Can't Hardly Wait

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Hi, welcome to NSYNC, the podcast that explores the history and impact of some
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of your favorite music moments in TV and film. I am your host, Rachel Brodsky.
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And I can't feel my legs. I have no legs!
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Most teen movies are bound to feature at least one party scene.
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But there's one movie that begs the question, what if the party scene became the entire movie?
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That's precisely what writing partners Harry Alphont and Deborah Kaplan did
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to create 1998's Can't Hardly Wait, a little movie about a big high school graduation
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party and even bigger feelings.
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Named for the replacement seminal single from 1987's Pleased to Meet Me,
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Can't Hardly Wait features a stacked soundtrack with needle drops from Smash
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Mouth, Blink-182, Third Eye Blind, Run DMC, Guns N' Roses, Busta Rhymes,
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Missy Elliott, Barry Manilow, Matthew Sweet,
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Sublime, Dire Straits, and Yazoo, just to name a few.
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There are just too many good songs to choose from, and that's why we can't hardly
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wait to talk about all of them, or as many as we can.
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Joining us is producer, audio maker, showrunner, and can't-hardly-wait superfan, Eleanor Kagan.
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So settle in, get comfy, lock yourself in the bathroom, or climb atop the pool
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house roof in the latest episode of NSYNC.
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It's all about the memories, man.
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♪♪
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Hi, Eleanor.
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Hey, guys. Thanks so much for having me.
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Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, Eleanor?
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Sure, uh, so...
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Doing a bio is very hard, so I will just say that my favorite movies are Can't
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Hardly Wait, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, But I'm a Cheerleader,
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All I Wanna Do, aka The Hairy Bird.
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And that is pretty much all you need to know about me, I think.
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Other than the fact that we were roommates for quite a while.
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Yeah, we've known each other for almost 20 years. I performed in The Murder
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Mystery at your wedding.
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Correct.
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There's a lot to unpack in that sentence.
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I make audio documentaries and podcasts and quilts and clothes,
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and I spent almost two years researching the history of male strippers.
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Hell. What? Where do you sell clothes? Because I want to look at them.
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I sew clothes in my apartment. Sew clothes. Oh, sew, not sell.
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I sew them in my apartment, and I post them on Instagram.
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Eleanor's got a great Instagram.
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Thanks.
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I did follow you earlier today.
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So no plugging because Rachel's already following you.
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I'm already. I like to see my guests faces before I talk to them.
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It's just the journalist in me. I just I like to I'd like to stalk before I talk.
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I want that on a t shirt.
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That's the t shirt. I like to stalk before I talk.
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Anyone I've ever dated can attest.
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Listen, I call that journalism, but yours is better.
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Rachel also texted me randomly this week saying, what if we put needle drop
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it like it's hot on a t-shirt?
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Would wear, would buy, would promote to all my friends.
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Hell yeah.
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OK, that's good to know. I mean, I'm biased because I thought it,
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but I would put that on a tote bag carry it everywhere to stay.
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So, Can't Hardly Wait is...
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the 90s mainstream answer to a movie like Dazed and Confused.
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Dazed and Confused is the 1993 masterpiece that takes place on the last day
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of high school in 1976 in Texas, but now we're in 1998 on the last day of school
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for Huntington Hillside High.
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As I mentioned in a previous episode, this is based on Huntington Valley,
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Pennsylvania, which is like two towns over from where I grew up.
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And we've replaced the hippies and jocks of Dazed and Confused with burnouts,
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art kids, wannabe gangsters, and, well, jocks of the 1990s.
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Our main character is Preston Myers, played by friend of the show,
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Ethan Embry. Ethan, we love you.
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Ethan, call us. Call us. And Preston has been in love with Amanda Beckett since
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the day in ninth grade where she moved to Huntington Hillside High and ate the
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same flavored Pop-Tart.
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And Preston just missed out on being the one picked to show Amanda around her
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new school and has been pining for her ever since. Can relate.
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Not creepy at all, really. I mean, it's funny to watch, can't hardly wait with
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like fresh eyes, like over and over and just like, well, we love him and we
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love this, but is it creepy?
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We look the other way on a lot of things in this movie.
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I realized that this is the third Ethan Embry movie that you are doing on your
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podcast, unless you are a purist and you refer to him in that thing you do as Ethan Randall.
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I think he was going by in the credits of that movie before he took on Ethan Embry as his stage name.
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Either way, I am very much in favor of this becoming an Ethan Embry podcast.
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Yeah, it's just a picture of Ethan Embry and it says, stock before you talk,
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or whatever, whatever you catch, right?
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So I guess by this logic, the next movie we have to find some way to talk about
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is Sweet Home Alabama, right?
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You brought a baby to a bar.
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or Cheap Thrills, which is an incredible underrated, later days Ethan Embry
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movie. But enough about Ethan Embry. It's the last day of school.
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It's time for Preston to give Amanda one of the thousands of love letters he's
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written to her over the years.
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And Preston's best friend, Denise Fleming, parentheses, as a tampon,
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played by an unfortunately hairstyled Lauren Ambrose, is the perennial pessimist
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and doesn't think any of this will go well.
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But Preston's got hope because Amanda and longtime boyfriend Mike Dexter,
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played by Cullen patriarch Peter Fasanelli, have broken up.
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The majority of the movie takes place at the end of School Rager.
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The host of the party is played by Michelle Brockhurst.
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Her character's name is girl whose party it is.
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Everyone is there, Preston, Amanda, Mike Dexter, and William Lichter,
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who played by Hook and Dick Tracy star Charlie Corsmo in his last onscreen role
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for 20 years. Oh my God, isn't he a lawyer now?
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He was at MIT at the time.
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So he was like- But didn't he go into law later? Am I making this up?
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Potentially, there's so many child stars that do bizarre things,
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like the dude from Charlie and the Chocolate, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
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Factory was an ostrich farmer.
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What?
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Oh yeah, dropping knowledge.
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Let's sit with that for a minute.
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So William Lichter has been bullied relentlessly by Mike Dexter,
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and he has a plan to go to the party, get Mike and one of his jock friends drunk,
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have a couple of fellow geeks waiting on the roof of the pool house to jump
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them, potentially chloroform them, and take pictures of them in compromising
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positions to make everyone think that they're gay? Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Not everything about this movie has aged great.
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No, yeah, we're all collectively cringing out loud.
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Is William Lichter the villain of this movie? Anyway, that storyline doesn't
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hold up, but everyone's plan goes to shit at the party. Mike wants Amanda back,
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William gets drunk, sinks Paradise City, becomes popular for a night, befriends Mike.
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Literally everyone tries to hit on Amanda, including her own cousin.
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Second cousin.
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By marriage. Not great.
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Preston loses his letter and is read for filth, and Denise accidentally locks
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herself in the bathroom with wannabe thug, special K, Kenny Fisher, played by Seth Green.
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only for them to fall in love and have sex on the bathroom floor.
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There's a Shaggy song in there somewhere.
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It wasn't me. Can Preston prove to Amanda that he really loves her before he
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goes to Boston tomorrow for a workshop with Kurt Vonnegut?
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And what does all of this have to do with a certain Barry Manilow song?
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So we have already started talking about our personal connections to this movie,
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but we are of the perfect age, the three of us, for this movie to really just hit us in the good parts.
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So, Eleanor, what is your, you said that this was your, one of your favorite
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movies of all time. What is your experience with this movie?
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Oh my gosh. My experience with this movie is that I saw it and I instantly saw
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every feeling that I was feeling as a seventh and eighth grader in this movie.
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and honestly re-watching this the other day.
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it still just connects me to those feelings. So this movie is all about crushes,
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it's all about longing, it's all about nostalgia for the thing that is currently
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happening but about to end, so that kind of like present, like we're losing
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out on the best days of our lives feeling.
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And when I was, you know, 13 or something when I saw this movie,
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maybe I was 12, I was feeling all all those feelings.
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I was about to graduate eighth grade, I was about to go into high school,
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I had an intense crush on a guy in my class who did not reciprocate.
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So I identified with Preston, I identified with Denise, I identified with everybody in this movie.
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And to this day, I still think it is one of the best on screen representations
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of what it is too long for somebody.
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And that is why I think it still connects to me, and the music is a huge part
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of that too, right? So this movie brings it all back for me.
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I mean, how many songs have been written about that same kind of longing,
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right? Like, I think that that it's all connected, right?
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Yes, I could relate to this. Everybody was pining for somebody else, right?
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Like... Yeah, in Romy and Michelle's high school reunion episode,
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we talked about how somehow everybody made someone else's life hell.
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That's the takeaway. And then in this episode, we're about how everyone's also
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always pining for someone else in high school.
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Just out of reach. What about you, Rachel? What is your experience with this movie?
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I have a very specific memory of renting this movie with my cousins.
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I think I was about 10 or 11.
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If this came out in 1998, then I was probably about 11. And when we rented a
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movie, we would watch it multiple times.
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And then I think they actually got the movie on cassette tape and just had it in their collection.
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So anytime I went to their house in Baltimore, which is where my family is originally
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from, we would watch Can't Hardly Wait. It was one of my favorite movies just
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to re-watch even before...
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I feel like now re-watching is just in the vernacular. And then it was like
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your re-watching was a little bit more of a self-contained thing.
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Like a ritual.
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Re-watching Can't Hardly Wait was one of my break from school rituals because
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I would go to my cousin's house on school breaks.
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And I just loved the chaos of this movie.
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It, to me, seemed And very realistic that all of these characters had grown
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up together effectively, but didn't know each other.
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They just have these ideas of each other.
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And then that whole night is breaking down and unpacking and getting past those
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ideas, only for the ideas to resurrect themselves in the morning.
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It was like real late night, haven't slept.
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sleepover vibes to this movie when you like get so tired that you feel like you're drunk,
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and you just start like telling people shit that you like would never usually
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feel Yeah, but I had crushes on Seth Green, of course, and Oh my gosh, yes. Ethan Embry.
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Okay, I have to I can't we gotta get to the bottom of this. Even before we started recording.
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Eleanor and Rachel were like, Oh my god, Seth Green in this movie.
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Seth Green in this movie.
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Seth Green.
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Seth Green. He was in every teen magazine around this time.
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But he's got the goggles and the pants and he talks so strangely.
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Yeah, I mean, those were stupid, but then he stopped talking that way.
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And it was like, he gets called out.
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Look in the mirror. You're white.
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Yeah. Lauren Ambrose reminds him that, hey, being a poser isn't cool. Just be yourself.
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you're hiding behind your giant goggles and your giant pants and shoes.
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Just, you know, yourself is really cute. So once he starts speaking like a normal
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person, like for his like background, once he stops appropriating...
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Yeah, the hood. He drops the hood voice.
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Yeah, he's completely adorable. And he's a cutie.
