46. Blade, The Matrix, Bricks

Phil & Jake rank the fictional vampire-hunter Blade, the first (and best) installment of The Matrix film franchise, and bricks on the List of Every Damn Thing.

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SHOW NOTES:

• We of course talk a lot about the Blade movies and Wesley Snipes. When reviewing Snipes' early work, we only mention Major League briefly and don’t even talk about how he didn't come back for the sequel. We also mention Passenger 57 and Demolition Man.
• Sticky Fingaz from Onyx was the star of the short-lived Blade TV series.
• We talk about the history of horror themes in comics. We don't really get into EC Comics, Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham, or the U.S. Congressional inquiry and Comics Code Authority that followed, but we could talk for days about that if you let us.
• Here’s the cover of Tomb of Dracula #10, featuring the first appearance of Blade.
• Marvel Comics characters discussed in this episode include Morbius (The Living Vampire), Werewolf by Night, the X-Men (especially Gambit), Ghost Rider, the Avengers and of course Dracula.
• We bring up John Woo, the Hong Kong-based action director. He's best known in the US for Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II. His HK work was very influential also.
• Yuen Woo-Ping is a director and choreographer based in Hong Kong who's also done a lot of work in American movies (The Matrix and Kill Bill for example).
• We talk about non-Marvel Cinematic Universe movies such as the 1989 Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie, Howard the Duck, X-Men and Ghost Rider. We do get into the MCU a little bit, with the upcoming Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali.
• We talk about a whole lot of other action movies, including Mortal Kombat (1995), John Wick, Speed Racer, Police Story, Drunken Master II and Die Hard.
• Daybreakers starring Ethan Hawke is a very smart (but also very dumb) movie that's a lot more fun than it needs to be. It's about a world where almost everyone's already been bitten by vampires and blood is getting scarce. We guess it's about oil?
• The recently-cancelled, long-running show The Venture Brothers' character of Jefferson Twilight is a Blade parody who specializes in killing vampires of African descent.
• Blacula is a 1972 film that Phil saw on broadcast TV as a child, but it fell out of rotation.
• Phil mentions, but forgets the title of, Jekyll and Hyde... Together Again. Here's the scene where he transforms. 
• In pop-singer Bebe Rexha's video for "Sacrifice" she restages a couple sequences from Blade. The song has a real early 90s club sound to it, that's what the kids want these days.
• In the episode, Phil says you don’t see a lot of references to Popeye in pop culture. We forgot about Ludacris' legitimately terrifying video for "Get Back".
• Laurence Fishburne is Phil's wife's favorite actor. When he shows up she always hopes it means everything up to that point in the movie was inside the Matrix. It's almost never true though.
• The Three Little Pigs should have a back-to-basics reboot. Kids only know the deconstructed versions now. There are deconstructed, ironic takes on the story going back to the 1930s! We just want a straight-up fable about planning ahead.
• We mention the Reginald Denny incident, which Ice Cube references in the song in “Natural Born Killaz”.
• Brickbats are bricks used as weapons. Here's an illustration of a member of the Dead Rabbits with a brickbat.
• Krazy Kat (AKA Krazy & Ignatz) is a comic-strip in which one character loves to throw a brick at the othe...