KM I am sixty. You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
MO and Tuala are off tonight and Monday, Mark Ronner sitting in with Tiffany Hobbes and Twala by the way, are They're on a cruise, which Tuala. It's a little bit of a stretch. I understand for Tuala because like me, he is deathly terrified of deep water. So I was hoping that we would hear from Mo tonight. I was hoping that we would get some maybe footage of Tuala vomiting over the side of the boat. But in lieu
of that, let's just keep moving here. Moe makes interviews a regular feature of the show, so tonight I'm doing one and sue me if I'm a little more nostalgic driven than Mo. But, like he says, host privilege, Tonight, I want to welcome the legendary Bert Ward, who you know is Robin from the nineteen sixty six Batman series that did nothing short of change all pop culture around the world and his grown up civilian identity. Bert is a hero to dogs. He runs General Giant Dogfood. Here
is his official introduction. I'm going to read this, then we're going to get right to the conversation. Bert Ward, the original Robin from the Batman TV series, and his wife Tracy have rescued more than fifteen thousand, five hundred dogs and hundreds of cats in the last thirty years, and they created Gentle Giants Natural non GMO Ingredients pet food to help all precious pets live longer and healthier.
Dogs eating Gentle Giants Natural non GMO Ingredients, Dog and Puppy food and following General Giants Special Feeding and Care program are living as long as thirty healthy, active years with a wonderful quality of life. They have also created Gental Giants Natural non GMO Ingredients, Cat and kitten food help cats live long, healthy, active lives too. Learn more at Gentlegiantsdogfood dot com and General Giants Pet Products dot com. Bert, it means the world to me that you are here tonight.
Hello with citizens, honest with you. I'm a little emotional right now. I can't tell you how much it means to get to talk to you. I still have a photo that you signed for me when I was like seven years old at a kmart in Spokane, Washington, and I boggles my mind. How many of these things you must have done over the last half centuries, signings, conventions. Do you still do a lot of that stuff?
Well, I did over seven thousand personal appearances and signed more than eight and a half million autographs, So that's a lot of autography.
Oh my god, I can't even conceive of that. So they've got to have run the range from like I remember when I met you as a child, it was a winter and kind kind of a cricket situation. I think it was the only one there. But at the same time, you guys were like Beatles in the sixties. It had you have had to have situations where it's like Tom Jones panty throwing deals.
Right, Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I would say that we had an enormous audience on Batman. When we aired on January twelfth, nineteen sixty six, there were more than four hundred million people that first week. In subsequent weeks that watch Batman, we had a fifty five share, meaning that of all the televisions on in North America that's Mexico, the US, and Canada, that's fifty five percent were watching Batman.
That's incomprehensible. Now, most people don't understand that that doesn't exist in today's fragmented TV environment. Nobody has gotten a fifty five share in most people's lifetimes at this point.
You're right, and not only that, but even the Super Bowl doesn't get that kind of a share. So, and you know, the whole Batman thing, it was such a wonderful show. There was something for everybody. For kids, it was the hero worship. I mean, who wouldn't want to be writing in the batmobile, chasing Tenus Villain's climbing walls, right, who wouldn't want to do that? And yet for the
adults it was nostalgia of the comic book. And for the teenagers and the college kids, that was a period in the sixties when hey, they didn't even want to watch television. They want to cruise around the Friday and Saturday nights, you know, the outdoor restaurants and stuff like that. But we pulled them in because of our campy style. We used to say that we put on our tights to put on the world. Yeah.
I don't think people generally understand that the show means different things to people of different ages and at different ages. I of course loved it when it was in reruns, as I wasn't able to see it when it was first run. But when I was a like three, four or five year old kid, of course I loved it. But then later on as an adult, I saw just
the brilliance of the humor. And I spend a lot of time trying to explain to people here just how brilliant the show was, how it actually saved the Batman comics, how it's its own hilarious thing, and all these dark, serious Batman movies and shows they can coexist with Batman sixty six. What's your perception of all that over the years as it sort of waxed and waned and waxed again.
Well, let me just tell you, if it wasn't for our Batman, I'm not sure you'd have all these superhero movies.
That's exactly right.
