Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry

Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's select, I've chosen our twenty twenty one episode on night Trap the video game one of those overlook pieces of pop culture history about one of those unfortunate pieces of technology that emerged during a sea change, which made it utterly out of date the moment it was born. It's a great story about a not at all great video game, and I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to

Yeah, Trap is the game that we're talking about. And I heard about this from watching the Netflix documentary series High Score.

Did you netflix and chill while you were watching that? Jerk?

No, I Netflix by myself and chilled because Emily.

Wasn't watching this.

That's a different thing.

Yeah, this is a different thing.

Okay.

This was a documentary series on Netflix, I think six parts that covered the history of video games, I can recommend it in one way in that it was a very light kind of fun watch, but it is by no means comprehensive and a little goofy at times, and how they handled some.

Stuff on Night Trips specifically or.

Like the whole series.

But it was fine, and it's you know, if you're in the from a certain generation and in the mood for like five plus hours of a bit of a nostalgia kick, you could do worse things.

But it's not great.

Have you ever seen that documentary? I think it's King of Kong? Oh, sure, man, that is one of the best time I've ever made. I haven't seen a year. They go to see it again.

It's great.

I think our old buddy Josh Bearman might have written the original story that that was.

Oh I'm not surprised you had something.

To do with that.

But Night Trap I learned about because in episode five they covered when video games started becoming violent, so Mortal Kombat obviously factored in heavily in that episode. And then this game called Night Trap. There's another game I do want to cover on a shorty by the way, one of the first LGTBQ games ever that was really interesting.

And had a cool story. What the heck is it called?

I can't remember now. I saw this a couple of months ago, so it's been a while.

Oh what was it?

I can't remember, but it was.

It's great and that'll make it for a good shorty okay, but a really cool story behind it. But this is night Trap, which figured in as the game that kind of brought about along with Mortal Kombat, but was really central informing what ended up being the ratings board for video games.

I mean, that's that's like understating it. Like this one game, yeah, paired with Mortal Kombat, basically led directly to the creation of that.

Yeah, So that's really why it's notable. The other thing that made it notable, and we'll get into all this, was that it was a a live action as in they shot you know, a little movie, right, and that you controlled, Yeah, that you sort of control, you.

Could conceivably theoretically pathetically control.

Because it wasn't a great game, but it lives in infamy because of every because it's a really cool story.

I think in the end, it is a pretty cool story. And the whole thing starts actually with a play from the I think it was written in nineteen eighty one by a playwright named John Oh. What's his last name? Krasank Okay, I want to say, son, I want to krisanch Shit, you don't think so? I don't know. Maybe well, regardless, he wrote a few episodes of Due South. What was that? It was like a show about a Canadian mountee.

I think, oh, all right, yeah he wrote this and it was if you've been to Sleep No More in New York, you may have the play Tamara to think because it is a lot like the concept of Sleep No More.

As far as I know, this was the one that broke that ground.

I think so in the ground they broke it.

It's about the painter Tamara de Olympica, who have never heard of.

She was a Polish painter who lived in Italy in the roaring twenties, okay, when the fascists were starting to take power, and she took no guff from them, no guff, hedonistic, amazing art deco painter, art deco portraitist, basically interesting. So her work's really interesting. I didn't know anything about it. I'd never heard of her until this too, but I looked her up. She seemed pretty cool.

But This is a play about her where it is set on a multi floor building. There are scenes taking place at the same time in multiple rooms, and as an audience member, you can move from one room to the other, missing out on some stuff, seeing some stuff, interacting. I mean it's Sleep No More. Yeah, they I don't know if they just totally ripped it off or if they said, hey, it's been you know, thirty years. Who's going to remember Tamera, right?

I think it was like they broke that ground, and once you break that ground, you're going to have people following your wake.

There's probably been other stuff that did this, but Sleep No More I think just got so much attention in New York for its run. It might still be going or maybe coming back after the pandemic.

