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For those who need a visual, here is a shot of Alyssa Milano in her pants from Double Dragon:

Sort of for kids? Paul Dini and Neal Shusterman were the writers. Dini is best known for writing the critically acclaimed "Batman: The Animated Series," "Animaniacs," and "Batman Beyond" and more. Shusterman worked on "Goosebumps" and "Animporphs." So definitely some kids movie pedigree.

The producer of my film* played one of the Jack City guys and I have talked to him at length about it. [The other guy in the commercial, is also in my film.] At the time, they were on a show called Furniture Guys, which was on PBS and The Learning Channel. He said that they were brought in quickly and there was no intention on expanding on their characters. I will ask him if he has anything to add. *Which we shot in Germantown, Philadelphia, which was where Mannequin: On the Move was also shot.

i had to look up what the video game version of Abobo looked like because I couldn't remember and must say, the film was pretty accurate

I know this topic was covered in the podcast but I want to share my first hand experience with this. My family was a camping family. We tented for awhile then eventually upgraded to a camper. Every long weekend and most of the summer was spent camping. We tended to go to the same campgrounds all the time and they were great. Then the ownership changed and they started putting in cabins and such so it was time to find new camp grounds. Now this was the late 80s and early 90s so sure enough if the campgrounds had a pool right next to it was a small shop full of cheap candy and the odd arcade machine. What child would not want to play games when surrounded by nature? We are camping one long weekend and there is a boy in the site next to ours who is about the same age as me so we start talking and decide to hang out. We explore the woods, rides bikes, etc. but eventually we pop into the shop for some snacks. There we see the arcade cabinets. There was Double Dragon and the game looked like fun. We go back to our camp sites and get some quarters and run back to the machine. The two of us start playing the game together. It was a real fun game. We were having a great time. "Look out kid I just met!" "No worries, got your back Cam Bert!" I think we only needed to continue once maybe. We were doing great. We get to the final boss and he was tricky but we quickly figured out how to beat him. The boss was downed and there were high fives a plenty. We look back at the screen and there are our two characters just standing there. The game is still going. We were both utterly confused and didn't know what was happening. We both questioned whether the game was bugged. Then as we were trying to figure out what to do, I accidentally hit his character and noticed I was hurting him. So I just proceeded to start killing his character. The new kid noticed and panicked and started trying to fight back but it was too late. I was already ahead and too skilled for him. I killed his character and the game proceeded to end. The kid was livid. He started shouting and yelling at me and I remember saying "We still beat the game." He wasn't having it he started crying and ran off to his camp site. I eventually made my way back to mine and when I got there my mom was also very upset. She explained that he had got back crying and saying it was all my fault and his mother was upset. I explained to my mom what happened and she didn't seem to care. I explained until I was blue in the face that's what we were suppose to do but she wasn't budging. I was just playing the game and that is what it wanted us to do. This was the game's fault yet somehow I am in trouble? I had to go over to his camp site and surrounded by both our families give him two quarters and apologize for killing him in the game.

Just popping in quick because I just finished rewatching the movie, but I won't have time to listen to the episode until tomorrow morning at work. BUT I WANTED TO SAY I loved this movie unironically when I was younger. Like enough that I still have a copy of it on VHS. I was ecstatic to find a used copy of Double Dragon on DVD in time for this episode. I don't know, guys. I don't know how to critique this yet. I know it's incredibly stupid, but I still have a fond nostalgia for this movie lmao (help) Anyway, I will listen to the ep tomorrow and get back and read everyone's comments. Cannot wait! "AIRMAIL!!!"

So that game image is from the video game adaptation made for the movie's release, similar to how they made Street Fighter: the Movie: the Game for the JCVD movie where they made a Mortal Kombat type game using the actor's images. In the original Double Dragon games, he looked like this: Also of the original game play style, they never had powers in the first game, but you would learn new moves as you defeated more and more enemies. You start with just punch and kick, but soon can do jump kicks, spin kicks, uppercuts, and even kneeing your opponent in the face while holding their head like it was a Muy Thai fight. The ending where you fight your brother was also a common trope for beat-em-ups of the 80s and 90s where two players would play through a whole game only to have to fight each other at the end to see who the better player was. I distinctly remember this being the end of Die Hard: Arcade where for some reason there is only one seat available on the escape helicopter and the players have to fight each other to get it, which is so weird considering you worked together to get there in the first place.

No, no, I was not. I was just a lowly PA. We were there ALL the time. Really ridiculous long hours. But we only really hung out with the other PAs and some of the Cleveland crew. A lot of the crew was from L.A., and those folks all hung together, so it was probably those folks. Stunt team. The stunt team was partying ALL the time. There's a story - that I think is true - that the stunt team famously got in trouble for rappelling down the side of the hotel they were staying in. We would drive everyone to everything, though. My friend drove Milano to the set regularly (and upset her when he wouldn't park in a handicap spot because it was closer to the set). I would drive Mark Dacascos and Scott Wolf around a lot. Took Dacascos to the dentist. He was AMAZING. Honestly, one of the nicest guys you ever met. Wolf was nice, too. Leon Russom and the guy who played the human version of Abobo - Nils Stewart. Also very friendly - and so funny. OH! And there were no smartphones or anything like that, so no GPS, so I got chewed out by some local douche when I got a little lost driving Robert Patrick and someone else to dinner one night. That was a whole thing.