And you know, there's one thing that a lot of people don't know, it really kind of sophisticated, that is in every superhero movie and in every action movie made today, something that Adam and I started back in nineteen sixty six. And let me tell you what it is. There was
a particular scene in a warehouse. We were looking for the Joker, and all of a sudden, out of the blue hair all these like eight different villains, you know, a henchman showed up and they're wan to fight with us, and you know, I mean it's very threatening, right, So I had this line to Batman, I said, got Batman, there's eight of them against two of us, odds in our favor.
I honestly don't think that you get enough credit for how hilariously funny you were on the show. On what a really gifted comic actor you were. I think it was taken for granted more than it should have been. I mean when I see your delivery at things like Robin, when is a door not a door? And you say when it's a jar? Nobody could have done that like you.
You know, it was a lot of fun doing it. But what I had just said in terms of even look at today's movies, all action movies, right in the middle of the most dangerous parts, there's always a moment where the two sleeds will turn to the other and have some comic thing where they say something funny to break you know, the energy, and yet didn't go back. So it's something that is used in all of the feature films today that what we ended up creating back in nineteen sixty six.
I am going to go even further than that and suggest that there is a straight line between what you guys did in Batman sixty six and the Deadpool movies that are so popular right now. And I think you were ahead of your time. Have you thought about that?
Yes, you know, and it's wonderful. Look, you know, let me tell you what we did with great family entertainment, what Warner Brothers has done with the superheroes, and Marvel has done they it's fabulous as well. I mean, there's room for everybody. People are they do love action films, and they love heroes, and they you know, the whole concept is entertainment. It's something that you want to escape.
It's bigger than life. It's something that we all can feel, even in our own world, if you know what I mean I do.
We're going to go to a break right now and we come back. We're going to talk about your pet food and a couple other Burt Ward Robin items. I'm talking to the legendary Bert Ward. It's KFI AM six forty.
You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Mark Ronner in from O Kelly and I want to get right back to this. Every second counts. We have the legendary, the legendary Bert Ward from Batman on the line. Bert, you're still with me?
Absolutely?
Okay, we're going to get to your pet food in just a second. But before we do that, I just have to know when Batman was at its absolute peak, what was your life like.
Busy listen. It was filming five days a week, eleven to twelve hours a day, and not in a costume that wasn't terribly comfortable, climbing walls, fighting villains, very dangerous filming back in those days not quite the same as it is today, and on weekends making appearances. It was like seven days a week. But I had a lot of fun and we made a lot of people happy, and we always did things in a positive way. Even when we made our personal appearances. You know, there would
be some people say, oh, take off your mask. Oh no, When Batman, Adam West and myself were in costume, we were in character. We preserved it for kids, so it was always something that you could all the parents love to bring their kids. We had a great time. It was a fun show. I mean, this made so many people happy.
It certainly made me happy. And we hear things like Don Adams basing his guest smart character on I think it was William Powell. Was there anyone's influence at all that we can hear in you as Robin? If you told us anyone who inspired.
You, well, you know, here's the interesting thing. Growing up, I always wanted to be a superhero and as a three year old child, my mother took photos of me on my tricycle riding around with a towel bath towel held together with a clothes pin. I mean, it was something that I daydreamed about. So when I had the opportunity to do it, you know the reason I was selected. There was eleven hundred young actors that tried out, and the executive producer told me when after I was selected
that the reason they picked me. They said, if there really was a robin, you know, like forgetting television. What if there really was a robin, they said, you, personally, Bert would be it. So we don't want you to quote act. We want you to do just two things. Be yourself and be enthusiastic. Well, that's pretty easy for me to do, and that's what I did for one hundred and twenty episodes.
Well you will always be my Robin. Now, for some time, you've been making and selling your own specialty dog food. Tell me about that. What led to that?