I would like to see that. I would love to see Tamra too, But this it was. It ran in New York, but it started a Toronto Art festival I think, oh interesting, and then some producers set it up in la and that's where it had its longest run. From about the mid eighties to the nineties. They had this just kept going and going and going. I was reading

With, Yeah, and the idea of the game, and we'll get a little bit more into the development of it in a minute, but it is basically like a party happening at this house, young like co ed types like sorority girls.

Maybe ye.

It's very sort of titillating, and that was one of the big deals.

A little bit. I think this for the time. Yeah, for the time, I wouldn't say, I mean you got married with children was like ten times more titillating those This is very tame. I think.

Well, you know, obviously part of the controversy comes from assaults on women in the game, understandably, but again we'll get to that. It is even tame compared to a lot of the stuff that was out at the time. But what's going on in the game is they are these pseudo vampires called augurs that are the bad people

Game, right, And I mean that's the story rather right. But again, I think you really pointed out something important that that was the concept in the actuality. They kind of missed the mark a little bit. Yes, So with the game the it was originally designed as part of a platform called Control Vision. I think internally it was called Nemo an Emo and it was being created by a company called Axelon, And Axelon was actually a Nolan like video game company name, but it was a Nolan

Which was I mean, it looks archaic, but it's a remarkable technology at the time to be able to do that.

Right, Yeah, it's still mind blowing. Like I'm like, I've they vaguely understand how this actually works, but the fact that they actually got this to work and had a proof of concept going enough that Asro was like sold, that was a big deal.

Yeah, and this was eighty five.

One of their designers was the legendary Tom Crane who designed Pitfall, one of my favorite all time games on the Atari.

That's a good one.

But it was a good team and they went apparently to these Tamera performances. They were also inspired by Dragon's Layer. Do you remember that game?

I do. I was never into it, but I remember watching it and just it looked cool.

I mean it was an animation game where it was fully animated and used LaserDisc to project this animated footage. So it looked awesome, but it was just it wasn't that great. The gameplay wasn't great.

No, but it followed a story. There was a story. Yeah, that was happening, and then every once in a while there's something you had to do to move the story along right as part of the game, and if you didn't do it right, the dragon like turned you into to Ash or something like that.

Right, Yeah, but you're not actually controlling the player, which was the big difference in these games.

For the regular game.

You're you're creating a sequence like you're doing this and then sitting back and then hopefully the thing you're hoping to happen happens. Now, the thing that differentiates that from Night Trap is that there was no coherent story while you were off doing something that you were supposed to be doing to win the game. Yeah, the story kept going on over here.

So you can't follow a storyline that way, no, which.

Is a big deal, and that was a big differentiator between it and Dragons Later.

All right, well, let's take a little break here.

That's a good setup, I think, and we'll come back and get more into Night Trap right after this. All right, so I mentioned the augurs, We need to explain a little bit about this game and what it was supposed to be and what it ended up being, because Netflix Dementary Jim Riley basically is like, well, the first thing they created a demo called Scene of the Crime.

Yes, and it was a.

Detective game and Hasbro liked it, like I said, but they had a big problem because the original idea that Jim had was to have ninjas, and he's like, it'd be great.

These ninjas come in.

They got throwing stars, they got weapons and they're doing all this stuff and you can control it and it's super cool. And Hasbro is like, wait a minute, we can't have what we call reproducible violence. So anything that a kid like kids love throwing stars, and we can't show ninjas throwing throwing stars into people because a kid will go and do that. You can't have a knife because the kid can go get a knife out of a drawer. It's got to be something that a kid cannot reproduce.

So they said, okay, well, how about what if the ninjas turn out to be and I'm sorry, I know ninja is the plural of ninja, Sorry for sure. What if they turn out to be vampires?

Right?

And Hasbro said, I kind of like where you're going with this, But kids can still like bite people on the neck.

I think it came the other way though. I think that was a note from Hasbro.

Oh was it?

I'm pretty sure they were like, what if they were vampires?

Okay?

And Jim Riley was like, Okay, I guess I can do that, okay, biting people's necks, And then Hasbro was like, can't do that because the kids can bite next to.

