Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Snow White (2025), Bedknobs & Broomsticks

right in. We've got a lot to cover, a lot to catch up on. Ready, actual round up. Yellow Jackets continues to falter, although there are a few bright spots. I'm loving Shawna's husband Jeff and her daughter Calli. They're especially good this season, as is some of the funkier revelations about Shanna herself. Those are tantalizing, but they're like

droplets of water in an otherwise fallow period. Get to the fucking twisted already in better DearS, I finished Jeni fallen order and my lightsaber is fucking cherry baby, got it tricked?

There's a secret underground prison that's populated with the worst killers in the world, so bad that they've been officially publicly executed, kind of like lefam Nikita, but instead of turning them into assassins, they've just got them locked up anyway. The opening scene, a bomb goes off, killing untold number of prisoners and releasing just as many. That's the premise, get the killers back. It is a solid cast, solid action, and provides a good old dose of freak of the

week vibes. Plus what the hell was that prison? Anyway? Remember right after Lost Everything had some mystery box situation, including a show about Alcatraz. There was a Spielberg show about some expedition in the Amazon with that guy from

Across the Universe Blonde dude. Am I just rambling? Yes, I have a ton of useless knowledge I have left over from last week, including the fact that every episode I tell myself I'm gonna do a rundown of all the new trailers and let you know which ones look like they're worth of dam or at least the ones that have got me hyped. Timing couldn't be more perfect

to do it. Then this week, what with that several minutes long ode to uncomfortable canvas furniture that was the Avengers Doomsday trailer, A slow pan of twenty six names of actors we all assumed would be in the movie X Men was a surprise the original X Men I guess are returning Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romaine, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, and Channing Tatum. Okay, that's kind of exciting

Alan coming. That actually is exciting. But as cool as that reveal might be, there were a couple of glaring omissions Spider Man, Doctor Strange, Miss Marvel, Moonnight she Hulk. Also, I guess we know who survives the Thunderbolts movie. Huh. You think maybe they could have held back on the reveal that a bunch of the characters in the movie that's coming out next month, are gonna survive the movie?

Speaking of Thunderbolts, Asterik, I am fucking stoked. I know a bunch of you are out there saying it's just Suicide Squad. Well, guess what. Suicide Squad is just the dirty dozen assholes, and Thunderbolts is more like Kelly's heroes. Thunderbolts manages to evade the trap that most of these types of flicks fall into. The members aren't all that villainous to begin with. They are low level, fucking Marvel villains. Several work as mercenaries for either side. Anyway, none of

them have say attempted mass murder. Suicide Squad is stuck with genuinely bad people that they have to soften to the point that they're unrecognizable. Harley Quinn is a psychopath, y'all. I don't know how everyone forgot that. I know she escaped an abusive relationship, and she's loud and proud in her relationship with Ivy these days, but she will still feed you to hyenas for no reason at all. The closest we've gotten to action Harley Quinn was that Birds

of preyflick. She's so fucking chaotic there and whatever way she's swinging these days, I think all genders can agree. Without Harley, there is no cause play community. People have always gone to conventions and costume, but that lady inspired a ferocity and dress up a previously unknown Do you think Harley is the hottest? I do, but your opinion may differ. Hit me up at father Malone seventy one at a gmail dot com. Let me know your dorky crush is a catwoman. I think most DC leaning people

will say miss Kyle, but I don't know. I'm asking that goes with everything we're talking about on the show. If you agree, disagree, have another point of view, feel free to drop me a line at Fathermalone seventy one at in gmail dot com. Or you'll have better luck on the socials, probably at Fathermalone on the Insta and the threads and the skies of Blue. Quite a few of you have reached out to say how relieved you are that Miss Foxy Brown made her way back home.