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I have a theory about this, too. I think that it is the perfect marriage of person with scenario,
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because the getting locked in the bathroom with someone enemies to lovers plotline
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is a fucking fantasy of a 12 year old if I ever had one.
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And that is literally the thing that I spent all day and night wishing would happen to me.
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I wanted to get locked in. It didn't have to be a bathroom. It could be any
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room that locked. I wanted to get stuck into that scenario with the person that
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I I had a crush on, because then...
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he would fall in love with me.
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And if you only got a chance to get to know you.
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Exactly. And I think that seeing Seth Green's character in that scenario,
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it was so romantic. It was so fantastical.
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It just made me fall in love with him.
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And these two characters, like they go way back. They have a history and they
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get to confront that. Do you remember, Aviv when we were talking about in the
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Shrek podcast, very afraid of what's good.
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Yes, we were talking about like, confronting someone because they just stopped talking to you.
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And why did they write stop talking to you? And like how I was telling you how
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I wanted to do that with like, the first ever boy I went on a date with, we like stayed friends.
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And then when you're technically still dating, because I told him that I liked
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him still, We were like years later and then he was like, cool.
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And then we just, I never heard from him again.
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Well, I feel like if we'd been locked in a bathroom at some later date,
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like if we were actually like lived in the same town and we're able to like hash it out.
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I mean, to me, that's like the fantasy of like being able to like achieve any
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kind of closure just by using words.
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So that's an interesting point of view because I obviously cast myself in the
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role of Preston, including like a absolutely hopeless crush on Jennifer Love Hewitt.
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Jennifer, if you're listening, I'm happily married, but we can exchange letters.
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So, Preston also has the same fantasy that if he just uses his words properly,
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He can make the unattainable.
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person fall in love with him, which I definitely also very much related to,
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right, is like not looking or sounding or acting like the coolest person in the high school.
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Was there still something I could do with my brain to like, make the object of my affection?
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Love me back. And so yeah, I have a similar affinity for this movie and kind
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of like a yearning awakening or a longing Awakening, not for Seth Green,
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but for Amanda Beckett herself, Jennifer.
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I like that our approaches to our childhood crushes have a clear through line
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to our career choices to view.
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The two of you became writers because of your prowess with words.
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I became a producer where I orchestrate situations in which people are locked
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in rooms. I produce situations.
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I love that. I also wanted to say before I forgot that I am such a big fan of Lauren Ambrose,
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like as Aviv knows, Six Feet Under is my favorite show of all time and like
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her character is probably my favorite character on the show.
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And this is of course pre Six Feet Under, but I really related to Denise Fleming
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and Can't hardly wait because I felt very invisible in high school.
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It was just not my time yet. And I always just felt like I was just there and no one really knew me.
00:17:18.717 --> 00:17:25.502
And I wish I had had a friend as nice, I guess, as Preston Meyer.
00:17:25.502 --> 00:17:30.866
I mean, I had a good friend who was a boy, but then kind of found out that he
00:17:30.866 --> 00:17:32.847
had feelings for me. There's the unrequited.
00:17:32.847 --> 00:17:33.828
Can I tell you something?
00:17:33.828 --> 00:17:34.209
Yeah.
00:17:34.209 --> 00:17:39.093
Can I tell you something? No, that's how it starts. Can I tell you something? Uh, yeah.
00:17:39.093 --> 00:17:41.834
That was junior prom. Ooh, woof. Yep.
00:17:42.315 --> 00:17:46.257
I really did love the platonic friendship between Denise and Preston.
00:17:46.257 --> 00:17:49.119
Yeah, I was a bitchy 8th grader for that whole week, actually.
00:17:50.400 --> 00:17:53.261
That line, by the way, in watching this movie the other night,
00:17:53.261 --> 00:17:57.524
I was like, that line has so much exposition in it. It's like a perfectly written line.
00:17:58.465 --> 00:18:05.819
I've had the exact same thought. way to just shoehorn a shitload of exposition
00:18:05.819 --> 00:18:10.393
into this one. Yes. Thank you for saying that, Eleanor.
00:18:10.393 --> 00:18:15.357
The off-screen movie. Also that was the thing that puzzled me as a kid,
00:18:15.357 --> 00:18:17.358
of why don't they get together?
00:18:18.419 --> 00:18:21.401
Because it seemed like the very direct and natural thing.
00:18:21.762 --> 00:18:27.986
And at the age of whatever, 12 or 13, I didn't think that boys and girls could be friends enemy.
00:18:30.203 --> 00:18:35.387
real sense of the word. There are a handful of connections between Can't Hardly
00:18:35.387 --> 00:18:37.568
Wait and Dazed and Confused, as I mentioned.
00:18:37.568 --> 00:18:40.871
It's a last day of school movie, it's an all-in-one night movie,
00:18:40.871 --> 00:18:45.054
it's a movie that's named after a song, and Can't Hardly Wait even has its own
00:18:45.054 --> 00:18:51.599
version of Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson in Jerry O'Connell's Trip McNeely, a high school hero.
00:18:52.139 --> 00:18:56.182
Trip McNeely? A high school hero who has turned into a college loser who basically
00:18:56.182 --> 00:19:00.305
shows up at the party and has his own version of saying, the thing I like about
00:19:00.305 --> 00:19:02.727
these high school girls is I get older and they stay the same age.
00:19:03.808 --> 00:19:08.531
But the main thing that unites these two high school classics is that they each
00:19:08.531 --> 00:19:10.332
have a banger of a soundtrack.
00:19:11.153 --> 00:19:18.298
So in our intro, Rachel mentioned a bunch of them, but let's run through kind
00:19:18.298 --> 00:19:22.781
of the greatest hits of the Can't Hardly Wait soundtrack.
00:19:23.422 --> 00:19:27.905
So as anyone who loves this movie and its soundtrack may know is that there
00:19:27.905 --> 00:19:33.029
are 15, approximately 15 songs from the movie on the soundtrack and like 50
00:19:33.029 --> 00:19:35.451
songs from which to choose.
00:19:35.451 --> 00:19:36.351
They left off, yeah.
00:19:37.072 --> 00:19:44.577
Yeah, and we, as you may have noticed, we could not decide on one song to hone
00:19:44.577 --> 00:19:47.720
in on. So we were like, this is our show, we can do what we want.
00:19:48.681 --> 00:19:50.242
Oh, the format breaker.
00:19:50.542 --> 00:19:54.531
We turned into Miley Cyrus, like it's our party, we can do what we want.
00:19:54.531 --> 00:19:57.759
And we're just gonna talk about as many we have time for. So,
00:19:57.759 --> 00:19:59.804
to give it a quick rundown.
00:20:00.730 --> 00:20:05.314
We have Third Eye Blinds, Graduate, which is one of my favorite Third Eye Blinds songs.
00:20:05.314 --> 00:20:06.435
Wow.
00:20:06.435 --> 00:20:10.818
Smash Mouth, Can't Get Enough of You, Baby, which is, we talked about this on
00:20:10.818 --> 00:20:13.380
our Shrek episode. It's a cover of a Four Seasons song.
00:20:13.441 --> 00:20:16.142
Didn't realize it was a cover until much later in my life.
00:20:17.103 --> 00:20:20.205
I believe it was also written for this movie, or not written,
00:20:20.205 --> 00:20:22.567
but covered specifically for this movie.
00:20:22.807 --> 00:20:25.749
We've got Damn It from Blink-182, a classic, Buster Ruckman.
00:20:26.291 --> 00:20:32.294
First Blink-182 song I've ever heard. This was my first experience with Blink-182, was this? Yeah.
00:20:32.294 --> 00:20:36.897
This was, I think, a lot of people's first experiences because it's pre-their enema of the state days.
00:20:36.897 --> 00:20:39.679
Yeah. And a year before American Pie.
00:20:39.679 --> 00:20:42.601
Yeah. Yeah.
00:20:42.601 --> 00:20:47.825
Blink-182 shirt to this recording specifically because of this.
00:20:47.825 --> 00:20:51.667
I love that. We got some Busta Rhymes. Fire it up.
00:20:52.508 --> 00:20:56.671
Missy Elliott. I'm gonna say this in the the whitest way possible,
00:20:56.671 --> 00:20:59.052
but hit him with the he. Right?
00:20:59.052 --> 00:21:01.494
Yeah. Yeah.
00:21:01.494 --> 00:21:05.067
KP and Envy swing my way feeder. Hi, Black Lab.
00:21:05.067 --> 00:21:09.360
Tell me what to say Matthew Sweet further down the replacements of course,
00:21:09.360 --> 00:21:16.564
Paradise City by Guns N' Roses and we have a very excellent needle drop of Run DMC's It's Tricky.
00:21:17.726 --> 00:21:24.230
And there's a like a plot related needle drop song of Barry Manilow's Mandy
00:21:24.230 --> 00:21:29.235
which isn't on the soundtrack, but plays like a pivotal role in the plot.
00:21:29.235 --> 00:21:32.539
So that's one of the songs that we're gonna refer to.
00:21:32.539 --> 00:21:33.720
Shut up about the dog.
00:21:33.720 --> 00:21:35.242
Shut up about the dog.
00:21:35.242 --> 00:21:39.627
Shut up about the dog, okay? Can I ask you guys a question about this? I'm genuinely Curious,
00:21:40.204 --> 00:21:45.028
how come some of the biggest songs in this movie aren't on the soundtrack?
00:21:45.028 --> 00:21:48.350
You know, it opens, you know, there's a couple of Yves Sixx songs in this movie,
00:21:48.350 --> 00:21:49.891
Open Road song, Inside Out.
00:21:50.052 --> 00:21:53.795
Like, there's a lot of very prominent needle drops that don't show up on the
00:21:53.795 --> 00:21:57.838
soundtrack. What is the, like, behind the scenes stuff about how those decisions
00:21:57.838 --> 00:21:58.698
get made? Do you guys know?
00:21:59.159 --> 00:22:02.080
A lot of the time it has to do with, like, contract conflictions.
00:22:02.841 --> 00:22:06.404
So, I mean, my best guess, Aviv looks like he wants to say something, but...
00:22:06.404 --> 00:22:08.386
No, no, I'm gonna agree with you.
00:22:08.386 --> 00:22:12.909
Yeah, my best guess is that it usually has to do with like whatever record label
00:22:12.909 --> 00:22:17.153
releases the soundtrack versus whatever record label that the artist in question
00:22:17.153 --> 00:22:19.735
is signed to and whether or not they could come to an agreement.
00:22:20.295 --> 00:22:23.577
Which is the same reason that This Used to Be My Playground didn't wind up on
00:22:23.577 --> 00:22:24.918
the League of Their Own soundtrack.