Okay, thirty years ago, in August of nineteen ninety four, my wife and I rescued a Great Dane. We found out that other Great Danes were being put to death in shelters because there was no rescue for them. And I said to my wife Tracy, in the first week of August nineteen ninety four, I said, we can't let these dogs die. How about just for a couple of weeks so we can find somebody else take this over. Let's rescue them. By the end of August, we had in our house one hundred and two Great Danes and
sixty one puppies under seven weeks of age. Wow, because they were all being put to death and we saved everyone. Well, you know here it is like thirty years later, haven't found anybody take over the rescues. But here's the key thing. This is our charity. My wife and I don't take any salary from this and because we love dogs and we've actually made it our life's work, we have found a way to help them live longer. Giant breed dogs particularly only live six to eight years or seven to
nine years. Other breeds usually live only ten or twelve years. We have found a way to make all dogs have a chance to live as long as thirty years. We created, after spending actually millions of dollars, we created a special food and a special way to care for dogs. And right now, throughout the United States and Canada, more than one hundred thousand dogs every day eat our gentle giants. Dog food is for all breeds, all ages, from the
youngest puppies to the oldest seniors. Here at our house right now, I've got five dogs that are over twenty years of age.
God.
We have a customer in PHOENICX. His dog on January third of twenty twenty five will be thirty one years old eating our food. And you say, well, how can you do that, Well, let me tell you in a nutshell, here's how we can do it. For any of your listeners who have dogs. Here's a quick suggestion. Go pick up some of the food you're feeding doesn't matter if it's the cheapest food, are the most expensive? Pick it up those kibbles, rub them in your fingers, put them down,
rub your fingers together. You're gonna feel a greasy feeling. That's animal fat that was sprayed onto the food and stealing the food to make dogs eat more, to make you buy more dog food. Well, that is terrible. We believe it's killing dogs. And why do I say that, because you wouldn't if you cook bacon, would you take the grease and pour down your garbage disposed? Of course not, it would clog it. We'll think of all the dogs whose arteries and intestines are clogged with animal fat. Okay,
and so we don't do that. Our food is incredibly healthy, non g O. That's another thing. You know in the US, our food now, our few food supply is more than ninety percent genetically modified to accept pesticide in the food. You know, when a farmer grows a plant and pets and bugs attack it, he sprayed with pesticide. Half the time it kills the plant, but with GMOs in it, the plant lives, and unfortunately the plant absorbs the pesticide.
Your dog eats the food, fruits vegetables, meat, whatever it is, and your dog ends up getting cancer. I mean our dogs, and this is absolutely true. In thirty years, we've had more than fifteen thousand, five hundred dogs here and less than a dozen had cancer.
Bert I don't I don't think a lot of people understand when they see the store bought pet food just how lousy and full of garbage it is, and how good quality pure food can give pets a new lease on life. I had a cat for eighteen years and it was on death's door a handful of times. And when I started feeding the cat raw food that was kind of expensive, it brought her back to life.
Absolutely. But what we've done is we've found a way. Now that's just the food, but it's how you've seed the dogs. We seed dogs differently. We feed our dogs a minimum of five times a day, small or more frequent meals. Why do you do that because their bodies wear out faster if they have to digest only two meals a day. There's so much technology in our thing,
and by the way, our food is general giants. I'd like to mention that those that want it here in southern California, they could go to any State, or Brothers Market, Ralph's, Gelson's. They could go to any petco. We're in fifteen hundred pet coos across the country, and they can order it online, you know, Petco, Chewy dot com. You know all of the other majors plot for cats as well. We lost too cats recently. One was thirty one years old and one was thirty two years old. You can't do that
with regular pet food. And our food is so healthy, it is the cleanest, and it's our charity. We take no salary from this because we want everybody to be able to afford a food to help them keep their dog or cat years longer.
That's incredible. And just tell people one more time where they can go online to check out everything about General Giant.
They can go to General Giantsdogfood dot com, General giantspatfood dot com or Generalgiantspet Products dot com. And you know, there's so many testimonials. We have thousands of testimonials on Facebook and other places where people their dogs were near death. You know, their vets told them nothing more can be done, and they came back on our food because it's pure, it's natural nutrition, and it's our charity. Again, we want everybody's dog and cat to live the longest, healthiest life possible.
This is our life's work. And by the way, quick thing. We got four awards on April twenty eight two from the President of the United States, the President's Volunteer Service Award for having rescued more than fifteen thousand, five hundred dogs, and the President's Lifetime Achievement Award for having created this special food and a special feeding and care program that now almost all of our dogs here are living twice their normal life man with no illness. Our dogs are
so healthy. The only time they go to a veterinarian is every three years for a rabies update. No illness.