I think I've thanked you all individually, but if I missed any of you, I'm thanking you here. It was truly a preciated Do you know when she came back. I scooped her up and walked around clutching her and bawling for like an hour straight, after which I fed her in Ripley, and then I let Ripley outside, and Foxy jumped down and started strutting out the door. Fuck you, kat, You're indoors forever. I mentioned this over on the crossover episode with Noise Junkies about the movie Crossroads. But the

trailer for Ryan Coogler's new movie is online. It's called Cinner. It comes out at the end of April. It's a prohibition era supernatural action gangster flick. I think I'm more excited for this film than anything coming down the pike. Check of that one out. There are several exorcism flicks on the way, got al Pacino in one. There's also a flick called Project Silence, which is about a group of people trapped on a suspension bridge. It seems a

very final destination. You know what else looks a bit like Final Destination? The new final destination movie Bloodlines. Can we retire that as a subtitle for any long running franchise. I don't care if it's the perfect title for your summation reimagining reinvestment, legacy sequel, prequel, whatever the fuck Bloodlines is taken, Move along. That movie looks good, though, the new Final Destination movie, and any Final Destination movie is going to be more fun than the most ponderous goddamn

still photographs were getting as horror these days. One other thing, not a trailer, not a movie podcast. Dana Carvey has had a bit of a renaissance lately with his SNL fiftieth appearances and the success of his show that he does with David Spade. But a couple of years ago he put out one season of a show called The Weird Place, which is basically an audio Twilight Zone, right down to Carve's Rod Serling impression, and he does all

the voices naturally. Each episode is short in sweet, interesting stories that I think are worthy of the original Twilight Zone. But more importantly, they are very, very funny with really oddball observances. For some reason, the fact that after a particular eventful moment a character paused to have a taco dinner and watch television just struck me as all kinds

of funny. The show is a nice reminder that Carvey is a pure entertainer who doesn't need all the ticks and mugging that he sometimes devolves into in order to really kill the weird place. They're like twenty minutes each. You can hear the entire season in like an hour. Well, I can't really prevaricate any longer. We're gonna have to deal with the princess in the room. Not you, sweetie, You're more like Princess Leah by the way, heir to a fallen kingdom. If I may, when the revolution begins,

can we have Lea as our de facto symbol? What better banner do you want to rally behind? Seriously, I am unapologetically a Disney person. My late wife and I honeymooned in Disneyland, where we anticipated going on the Haunted Mansion one million times. But we were married on Halloween, so when we got to the park, it was already themed with Nightmare before Christmas, so we ended up going a handful of times. You know, not everyone thinks that movie is as magical as those who were raised on it.

Some of us thought it peculiar that a champion of the misunderstood, mister Tim Burton, would craft a story that essentially says, know your place, whatever lot You've been assigned in life. That's it, baby, Do not seek outside interests. I suppose the lesson could also be know your limitations, but that's equally fucked up for a kids movie. But I digress. Look, I love Disney, but I'm not totally insane. My place isn't tricked out in Disney Ona. I'm not

dying to be a resident of Celebration, Florida. I know Disney is no longer affiliated, but does a better symbol of Disney fans gone too far exist beyond a living in a town created by Disney. At the same time, I never subscribed to the overly facile portrait of Disney Corporation as What's wrong with America? It would always pop

up in political art alongside a crucified Ronald McDonald. Probably, of all the evil corporations ruining America, the one whose primary product is joy isn't really high on my list of villainy. I could do a whole show just on the animated films of Disney or the many television series they produced throughout the fifties and sixties. Do you remember Doctor Sinn the Scarecrow. He was a Western English robin hood patrolling the grounds of Rumney Marsh, which incidentally was

the original name of my hometown of Revere, Massachusetts. In fact, the cemetery in Revere, the oldest one, is called ye Old Rumney mar Cemetery. I could do an entire show just about Disney short subjects. Have you ever seen Dad? Can I Borrow the Car? Narrated by teenage Kurt Russell. It's fabulous.