So what they found, and this is a great metaphor for the night Trap overall. Yeah, what the ninja Originally, what they turned out to be in the end were loping vampires who used what looked like a Ghostbuster's pro tom pack with a collar of the kind that Arnold Schwarzeninger was wearing at the beginning of Running Man, like a clamp sort of yes, yeah, on the end, and that that is what they used to draw the blood from the hapless teens who you were in charge of protecting Night Trap.

Yeah, so what Hasbro did was they noted it to death and neutered it to death because they said. He even was like, all right, I can do vampires. They can run around and hurt people. And they said, no, no, no, they can't even run around. It's too scary if they're fast. Yeah, So they came up with augurs who in the game they are described as vampires who had been half bled and left to die. So they are not quite vampires, but they aren't human either, and that makes them lopy

Oh, it was okay because it was definitely its own thing.

It was its own thing, and it's funny.

In the documentary, Jim Riley was like, in the end, he said, this trow car, which you know, it didn't show it explicitly. It showed the clamp going around the neck and this little drill and so out of a shaft start and then sort of moving and then blood being drawn. But it doesn't like going in the neck or anything. No, but he said what they ended up with, he said to me, was something far creepier than a

And it's also it's weird that Hasbro was so fixated on not including reproducible violence because apparently they saw night Trap as a way to interest adults, right, because they had apparently found out during focus group testing of Seen in the Crime. I believe that the parents who were in the room or were part of the focus group were saying, like, I really kind of liked this. It's like a TV show, but I get.

To contry it because it looked like something that they understood.

Right, Yeah, and so Hasbro was like, oh, okay, this has been like a kid's thing up to this point. Maybe we can finally crack into the adult market with this stuff. So it's weird that they that they kidified it to death if they were trying to use it to capture adults, but maybe they were like, it has to go both ways in case adults don't like it.

Well, I think in the documentary they make the point that Hasbro was I think the adults were looming out there as a possibility, but they were like.

Adults will never play video games.

So what they really wanted until they grow up and then continue to.

Play video games.

Well, they really were after was a teenage market, which didn't fully exist at this point. Gotcha like an old like sixteen and seventeen year old boys, which is why they put sorority girls in. Like a nighty at a slumber party was an all in an effort to sort of titillate, you know, people.

Like me, right, and it worked like a charm.

I had never heard of it back then, because you just.

You would play night trap in Netflix and chill by yourself.

So they actually had to shoot this like a movie, you know. They shot it in Culver City on a sound stage. And what they would do back then for and there were more full motion games of the time, and you would try and cast one recognizable face among this cast just sort of they called it the anchor to like, all right, well this has got so and so in it.

And who did they cast for Night Trap?

Dana Plato from from Different Strokes. Kimberly. Yeah, Kimberly who passed away very tragically. Man, I was reading about her life. She had a hard, sad life.

Man, very tragic story.

Yeah, it is. It's very sad. And they actually went back and ruled their death of suicide later. Did you know that. I don't know if I knew that. Yeah, she died by suicide ultimately because she overdosed the like drugs or yeah, soma, I believe, which is like a generic lore tab interesting, which I think you really have to try. Like, I don't think that's an accidental thing, which is probably why they did that. But it was at a family reunion in Oklahoma, Wow, which I'm like, God, man,

Later, No, I think I knew that, like not super long ago, right.

Like yeah, in the twenty tens, yeah, oh.

Man, very sad, but yeah. Dana Plato was cast as that anchor. She played Kelly, who was a secret agent who had infiltrated the house.

She was undercover.

Yeah, she's undercover.

And she would talk right to camera and say things like you've got to get to the other room because the augurs are after whoever mayor helper, Yeah, go help her.

Yeah, and we should say also, so the group of crime fighters that she was a part of was called SCAT. Yeah, the Special Control Attack Team SCAT. And then I don't know if we also said so the people who own the house had invited this group of teens that included undercover Dana Plato Kelly, who which I saw admittedly on Wikipedia. This is a great example of night trap being night trap in the In the credits at the end, Kelly's name is spelled with a y on the end. In

They're actually they don't attack people.

