Episode 90: Spider-Man: No Way Home Swings us into 2022!

 

It seemed to take forever to get here, but Spider-Man: No Way Home arrived right before Christmas, and it was one of the best presents any of us got this year! The Planet 8 crew loved this latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and in this episode, we talk all about the movie and all the things we enjoyed. This is a spoiler-filled review, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, what are you waiting for? Go see it, and hurry on back to the podcast!

From the many interesting villains of the film, with Willem Dafoe's Goblin and Alfred Molina's Dr. Octopus foremost, to the death of Aunt May, to the appearances of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as other versions of Peter/Spidey, this movie was just packed with amazing moments and surprises. We'll do some deep dives and discuss all of this and more.

Of course, Dr. Strange is also in the film and we have to talk about his role in things and what his status is in the MCU -as well as Wong, the new Sorcerer Supreme! There're also all the implications of the multiverse rifts -where will this go in the future?

Aunt May utters the famous line, "With great power must also come great responsibility," giving Peter his guiding light, right before she passes away. Losing her gives Peter the sense of loss the other two Spider-Men have that drove them and her last words give him that moral compass he needs so much.

MJ and Ned provide Peter with support that no other Spider-Man has had. Moving forward, how will he cope without their help? And was it fair of him to not tell them who he was? 

At the end of the film, Peter/Spider-Man is reset to a place much more like the classic Spider-Man in the comics: poor, struggling, very much a street-level hero, not the galaxy-spanning hero we'd seen in Endgame. No more help from Tony Stark, from now on, he has to stand on his own two feet. No Way Home feels very much like an origin story. We're excited to see where Spidey goes next!

This episode's Sensor Sweep, we want to chat a bit about our YouTube channel. Listeners we invite you to check out our podcasts on YouTube. Bob does a nice job of adding graphics to the audio. It's another way of catching the show. We also have a few special video episodes that are not part of the regular podcast, where we've discussed things like AIP films or bad Facebook purchases! If we hit 1,000 subscribers, we can do live video, which we would really like to do. Currently we are over 300 subscribers. So please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/c/Planet8Podcast

That's a wrap! Please let us know your thoughts on Spider-Man No Way Home, our episode, or anything else you want to talk about!

Thanks for listening True Believers!

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Episode 87: Thankful for the Marvel Cinematic Universe!

 

Welcome all, and to our fellow Americans, Happy Thanksgiving! It's become a tradition here at Planet 8 for us to celebrate and be thankful for some genre-related franchise, and in the past, we've been thankful for Star Trek, Star Wars, and James Bond. This year, we are expressing our love and gratitude for the magnificent Marvel Cinematic Universe -the MCU! Now with 26 films and climbing, not to mention the MCU TV series, we've been blessed with a bountiful collection of films that created a rich, complex, and deeply rewarding experience for the viewers. 

We'll have a conversation about our early experience with the MCU, when we first started hearing about Marvel making an Iron Man film, what we thought of it and how Marvel blew us away with that and the succeeding films. 

Casting has been a big key to making the films successful, and we'll talk about our favorite castings and the ones we thought might have been crazy, but actually worked out really well. 

Of course, no discussion of the MCU would be complete without going around and talking about which Marvel movies are our favorites! With so many to choose from now, it's getting harder to pick, but we do come up with a few. Amazingly, there are few MCU films that we don't like. There may be a few that we like less...but somehow they have kept a high level of quality through the series.

The crew also talks a bit about the latest MCU film, The Eternals, so if you haven't seen that film yet, be warned! And we can't neglect all the activity on Disney Plus - four series so far, and as this episode goes live, the Hawkeye series will be hitting the airwaves in a couple of days! Where else will the Marvel Cinematic Universe go? We can't wait to see.

For the Sensor Sweep, Bob shares information about a book by his friend Norman England, Behind the Kaiju Curtain: A Journey onto Japan's Biggest Film Sets. This book is a personal record of Norman's experiences while he wrote for Fangoria and was able to visit the sets of a number of kaiju films in a professional capacity. He met many of the actors and crew on the films and the book gives you an intimate look at what went on in the Japanese film industry in the 90s. If you like kaiju films, this is a must-read! Ask for it at your local bookseller, or get it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. 

That's all for us this time. Listeners, we are also thankful for you! We appreciate you listening to us, commenting, subscribing, contacting us on Twitter and Facebook. It's great to feel a sense of community forming around Planet 8. We hope that you and yours are safe and well.

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Avengers Assemble!!