle you know all these all these like reboots and remakes um hornet that are that are that are designed to appeal to us on a sense of familiarity and now um and now we and now I now I am too old to have the familiarity so it frightens and confuses me I can't I can't get too upset about it I guess what year did you graduate from high school I graduated from high school in 2000. so this is I think I also this is a thing I had mentioned uh in my review is that I do think that there is a this is like one of these uh pokemon is one of these dividing lines between micro generations like I think it is a very zenial like the the kind of old millennial or or very young gen xers who it we were simply too old for it but it was still kind of in our world yeah um yeah if you had
Vic00:30:56younger siblings I would they would have been into but there were also two iterations uh yes JVL uh from like I mean there was pokemon when I don't know I mean my my cousin who's uh about Sonny's age when he when he was a little kid it was popular and then it came back again it was gone was it gone I don't know if it was gone but then they came back again would you like to know about
JVL00:31:15pokemon all right come on give it to us give us some please give it to us okay or do you want
Vic00:31:19to do our our ad oh no no no you can you can you oh well you know tell me okay well I do the ad read first I was just about to complain about I mean obviously it was too loud it was besides that I actually use the bathroom so I have no idea you must it was it would have been great if you
JVL00:31:34resurrected missed that perfect scene while you're out peeing when the healing movie would have been
Vic00:31:40great I said what what are these healing pokemons doing here I seem to have missed how that happened but uh and you can't really complain about plot holes because obviously we're talking about pokemon but it did seem weird didn't it that they could just break into the bay you know how they just
Sonny00:31:53entered into the the secret lab is not the secret the secret lab had been abandoned because the
Vic00:31:58youtube cameras there and there's nobody there they just got it and then all of a sudden he starts hacking into the computer yeah and my first thought is obviously this multi-billion dollar corporation doesn't seem to think cybercrime is important but they should think it is JVL admit it
JVL00:32:13you think that cybercrime is something that happens to other people you may think no one wants your or that hackers can't grab your passwords or credit card details but you'd be wrong stealing data from unsuspecting people on public wi-fi is one of the simplest and cheapest ways for hackers to make money when you leave your internet connection unencrypted you might as well be writing your passwords and credit card numbers on a huge billboard for the rest of the world to see that's why i decided to take action to protect myself from cyber criminals i use express vpn express vpn secures and anonymizes and it makes anonymous your internet browsing by encrypting your data and hiding your public ip address express vpn has easy to use apps that run seamlessly in the background of your computer phone and tablet turning on express vpn protection only takes one click using express vpn i can safely surf on public wi-fi without being snooped or having my personal data stolen for less than seven dollars a month you can get the same express vpn protection that i have express vpn is rated vpn service by tech radar and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee protect your online security today and find out how you can get three months free at expressvpn.com slash wfb that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s vpn.com just the way it sounds expressvpn.com slash wfb for three months free with a one-year package visit expressvpn.com slash wfb
Vic00:33:49to learn more thank you jvl uh so you were in the middle of explaining that pikachu excuse me pokemon was never i always thought it was here it was gone and it came
JVL00:34:01back in popularity no uh so this is as sonny said this is one of these microgenerational things uh where you and i missed it by a lot sonny barely missed it if you had had a if you had a younger brother two years younger than you you would have been so totally immersed it was like 96
Vic00:34:18or 97 is that right no before that right wasn't there i remember it from before that or am i wrong
JVL00:34:24you are incorrect victorino uh but that's because you're so old that all these things
Sonny00:34:28it was back in 19-dickety-12 i was wearing an onion on my belt as was the style at the time and the pocket monsters came to the united states
JVL00:34:41so how much do you guys want to know because i now know all the things what thank you what what year was this created in japan it was first released in 1996 for the game boy in japan it was originally a game boy title originally called capsule monsters then changed to pocket monsters and then
Vic00:35:01abbreviated to pokemon short for pocket monsters i almost kind of remember pocket and it became so