The Littlest Outlaw. That's five years. Even adjusted for inflation, you take all the budgets of all of those movies, it's still nowhere near what we got to remember that number, that output and realized that while Disney cut his teeth with the animated shorts in the early nineteen thirties. It was nineteen thirty nine that Disney as a studio entered the cinematic arena and declared itself a contender. That was with the first full length animated film, snow White in

the Seven Dwarfs. Aside of getting stoned and watching Fantasia, that is my favorite Disney film. It's so slick and yet still experimental. You can feel the desire at the end of every animator's brush to make what you're seeing magic, and you can see innovation in every goddamn scene. It is a triumph just technically, never mind the fact that you can already see the dynamism that they'd approach every

subject with, baking it into the story. And about that story, do you know there is an early version of the Tale of snow White where the evil queen is not her stepmother at all. It's her actual mom. That's the only change. How do you like them poison apples? There's a Greek version with poison grapes instead of apples. The Netherlands doesn't have a Prince Charming, it's snow White's dad that saves her. There's a French version where there are

no dwarves but a band of thieves. There's a fucking Scottish version with thirteen cats instead of dwarves, and in that one, the snow White character is on the run because she's been framed for murder. Oh my god, Scotland, If you guys would have one fucking sunny day, I would move there on a heartbeat. The Spanish version dispenses with the magic mirror and instead makes it a demon that whispers into the Queen's ear the whole time. Here's my problem with the mirror, by the way, not the mirror,

but it's use. We're led to believe in every one of these iterations that the evil Queen is above all vain. She needs to hear every day that she's the fairest, and the day she hears different, that girl's gotta go. She's then duped into believing that snow White is dead. A significant amount of time then passes, and then and then the queen asks who's the fairest, and the mirror spills the beans snow White's alive. You're telling me the Queen didn't ask at any time up until now. It

wasn't the first fucking thing she did. When the huntsman showed back up with a stag heart. Now, who's the fairest still snow white? The fuck? That's a dear heart? That punk is lying to you, queen. You know, if you heard the Spanish version, you're probably a child in Spain. And I have a sneaking suspicion that you might have imagined snow White or Blanca and the abas as looking a bit more like yourself and less like the nearly transparent version in the Disney film. The snow White story

got around, and everywhere it went people claimed ownership. Hell, it got around cinematically as well. The Disney film is the fourth film adaptation of Snow White, and the second animated. Betty Boop got there in nineteen thirty one, and she hung around with Cab calloway gasp, pearls clutched. Since then, there have been dozens of films, hundreds of animated versions.

Every kind of snow White and every amalgamation of numbered henchmen have been visited upon the screens, both big and small, and you never heard word one about fucking any of them, not a peep. Why because who gives a fuck? Oh? Racists and misogynists. I used to not understand toxic fandom, and yeah, there are any number of factors that contribute to the forming of these fuckers, and who knows, they might be just shitty across the board, and it isn't

narrowly focused as something like racism or hating women. But let us not speak falsely. Now the hour is getting late. You throw up a Hitler salute, you're a Nazi. And if you're after a children's movie because it's not white enough, you're a fucking racist. End of story. Here's a question for a future show. What do these assholes enjoy? We know full well what they hate. They organize around their hatred, but does anything make them happy? And can we take

that away from them? Seriously? Get fucked you ask clowns who roots for failure? How sick in your soul are you? Oh right, racist and sexists clinging to an ideology that's currently death rattling. Enjoy yourselves in twenty years, guess who's going to be the minority in America? Snow white? The new one, the one I'm reviewing, is a colossal fucking failure.