No, they brought them there for the augurs.

Right right right to source their blood. I guess there is a pretty funny scene in it. When did you watch any of it?

I watched the whole thing. I watched. I think Crumpy Gamers did like a playthrough.

Yeah, they have a full I watched.

There's stuff too, and yeah, I've watched a lot of night Trap stuff.

The best part is when they're explaining in the game what the augurs are and the woman says, you know, it's a vampire who's been blah blah blah, and one of the scat guys is in the background and he goes.

You've got to be jiving me.

I'd like see that.

Oh it was great.

It was like, was this game made in nineteen eighty nine or nineteen seventy three?

It was really confusing. Yeah, like what era it was?

So you said it was shot on a sound stage in Culver City and it took like thirty days almost.

But he is shooed a ton of stuff.

Yes, because it was like a two hundred and fifty page script which is incredibly long. Wow ed who helped us out with this one. He points out that a two hour movie might have one hundred and twenties page script.

It's about a minute per page. As the rule of thumb, this.

Is two hundred and fifty pages for a video game that was not very good. Yeah, they didn't have a lot of dialogue, but there were a lot of different outcomes that happened in one just one particular saint short. So if you shot a scene, you had to shoot it multiple times to get what you wanted, and then you had to shoot those multiple times multiple times for each outcome.

Yeah, and we should say that the violence in the game, like we said, is suggestive for the Augers.

You don't know, we see anything.

The only real violence is when the Augers are dispatched of. But it is very much a wiley Odie bugs bunny sort of thing.

Yeah, it's the definition of cartoonish.

Yeah, Like they will be a murphy bed will flip them out of a window, or they'll just whow, like fall through a trap door.

The stairs, very like one of the things. If they're coming down the stairs, you can trap them by collapsing. This cartoon when they fall into the trap like a smoke machine pours smoke out of it. It's impossible that they weren't going for cartoonish violence. There's no right, of course, the producers and directors. Yeah, we're trying to be like scary in any way, shape or form.

But it was shot by Don Burgess, who was nominated for an Oscar less than a decade after Night Trap for Forrest Gump.

So they had a real team.

It wasn't just you know, they didn't, you know, say all right, let's go out in the valley and use some like a porn crew.

Sure, just do this thing like.

They had a real crew, know, and apparently has Bro spent depending on who you ask, least a million dollars on this.

Yeah, they said one to five in the documentary, so they put some money into it, and it is not apparent on the screen. The sets look terrible. The the doorways, I don't know if you noticed, but any doorway, they didn't build the door down to the floor. They built the door down to like a one foot tall step over, So anytime someone opens the.

Door, they step over this like one foot tall like wooden set.

That's awesome. I mean the set is. It's basically like they could have repurposed it for growing pains or family ties or something.

Mate or no, they probably would have said, like, this doesn't look good.

Right, maybe small wonders. I think they used it for small wonder How about that.

There is no nudity we should point out. But it again was never going to be kid friendly. But also when you when you will get to the court stuff, when you hear how it's described by these senators.

It's so over the top, it's so over the top.

Yeah, should we take a break? You don't want to take a break.

No, I'm excited and I'm ready to keep going.

Let's take a break, all right? Well, I guess we should take a break. By saying that Hasbro dumped the game? This is a nice cliffhanger. Hasbro dumped the game?

Well, Hasbro dumped the game or not?

Chuck, Okay, we'll find out right after this.

Okay, Chuck, cliffhanger ants er time.

Hasbro dumped the game because a it wasn't that great, But the big reason was because CD Rahm Technology started up and they were like, we've got VHS technology and we suck a million five into this Turkey, like, let's just dump it.

And that should have been the end of.