Good on you for that. Good on you for that. That is so terrific. Bert, We're up against the clock. Before you go, Can I get a holy something from your holy mediocre radio host, Holy sad nerd, Holy insels something, holy superhero host.
Wowe, Dolly Mark, You're the greatest.
That was worth the whole thing right there, Bert Ward, I cannot tell you how much it means to have you as my first guest. I appreciate it. Hope, I talk to you again. Take care.
Thank you. As we said, I'm Batman to them Batmobile.
Absolutely, you're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from kf I A M six forty's.
About pop culture.
Ron and Report with Mark Ronner.
It's Later with Mo Killing on kf I AM six point forty Live Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Mark Ronner. It's the Run and Report and a couple of vastly different things this week. First Terminator zero on Netflix. Here's a bit of the trailer and it's pretty visual, and radio is more of a non visual medium, So I'm gonna give you a little color commentary while the clip plays, and we're gonna cut it off because I think it
gets a little gnarly about halfway through. Vicious dog, unstoppable terminator killing people with automatic weapons, Terminator's face half off, army of robots marching. You have uncertainty. Only one thing is brutal terminator violence against humans.
Things will get worse.
Truck ramming a terminator over a bridge. You're not gonna kill him. I need to stop.
Judgment day.
Terminator with a crossbow popping out of his arm. We haven't seen that before. Dan die or you can come with me, who orde comply or Die seems reasonable. Terminator zero is an eight part animated series, and I don't watch a lot of animated movies or shows. You know why, because I'm an adult. Go ahead, foosh, okay, that's a joke. I like running into the ground and taunting people like
to wallow with. But anime creators in Japan have always understood that you can make any kind of animated movie tell any kind of story, and it doesn't have to be for kids. In fact, plenty of it can be
pretty hardcore, and this Terminator show definitely can be. There is some violence that goes hard in this it's in fact, I wish more of the movies in the Terminator series had been this entertaining instead of just feeling like they keep going back to the well over and over and over because they haven't quite extracted all the money they can from Terminator fans. Arnold needs some new hummers in a humid or back to work. The truth is Terminators
kind of like the Alien series to me. The first one was a milestone, the second one up the aty and was a bigger, different kind of classic in its own right, both classics. And then there's the rest about the most you could say is they had some good stuff in them, but generally ranged from uneven to just outright code browns. Can you even name all of them?
If you've seen them all, Tiffany, you win nothing. There was Terminator three, Rise of the Something or Others, Terminator, Salvation, Terminator, Genesis ge Nisys, which irritates me. That's an irritating spelling. Terminator, Dark Fate, which is that the one where they brought back Linda Hamilton.
I think so okay, I have no idea.
And then you had a two thousand and eight TV series with Lena Heaty from Game of Thrones, and I got to tell you, of all these that one wasn't that bad, believe it or not. T Zero set in Japan in nineteen ninety seven before Judgment Day. Pretty familiar premise, you heard it, Come with me if you want to live, or something along those lines. But it's nicely executed. Pardon me.
A terminator is sent back to kill a scientist who's developing an aa AI called Cookoro to compete with the sky Net that we all know and kill the scientist children, and a female fighter sent back to stop the killing. Kind of a female Kyle Reese. This one gets right down to business, with a minimum of cheese, plenty of attention,
and some fairly jarring violence. Full disclosure. I was friends with Harlan Ellison, who sued James Cameron for ripping off a couple of his Outer Limits stories for The Terminator, allegedly episodes called Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand. They're on they're streaming. You can find them episodes of the old black and white Outer Limits, both excellent stories about time travel and saving the human race. That is why you see the acknowledgment added at the end of
the first Terminator movie. Alison got some money too, but he never told me how much. But he was always good about picking up a check. By the way, Ellison wrote another modern classic about computers all linking up, becoming sentient, and killing off nearly all humanity. It's called and I'm not making this up. I have no mouth, and I must scream, one of the all time great titles. The super Mega computer in this story keeps the last handful of humans alive so it can torture and taunt them.