JVL00:35:08quickly uh popular so it launches in early 96 by october of 96 there is a card game version of it coming huge all in japan still a manga series also launches that fall in japan it becomes one of the best-selling manga titles of all time uh and by early 1997 there's an anime series running which becomes enormous so it just conquers all media in japan and then arrives in north america in 1998. okay oh my gosh uh it is yeah so i was 16 when this comes out in the states basically i was
Sonny00:35:42like i was just i was just too old for it you just missed it uh it it couldn't compete with pogs anyway so
JVL00:35:48it's good that it came out later so if you're gonna get to that in a second it is in a way almost a perfect economic creation right so you think about you think about what video games do in in terms of enticing interest and what pokemon did was it combined the player versus player battle stuff and so it's a very very early player versus player system because you i don't know if you know the game boy family but people had game boys you could stick a cord into the two game boys and connect them and play against each other ah so this is like early early handheld player versus player like you could do with the tetris you could actually do that with correct correct and so you would stick your cord into from your game boy into your friend's game boy and you could battle each other with pokemons uh so it gave the same sort of frisson of combat that you get from say street fighter right remember how people would line up for street fighter yes you know for hours and hours
Vic00:36:52to play each other or just play the computer you know i don't like playing other people yeah well
JVL00:36:56you you are alone in this everybody liked the whole idea was that the appeal of street fighter was not that you're playing the computer and beating it but you're beating other people as
Vic00:37:04social as i am in other settings when it comes to like the video game thing i i'm not into the you
JVL00:37:09know i'd be standing rubbing shoulders with something besides that also i i just too i don't know i don't know these you know it's weird but it so it combined uh it it combined the player versus player excitement with the collector's impulse because part of pokemon was there like 121 pokemon you got to collect them all i think it's interesting that
Vic00:37:30the card thing came second i always figured technologic speaking would be easier to make
JVL00:37:34cards first but hard came card came second and the idea was always the idea of collecting them all was built into the very fiber of this thing and so it spawned an entire ecosystem of fan magazines and spin-off games and then the economics of it went really crazy because the handheld video game systems began uh mutating so you had game boy advance game boy color eventually the nintendo ds and let me step back a little so when whenever they released a pokemon game they released it in two variants so there would be two there would be the original was pokemon green and pokemon red was to get all to collect them all you had to get both you had to buy two versions of the same stupid video game and then when you got to the next iteration of the video games uh you know the next handheld system so when you went to game boy advance and they released pokemon sun and pokemon moon so you had to buy those two but then they would re-release as special editions the first two titles from the last system as like pokemon ruby and pokemon emerald and you have to buy them all and so every time you moved to a new video game system they would re-release all of the old titles as special editions for you to buy again so it's basically just a value though a money a money
Sonny00:39:00mint it was just a mint for nintendo yeah mr satoshi am i allowed to say that you said it i
JVL00:39:08think so satoshi tajiri it's currently worth 5.6 billion and the only thing he ever did was invent
Vic00:39:17did he invent all of them or did he just invent the idea of it and a couple of them and then
JVL00:39:22everyone else he was a bug collector and the idea was what if i could let people collect bugs but their bugs could fight one another that's a 5.6 billion dollar idea he he was a dropout of high school did not complete high school did not go to college he was so into video games that's why he couldn't complete high school and he started out got to start by uh starting a game zine a game called game freak uh we're just like a fan magazine about video games like there's an 18 year old kid writing fan video and and then decided to start producing a couple games but then went to poke it took six years to develop