It, not just Night Trap, but the whole Control Vision thing, that the whole platform that Night Trap was just going to be a game on totally gone. Hasbro said forget it. The thing is, the people who worked on designing this game said no, no, no, no, Hasbro's being short sighted. It's too good this game in particular. Maybe control Vision is good. Granted the VHS thing, we're going to just forget about that, but this game is too groundbreaking to

Do you know how much they sold it for?

But now I couldn't find didn't find it either. I would guess peanuts. Basically, they probably were like, I don't ever want to hear the words night or Trap together again. Get it out of here. But these these designers, developers, directors, writers, everybody got together formed Digital Pick and bought it and started developing Night Track, ironically for CD ROM which is the very type of media. Yeah, that killed it in the first place.

Yeah.

By Jim's telling on the documentary, I don't know if they were already going CD ROM or if it was initiated by Sega. But he got a call, he said, out of the blue from Sega, who had their gaming system at the time, Sega Genesis and then Sega CD was an add on system featuring this new cd RHALM technology. And he said, they got a call, They said, hey, you want to develop this for CD RAM And he probably got a good laugh out about that and the irony, and then said sure, because night Trap must live.

Yes, this guy is dedicated to night Trap living. If there's one thing that he wants to keep alive in the world, it is night Trap, that's right. So they started developing it for CD ROM. It was a step up for sure, from what I can tell, like the graphics worked a lot better. The problem is is this is nineteen ninety two.

Nineteen ninety two was when it was finally released as a CD ROM game.

Yeah, they had shot all this footage in the late eighties, but it looked like the late seventies. There was a big difference between say nineteen eighty eight and nineteen ninety two. Style Wise, it was apparent, visually apparent, and immediately apparent to anybody, say, a video game playing age. Yeah, I agree that was a big strike against night Trap to begin with, But probably the biggest stripe of all was

Yeah, and so this very much mirrored if you listen to our Satanic Panic episodes and the PMRC and music label MPAA m PAA, Like this was all the time when everyone was saying, hey, listen, we need to start at least labeling the stuff so parents know what their kids are doing and just watch a little bit, you know, there's all kinds of it was in the Netflix documentary.

So here's the thing. They went after Moral Kombat, Yeah, which was super violent, it really was. Yeah, And they went after night Trap, which was again cartoonish. Not a drop of blood spills from a person's body, right, had ladies in lingerie one? Yes, Okay, I'm not defending any kind of violence against women, of course, not defending objectifying women. But Night Trap was unfairly railroaded. Oh yeah, because for some reason, I think probably because it was it was film,

That was the difference, because there was there were one hundred exploitation movies and horror movies by this point, share two hundred, yeah, three hundred. It was a thousand times worse than this. Yeah, But the fact that you were controlling Yet they never said, and they make a big point about this in the documentary, like you weren't doing the violence, Like the whole point of the game was to stop the augurs. That's like you weren't the person doing the augur You're preventing the violence.

Yeah. I guess that's why they call them augurs because it was kind of like an augur.

Yeah, yeah, the tool was Yeah, that's what I get tobar. What was it called crow car trocar? Yeah.

But yeah, and they never I mean he Jim Riley was like, they clearly never even played the game.

Yeah, no, they were talking about the.

Cover of the thing was lurid. They didn't like the cover of the box.

Yeah, yeah, they definitely hadn't played the game. It was just impossible from what they were saying happens in the game.

Uh.

And the big one was like you were saying that it it let players carry out sexual violence against women. No, you do the opposite of that, right, there's violence that is carried out by the augurs if you don't do it right, if you if you're not good at the game, if you lose, yes, exactly.

But even then, like even in the most disturbing scene, which was the one with the lady and the and the night looking in the mirror, the augers come in behind her and it's for sure creepy looking at first, but you know, then they get out the croke Car. I can't even remember tro Car and she's like ah ah, and it's like the worst B movie. And then they just sort of dragger over the threshold of one of those doors.

I would say, gently escorted, yeah, through.

The doors, like you don't see any of the violence even No, it's all just suggested, right, yes.