If you've never read it, you're in for a treat, A sick treat. But it beats the hell out of that West World show. Now. It struck me watching Terminator Zero that we're a lot closer to that terrifying sky Net future now, because back in nineteen eighty four, the Terminator was an unstoppable killing machine who might as well have been Michael Myers from Halloween or the Student Loan People. But now we've got AI starting to put people out of work, actors and writers going on strike to stop that.
We've got autonomous cars as well as a mole for big autonomous car working right here on this show. Twalla Sharp, I'll say this, as scary as the Terminator robots and the movies are, at least they're not cranking out screenplays. Terminator zero has some big timers doing voices. Timothy Oliphant voices the Terminator. You'll also hear Rosario Dawson, Andre Holland Sonoya Mizuno, who may not be familiar to non Nerds, but she's going to be Nerd Royalty soon. She's in
House of the Dragon. She was in Alex Garland's dev series and Ex Machina. I'll admit I am not a huge fan of the animation, which looks like a mix of that traditional speed racers style and some computer generated stuff all swapped in together. But T zero is the most watchable entry since T two, which reminds me I also hate Siri. Oh crap, did I just activate a bunch of them? Sorry? Tell her to stop Judgment Day
from coming. And finally, Kevin Costner's Horizon is on HBO slash Max now after being a huge flop in theaters. It cost one hundred million dollars for chapter one and it's only made about a third of that back in theaters. Sorry, that's Horizon and American Saga chapter one of four. Chapter two should be premiering at the Venice Film Festival, which just started. Three is reportedly filming fours in development. Honestly, a three hour western in theaters when we're still in
a pandemic was kind of a big ask. And whether it's a vanity project or a visionary work of art that would make John Ford cry, I guess we won't know until we've seen it all the way to the end. But I admire the nerve and the ambition of Kevin Costner for making this. He doesn't show up until an hour into the movie, and by the end of the three hours, we barely know anything about him, and there's not really even a story in this first movie. So
much is the beginning of one. So I can't say it's fully satisfying, but it is one hundred percent worth seeing, especially if you do love those john Ford john Wayne movies, or if you liked Lonesome Dove How the West Was Won, those big, sprawling epics. It is just beautifully photographed, lots of battles, well staged, big cast of characters. I want
to see where it all goes. And I think it's important to support big swings like this from artists in part to encourage actual artists to give us more than the usual movie commerce that were fed. I mean, listen, I like Marvel movies as much as anyone else, but I'd also like the little variety on the menu. You know. Another thing this movie gets right is that it looks so realistic that I constantly kept wondering how bad everyone smelled.
We forget how much indoor plumbing changed life for everyone. These were not people who showered every morning or every week month, and whatever their pooping arrangement was, I'd like to be spared any depictions of it. Also, if this Horizon movie boosts the career of Jeff Fahey and his glorious facial hair, it'll all be worth everything at cost. That's right. I buried the lead. Fahie the lawnmower man is in this Tiffany. Have you ever watched a western in your life?
I have. I grew up watching westerns with my mother on Turner classic movies, I believe, and whatever was on on television before television went off.
I don't I don't know that they're for everybody, but if you grew up on them, this is going to hit all the buttons for you. Terminator, you mentioned to me that it was today's judgment day or yesterday was judgment Day.
So there's there's a bit of a controversy thinking of Skynet. Skynett maybe today where Skynett becomes self aware, or it maybe nineteen ninety seven. I'm not fully sure. I was trying to look it up quickly off air, but many online are saying that August twenty ninth, twenty twenty four is when Skynet becomes self aware.
Well, I guess we'd better be ready for it. Time to go to a break. When we come back we're going to talk about the Poltergeist house that just sold.
You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Mark Ronner in for Moe. Moe and Twaller are off on a cruise, hopefully just well in their cups by now. But you don't think just because Moe's gone, we're not going to have name that cult movie classic. If you want to get in line, call up and play. Here's the number. Eight hundred five to two oh one five three one, eight hundred five two oh one five three one four four. Wait a minute, one five oh three.
I wrote it down wrong. Okay, scratch that, because I wasn't wearing my glasses when I copied down the movie, because I'm too vain to walk around in the building with glasses. Eight hundred five to two oh one five three four Is that right? Foosh?
Sure?