00:22:25.879 --> 00:22:30.823
It might come out like, sometimes soundtracks come out in like 20 year,
00:22:30.823 --> 00:22:36.968
30 year anniversaries and then enough time has passed that those contract stipulations
00:22:36.968 --> 00:22:41.671
of yesteryear can be like they either don't exist anymore,
00:22:41.671 --> 00:22:46.575
or record labels will turn over and get new staffs and then come to an agreement.
00:22:46.575 --> 00:22:52.706
But a lot of the time, initially, it has to do with like money contract stipulations,
00:22:52.706 --> 00:22:58.524
and whether or not like the powers that be at labels can work out an agreement.
00:22:58.965 --> 00:23:04.649
It also could potentially be like some hedging of bets where they like are guessing
00:23:04.649 --> 00:23:09.793
at what songs will be hits and kind of making us a mixtape that they think will like,
00:23:09.793 --> 00:23:14.697
but it seems weird that they left off some huge hits of the time like Inside
00:23:14.697 --> 00:23:18.360
Out from U6, which is like, was a massive song.
00:23:18.360 --> 00:23:24.785
Yeah. So okay. So there are like, as Rachel mentioned, like a significant number
00:23:24.785 --> 00:23:31.630
of needle drops and we can kind of do the greatest hits of our process on each of them.
00:23:32.261 --> 00:23:37.455
To back up for a second, I found a really good Reddit thread that lists out
00:23:37.455 --> 00:23:43.099
every needle drop in the movie, like when the song plays, like what's happening
00:23:43.099 --> 00:23:44.700
on screen when the song plays.
00:23:44.700 --> 00:23:49.404
So, Third Eye Blind sounds when Preston finally sees Amanda at the party,
00:23:49.404 --> 00:23:54.033
but he keeps getting interrupted by the guy who keeps asking him if he remembers stuff.
00:23:54.033 --> 00:23:59.305
And apparently, Graduate also plays in the original trailer for Can't Hardly
00:23:59.305 --> 00:24:00.628
Wait, which I never knew.
00:24:29.024 --> 00:24:34.248
And Can't Get Enough of You by Smash Mouth plays when Preston and Denise are
00:24:34.248 --> 00:24:38.371
watching Kenny dancing in front of the mirror. He's getting all like psyched
00:24:38.371 --> 00:24:39.992
because he's gotta have sex tonight.
00:24:42.135 --> 00:24:46.647
Blink-182's Dammit plays as the cops enter the party near the end of the movie
00:24:46.647 --> 00:24:49.600
where everyone makes a mad dash to get the heck out of there.
00:24:50.460 --> 00:24:54.283
Aviv, are you familiar with the Broham song? Because I was not.
00:24:54.423 --> 00:24:57.816
No, I don't know that I've ever heard this song.
00:24:57.816 --> 00:24:59.727
I don't think I have either, but.
00:25:00.988 --> 00:25:03.570
But this is one of Kenny's moments, right?
00:25:03.570 --> 00:25:04.911
Right.
00:25:04.911 --> 00:25:07.853
Apparently the guy from this band was also in Third Eye Blind.
00:25:08.494 --> 00:25:10.955
Oh, so it's probably just another toss it in.
00:25:10.955 --> 00:25:11.696
Okay.
00:25:11.696 --> 00:25:14.518
According to Wikipedia, can I say as you're reading these off?
00:25:14.518 --> 00:25:14.838
Yeah.
00:25:14.838 --> 00:25:19.101
I feel like a good quiz for the Can't Hardly Wait Superfan would be,
00:25:19.101 --> 00:25:21.443
can you name when all these songs happen in the movie?
00:25:22.764 --> 00:25:30.029
So, Can't Hardly Wait superfan, Eleanor Kagan. Yeah. When do you hear Busta Rhymes' Turn It Up?
00:25:30.029 --> 00:25:31.470
This is a hard one, I think.
00:25:31.470 --> 00:25:32.731
This is a hard one.
00:25:32.731 --> 00:25:35.013
Well, it's the next one on the list.
00:25:35.013 --> 00:25:38.916
It's during a scene change, I know that, but I don't remember what the change
00:25:38.916 --> 00:25:40.257
from one scene to another is.
00:25:40.257 --> 00:25:43.679
It is when we see Kenny in the convenience store.
00:25:44.740 --> 00:25:45.420
That's right.
00:25:46.462 --> 00:25:51.865
So, one of the big needle drops that we were talking about in our email thread
00:25:51.865 --> 00:25:54.547
leading up to this episode was It's Tricky by Run-DMC.
00:25:55.028 --> 00:25:59.811
So explain to me, of the three of us, the can't hardly wait novice,
00:25:59.811 --> 00:26:03.814
the significance of It's Tricky, the Run-DMC needle drop.
00:26:04.455 --> 00:26:10.500
So Kenny's whole plot line revolves around him wanting to have sex at the party,
00:26:10.500 --> 00:26:15.244
and he has narrowed the list of women that he's gonna try to sleep with down
00:26:15.244 --> 00:26:16.844
to 10 very lucky finalists.
00:26:18.066 --> 00:26:24.250
And he arrives to the party with a backpack full of supplies that he calls the love kit.
00:26:24.250 --> 00:26:29.913
And it's got like a Kama Sutra book, a candle, some like feathery things that
00:26:29.913 --> 00:26:33.696
I still don't know what they are, and like reams of condoms. And so...
00:26:33.696 --> 00:26:36.778
Reams.
00:26:36.778 --> 00:26:38.119
A bandolier of condoms.
00:26:39.540 --> 00:26:45.243
At one point in the movie, he overhears a girl crying and saying that in order
00:26:45.243 --> 00:26:46.844
to get back at her cheating boyfriend.
00:26:46.844 --> 00:26:51.087
She's gonna hook up with the next guy that talks to her. He immediately starts
00:26:51.087 --> 00:26:54.570
talking to her. She agrees to go to the pool house with him.
00:26:55.250 --> 00:27:01.735
And he runs off to a bathroom upstairs to prep. And the second the door closes,
00:27:01.735 --> 00:27:03.336
when it's It's tricky. Stop this shi-
00:27:18.160 --> 00:27:23.004
And you see Kenny Fisher, like, making sure that he doesn't smell.
00:27:23.364 --> 00:27:27.167
He wants to, I mean, he's like running through the list with himself.
00:27:27.167 --> 00:27:31.551
He's like, bathroom, pee, underarm check, don't put the Jimmy hat on now, that ain't gonna work.
00:27:32.452 --> 00:27:36.935
So he's like, he clearly has no idea what he's doing. He has never had sex.
00:27:36.935 --> 00:27:40.658
He doesn't know whether he's supposed to put the condom on, you know,
00:27:40.658 --> 00:27:44.261
long before the act actually starts.
00:27:44.681 --> 00:27:48.344
But he's in the bathroom, like, reading through the Kama Sutra book,
00:27:48.344 --> 00:27:54.328
practicing positions, and all of this is soundtracked by Run-DMC,
00:27:54.328 --> 00:27:58.511
which is what I imagine they were thinking when they wrote this song.
00:27:59.051 --> 00:28:03.134
Yeah, it's tricky to have sex and figure out when to put on a condom,
00:28:03.134 --> 00:28:04.975
was the original title. Exactly.
00:28:05.636 --> 00:28:12.120
Eleanor, how would you feel like if you had met someone at any point and decided
00:28:12.120 --> 00:28:16.303
that you were gonna do it, and then just saw that he was already wearing it.
00:28:17.955 --> 00:28:21.968
Like, his pants come off, and he's already wearing it.
00:28:21.968 --> 00:28:24.790
Prepared, boy scout, always be prepared.
00:28:25.671 --> 00:28:29.433
I'd be like, oh, this is making my Kenny Fisher fantasy become reality.
00:28:31.315 --> 00:28:38.240
So I particularly love this needle drop because there is a sense of comedy to it, right?
00:28:38.240 --> 00:28:42.804
We talked about, like, in our Barbie episode, there's like a punchline of Matchbox
00:28:42.804 --> 00:28:48.328
20's Push where it's like, it is the bro anthem, this is the anthem of the guy
00:28:48.328 --> 00:28:52.612
playing the acoustic guitar at a prospective mate, right?
00:28:53.072 --> 00:28:57.916
Versus this, where the song itself is not the punchline, it's just like commenting
00:28:57.916 --> 00:29:05.670
on how absurdly inept Kenny is at any of this stuff. So I think it's like a really interesting.
00:29:06.210 --> 00:29:09.872
Fun moment that it doesn't call attention to itself too much,
00:29:09.872 --> 00:29:12.995
but still gives you like a layer of comedy in this moment.
00:29:13.896 --> 00:29:15.577
I Would fully agree with that.
00:29:15.577 --> 00:29:20.020
It's it's a really good needle drop and like you you feel like cut They're kind
00:29:20.020 --> 00:29:25.325
of lapping at and with Right and as a 12 year old hearing this song for the
00:29:25.325 --> 00:29:29.228
first time hearing run DMC for the first time It's kind of a wild way to be
00:29:29.228 --> 00:29:32.330
introduced into the world of classic hip-hop Yeah,
00:29:32.330 --> 00:29:38.495
which is not Kenny's thing is like the Busta Rhymes stuff like this is not a Kenny song.
00:29:38.495 --> 00:29:42.018
It is a song that's like commenting on how kind of silly he is.
00:29:42.018 --> 00:29:46.441
Yeah, I was gonna shout out Eve six is open road song, which comes in at the
00:29:46.441 --> 00:29:50.725
very beginning of the movie where we're like the graduation scene is actually happening.
00:29:51.465 --> 00:29:54.748
And for so long, I did not know that this was an AB six song.
00:29:54.748 --> 00:29:57.990
And I had it on like a mix and everything that a friend made for me.
00:30:29.373 --> 00:30:32.576
Are we all following the guy from Eve Six on Twitter?
00:30:33.057 --> 00:30:33.597
Oh, yeah.
00:30:33.597 --> 00:30:34.298
He's great.
00:30:34.298 --> 00:30:37.742
Of course. I mean, he now has an advice column for BuzzFeed.
00:30:37.742 --> 00:30:43.148
I am reaching just off screen and pulling out my full of holes,
00:30:43.148 --> 00:30:47.753
thin as paper Eve Six t-shirt from their tour of in 1998.
00:30:48.628 --> 00:30:49.268
That's amazing.
00:30:50.029 --> 00:30:53.712
Eleanor truly is like a clothing maker because I don't think that you needed
00:30:53.712 --> 00:30:56.844
to record this from your closet. You just wanted easy access to like,
00:30:56.844 --> 00:31:02.238
oh, you mentioned Smash Mouth. Here's my Smash Mouth shirt. Here's my Creed shirt.
00:31:02.249 --> 00:31:06.722
I do not have a Creed shirt. I was never really a big Creed fan,
00:31:06.722 --> 00:31:11.265
but their music was everywhere right next to Eve Six and Blink-182.