But again, Night Trip got lumped in with Mortal Kombat, and because of this, because it was very clear that the writing was on the wall. The media has a really great track record of saying, oh God, if we don't come up with a rating system ourselves, right, Congress is going to impose it on us. And so they came up with the ESRB, the Entertainment Software Rating Board. It was an industry created, self imposed rating system that was brought about in large part because.

Of Night Right. So Sega pulls the game.

Eventually, it became really popular because of these senatorial hearings, right, which is what always happens.

Yes, it's exactly right. It was starting to fade away. It would have been lost to history, and then the senators came in and we're like's go buy that game.

Kids wanted to play it, but Sega did eventually pull it. Digital Pictures re released it as their own distributor and rated it M for mature, And that should have that should have also been the end of it, right.

Yeah, I should have just kind of went away, especially after Sega pulled it, because it got pulled from KB Toys and Toys r US because the kids. But like you're saying, it was still around, and then when Sega pulled it was like you couldn't find it anyway, right, that should have been the end. And then in twenty fourteen, Tom Riley, Jim Riley, Jim Jim Riley started a Kickstarter and said we're going to resurrect Night Trap. All we

And that was in twenty fourteen.

Yeah, so that obviously was the end of night Trap, Right, that was not.

The end of night Trap, the bad game that refused to die.

Yeah.

In twenty sixteen, there was a video on YouTube that showed someone playing night Trap on their telephone on their smartphone, and I don't know if it was Jim Riley or one of the original devs saw it and was like, what is going on.

You can't play night Trap on a smartphone?

Yeah, because it was never developed that the technology, and let's that smartphone is playing a CD that I don't know about in the background.

And they got in touch with the person.

His name was Tyler Hogle and he was a mobile game programmer who followed was a fan of the original as like in a cult fan way.

That's a deep cut at that time, a.

Super deep cut, and then basically said I'm going to get a playable version hacked together for smartphones and did it like semi successfully.

Yeah. So he basically created this just on his own. And then once the video surfaced, Yeah, and the original developers, Jim Riley and some of the others got in touch with them. They said, here, man, here's here's we lost the code years ago. No one has any idea where it is but we do have original thirty five millimeter footage, which is timestamps, which is really critical because you have to wait. As we'll talk about how to play it in a second. The timing is everything between the video

Yeah, that was the twenty seventeen twenty fifth edsh rated tea for teens.

This time still preposterous, which.

Is funny, And apparently the you know you said he lost the code, but he was, that's really easy, Like I've got all this footage that's time stamped. Yeah, it's like I can code this thing in my sleep.

Basically he basically did. So there's a twenty fifth edition of night Trap, which apparently Nintendo has a version of oh, which is kind of funny because at the time of those Senate hearings in nineteen ninety three ninety four, Nintendo famously said they would never allow night Trap on their platform, and they did.

Yeah, and Nintendo is still sort of known as the more family friendly unit.

Yeah.

I think they even had a bloodless Mortal Kombat if I'm not mistaken, or maybe it was a setting.

Oh I think yes, it rings a bell. Did you see the new Mortal Kombat movie? Did you any I have seen zero Mortal Kombat movies. The new one just came out on hbox. Is it good?

That's pretty good? I mean, did you play the game. Do you have nostalgia for the game?

Sure? Yeah, you should watch it.

Okay, it's good enough.

It looks good and there's great fights and then some nice Easter eggs and it's like the Mortal kom that movie that should have been because they made one previously.

That wasn't that great. Yeah, from the nineties.

Yeah, but this one looks it's pretty cool.

Okay, okay, where you rip.

Out spines and hearts and.

And the way they do the blood, it looks just like the game.

Is it rated T for teen? It's rated R okay because it's a movie.

But we mentioned that it wasn't that great of a game because of the gameplay. One of the biggest problems was that you've got all these stories going on in these different windows, but you can only kind of control one at a time, So when you're controlling one scene, other stuff is going on, and we mentioned that makes it impossible to follow the actual story.

That's a problem, so it suffers there.