Okay. We were bound to hit some sort of glitch tonight, and I'm glad that that's all it's been so far. Five Radio one eight hundred five too oh one five three four. We will give you some kind of Mo Kelly swag. It will be unspecified. It'll be a surprise grab bag. It could be a key chain of later with mo Kelly. It could be a mo Kelly mug. That's right, you could drink out of Moe's head. Or it could be something else. But you'll get some sort of swag, will take down your name and your stuff
and you will receive an item. But before we go to that real quickly the Poltergeist House. So the Poltergeist House from the nineteen eighty two Toby Hooper horror movie that everyone has seen, what tiffany of Have you seen Poltergeist?
I have?
I have.
I saw it as a child, I saw it as an adult, and equally scary both times.
Did it really scare you?
I won't say it scared me. It creeped me out because you start to think about your TV coming alive in the middle of the night, that type of thing.
It sold less than three weeks after it was placed on the market. It was listed for sale for the first time in forty five years. The agent said. Although much of the house has been updated, some of the rooms would still be familiar to fans of the movie, including the kitchen and family room. No word about the pool where all the where all the corpses were The house was originally listed at one million, one hundred and seventy four, nine hundred and ninety nine dollars, and it
reportedly received several offers. We don't know what the final negotiated price was, but my question to the crew is, Tiffany, would you live in that house?
You know, that price seems relatively low, you know, compared to specs in the neighborhood and homes around California, Los Angeles. I think if I were offered that home.
Yes I would.
I would be a little.
Nervous at some point, but you quickly get over that. You realize you're getting a good deal.
Well, it's also just a movie house. It's not like a real murder house. Foosh, would you I think I might. I'd be a little nervous at first, but yeah, considering the price, Yeah, I think that housing is so expensive right now that I would live in the Bates Motel if it was under twenty three hundred bucks a month for a two bedroom. Andrew, what about you? No, now you don't want to give it even though it's just a movie house.
You know what, all of the all of la that's listening right now, just like me, I don't need no bad juju follow me around.
Movie house or no movie house. I got to tell you, I am priced out of ever in my life owning a house in the Los Angeles area. So I think if the Amityville house where real stuff actually did happen, if that came on the market well, and if it was here in LA and there was a good deal on that, I'd have to consider it. I'll say you. I read the Amityville book when when I was quite young in my grandparents' basement in Spokane. And here's the
setup the basement. You go down a flight of stairs, there's a long hallway with rooms that go off, and then there's my bedroom at the end of the hallway. And there's no light switch at the end of the hallway. There's only the light switch at the top of the stairs. So I turn the lights off and I feel way down my way down to my bedroom. And I read the Amityville horror book and it scares the hell out
of me when I'm a kid. But I can't go back downstairs now because the lights at the top of the stairs, and I just have to stay downstairs and eat it all night. What I'm telling you is I would live in the Amityville House if there was a good deal on it.
Okay, there is another house in Los Angeles. It goes by the Moniker Murder House. So you had actually coined the Poter Guy's house as such, but it's not that. And the murder house was used for filming an American horror story and murders. She wrote Buffy, Yeah, murders, she wrote Buffy the Vampires, sleigher all these things. That house is like five stories, all brick on the outside, with these really dark small windows. It kind of looks like
a castle. It's very Gothic in style. That one I would not live in, no matter.
You couldn't pay me to spend the night in the Queen Mary Listen, slap a coat of paint on it and fabreeze it, and I'm gonna call it good because otherwise I have no hope of ever owning a house in this area. Things are so expensive now. I know that realtors have to tell you now if there has
been a killing and a house. And I'm genuinely curious if people are sort of doing that whole Jack Benny cheapskate your money or your life thing when they find out about this, because who can what normal person can afford nine hundred bucks for an average sized house. You got to be doing the math in your head, like, well, okay, I guess if there's a presence here, can they chip in for utilities? I don't know. Let me give you the number one more time. We're going to play Name
that cult movie classic when we come back. The number. I'm gonna get it right this time eight hundred five two oh one, five three four. If you get through, you're going to get something. We just don't know what it is. It'll be some mo Kelly swag. Name that cult movie classic? Coming up right after this break, Mark Ronner in from O Kelly on a KFI rather AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeart app.
You've been listening so later with mo Kelly. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty seven pm to ten pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.