I'm serious. It is bafflingly bad. There are moments I just stared, mind reeling trying to comprehend how this came to be, But the problem wasn't because the casting was color blind. That may have contributed to its financial downfall a little, but I think really, when you remake an animated film from ninety years ago, spending upwards of three hundred million dollars on it, it kind of means you're

setting yourself up for failure. This is cleopatracized hubris. You think the company pumping out all of those films in the early nineteen fifties would have taken this risk. Of course not, but they did. So they have to make it as blandly appealing as possible because it has to make a billion dollars to be profitable. It's always hilarious when these toxic bros starts screaming about woke corporations. Do you know how business works at all? Dummies? You go

where the money is. The twenty year obsession with IP is proof of that. Do you think one human being was clamoring for a Green Hornet remake? No, but the name was wreckedizable, so throw money there. I've spent my whole life tempering anything good a corporation has done with the knowledge that if they weren't profiting, they wouldn't have done it. But hell, however, you get progress right, you'll

take it. So if you think Rachel Ziegler's casting is this movie's downfall, does that mean Tom Hanks wasn't Italian enough as Geppetto? Was that why Pinocchio was such a failure? Now can you see why this is such a difficult review to navigate? It should just be this is a muddle headed remake, don't see it. Instead, it's become freighted with so much political fould all in nonsense that by dissing the movie, I end up on the side of these toxic pricks. It was the same situation with Ghostbusters.

Answer the call no no vaginas in the jumpsuits.

popping off for him. Also, your dad made the movie, and he cast this girl and helped all the other boneheaded decisions make it to the screen. What bone headed decisions you ask? Let's talk about snow white.

sums the movie up. It should be called a ropodope, the motion picture. Every time your mind finds purchase a performance, a bit of scent decoration, a costume, you begin to settle in and bow. You're on the fucking pavement wondering what the fuck happened? This movie is two fucking hours,

a solid two hours. How they get there? More songs, of course, the Greatest Showman type numbers, you know, rousing tunes that start off small and suddenly everyone's chanting and the music is building, and it plateaus and grows higher. It's the musical theater equivalent of imagine dragons, all anthems, all the time. It's exhausting, but yet again that's what works, right, That's what audience is like. And we've got how much riding on this do what works? The Greatest Showman? Those

pricks we got to sell soundtracks. The budget is too hi. There's some blow dried Prince Charming here. But now he's a rogue thief. So he's basically Aladdin or whatever the archetype happens to be now, the helper guy. We see him in every movie. Why because that's what they think we want. So we got to put him in because we got to make the money. The worst defense in the movie, however, is giving Rachel Ziegler snow White's bob haircut.

She'd be better off with a Prince Valiant. I'm serious, now, listen. I said, snow White is my favorite Disney animated flick. It is. I saw it very young and often, and in the land of too much information, I think snow White and the Evil Queen are completely formative in what I find attractive and sexy in women. I mentioned my wife and I went to Disney on our honeymoon. There exists a photo of me and snow White in which

I can only describe my expression as giddy. I get a lot of things in life, giddy ain't one of them. So my feelings of what snow White should look like or as strong as anyone's more maybe, and if they're going to veer away, veer away, she looks awful, impossible to watch. Not to bring back Tom Hanks, but remember the Da Vinci code. Neither do I, but I remember

that terrible fucking head of hair. And not to bring it back to the toxic folk, because I don't think they have one fucking interest in Snow White at all. But if you're a purist and you want a live action version of the Disney cartoon, it exists. Disney did that in nineteen eighty. They filmed their theatrical version of Snow White at Radio City Music Hall. Snow White is as white as your teutonic dreams will allow, and all the dwarves are in masks that are identical to how

they look in the film. No surprises, just a literal one for one. It's on YouTube. Watch it right now. HP and I are going to be doing it over on our Patreon channel if you want to hear more about it there. If you listen to the show with any frequency, you know I have no problem with remakes, and I have no problem with a studio wanting a huge success. I want them to have a huge success.

But because there was some vision going in, Snow White is the most bi committee thing I have ever seen, and hopefully it will mark an end to this kind of bullshit. Also, in none of the remakes I mentioned has anyone made the point that maybe the fucking mirror is the problem. Whispering insecurities and sewing fear. Maybe those ladies should get together and smash that fucking mirror. Let's see that in a remake. You got an idea for

a remake? Tell me whoa hit it? Hp K, Thank you hp We know we ended up on this network because you were stealing pens at the last one. Oh traguna, mccoitees, Trichorum satusty. It's bed knobs and broomsnakes, motherfuckers?

do another. That was a proper fucking instinct. In fact, during those negotiations, Mary Norton put out a sequel called Bonfires and Broomsticks, and Disney grabbed the rights to them too, And then they started putting a movie together, hiring the Sherman brothers to write songs and Don Degrady to write the script, and then they got the rights to Mary Poppins and it was off to the lock with you nesse.