00:31:11.265 --> 00:31:15.048
Do you have a Creed tank top so you can approach it with arms wide open?
00:31:15.989 --> 00:31:20.913
No, but I do have this signed album cover by Sugar Ray.
00:31:20.913 --> 00:31:25.076
Yes! Eleanor, you know I just interviewed Mark McGrath.
00:31:25.917 --> 00:31:31.881
I think you mentioned that on a past episode, which made me reach into storage
00:31:31.881 --> 00:31:34.884
and grab this relic of 1997.
00:31:34.884 --> 00:31:38.386
I'd like to live in your closet, if that's okay.
00:31:40.168 --> 00:31:48.374
It is a shrine of late 90s alternative rock memorabilia that appealed to a 12 year old.
00:31:48.374 --> 00:31:54.899
I feel like we all need to go on the butt rock cruise. Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:31:54.899 --> 00:31:55.700
Is that real?
00:31:55.700 --> 00:31:58.782
It's a it's a cruise. It's not called the butt rock cruise. No, it's mine.
00:31:58.782 --> 00:32:03.140
It's my name for it. When I was still on staff with Stereogum,
00:32:03.140 --> 00:32:08.430
we would just refer to the upcoming it's it I think it's happening next spring,
00:32:08.430 --> 00:32:15.235
but it's a cruise, like the 90s something, or I'll look it up. It's got Creed.
00:32:15.615 --> 00:32:18.157
Creed's gonna be on it. It's got like Tonic, Creed, Cruise.
00:32:19.859 --> 00:32:25.062
Oh, that's okay. The Summer of 99 Cruise. The Creed Cruise. Oh, no. Oh, fuck that.
00:32:25.062 --> 00:32:26.664
That sounds horrible.
00:32:26.664 --> 00:32:29.485
Horrible or incredible. It's got, okay, Buckcherry.
00:32:30.647 --> 00:32:31.067
Shivers.
00:32:31.067 --> 00:32:32.268
Tonic.
00:32:32.268 --> 00:32:32.609
Have seen.
00:32:32.971 --> 00:32:35.358
Vertical Horizon, Fuel. Oh!
00:32:35.358 --> 00:32:37.486
Can I tell you something funny about fuel?
00:32:39.491 --> 00:32:43.333
Not funny. I mean, it's my own lore. So again, 12 years old,
00:32:43.333 --> 00:32:48.016
I had a bat mitzvah, and there's a moment where you enter the party,
00:32:48.016 --> 00:32:53.500
and my entry song was the second verse of Shimmer by Fuel. Hell yeah.
00:32:53.961 --> 00:32:55.962
Eleanor, you and I are going to be best friends.
00:32:56.823 --> 00:32:59.124
Did you also walk into your bat mitzvah to Fuel?
00:32:59.124 --> 00:33:05.629
No, I wish. That's so cool that I... No, but that's one of my favorite songs ever.
00:33:06.430 --> 00:33:10.173
Yeah, it's so good. And if I could have walked into my bat mitzvah,
00:33:10.173 --> 00:33:13.275
I didn't have music at my bat mitzvah. We had a nice luncheon.
00:33:13.275 --> 00:33:15.557
We didn't have- We had a nice luncheon too.
00:33:15.857 --> 00:33:17.278
Mine was also a nice luncheon.
00:33:18.820 --> 00:33:23.303
We didn't have a DJ or anything of the sort, but I loved Shimmer so much.
00:33:23.303 --> 00:33:28.287
Oh, by the by, we got some listener feedback from Shoshana Rubinstein, my mother.
00:33:29.248 --> 00:33:30.539
That the show is too Jewish?
00:33:31.309 --> 00:33:35.773
No, not Jewish enough. I, on a previous episode, mentioned that I would sneak
00:33:35.773 --> 00:33:40.056
into movies for several years, and I was expecting my mom to be very disappointed,
00:33:40.056 --> 00:33:43.999
and she was. She called me and said, I thought I raised you better than that.
00:33:44.980 --> 00:33:46.000
Was she serious?
00:33:47.081 --> 00:33:50.304
Who's to say? We'll find out, I guess, when this episode comes out.
00:33:50.304 --> 00:33:51.205
Not important.
00:33:51.205 --> 00:33:56.108
So I wanna talk a little bit about the song that the entire movie,
00:33:56.108 --> 00:34:01.612
the plot of the movie, kind of hinges around, which is Barry Manilow's Mandy.
00:34:02.914 --> 00:34:07.797
I remember all my life Raining.
00:34:49.385 --> 00:34:56.829
Happy people pass my way So, Preston thinks that it is a good day to tell Amanda how he feels,
00:34:56.829 --> 00:35:00.633
not just because Mike Dexter broke up with Amanda, and not just because it's
00:35:00.633 --> 00:35:04.678
the last day of school, but because he woke up and heard Mandy,
00:35:04.678 --> 00:35:09.443
the Barry Manilow song, on the radio, and he thinks that Mandy is short for Amanda.
00:35:10.858 --> 00:35:16.662
So, let's talk a little bit about the use of Mandy specifically in this movie,
00:35:16.662 --> 00:35:22.566
because there's a lot going on, and I did not mention a very pivotal character
00:35:22.566 --> 00:35:25.708
in this movie, so we could talk about it when we got here.
00:35:26.869 --> 00:35:32.873
Well, so Preston thinks that he's going to make contact finally with Amanda
00:35:32.873 --> 00:35:38.967
and talk to her, but then he sees her being forcibly kissed by her second cousin through marriage,
00:35:39.878 --> 00:35:45.262
And thinks like, oh, well, she's dating someone else now or something, or my moment has passed.
00:35:45.262 --> 00:35:46.002
Someone's swooped in.
00:35:46.002 --> 00:35:51.826
Someone's swooped in, the window has closed. So he goes off on a sad 2am car
00:35:51.826 --> 00:35:57.109
ride and decides he needs to ask Barry Manilow personally,
00:35:57.109 --> 00:36:02.993
is this song about a woman that you love named Amanda, or is it about your dog?
00:36:03.514 --> 00:36:08.917
And it's kind of like if you think it's about his dog, then maybe you're like
00:36:08.917 --> 00:36:12.740
a glass half empty person like Denise Fleming.
00:36:13.281 --> 00:36:18.304
Or if you think it's about a woman named Amanda, then you're a hopeless romantic
00:36:18.304 --> 00:36:20.406
who believes in fate like Preston.
00:36:20.406 --> 00:36:26.451
So he drives off, finds a, I guess, a radio station he's listening to,
00:36:26.451 --> 00:36:34.016
has Barry Manilow on the horn, ready to talk to a lucky call in, like a, what's that?
00:36:34.016 --> 00:36:37.199
What's that ship? Like a Casey Kasem sort of guy. Yeah, like a Casey Kasem kind
00:36:37.199 --> 00:36:43.161
of thing. I was gonna say like, who's like the long time DJ who does like a
00:36:43.161 --> 00:36:45.582
nighttime show on like a soft FM station?
00:36:45.882 --> 00:36:48.263
Do you know who I'm talking about? Henry Rollins.
00:36:49.954 --> 00:36:51.904
No, her name is like Dina, Dina.
00:36:52.985 --> 00:36:54.085
Oh, oh, Dina.
00:36:55.135 --> 00:36:56.796
Like, dear Delilah or whatever.
00:36:56.796 --> 00:36:57.596
Yes, thank you.
00:36:57.998 --> 00:36:59.959
Delilah, Delilah, it's like a- Like the lonely hearts?
00:36:59.959 --> 00:37:03.402
Yeah, it's like a call in Delilah kind of thing.
00:37:03.402 --> 00:37:11.188
So he does manage to get, just before he can actually ask Barry Manilow what Mandy is about,
00:37:11.188 --> 00:37:16.952
who Mandy is about, then an angel, a dancer, a stripper dancer,
00:37:16.952 --> 00:37:21.936
Jenna Elfman, her, she is- The great Jenna Elfman, who I saw in Apple.
00:37:22.517 --> 00:37:27.360
Nameless in the movie, but she is Jenna Elfman, the one and only,
00:37:27.360 --> 00:37:32.163
and she is coming off of a horrible shift at the club.
00:37:32.864 --> 00:37:35.886
Her car is broken down. She interrupts the call.
00:37:36.286 --> 00:37:41.570
Preston never gets to ask the question that he so badly wants to talk to Barry Manilow about.
00:37:42.130 --> 00:37:48.195
And he and Jenna Elfman get into this kind of first argument as she's hanging
00:37:48.195 --> 00:37:51.157
up his phone call, taking the phone away from him, calling a cab,
00:37:51.157 --> 00:37:56.701
and being like, look, I think I have had a much worse night than you.
00:37:56.701 --> 00:38:00.744
For our younger listeners, a payphone was a phone where you just,
00:38:00.744 --> 00:38:04.026
it was there and you would go to it.
00:38:04.568 --> 00:38:08.910
This was before you could call someone whenever you wanted, whenever.
00:38:09.250 --> 00:38:10.451
And also it was before Uber.
00:38:10.872 --> 00:38:12.352
You put a quarter in the phone.
00:38:12.352 --> 00:38:14.834
I swear to God, you put a quarter in the phone.
00:38:15.175 --> 00:38:17.797
Let's carry a bunch of quarters in your pocket at all times.
00:38:18.217 --> 00:38:19.918
Or you could make a collect call.
00:38:20.459 --> 00:38:24.081
Oh, I don't even want to start to explain. I never really understood them.
00:38:24.081 --> 00:38:25.952
I'm not going to try to explain them to the youth.
00:38:26.523 --> 00:38:27.964
Google exists for them.
00:38:28.585 --> 00:38:34.309
For them, not for us. So I want to set out to answer this question that Preston never gets an answer to.
00:38:34.789 --> 00:38:42.114
Is Mandy about a woman named Amanda and or a dog named Mandy or Amanda?
00:38:42.755 --> 00:38:44.136
So, this is from groovyhistory.com.
00:38:47.078 --> 00:38:50.901
Barry Manilow's Mandy was not about a dog.
00:38:51.502 --> 00:38:55.564
There was an urban legend that the song was about a dog. So,
00:38:55.564 --> 00:39:00.688
the song was co-written by a guy named Scott English and Richard Kerr.
00:39:01.249 --> 00:39:05.612
And a reporter was irritating Scott English and so he just made up the story
00:39:05.612 --> 00:39:08.734
about the dog. And in the same interview with that reporter,
00:39:08.734 --> 00:39:11.476
Scott English told him that Lassie was his favorite movie star.
00:39:11.476 --> 00:39:13.257
So he's just like obsessed with dogs.
00:39:14.538 --> 00:39:19.520
But the song is not about a woman named Amanda because the original title and
00:39:19.520 --> 00:39:21.741
lyrics for Mandy was Brandy. Hmm.