Vic00:40:06pokemon once they signed the initial contract for nintendo i that the game zine is like but that that's that that's that's interesting because i myself i'm a big fan of game magazines game game game magazine nintendo power magazine you mean nintendo yeah please tell me you had a subscription to nintendo power i did not uh the uh okay uh i thank you thank you jvl i i gave this movie a b because i was ready for an f based on the trailer i thought the trailer was awful i thought it was this sensory overload and it was and they they sort of had a compact version of ryan reynolds it felt like it was going to be deadpool three you know because it's all of ryan reynolds's snark in a two-minute trailer or whatever and i just could i just couldn't take it so that was the expectation i had going into the movie so i was pleasantly surprised it's kind of a tone down by by comparison it's kind of a tone down compare uh performance i thought for ryan reynolds you know i mean being yeah ryan reynolds but not it's
Sonny00:41:10not the same where is he on the ryan reynolds smarma meter i would say closer to green lantern than dead pool okay wow okay yeah so there you go uh closer to blade three than green lantern though right
Vic00:41:25right so that yeah okay and trying to wrap my head around that yeah but uh but sonny's right justice smith i mean i thought he was fine in jurassic world right he was well he has like four lines in jurassic world right and the rest of it is reaction uh this one it's just awkward there's just moments where he has you know it's not a movie no he could not catherine newton on the other hand
Sonny00:41:46was interesting i thought she was nice i don't know what that is she plays the intern she plays uh so she plays a intern at a news uh tv news network basically cnn of the poke city yeah uh and she has to she is the one who helps uh our hero solve the mystery of why his dad was murdered
Vic00:42:08so when i went to the theater though you went to a screening right sonny no i went i went to a thursday night screen yeah i went uh tuesday tuesday night and uh there are a lot of kids at this thing yeah so it's like you're watching a movie and then just everyone's mulling around in the theater it's just people walking around did you bring your kids no they didn't want to see this i think it's they're not interested that's not their thing either that's interesting that's interesting oh the marvel stuff they love
Sonny00:42:35that's great so pokemon i think the biggest pokemon thing right now is with the phones right there's a pokemon game on on pokemon go iphone pokemon go oh of course can i tell you about pokemon go let me just let me do so what's what's funny about pokemon go is that uh one of like the hot spots for finding the creatures is a fort ward fort ward park which i live near and i will go there sometimes with the family to go to a playground or whatever and there will be random people staring at their phone who just like wander out into the middle of the grass stop and then turn around and walk away and when that happens i'm like okay they just released some new pokemon thing do you ever throw things at those people no i should i should
JVL00:43:16just boo just hit him with a baseball nerd nerd so pokemon go is not actually a nintendo game interestingly enough uh it was created by a san francisco company a tech startup called niantic which began actually as an in-house development project from google uh it did 207 million dollars in revenue in its first month in release uh but it crashed like if you remember there was a real an actual fad and craze with pokemon go uh where in the first month it was doing like 28.5 million daily users here in america like you would see people all the time walking around with their stupid phones i remember that first weekend like even out by me and wood like just everywhere you went there are people walking around with their stupid phones uh it then crashed all the way to five million daily users uh why rebounded why because it was a fad people just like you know all because it's new and then they're like well because of the
Vic00:44:15we have a colleague in this office study who just reloaded his uh pokemon go app global revenue
JVL00:44:23yes on pokemon go as of march of this year so pre-movie 2.45 billion dollars so what this yeah what this the movie does pokemon is it is sim it is like the video game version of a casino it it's just minting money hand over fist for forever
Vic00:44:45and it is uh are they saying that this is the most successful movie based on video uh
JVL00:44:53game per se i don't know i mean globally it might wind up as that because i assume pokemon's gonna
Sonny00:44:58be a giant thing in asia i uh i wonder if it beats warcraft which was actually which actually wound up doing not bad hold on let me let me pull a box off warcraft did very well globally i wonder if
Vic00:45:08it'll do better than super mario brothers the one with john leguizamo i believe mario brothers the
JVL00:45:15the video game series is still tops in terms of total series revenue across all platforms all
Sonny00:45:23time but pokemon is a close second well uh well this doesn't this doesn't have okay the international but uh i mean the lara croft tomb raider movie is still the highest grossing domestic the remake not the remake the first one the first one is still the the highest total 133 131 131.