They try to restart it in the mid sixties, but the script built around the premise of let's take a property with a passing resemblance to Mary Poppins and make it even more Mary Poppins turned out to be too fucking similar to Mary Poppins, so it was shelved again. Then finally in nineteen seventy they brought back everyone, reworked everything, added a deleted song from Mary Poppins, even though we

are not making Mary Poppins now. They just needed a director, so they went with Robert Stevenson, director of You Got It Mary Poppins. His first order of business was cast the lead of Miss Eglantine Price, a witch in training who must care for three orphans during the London Blitz. So he went to Julie Andrews, who thought it was

a little too close to Mary Poppins and turned it down. Then, out of loyalty or panic, attempted to re accept the part, but they had already gone with a red headed Irish beauty in the form of future missus Lovett and Miss Teapot and Missolve all the Murders Dame Angela Bridget Lensbury. By the way, that's the proper way to spell Bridget. The Irish Brigid brigid and to continue to distance themselves from Mary Poppins. As for co lead, they cast David Tomlinson,

the dad from Mary Poppins. I kind of hate all of the Mary Poppins comparisons because this was that movie.

poor kids. They talk like they escaped from a Dickens novel and their schemers. They're not getting into mischief because they're bored. They're on the run, possibly orphaned, and now put in the care of some strange woman in some rural village on the coast. That setup makes all the difference, because they will travel from the real world to an animated and they'll have episodic musical numbers At Famed British locations,

just like Mary Poppins. But while we were left wondering where Mary gets her magic, there's no doubt with miss Price. She is a fucking witch and there's an ambulet to be found, and these kids are gonna help her do it because bad people are after it. Once that there's a plot, you're fucking right. Unlike Mary Poppins, Not only do they have to skip around the globe using a bed as conveyance to stop the villains. In the form of Sam Jaffy, Keen eared Midnight Viewers listeners will remember

his appearance in the pilot for Night Gallery. He was in the Richard Kylie Nazi episode Nazis you say, that's right, They're on the way. That's the fucking climax they've concocted for this film, and Angela Lansbury and a group of disadvantaged kids have to use magic to fight a Nazi invasion and knock those motherfuckers back into the Atlantic Ocean. Sound good? Is great? Well almost? The movie is way

too long. The theatrical version I grew up watching evidently had twenty minutes removed, and it's too long in that iteration. Never mind the restored version that includes all the stuff that was too ponderous for an already badly paced film. I'm just being honest. I'm recommending this movie outright, see it immediately on Disney Plus. But I am also recommending let this get the remake treatment. It wouldn't be hard and it would be oh so timely. I think this

is the kind of entertainment to our kids need. Hell, I need it. I had a blast rewatching it, and the song Portobello Road is one of my all time favorites. In Hell, any movie that can get a bunch of children chanting in Latin is worth a rewatch and a reimagining. Have we talked enough? Have I did I make up for my absence last week? I hope so. But I am gonna wrap it up and try to enjoy my Sunday. I mentioned the Patreon channel that's patreon dot com slash

fatherm alone. You get episodes early and commercial free and bonus shows like Cable Box Theater where Noise Junkies host HP and I take a look at filmed theatrical productions that showed up on cable TV in the early eighties. Or if you have no dough to spare. You can just share this show on your social media or like it or five star it. You know the drill OH tune back in, OH, tune in On Friday, HP is rejoining me. We've suddenly stumbled into a retrospective of the

films of John Fusco. Last week we did Crossroads. Next time we're doing Young Guns. It's gonna be a blast. That's on Friday.