00:39:23.888 --> 00:39:28.286
So, Scott English and Richard Kerr wrote a song called Brandy,
00:39:28.286 --> 00:39:35.295
and then they changed it to Mandy because, I don't know, maybe that other song Brandy came out?
00:39:35.666 --> 00:39:39.998
It says on old time music, which is what you just cited, right?
00:39:39.998 --> 00:39:43.101
Yeah. Yeah. I cited groovy history.
00:39:43.101 --> 00:39:52.087
Oh, okay. So old time music claims that Mandy was inspired by a photograph Manilow
00:39:52.087 --> 00:39:55.028
found in a teen magazine of his high school sweetheart.
00:39:56.290 --> 00:40:01.453
That girl in the photo was named Brandy, but Manilow changed it to Mandy to
00:40:01.453 --> 00:40:03.734
ensure the name worked better with the melody.
00:40:03.734 --> 00:40:08.097
Oh, Brandy. I guess Mandy's a little bit better than Brandy,
00:40:08.097 --> 00:40:10.098
but we're really splitting hairs here.
00:40:10.419 --> 00:40:14.841
So this song actually does have a connection to high school and crushes after all.
00:40:15.222 --> 00:40:16.342
Isn't that crazy?
00:40:16.943 --> 00:40:24.047
Wow, but you know, what's funny is that song facts says that Mandy was a common
00:40:24.047 --> 00:40:28.751
name for the 1970s recreational drug, the quaalude or the mandrake.
00:40:29.412 --> 00:40:30.792
No, fuck that shit.
00:40:30.792 --> 00:40:34.556
And Manolo was in recovery when he wrote the song. No way.
00:40:34.556 --> 00:40:37.138
That's song facts. Check your shit.
00:40:37.138 --> 00:40:40.560
Check your shit, man. That doesn't make any sense. I don't even I don't think
00:40:40.560 --> 00:40:44.403
that that's actually the facts. But that's funny that that's there.
00:40:44.403 --> 00:40:49.767
That's so funny. Yes, I don't think so. But I would pay to hear a version of
00:40:49.767 --> 00:40:53.490
the song that's like, oh, quaaludes, where you came and you gave without taking.
00:40:54.030 --> 00:40:58.213
But I do, yeah, I do love that, especially it is not just high school,
00:40:58.213 --> 00:41:01.995
but it is this longing, right? This longing for nostalgia and this longing for
00:41:01.995 --> 00:41:03.376
the girl that he like lost.
00:41:04.077 --> 00:41:07.699
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but before I just wanna pop in too,
00:41:07.699 --> 00:41:11.421
that Cora says, and again.
00:41:11.421 --> 00:41:13.503
We're scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
00:41:14.764 --> 00:41:21.027
Laura says that Mandy slash Brandy is a cover, technically. And the song was
00:41:21.027 --> 00:41:22.527
written by Scott English. Yeah.
00:41:25.536 --> 00:41:27.097
Is it the duo? Did you just say this?
00:41:27.097 --> 00:41:32.780
I did. So it was written by Scott English and Richard Kerr. So technically a
00:41:32.780 --> 00:41:37.803
cover because some other artist recorded it first, but it wasn't really like a popular hit.
00:41:39.264 --> 00:41:43.227
I'm a little skeptical about this photograph thing too, because Manolo was not
00:41:43.227 --> 00:41:48.330
the first person to record the song and didn't seem like he had a hand in writing
00:41:48.330 --> 00:41:49.271
it. So I don't I don't know.
00:41:49.661 --> 00:41:55.014
But fun fact, the film takes place on Wednesday, June 17, 1998,
00:41:55.014 --> 00:41:58.536
which was Barry Manilow's 55th birthday.
00:41:58.536 --> 00:42:01.257
It was also the day after my 12th birthday.
00:42:01.498 --> 00:42:03.158
You and the Manilow, one day apart.
00:42:03.999 --> 00:42:08.781
You know what's funny? I actually met Barry Manilow once, and I have a signed
00:42:08.781 --> 00:42:14.743
copy of the record that Mandy was on, but I did not get to ask him the question.
00:42:18.145 --> 00:42:18.735
I did not,
00:42:42.876 --> 00:42:48.259
get a very specific memory of that song as well.
00:42:48.740 --> 00:42:54.464
I was very into any sort of like schmaltzy song about longing.
00:42:54.464 --> 00:42:58.907
I don't know that I would necessarily call this song schmaltzy, but like, you know,
00:42:58.907 --> 00:43:03.240
as I was kind of thinking about this podcast recording, I was going back through
00:43:03.240 --> 00:43:09.475
my childhood journals and I would write down all the lyrics to the songs that
00:43:09.475 --> 00:43:11.596
I was listening to and my feelings about them.
00:43:11.596 --> 00:43:17.160
So like, Have You Ever by Brandy, Have You Ever Loved Something So Much You Cry.
00:43:17.560 --> 00:43:20.362
That song is about longing. Right?
00:43:20.362 --> 00:43:24.365
Um, you know, we mentioned Tonic earlier, the song If You Could Only See.
00:43:25.586 --> 00:43:29.659
That song. And then Farther Down by Matthew Sweet was one of those songs.
00:43:41.617 --> 00:43:44.959
I would write down the lyrics in my journal right alongside
00:43:44.959 --> 00:43:50.103
all my feelings both about Seth Green and about the kid that I had a crush on
00:43:50.103 --> 00:44:00.730
at school and just like wax on and on about how lonely I was and how sad I was
00:44:00.730 --> 00:44:02.611
and I would like lay in bed.
00:44:02.662 --> 00:44:07.595
I had this little Walkman, a CD Walkman, and I would play the Can't Hardly Wait
00:44:07.595 --> 00:44:14.240
soundtrack on my headphones as I was going to sleep and like cry in bed listening
00:44:14.240 --> 00:44:18.556
to this song about how like lonely I was and how no one would ever love me and
00:44:18.556 --> 00:44:21.004
why wouldn't these boys at school love me.
00:44:22.085 --> 00:44:26.988
But like this song got it and like it's the longing that Matthew Sweet sings
00:44:26.988 --> 00:44:31.552
about matched my longing and it was like a lifeline for me.
00:44:32.062 --> 00:44:38.316
I'm wondering if this is like a perfect collision of yes all of these feelings
00:44:38.316 --> 00:44:43.380
in these songs and in the film are true and real.
00:44:43.380 --> 00:44:50.485
But the age that we were, we're experiencing romantic love and longing and heartbreak
00:44:50.485 --> 00:44:53.807
and loneliness so significantly for the first time.
00:44:53.807 --> 00:44:57.830
And we like don't know how to like turn on the dampeners or like,
00:44:57.830 --> 00:44:59.531
you know, like deal with these things.
00:44:59.531 --> 00:45:03.200
And so there is this pure uncut,
00:45:03.200 --> 00:45:07.107
like Colombian heartbreak that we are,
00:45:07.107 --> 00:45:09.799
that we're experiencing through this movie, through this soundtrack,
00:45:09.799 --> 00:45:15.443
I would add Waiting for a Girl Like You on that list of longing songs,
00:45:15.443 --> 00:45:19.526
the foreigner song that Preston is listening to on the radio.
00:45:19.526 --> 00:45:20.407
Love Hurts.
00:45:20.407 --> 00:45:24.200
And Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits, also in this movie.
00:45:25.411 --> 00:45:25.911
Incredible song.
00:45:25.911 --> 00:45:30.015
Love that song. That was like one of my favorite longing love songs in high school.
00:45:30.475 --> 00:45:31.476
Also from the scene.
00:45:31.476 --> 00:45:34.664
Yeah. The Dire Straits is one of my all-time favorite bands.
00:45:34.664 --> 00:45:36.370
Not- The Sultans of Swing.
00:45:36.370 --> 00:45:39.339
And not in small part due to the sun.
00:46:02.619 --> 00:46:07.863
This song and its placement in Empire Records, another Ethan Embry movie,
00:46:07.863 --> 00:46:11.786
there's so many like little fun connections. Parallels. Yeah.
00:46:12.607 --> 00:46:19.052
And so that placement and then this placement, I just like could not get enough of that song.
00:46:19.732 --> 00:46:22.715
Have we heard the Killers cover of that song?
00:46:22.715 --> 00:46:24.076
I have not.
00:46:24.076 --> 00:46:26.678
Dare I say better than the original.
00:46:28.019 --> 00:46:28.819
Wow, I gotta hear it.
00:46:28.819 --> 00:46:33.823
And I love the original, but the killer's cover of Romeo and Juliet is incredibly good.
00:46:36.465 --> 00:46:39.791
Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start. And I.
00:46:54.057 --> 00:46:59.541
Just that the time was wrong. Juliet. Well,
00:46:59.541 --> 00:47:08.126
all of this discussion of longing and not knowing how to use one's words to
00:47:08.126 --> 00:47:13.830
get that out is a huge theme within the song that the movie is named for.
00:47:13.830 --> 00:47:18.913
Can't Hardly Wait, it encompasses, like the song by The Replacements,
00:47:18.913 --> 00:47:20.494
encompasses that feeling.
00:47:21.115 --> 00:47:26.278
Like, I did write down some of the first lyrics, which is, I'll write you a letter tomorrow.
00:47:27.440 --> 00:47:31.703
Tonight, I can't hold a pen. Someone's got a stamp that I can borrow.
00:47:31.703 --> 00:47:33.905
I promise not to blow the address again.
00:47:47.899 --> 00:47:51.141
I also absolutely adore the song, adore the replacements.
00:47:52.002 --> 00:47:55.064
This is on Nice to Meet Me, right? There's like a- Pleased to Meet Me.
00:47:55.245 --> 00:47:56.305
Pleased to Meet Me, sorry.
00:47:56.746 --> 00:48:02.250
There's like an extended version of that record where you can hear a demo of Can't Hardly Wait,
00:48:02.250 --> 00:48:06.933
and the first line is, I'll be there in an hour, which I also think is like
00:48:06.933 --> 00:48:12.678
a great like in media res song writing, like I'm on my way.
00:48:12.678 --> 00:48:18.212
But yeah, I think that this song is so good. And was it like a giant popular
00:48:18.212 --> 00:48:23.796
song at the time? Or did they just like name a whole movie around it and use
00:48:23.796 --> 00:48:26.068
it as the credit song because it was just that good?
00:48:26.488 --> 00:48:32.252
I think that, well, The Replacements are, they've always kind of held that like
00:48:32.252 --> 00:48:39.817
cult favorite, like punk influencer place in music history.
00:48:39.817 --> 00:48:43.700
I mean, I remember finding out about them because I was a big Green Day fan.
00:48:44.221 --> 00:48:48.624
And Billy Joe Armstrong, in an interview, was talking about how much he loved
00:48:48.624 --> 00:48:52.607
The Replacements and how they really informed Green Day's sound,
00:48:52.607 --> 00:48:54.008
at least in the beginning.
