What A Cartoon Movie! - The Iron Giant

Finally watched the Iron Giant for the first time just so I could listen to your podcast about it! Can’t wait to listen to your deep dive into the history!

Tashmon Dimps

The objectivist/Randyian stuff in Bird's work really *is* hard to ignore when you think about how omnipresent it is. When I first started hearing about it around the time Incredibles 2 came out, I was a little skeptical given how much inspiration the original took from Watchmen, but the fact that it's in almost all of his movies makes that hard to argue. And granted, obviously Incredibles ends with painting superheroes as good and necessary while Watchmen says the opposite, but I could have chalked that up to either just purposefully wanting to not condemn superheroes or Disney not wanting such a bleak statement in their movie. In any case, I still enjoy a lot of his work despite the fact that anyone who likes Ayn Rand immediately makes me uncomfortable. -- AND MORE ON-TOPIC: I hadn't seen this movie in probably 15 years or so but always remembered it fondly and people on the internet always talked it up, so while I'm not as in love with it as everyone else (similar to Bob), I'm glad revisiting it didn't disappoint me. It's still super fun and kind of unique, and it's unfortunate it did so poorly upon release.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

I watched Tomorrowland in a plane and I disliked it so much, I wanted to boo and throw things at my tiny screen as the end credits rolled

nina matsumoto

That was a really great podcast! I enjoyed all of it - generally I enjoy the history section the most and any of the production information that you share, but man, this was all really fantastic! Cheers!

In the case of possible objectivism in The Incredibles, this is somewhat countered by the fact that Bob's office boss is bad and a government agent is one of the good guys.

Bennett Billard

As far as viewing experiences go, the landscapes are especially overlooked, particularly near the deer scene. My only other remark is I think Brave Little Toaster has family dog beat as far as A-113 references go, but both came out in 1987 and I don't think Brad Bird had anything to do with BLT.

Boomer Spacely

I rewatched this movie for the first time since I saw it in theaters in '99, and the ending still brought tears to my eyes. Whenever I bring this movie up, there's usually at least one person in the conversation who remembers it fondly.

I think I might know the Iron Giant toy Bob was talking about! It was a small toy of the giant but only it's arms could move; they'd turn around like a windmill and that's all it could do. I remember getting that toy as part of a packaged VHS copy of "The Iron Giant". Great episode guys, I really loved Iron Giant when I was a kid!

I just wanted to say thank you for doing this film, as I had inexplicably never seen it before, and watched it for this. It was a wonderful film, that did leave me in tears by the end.

Tony King

My take on the whole 'gun' debate here is that Hogarth is just a kid who doesn't really grasp the entirety of what he's doing or the situation. Which is somewhat believable imo. He's seen cool cowboys and soldiers on television and wants to emulate them but when he's confronted with the realization that his big robot buddy is just a tool for destruction he's trying to dial that back and when he sees the dead deer that's him also slowly realizing the dangers guns pose. I suppose you could make some pretentious reading like he needs to deprogram himself from his culture as much as the Giant does but that's a pretty big stretch. Either way nice podcast!

Devin Hoffarth

Great way to close 2019. An absolute classic.

Frank Grimes