JVL00:45:45uh pokemon may beat that it underperformed as of saturday night they were projecting it to do 60 to 70 million yeah and so things fell off clearly the audience didn't like this thing so warcraft
Sonny00:45:59grossed only 47 million dollars uh at home it was it was a huge bomb here grossed 433 million dollars total worldwide so another 386 million uh it's it has the the most insane domestic foreign split i've ever seen it's basically 89 to 11. okay that's crazy for for a movie that was actually in an american made
JVL00:46:23hollywood an america and americans you would expect that of like blood wolf 2 or whatever
Sonny00:46:28that chinese movie yeah no an american an american uh made film that cost 160 million dollars to make so it probably came close to gross to grossing enough to make its money back not it didn't quite get there but it probably came pretty close did either of you ever dabble in warcraft no no you wanted you wanted me to and you gave me the 213 million dollars in china warcraft okay
Vic00:46:53and you gave me the installment but i don't i know i don't think i ever did because i was stuck in you know what i was playing was diablo oh yeah you were doing diablo at the time my dad did too my dad and me were both playing that uh but you were into warcraft i'm into it i was not too strong you dab you were you were warcraft curious i was warcraft curious i dabbled in it and
JVL00:47:14um what were you i realized that it was yeah that it was no good i had to get out of one because i'm because it is like like a perfectly designed slot machine uh warcraft is designed to tickle all of
Sonny00:47:31your neural pleasures bells and whistles the sounds that happen the sort of the pace of discovery of
JVL00:47:38good stuff like just as you're about like hey i should turn this off something amazing happens to you and then the new quest you're on like the quest it is so perfectly engineered in that way uh so that the quests are all exactly the right length of it it's like it has hacked all of human behaviors and i had to get out so tell me about what were you what were and more importantly what was your name i i don't remember i because that it depends on the type of character you play rolling a tune as they call it oh uh it really depends on what your style of play is and if you are a solo person like me i was not going to join a guild and like come up with like real world warcraft buddies that like we could all organize raiding party no pass hard pass hard pass because you're gonna do that then you really want to be like a healer because those people are very valuable few people play as healers you can you wind up on asymmetrical advantages of choosing to be a healer so you've thought about this uh but i believe i went as a which gave you a pretty good uh i never liked playing as a tank you know like as a straight warrior or something like that so i i always would rather be somebody who's more powerful but at
Sonny00:48:55range and you know what you know what go fork yourself go fork yourself tell me about your
JVL00:49:02weapons mr like oh i couldn't play because i was on diablo all the time but you're a nerd because
Vic00:49:07you're playing warcraft one time my friend george guitar you wrote a cover story about civ i did fine but he had i get to judge both of you it's great guilty as charged my friend george who listens to the show uh he uh was also playing diablo when he had found a missing piece of a set of armor and then he had me go online and then we met each other and then he transferred it over but then i lost my map something happened it just goes blank you have our hand jobs while you were in the diablo world together too that down mark down the time that you gotta believe that one okay
Sonny00:49:37did you not touch video games at all no i was i played nintendo and like some super nintendo uh uh uh play game boy but when did you leave all this behind like so you never dabbled in
JVL00:49:51like college when everybody when all the other cool kids no i was you were just off at your
Sonny00:49:55true foe festivals no i was i was never into the other third years 400 blows so i was i was uh i was very brand loyal to nintendo and so when playstation took it out or took over as like the dominant video game form i was like ah playstation i'm never doing that so it wasn't it wasn't actually until playstation 3 became the cheapest and best blu-ray player that i got like semi back into video games i play maybe i haven't played a game in like a year but i before i had kids i was playing like three or four games a year um and it was always the big whatever whatever like the big title was the year before and was now available for 20 on amazon that's what i was playing so what style what would you pick up uh first first person shooters i like i liked uh bioshock
Vic00:50:43oh what was that what was the one that uh i i used to play it on my power mac and you had it too with the the uh the uh doom no no no no no no no it's like command and conquer yes command and
Sonny00:50:55yeah well i played command and conquer but that was that was like back in the 90s i was that video
Vic00:50:59game that was a computer i played that when i was at the weekly standard uh okay but not at the
Sonny00:51:03uh no but i i'm a i'm a first person shooter
JVL00:51:07that's what i do you play them networked or no i
Sonny00:51:13played so i played some counter-strike in college we where i would we would be on a lan and all playing together but my computer wasn't really good enough for it so i was like really janky and i was never i kind of hated it um but yeah no it was the the the the games that i have played most recently and have really enjoyed uh god of war not technically a first person shooter but kind of super violent and fun uh the arkham knight games the arkham games the batman games are actually really really good and uh all the resident evils big fan of the resident evils so we only have like two video