00:48:54.008 --> 00:48:59.032
And so while The Replacements song that we're talking about came out in the
00:48:59.032 --> 00:49:05.837
mid 80s, I don't know that it was necessarily like zeitgeisty like 10 years later.
00:49:05.837 --> 00:49:11.221
Yeah, I don't think so either. I mean, I think the creators of the movie probably
00:49:11.221 --> 00:49:14.703
just plucked it out of obscurity because they love that song so much.
00:49:14.703 --> 00:49:17.625
If you think about it, they were probably the age...
00:49:19.367 --> 00:49:23.309
Now, this is speculation, but they were probably the age that their characters
00:49:23.309 --> 00:49:26.552
are when Can't Hardly Wait came out.
00:49:26.892 --> 00:49:30.634
That's my guess too, is this is the song that they would have been listening to,
00:49:30.634 --> 00:49:36.532
unlike basically every other song on the soundtrack, except for maybe it's tricky
00:49:36.532 --> 00:49:42.966
and honestly maybe Mandy that like this feels like a window into the filmmakers,
00:49:46.261 --> 00:49:49.523
Tastes and you know, they named the movie after it, but the filmmakers also
00:49:49.523 --> 00:49:55.548
do make a voice cameo in The very beginning they're the ones talking about the
00:49:55.548 --> 00:49:59.171
party over the opening Title of the movie.
00:49:59.171 --> 00:50:04.375
They're the ones talking about with anyone and I'm not going with anyone So
00:50:04.375 --> 00:50:10.240
the last Neildrop that I think we we can't finish an episode about can't hardly
00:50:10.240 --> 00:50:13.923
wait without without talking about the Loveburger performance that wasn't.
00:50:14.594 --> 00:50:16.425
Which leads into Paradise City.
00:50:16.985 --> 00:50:20.188
Yeah, Paradise City featuring William Lichter.
00:50:20.708 --> 00:50:28.674
Yeah, I did get some insight into Placing Paradise City, which is kind of a
00:50:28.674 --> 00:50:31.056
huge get when you really think about it.
00:50:31.617 --> 00:50:38.021
That's a huge song. I had not heard of that song personally at around 10 years old.
00:50:41.504 --> 00:50:47.048
Same. Yeah, in the 2018 Billboard interview, I found where Ralph Saul,
00:50:47.048 --> 00:50:50.830
the music supervisor for Can't Hardly Wait, is describing getting GNR.
00:50:53.312 --> 00:50:57.825
He's, I guess, talking to the author Gil Kaufman about how given the band's
00:50:57.825 --> 00:51:03.639
difficult reputation, he wasn't so sure that they would end up getting Paradise
00:51:03.639 --> 00:51:05.360
City for the scene in question.
00:51:06.341 --> 00:51:11.735
that Guns N' Roses had been given, I guess like their first ever movie placement
00:51:11.735 --> 00:51:16.308
with Sweet Child of Mine in the 1988 horror movie, Bad Dreams.
00:51:16.308 --> 00:51:18.229
Oh yeah. Have you seen that?
00:51:18.229 --> 00:51:18.989
No.
00:51:18.989 --> 00:51:20.330
I hope not. I have not.
00:51:21.011 --> 00:51:25.474
It sounds like one of those like really cheese ball 80s horror movies.
00:51:25.894 --> 00:51:30.097
I think that, without knowing anything about it, that sounds pretty on point, but.
00:51:30.578 --> 00:51:36.643
Their songs also feature heavily in Terminator 2, colon judgment day. Mm hmm.
00:51:37.746 --> 00:51:39.828
Well, that's probably going to be a bigger paycheck, right?
00:51:40.992 --> 00:51:42.412
Huge paycheck for them, yeah.
00:51:42.412 --> 00:51:44.739
You could expect from Can't Hardly Wait, but.
00:51:45.876 --> 00:51:51.280
It sounds like the music supervisor and the band had a pre-existing good relationship.
00:51:51.700 --> 00:51:58.805
One of my favorite facts about Paradise City is that Slash does not like the
00:51:58.805 --> 00:52:02.607
lyrics to Paradise City and prefers the original,
00:52:02.607 --> 00:52:08.611
which is, quote, take me down to the Paradise City where the girls are fat and they got big titties.
00:52:11.594 --> 00:52:15.256
And he said, quote, we all, we being the band, all thought it it was funny,
00:52:15.256 --> 00:52:16.998
but it wasn't going to make it onto the album.
00:52:17.878 --> 00:52:22.842
Once they got permission to use Can't Hardly Wait, this because the movie Can't
00:52:22.842 --> 00:52:25.764
Hardly Wait was initially titled The Party.
00:52:25.764 --> 00:52:26.184
Right.
00:52:26.775 --> 00:52:31.048
And once they got approval from the replacements, then they just decided to
00:52:31.048 --> 00:52:32.329
call the movie Can't Hardly Wait.
00:52:32.329 --> 00:52:35.811
Which is a good change, pretty woman-esque change.
00:52:36.933 --> 00:52:42.236
It's so funny to me in retrospect that this movie is PG-13, given that it is
00:52:42.236 --> 00:52:44.538
about teens drinking and doing drugs.
00:52:45.619 --> 00:52:49.122
And I wonder if they would have been able to use Paradise City in the movie
00:52:49.122 --> 00:52:51.384
at all if it had had those original lyrics.
00:52:51.964 --> 00:52:53.145
Funny that you should mention that
00:52:53.145 --> 00:52:55.967
because this is a very William Lichter moment. So let me set the scene.
00:52:56.608 --> 00:53:00.311
Loveburger has broken up. Loveburger is like the house band that has been hired
00:53:00.311 --> 00:53:03.994
to play at the party featuring Breckenmeyer and Donald Faison.
00:53:04.795 --> 00:53:08.777
And they break up. Someone throws on Paradise City on like the,
00:53:08.777 --> 00:53:10.779
whatever, the mix tape, the mix CD.
00:53:11.840 --> 00:53:17.323
William, drunk on beer, recognizes the song, gets up and sings Paradise City
00:53:17.323 --> 00:53:20.406
and becomes like a rock god very briefly.
00:53:20.406 --> 00:53:24.008
I know this song. The guy who tutored me in math used to make me listen to it.
00:53:26.010 --> 00:53:29.252
Hey, I know this song. I know this song. I know this song. The guy who tutored.
00:53:52.570 --> 00:53:59.234
And so, in the scenes previous to that, William is getting drunk accidentally, right?
00:54:00.196 --> 00:54:05.899
He's supposed to know his limits, but he's 17, and he gets kind of shit-faced.
00:54:06.760 --> 00:54:08.562
William, you could get drunk.
00:54:08.562 --> 00:54:10.012
You could get addicted.
00:54:14.627 --> 00:54:18.909
So, William originally takes tequila shots in the scene,
00:54:18.909 --> 00:54:26.474
and that had to be changed to him squeezing some lemon into his mouth because
00:54:26.474 --> 00:54:31.076
the depiction of underage drinking would have earned the movie an R rating,
00:54:31.076 --> 00:54:32.576
and they didn't want that.
00:54:33.000 --> 00:54:38.664
So, it's like a very similar thing of the small changes that make it more palatable
00:54:38.664 --> 00:54:39.725
for this broader audience.
00:54:40.526 --> 00:54:45.480
I read that one of the extras in the background was like,
00:54:45.480 --> 00:54:52.055
taking a, like a beer bong hit, or like, God, what's that thing called where
00:54:52.055 --> 00:54:55.958
you like, poke a hole in a can of beer, shotgun it?
00:54:55.958 --> 00:55:00.562
You shotgun it. Yeah. He was shotgunning a beer, and they had to use CGI to
00:55:00.562 --> 00:55:03.384
instead make it look like he was blowing up a balloon.
00:55:03.384 --> 00:55:05.425
Sure.
00:55:05.425 --> 00:55:08.807
And apparently it's in the scene in the background when Amanda first walks into
00:55:08.807 --> 00:55:13.130
the party, but I watched the scene like four times looking for it and could not find it.
00:55:13.130 --> 00:55:19.635
Yeah, I think that they also used CGI to replace the tequila glass with the
00:55:19.635 --> 00:55:26.079
lemon, which is like very interesting for 1998 for them to throw like VFX money
00:55:26.079 --> 00:55:27.760
at stuff to not get an R rating.
00:55:27.760 --> 00:55:32.404
I mean, they saved money on a lot of other things. So I guess they had a little spare budget.
00:55:32.404 --> 00:55:33.525
I guess so.
00:55:33.525 --> 00:55:39.729
I think every shot of this movie is its own like Garden of Earthly Delights level of intricacy.
00:55:41.250 --> 00:55:46.434
Because in any given shot, there are like 17 things going on in the background,
00:55:46.434 --> 00:55:50.787
which I think just speaks to the level of filmmaking here that you could watch
00:55:50.787 --> 00:55:55.261
this movie a million times, pause it and then notice new things in the background every time.
00:55:56.201 --> 00:56:01.525
I quickly wanted to touch on something, I think, Aviv, like you mentioned how
00:56:01.525 --> 00:56:05.108
they had to change the rating, because like originally this was going to be
00:56:05.108 --> 00:56:07.770
an R rated movie and then they changed it to PG-13.
00:56:08.531 --> 00:56:13.504
And there was a really good oral history in The Ringer from I believe 2018.
00:56:15.396 --> 00:56:20.700
And Ethan Embry is talking about how like all the stuff that didn't make it
00:56:20.700 --> 00:56:22.903
into the final cut of the movie because of that rating.
00:56:24.345 --> 00:56:30.611
The irony, the article says, that a lot of the stuff that the directors were forced to cut,
00:56:32.302 --> 00:56:38.766
would definitely fly today, but also in the years since Can't Hardly Wait came
00:56:38.766 --> 00:56:41.368
out, like American Pie was obviously a huge hit.
00:56:43.209 --> 00:56:46.692
Yeah, right after this. Right after this, and there was like this blow up in
00:56:46.692 --> 00:56:50.234
the late 90s and early 2000s of raunchy teen movies.
00:56:50.795 --> 00:56:55.178
Yeah, it's weird. The filmmakers themselves are,
00:56:55.178 --> 00:57:02.663
I think, a little raunchier than this movie would indicate because they also
00:57:02.663 --> 00:57:09.488
did the like very satirical and I know Eleanor Kagan beloved film,
00:57:09.488 --> 00:57:10.969
Josie and the Pussycats.
00:57:11.350 --> 00:57:12.250
Oh, absolutely.
00:57:13.191 --> 00:57:14.432
Which reunites Loveburger.
00:57:14.432 --> 00:57:19.556
Which reunites Loveburger as du jour. But yeah, I think, I mean,
00:57:19.556 --> 00:57:22.978
I think the movie is great and it's very genuine, right?
