PREPARE YOUR SIX-GUNS AND YOUR BOLOGNESE AS WE DIG INTO THE TWO-FISTED ITALIAN COWBOY TALES OF THE BIGGEST YEAR IN SPAGHETTI WESTERN HISTORY!

Welcome to another multi-part exploration of a single year in genre filmmaking. Join Gabe and returning guest Patrick Ripoll as they follow up their series on the slasher films of 1981, the gialli of 1971, and the giant monster movies of 1957 with a look at the spaghetti westerns of 1968.

Gabe, a superfan and massive nerd, narrowed down a list of seventy-seven (that’s 77) films to the 15 he thinks best represent this jam-packed and particularly uneven year for the genre. In episode one of what will (probably) be three total episodes, we discuss Ferdinando Baldi’s Django, Prepare a Coffin (Italian: Preparati la bara!), Giorgio Capitani’s The Ruthless Four (Italian: Ognuno per sé), Lina Wertmüller & Piero Cristofani’s The Belle Starr Story (Italian: Il mio corpo per un poker), Enzo G. Castellari’s Johnny Hamlet (Italian: Quella sporca storia nel west), and Giorgio Stegani’s Beyond the Law (Italian: Al di là della legge).

Check out the complete list here: https://letterboxd.com/gabepowers/list/the-spaghetti-westerns-of-1968/


00:00 – Intro: What is a spaghetti western? Why 1968?

14:13 – Django, Prepare a Coffin

35:37 – The Ruthless Four

56:00 – The Belle Starr Story

1:20:01 – Johnny Hamlet

1:36:24 – Beyond the Law

1:52:12 – Outro

COME WITH US AS WE TUMBLE DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE, PASS THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, ENTER THE WARDROBE, AND RIDE A TORNADO TO OZ!

It’s time to cover one of my favorite subgenres: movies where people cross over into another world where they learn a lesson and meet a bunch of walking metaphors. This episode’s guest host, Betsy, calls these Portal Fantasies and notes similarities to the popular anime/manga Isekai genre, but I’m afraid that those titles will mess up my search results, so I’m calling them [Blank] in Wonderland Movies.

We’re trying to cover some of the rarer examples of the genre – specifically Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), Vladimir Grammatikov’s Mio, Min Mio (aka: Mio in the Land of Faraway, 1987), Hiroyuki Morita’s The Cat Returns (2002), and Gokhan Yorgancigil’s On the Count of Zero (Turkish: Sıfır Dediğimde, 2007) – but we can’t help but also talk about popular classics, like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Pan’s Labyrinth, Spirited Away, and others.

00:00 – Intro and all the important, great movies we aren’t going to cover

12:29 – Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

34:04 – Mio, Min Mio

1:07:22 – The Cat Returns

1:29:23 – On the Count of Zero

1:47:55 – Outro and other recommendations

IT’S SEQUENTIAL DRAWINGS VERSUS FLESH & BLOOD ACTORS IN A SHOWDOWN OF MULTIMEDIA PROPORTIONS!

Since the advent of filmmaking, people have been combining live-action photography with hand-drawn animation and now we’re talking about it. But this is a podcast and we don’t have time to cover a century of motion pictures, so Gabe and returning guest Tyler Foster are covering a smaller collection of movies released in the wake of Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), some inspired by its success, others that would have existed without it.

This month’s diverse slate includes Walter C. Miller’s It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown (1988), Maurizio Nichetti & Guido Manuli’s Volere Volare (To Want to Fly, 1991), Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World (1992), Jan Svankmajer’s Faust (1994), and Des McAnuff’s The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (2000). I had some issues with Tyler's audio and had to do some actual (gasp) mixing to correct it. Hopefully, I did my job well enough that it sounds relatively consistent.

00:00 – Intro

11:16 – It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown

26:18 – Volere Volare

43:09 – Cool World

1:23:07 – Faust

1:41:43 – The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle

2:02:20 – Outro