JVL00:51:48games so movie we have we have uh dc versus mortal combat and yeah kind of violent and madden we could turn the blood off oh well what about like lego stuff and so flash i guess we have a copy but there's like a bard for my brother-in-law so we uh flash does not play video games very often so it's great because whenever he does want to play and i'll like wander and be like hey wanna wanna let me let me hop in there we'll uh you know do a little battle and i can still just crush him oh my gosh it's pretty
Vic00:52:24pretty satisfying my son likes i am the king nerd my son likes the forza games you know the racing games it's all racing so he just knows all oh man i can't drive any of that i had a friend i'm
Sonny00:52:35terrible who was super into gran turismo when when we were in college uh who like obsessively did everything got like all of the mods and all of and was like watching the like meter the progress meter tickets like i'm up to 98 percent now it's been i was like sonny can you
Vic00:52:54really briefly tell us about your pog collection because you weren't into uh pokemon but i i
Sonny00:52:58jokingly said oh maybe you could tell us about your pogs you actually did so in 90 in 1993 or early 90s early 90s pogs they the the the pog was an import from hawaii i think it was like the you what it was essentially was uh milk caps or bottle caps uh originally and basically what you did is you would stack them up and then you would you would try and flip them and if however many you flipped over that was that was you know the win so uh they bring it to america and they brand it with all the things like i had i had like a full collection of dc pogs i had like all the dc skycap in near mint condition not anymore because i've played with them uh yeah rookie mistake why pogs are great when i was in when i was in uh when i was in in middle school i guess is when when this this this came out there were like two groups of kids you had the you had the kids who were playing magic and you had the kids who were playing pogs magic i was magic the happening magic the gathering yeah and i was always a pog kid because magic was for say two uh i don't think
JVL00:54:04there was i don't think there was i don't think it was i don't think that was pepsi versus coke
Sonny00:54:07yeah i know i i don't really think there was a there was a big difference in that uh i don't know it was uh pogs were great man i i had a slammer i had a quad slammer what is great it was like well so you flip the cards you need a slammer right you gotta write that one down and i had a i had a quad slammer i would just i buzzsaw people there are like 17 people who are listening to this
Vic00:54:28who know know what that means but they love it member berries they love it okay thank you sonny any other thoughts on no i got nothing okay great um moving right on to uh right along to corrections additions and shout outs i have one which is to daniel blue besides that greatest restaurants ever listener tthresh14 had a question uh that i told him that i would answer on the show he had a question about one of my favorite movies brewster's millions with richard pryor about having to spend 30 million in 30 days in order to get a 300 million dollar inheritance with nothing to show for it with nothing to show no ownership and he said how did mailing the rare stamp not violate what he calls the inherent value a former legal correspondent on the podcast known as write and writer r.i.p r.i.p uh the answer tthresh is because monty brewster used the stamp for its original purpose so it might have some value but he used the stamp as a stamp plus everybody got distracted by the baseball game with the yankees remember that part where he remember he was part of the hoboken bulls and then he wanted to organize a baseball game with the yankees and everyone got distracted by that and then he ran for mayor as none of the above brilliant a brilliant stroke a stroke of genius that was a great movie it's a great john candy isn't it that's right i forgot that john candy fantastic fantastic okay that is all the time we're giving to this episode questions comments complaints compliments tweet us at victorino mattis at sonny bunch again be sure to subscribe to us on itunes or google play just type in sub beacon at a podcast we're there leave a review tell your friends until next time
JVL00:56:11so other thoughts anything i uh one of the millennials who worked with me who works with me we had a conversation this uh this week in which uh it became clear that she had no idea who chris farley was wow wow yes uh it was just essentially either for movies for nothing you know just before her time it is it is something else so your kids didn't even as little kids do pokemon no not at all that's so familiar with it because it's still a thing yeah i mean this is a thing the kids do and like it's not just the millennials looking back yeah right that's interesting it's
Vic00:56:59not your kids must be really cool i know just interested in other stuff i guess i mean but they don't seem to mention that their other friends are also into it either so i mean they're do other things i i wonder if
JVL00:57:11if there is an epidemiological aspect to this like watching the spread of an epidemic where you know one kid in a school in one district gets into it and then like his friends get into it because he's doing it and it sort of radiates out that word so if you just happen to be like let's say they say they have a hot zone then all of a sudden you're into it because like everybody around you is doing it right and
Vic00:57:36right speaking about that you know i don't know but speaking of speaking of disease speaking of disease if i may um my brother-in-law captain bill dwyer was telling me that he now knows a couple guys who have been bitten by something called the lone star tech are you familiar with this true story this i'm not making this up it's called the lone star tick it gives you you ready for this a red meat allergy oh i've heard about that yeah this is i'd rather get bubonic plague like you do and you know it's so scary already you you cannot like all of a sudden you become violently ill from eating steak or something like that or something like that so my thought was once again Sonny Bunch is right don't go outdoors don't go outdoors if you stay indoors i'm sure it'll be fine
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