00:57:22.978 --> 00:57:27.802
Like there is a lot of real pathos in the characters' stories,
00:57:27.802 --> 00:57:33.586
but it would be fun to have, like, release the R-rated cut of this movie, you cowards.
00:57:34.687 --> 00:57:41.111
Apparently some of those deleted scenes are on the 10-year and 20-year reunion DVD Blu-rays.
00:57:43.694 --> 00:57:47.597
Mine has not arrived from eBay yet, but I will watch them and report back,
00:57:47.597 --> 00:57:50.099
and then you can update your listeners in a future episode.
00:57:50.439 --> 00:57:54.182
Please do. The last song I wanna mention on the soundtrack is just personally for me,
00:57:54.182 --> 00:57:58.845
the scene where Preston and Amanda finally get together, spoilers,
00:57:58.845 --> 00:58:06.110
is set to Yazu's Only You, which is the song that my wife walked down the aisle to at our wedding.
00:58:06.110 --> 00:58:06.960
Aw.
00:58:06.960 --> 00:58:07.811
Yeah.
00:58:07.811 --> 00:58:10.512
I know. That's disgusting.
00:58:43.879 --> 00:58:47.441
When that started playing, I was like, hell yeah, can't hardly wait.
00:58:48.462 --> 00:58:52.925
So, fun fact, both Rachel and Eleanor were at my wedding, so they experienced
00:58:52.925 --> 00:58:57.829
this. This is just for you listeners to know that I did get to marry Amanda Beckett.
00:58:58.870 --> 00:59:03.293
We need to dedicate an episode specifically to Aviv's wedding ceremony. --Great.
00:59:03.293 --> 00:59:04.954
--Ha ha ha.
00:59:04.954 --> 00:59:06.496
Best wedding ceremony I've ever seen.
00:59:06.496 --> 00:59:07.516
The oral history.
00:59:07.817 --> 00:59:09.437
The oral history of El Portico.
00:59:10.939 --> 00:59:17.344
So, Yazu's Only You and 311's All Mixed Up are just two examples of songs that
00:59:17.344 --> 00:59:19.945
were in the movie but didn't make it onto the soundtrack.
00:59:20.526 --> 00:59:26.070
And in that Billboard interview that I cited earlier, Ralph Saul talks about
00:59:26.070 --> 00:59:32.594
the small fraction of songs that did make it onto the soundtrack initially.
00:59:32.594 --> 00:59:37.197
And he said there are 15 songs on the soundtrack, but more than 50 in the movie.
00:59:37.618 --> 00:59:42.141
So what made the soundtrack was an interesting dance. A lot of it was informed
00:59:42.141 --> 00:59:44.562
by the fact that Elektra Records released the album,
00:59:44.562 --> 00:59:48.545
so naturally some of the labels acts got precedence, while others,
00:59:48.545 --> 00:59:53.568
the aforementioned Yazoo, Only You, and 311's all mixed up, didn't.
00:59:54.790 --> 00:59:59.472
He also said that if he could release a 20th anniversary edition today,
00:59:59.472 --> 01:00:05.816
then Saul would definitely make it a double disc with some guaranteed,
01:00:05.816 --> 01:00:10.258
as Billboard says, party starters like tone locks, funky cold medina, tone lock.
01:00:11.798 --> 01:00:17.361
Tone Loke, damn it. I have to tell you about the time that I accidentally called Suge Knight.
01:00:18.602 --> 01:00:21.124
Suge Knight? Did he hang you out of a window and threaten to kill you?
01:00:22.485 --> 01:00:25.687
No, this was like back in 2015 when I was just starting to work at Spit.
01:00:25.687 --> 01:00:27.588
I hung myself out the window that day.
01:00:30.030 --> 01:00:34.192
So Tone Loke's Funky Cold Nadina and D. Light's Groove is in the Heart, a classic.
01:00:34.192 --> 01:00:39.236
Interesting. They create the soundtrack with a lot of new songs,
01:00:39.236 --> 01:00:41.417
old songs, rock, rap, pop.
01:00:41.458 --> 01:00:47.462
So it feels like a mix tape or a mix CD that would be played at a party.
01:00:47.462 --> 01:00:49.164
Like an actual party soundtrack.
01:00:49.164 --> 01:00:54.568
I always loved the needle drop of Don't Leave Me This Way by Thelma Houston in the movie.
01:00:54.988 --> 01:01:00.372
It's the moment when Freddie Rodriguez, who's one of Mike Dexter's boys,
01:01:00.372 --> 01:01:04.996
is making out with his girlfriend and Mike tries to remind him that they had
01:01:04.996 --> 01:01:07.858
all planned to also break up with their girlfriends, but he doesn't want to
01:01:07.858 --> 01:01:10.720
because her parents are out of town and they have mirrors above the bed.
01:01:13.603 --> 01:01:14.963
Another Six Feet Under alum.
01:01:15.824 --> 01:01:20.897
Yeah, a lot of Six Feet Under alums. And there's a lot of weird connected tissue
01:01:20.897 --> 01:01:25.170
with some of this movie is such a who's who of 90s actors.
01:01:25.170 --> 01:01:33.636
So you've got Amber Benson, who plays Tara in Buffy and Seth Green also later on in Buffy.
01:01:34.697 --> 01:01:39.570
And oh, there's also a a great moment when Jason Segel, who pops up in the movie,
01:01:39.570 --> 01:01:44.924
he has this line about how you know who is always underrated Velma from Scooby-Doo.
01:01:45.845 --> 01:01:50.529
And he was in Freaks and Geeks with Linda Cardellini, who played Velma in Scooby-Doo.
01:01:50.989 --> 01:01:52.010
How the fuck about that?
01:01:52.010 --> 01:01:52.890
And they dated.
01:01:52.890 --> 01:01:53.771
And they dated.
01:01:54.171 --> 01:01:55.052
And they dated.
01:01:55.052 --> 01:01:59.075
We're a veritable IMDb trivia right here.
01:01:59.996 --> 01:02:05.442
And Daphne in Scooby-Doo, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy for going back to Buffy.
01:02:05.442 --> 01:02:06.244
Indeed.
01:02:06.244 --> 01:02:08.607
All right. fine. That one can't hardly wait.
01:02:08.607 --> 01:02:09.749
They're not always just.
01:02:10.477 --> 01:02:13.239
Just the six degrees from game in the 90s.
01:02:13.239 --> 01:02:17.762
It really, especially of this era, right? So there's, I think,
01:02:17.762 --> 01:02:24.747
an interesting appraisal of movies and music made for teenagers.
01:02:25.107 --> 01:02:28.269
When they come out, it's always like the sky is falling, right?
01:02:28.269 --> 01:02:33.213
It's the end of the art form. The kids aren't all right. They're listening to all this nonsense.
01:02:33.793 --> 01:02:37.897
And then as the kids and the teens get older and more nostalgic,
01:02:37.897 --> 01:02:41.599
they appraise things like too highly sometimes in the opposite direction.
01:02:41.599 --> 01:02:45.362
So like, how our parents sat us in front of the Beatles and the Stones and the
01:02:45.362 --> 01:02:50.456
Who, and puzzling for my dad, The Doors, and mediocre Western movies or dramas.
01:02:51.267 --> 01:02:57.704
And I think it's so interesting that this movie is all about nostalgia,
01:02:57.704 --> 01:03:04.376
and like in Back to the Future, when they shoot the 80s like a commercial for the 80s,
01:03:04.817 --> 01:03:11.241
they're looking at the present through the lens of nostalgia already,
01:03:11.241 --> 01:03:16.315
which is, I think, what makes this movie so easy to rewatch,
01:03:16.315 --> 01:03:18.526
to look back on through 2023 eyeballs.
01:03:21.769 --> 01:03:27.333
So as Ralph Saul said to Billboard, he said, quote, It's never going to be the
01:03:27.333 --> 01:03:31.436
90s again, but the appetite for soundtrack seems to be at a higher level again
01:03:31.436 --> 01:03:32.636
than it's been for a while.
01:03:33.318 --> 01:03:37.982
The job of making soundtracks is a byproduct of enhancing the experience of
01:03:37.982 --> 01:03:42.467
the movie, so hopefully the choices make it better at any given moment and bolster
01:03:42.467 --> 01:03:46.331
a scene that would have been less impactful without the perfect song choice.
01:03:47.109 --> 01:03:55.334
I think also at this moment in time for for us as like tweens in 1998-1999,
01:03:55.334 --> 01:04:00.358
it wasn't like you could just go to like YouTube or Spotify and play these songs.
01:04:00.358 --> 01:04:05.561
You either had to, you know, wait for them to come on the radio or on MTV or
01:04:05.561 --> 01:04:10.365
rewatch the movie or save up your allowance and buy the CD soundtrack or the
01:04:10.365 --> 01:04:14.568
single or like maybe you could find them as an mp3
01:04:14.638 --> 01:04:19.251
on the internet to play on Winamp because this was like just before Napster.
01:04:19.591 --> 01:04:20.732
Early Napster, yeah.
01:04:21.112 --> 01:04:25.234
So it's not like these songs were just easily findable.
01:04:26.796 --> 01:04:31.419
You had to put some effort into it or just wait. And so having this soundtrack
01:04:31.419 --> 01:04:35.441
was like you would listen to these songs over and over and over again and maybe
01:04:35.441 --> 01:04:40.324
they came on the radio but you created these deep relationships with them by that proximity.
01:04:40.925 --> 01:04:45.087
And also like the transitions that they used within like the soundtrack.
01:04:45.087 --> 01:04:49.871
So on one hand, you have an album that like one artist makes and you just like
01:04:49.871 --> 01:04:53.994
think of the transitions that create the entirety of the album.
01:04:53.994 --> 01:04:57.857
But then like, if you didn't have that album by the one artist,
01:04:57.857 --> 01:05:01.760
but you just have like a movie soundtrack, then you associate like one song
01:05:01.760 --> 01:05:06.184
with a completely different artist that comes on next given how it was sequenced.
01:05:06.805 --> 01:05:11.908
Yeah, I mean, and we talk a lot about 90s movies on this show or movies up to
01:05:11.908 --> 01:05:16.912
like a certain point where like, as Ralph Saul said, like the golden age of
01:05:16.912 --> 01:05:19.334
the movie soundtrack, which went away for a while.
01:05:19.334 --> 01:05:24.297
And I think it went away for a while, due to filmmaking trends,
01:05:24.297 --> 01:05:28.640
but also due to how easy it was to pull these songs off the internet.
01:05:28.640 --> 01:05:34.144
And it makes the needle drops less iconic. But it also could be that we millennials
01:05:34.144 --> 01:05:37.886
are doing the same thing as our parents did, and holding up these moments from
01:05:37.886 --> 01:05:43.110
our childhood or formative years as like underappreciated in their time as these masterpieces.