But there's also this thing where you have a red light, a green light, and a yellow light. And when these lights turn on, if it's the right color light, is when you engage the trap button, and that's when the auger will flip out the window.

But it has to be timed right.

Yeah, And apparently while you're in these other rooms, if you want to follow the story for a couple of minutes, they will change the codes, the color codes, right, So if you're in another room, they'll be like, the code is now green, yes, and you don't know that because you're not watching it. So you go back and you think the code is red, and so you're losing the game.

Yeah, because you have to have the right security code activated to activate the traps. Because this is the Martin's family's security cameras. The Martin family, the vampires are the ones who created the traps. You're just hacked into it thanks to your pals at SCAT, right. You're basically freelancing for it. But when they change those codes, it doesn't show on screen.

Right.

The character tells another character to go down to the basement and change the code.

A different screen that you may not be watching, Yeah, in.

A different room that you can't hear or see or anything like that, because you're in the living room and this conversation is happening in the kitchen.

Uh huh.

That is not a thing where it's like, oh, that's a cool little little little feature, you know, gay part of the gameplay that is a maddening ho yes, a bug, right, So that's a big part. That's a big problem with it as well. And then also you don't have to get a perfect you don't have to play a perfect game to win. But if any of the augers get any of the characters, you lose. If too many augers start to accumulate, you lose, and you get yelled at by the leader of scat it's kind of funny, he

Yeah, I mean, hats off to the grabster because he actually played this thing and tried to play it, which was more than I was willing to do.

But I did watch the walkthroughs.

Did you see the night Trap video or the lip sync video?

I did not.

There's actually a theme song night Trap, look Out behind You or something like that that one of the characters does an air guitar tennis recket lip sync too wow dancing while the other characters have to watch and pretend like they're not mortified with embarrassment at seeing this. It's really something.

Oh man.

I kept waiting in the documentary for a big reveal that like George Cline was one of the augurs or something, but Dana Plato was about as you know, yeah, a list as it got at the time, which was probably C list at the time.

Yeah, yeah, you got anything else?

I got nothing else? Night Trap, go seek it.

Out, night Trap, look Out behind You.

That's right.

If you want to know more about Night Trip. You don't even have to play. You can just go on YouTube and watch basically the movie, and even then it's still generally incoherent. But since I said it's still generally incoherent, it's time for listener man.

I'm gonna call this speed reading trauma. Hey, guys, I should start with the obligatory long time, first time, finally reason to email, and here I am so hello. I didn't think that a short stuff on speed reading, of all things, would trigger my first email, but here we go. Halfway through the show, I was flooded with a vivid memory of speed reading in my elementary school gifted class. Speaking of other scams, this was in the early nineties.

I had no idea that this was a scam.

I just thought it was a standard part of the curriculum that I wasn't very good at, and I felt terrible about it. Then again, in my Louisiana public school curriculum, we also had to get a hunting license and shoot clay pigeons as part of Louisiana history in middle school.

I grew up shooting clay pigeons.

Really for school. No, okay, I would like to try.

That is cool.

Skeet shooting.

Yeah, that's another way to put it.

Looks like fun. Just stand behind.

That's the rule, right basically anyway, Thanks so much for the entertainment and education edutainment, especially this past year. I've often had you in my ear while I work from home to feel a little less solitary. That is from Kate Ellis Jensen in Boulder, Colorado.

Thanks a lot, Kate, that was a good email. Very sorry to set off the trauma, but I'm glad that it's passed. I'm presuming it passed.

Yeah, I kind of remember that happening, but I certainly was not in a gifted class.

It doesn't sound like a very fun procedure. It kind of sounds like Ray Finds revealing himself to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Red Dragon. Oh spoiler, so you see.

Yeah, you know I'm.

Talking about Sure, we've talked about that recently.

Yeah, the wheelchair and fire scene.

This rule hilarious but also really funny. If you stop and think about it. Sure, that movie just danced on the line and sometimes it went over. Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about Red Dragon, Oh wait, I already said that stuff. If you want to get in touch with the like Kate did, then you can email us like Kate did at Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.