01:05:43.630 --> 01:05:46.632
Can't Hardly Wait has a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes.
01:05:47.473 --> 01:05:50.835
And I think that that's low, but I also don't think it's like,
01:05:50.835 --> 01:05:55.157
I don't think it's like a 90% should belongs a 90%.
01:05:55.478 --> 01:05:59.870
Half the songs on the soundtrack are also these like, we look at them through
01:05:59.870 --> 01:06:05.303
a lens of like partial mockery and partial nostalgia like Smash Mouths which
01:06:05.303 --> 01:06:07.325
we talked about a couple weeks ago,
01:06:07.325 --> 01:06:14.473
311, Eve 6, Creed, all of these songs feel good and and they feel like good
01:06:14.473 --> 01:06:17.384
pieces of art, but they also feel like a little cheesy.
01:06:19.953 --> 01:06:23.275
because they represent so strongly this time and place.
01:06:23.776 --> 01:06:30.161
It also kind of represents like which door you opened in your personal taste
01:06:30.161 --> 01:06:37.476
the year that they came out because a lot of people did like Creed and 311 and Smash Mouth,
01:06:37.476 --> 01:06:42.336
but if you thought of yourself in a certain way as a music consumer,
01:06:42.336 --> 01:06:45.112
then you would never like these bands.
01:06:45.872 --> 01:06:52.157
I mean, it's like time has flattened as millennial nostalgia has increased.
01:06:52.958 --> 01:06:58.382
So today, I think we've talked about this before, but like new metal has kind
01:06:58.382 --> 01:07:01.065
of taken on an entirely different meaning.
01:07:01.065 --> 01:07:06.709
It's bad, man. Because Gen Z has reanimated it, but they wear it slightly differently.
01:07:06.709 --> 01:07:10.492
There's like a hint of irony, but it's also really, really fashionable.
01:07:10.952 --> 01:07:13.514
And they're also doing the same thing with emo. It's like, yeah,
01:07:13.514 --> 01:07:15.736
things are folding in on themselves.
01:07:15.736 --> 01:07:18.438
Is this movie our generation's American graffiti?
01:07:19.039 --> 01:07:23.302
I think it might be, right? Because, and I keep going back to the comparison
01:07:23.302 --> 01:07:28.225
of Dazed and Confused, which is like the arthouse version of Can't Hardly Wait.
01:07:28.546 --> 01:07:33.069
But that is already looking back on a previous time.
01:07:33.890 --> 01:07:37.272
It was made in 93. It's about one day in 1976.
01:07:37.472 --> 01:07:45.849
This movie does a truly incredible job of accurately depicting what our millennial
01:07:45.849 --> 01:07:52.184
nostalgia would be looking back on this film 15, 20, 25 years later.
01:07:53.465 --> 01:07:59.689
This movie holds up in the way that, you know, just to take a recent example
01:07:59.689 --> 01:08:03.252
from your show, if somebody was watching Shrek for the first time in 2023,
01:08:03.892 --> 01:08:06.675
you know, they would probably enjoy it.
01:08:06.675 --> 01:08:11.358
But if you were watching Can't Hardly Wait in 2023, not having this previous
01:08:11.358 --> 01:08:15.462
relationship with it. I think there's a lot of things that would land really
01:08:15.462 --> 01:08:18.584
differently and probably land really poorly. Yeah, yes.
01:08:19.025 --> 01:08:23.268
But there's something about the art from our childhoods where,
01:08:23.268 --> 01:08:28.912
you know, you were mentioning this, some of these bands our movies are cringe
01:08:28.912 --> 01:08:32.335
and offensive, but we love them.
01:08:33.771 --> 01:08:37.634
Not because of, well, we loved them despite that.
01:08:37.634 --> 01:08:41.557
We were there for it. Maybe we weren't graduating that year,
01:08:41.557 --> 01:08:46.640
but it's in that corner of our brain that never gets any older.
01:08:46.640 --> 01:08:50.923
And we loved them before we had the critical thinking skills to unpack them
01:08:50.923 --> 01:08:55.397
in the way we would now as adults. And so we can both love them unironically
01:08:55.397 --> 01:09:00.340
from the child part of ourselves, but also critique them from the adult part of ourselves.
01:09:00.340 --> 01:09:04.113
And that goes for the movie too. But the thing that I'm fascinated by is like
01:09:04.113 --> 01:09:08.956
a lot of these nostalgia bait movies are made about different times.
01:09:08.956 --> 01:09:12.959
So even American Graffiti was made in the 70s about the 50s.
01:09:13.580 --> 01:09:19.043
And there are so few high school movies that get high school so right that they
01:09:19.043 --> 01:09:23.526
become indelible classics to the generation that watched them.
01:09:23.526 --> 01:09:29.450
And frankly, let's be honest, like we are watching Gen Xers in the movie, right?
01:09:29.450 --> 01:09:35.275
But we were the eighth graders who were looking up to these characters as somewhat role models.
01:09:35.275 --> 01:09:41.219
But I can only think of this movie and maybe The Breakfast Club to get so right
01:09:41.219 --> 01:09:46.843
the year that they lived in, to define the year that they came out in.
01:09:46.843 --> 01:09:50.286
It's good that you bring up The Breakfast Club because Can't Hardly Wait was
01:09:50.286 --> 01:09:52.988
intended, it was like an homage to John Hughes.
01:09:52.988 --> 01:09:58.151
Sure. I can definitely see that too. So how do we appreciate,
01:09:58.151 --> 01:10:04.093
how do we learn to discern what time capsules will be right,
01:10:04.093 --> 01:10:07.334
like Can't Hardly Wait or The Breakfast Club, and what fades away,
01:10:07.334 --> 01:10:11.936
like a dozen and a half high school movies that I could list that no one's ever heard of.
01:10:11.936 --> 01:10:15.577
Those movies that we look back on and we're like, oh yeah, I remember that movie.
01:10:15.577 --> 01:10:19.959
They were so fun, but they don't hold the same, they're not on the same kind
01:10:19.959 --> 01:10:22.669
of pantheon level as can hardly wait.
01:10:23.425 --> 01:10:26.747
Well, I mean, this movie doesn't take itself too seriously,
01:10:26.747 --> 01:10:33.451
but at the same time, there's a self-awareness and deeper questions about life
01:10:33.451 --> 01:10:37.193
that you feel like you might be capable of answering as an adult,
01:10:37.193 --> 01:10:40.689
but maybe you're not capable of answering quite like at the age of 18,
01:10:40.689 --> 01:10:41.496
like you're on the precipice.
01:10:41.496 --> 01:10:45.819
Yeah, so maybe it is the pathos. It's very coming of age in like a real way
01:10:45.819 --> 01:10:48.121
that it's like Olivia Rodrigo.
01:10:48.121 --> 01:10:52.243
I mean, everyone can appreciate the questions that Olivia Rodrigo has,
01:10:52.243 --> 01:10:57.107
no matter what their age, but I mean, who doesn't?
01:10:57.107 --> 01:11:02.191
And because she taps into something in all of us, regardless of how old we are,
01:11:02.191 --> 01:11:03.552
like whether we're living through
01:11:03.552 --> 01:11:06.834
it in the now or whether we are like triggered by the memory of it.
01:11:06.834 --> 01:11:12.778
I definitely feel like the Steve Buscemi meme, hello, fellow youngsters, hello, fellow kids.
01:11:13.419 --> 01:11:20.534
But in all seriousness, I love the question that Ken Hardley asks about fate,
01:11:20.534 --> 01:11:22.206
whether or not we believe in it.
01:11:22.206 --> 01:11:32.653
And I think Denise Fleming kind of arrives at a slightly less jaded point at the end of the movie,
01:11:32.653 --> 01:11:37.577
because she is obviously incredibly smart.
01:11:37.577 --> 01:11:42.201
She's a really smart character, but she's totally over everyone around her.
01:11:42.201 --> 01:11:45.623
thinks she just knows what everyone's going to say before they say it.
01:11:45.623 --> 01:11:51.788
And then she's truly surprised by Seth Green in a way that she never saw that
01:11:51.788 --> 01:11:55.030
kind of relationship circling back out of an old friendship.
01:11:55.030 --> 01:11:59.813
And now they've slept together on the bathroom floor. And fate,
01:11:59.813 --> 01:12:04.376
as she said, works in a really fucked up way sometimes. But she's taken on a
01:12:04.376 --> 01:12:05.517
little bit of Preston's romance.
01:12:07.419 --> 01:12:11.081
And meanwhile, Preston's been brought down to earth a little bit by his knight.
01:12:11.521 --> 01:12:17.588
Yeah, and Amanda telling him, how dare you think that I would have fallen? We haven't even spoken.
01:12:18.049 --> 01:12:26.566
I think, ultimately, the conclusion that I come to is that we only can see how good we Had it.
01:12:27.260 --> 01:12:33.024
after it's gone, right? And the bad stuff fades away and we remember all of
01:12:33.024 --> 01:12:37.287
the really truly great moments, even if they are a little cringey,
01:12:37.287 --> 01:12:39.689
kind of like the last day of high school, right?
01:12:40.150 --> 01:12:43.072
And all of those faces frozen in the yearbooks.
01:12:43.573 --> 01:12:47.816
Barring being horrifically traumatized by your high school experience,
01:12:47.816 --> 01:12:53.080
which many of us have been, there is the sense of nostalgia with art as well
01:12:53.080 --> 01:12:57.043
as with the characters in our little movie. That's all I got.
01:12:57.844 --> 01:13:02.988
Eleanor, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find your work on the internet airwaves?
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You can find my work at eleanorkagan.com. My show that I alluded to earlier,
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the two years I spent researching male strippers, resulted in a podcast called
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Welcome to Your Fantasy, which is about the history of the Chippendales dancers
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and the drama that happened within and around them.
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And I post things that I sew and make on Instagram at BloomsdayMakes.
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And we are on Instagram at the NSYNC pod. Find us there and let us know the
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answer to this question.
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What is the best thing that someone wrote in your high school yearbook?
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You can even post a picture and tag us.
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We'll choose randomly from the best answers, and the winner will get some NSYNC swag.
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Thank you for listening. And if you liked this episode, please check out our
01:13:50.225 --> 01:13:54.468
other episodes. Like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
01:13:55.259 --> 01:13:59.062
NSYNC is edited by Emily Reeves, production coordinator Kyle Bosh,
01:13:59.062 --> 01:14:03.875
social media producer Dayelle Stamfley, executive produced by Tommy West,
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original music by Taylor Barefoot.
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NSYNC is a production of Gotham West Studios.
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That's a wrap on season one of NSYNC. Thank you so much for listening.
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We're going to take a couple months off, and we'll be back later this fall with
01:14:16.848 --> 01:14:19.451
more episodes featuring your favorite needle drops.
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We will see you next time.