They were definitely goofy in love or whatever on set. You could just tell. But they were so young, right? I think we were around the same age. I was 23 at the time. Wolf is two years older, so he was 25. Milano was 21. So just too fast too soon. PLUS ... celebrities.

I wanted to talk about their romance as well...I found a People Magazine article from March 1994 (the movie came out in November of that year) and it goes into detail about how their romance blossomed while on set. Here are some excerpts from the article: "The meeting, apparently, had the feeling of fate. “I knew it the second I met him,” says Alyssa. “I called my mom and told her, ‘This is the man I’m gonna marry.’ ” Scott couldn’t have agreed more. “I could have asked her to marry me two weeks after we met,” he says. “I’m convinced we’re like two halves of the same soul.” Their particular brand of puppy love is on display wherever they go. “It’s nice when other people notice,” says Wolf. “People get all oogily around us.” Oogily? “That’s our word,” explains Alyssa. We’re talking terminal cuteness here. To her, he’s Love Bug; he calls her Angel Face. True, Scott, who graduated from George Washington University with a finance degree before pursuing acting, was “very, very content to be single” at the time of their first meeting, he says. But a week later the two went to a dance club with film-crew members and “started playing these stupid games like 20 Questions,” recalls Alyssa. “After that we played Truth or Dare, and someone dared us to kiss. I wanted to slip that guy 20 bucks.” Scott’s resistance quickly faded. “It didn’t hurt that she was incredibly cute,” he says of his intended. “Yeah, I was physically attracted to her. I don’t know how you can be a human male and not be.” At the end of the Cleveland location shoot, a bereft Milano returned to her home in Los Angeles and wrote a page-and-a-half poem about Scott, who had five more days of shooting left. “It was real sappy,” she says. “It could have been a Hallmark card.”" "In August (1993), Scott moved into Milano’s two-bedroom, Spanish-style house in the San Fernando Valley. Then, just before Halloween, he surprised her with a 1940’s-vintage diamond engagement ring hidden in a pumpkin. After he proposed (on one knee) and she accepted, they decorated the gourd with a carved heart and the legend “Alyssa loves Scott.” “I got the ring,” she says. “I figured I’d better write that.” But my favorite quote comes at the end of the article: "She also lets people know that, cuteness aside, what she wants is a serious thing. “I really don’t want people to look at this as another couple who met on a film set,” she says. Not a chance, seconds Scott. “This is anything but that. You can interview us 25 years from now—and we’ll prove it.”" It's now 25 years since the movie came out. How'd that work out Scott?

FYI, I was a PA on the movie way back when on the Cleveland shoot. That's me in the back standing.

The gang mentions wondering why Robert Patrick would take on DOUBLE DRAGON so soon after T2. Patrick is from Cleveland (actually Bay Village, Ohio, also hometown to Patricia Heaton and RIVERDALE's Lili Rinehart). One of the producers, Alan Schecter, was also from Cleveland. He was sort of a B-movie Russo Brothers before the Russo Brothers were a thing, always trying to get films made in Cleveland. Patrick would come back to Cleveland with Schecter for RENEGADE FORCE with Michael Rooker.

this is the content we crave

A quick anecdote. While filming on the Cuyahoga, the crew accidentally turned over a small boat. One the boat? A $20,000 camera. Which, I suppose, is still somewhere on the bottom of the river. Also, while we did our best to let residents know that there would be a pretty incredible explosion on the river sometime during the summer afternoon that scene was filmed, we couldn't tell everyone. 911 was flooded with calls from people who reported the river on fire again.

A couple BTS photos for you. No digital cameras at the time this was shot, so a couple Polaroids I picked up on set.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this episode prior to posting my comments here, but I had to get this all out while it’s still fresh in my mind. So, please accept my apologies if any of my observations are covered on the podcast. Okay, the thing I think I enjoyed the most about this movie was the blatant production rip-off elements “borrowed” from other movies. The humorous commercials and television news breaks to fill-in the narrative are blatant rip-offs of RoboCop‘s commercials and Media Break segments. Shoveling trash into the engine of the Dragon’s station wagon’s engine was a rip-off of Back to the Future, as were the UPC license plates (which were also used in RoboCop II). Post apocalyptic L.A. is a rip-off from Escape from L.A.* The movie had a TMNT vibe to it, and Abobo was kind of like a mutant rip-off of Bebop and/or Rocksteady. And while we’re at it, the station wagon itself was a “nod” to National Lampoon’s Vacation. Speaking of Abobo: during the chase scene at the beginning of the movie when he and his henchmen are chasing the Dragons through the streets of New Angeles, Abobo activates a joystick controller in his truck to zero-in on the Dragon’s after they use a map to obscure Abobo’s windshield. At one point, the henchmen slaps Abobo’s hand away from the joystick and takes over, saying, “You always sucked at video games.” Instead of looking easily angered or even dejected at this cutting remark, Abobo smiles back in this sexily sinister way at his flunky. The following shots are brief, but they are framed in just the right way to make it look like Abobo and his twink henchman are giving each other frantically joyous hand jobs. Why do good, well-meaning, but ultimately short-sighted tertiary characters always keep mystically powerful shit—that if it fell into the wrong hands could spell certain doom for us all—in the most easily obtainable and constantly needing-to-be-protected-at-all-time trinkets? Just Mordor that shit and get it over with already! *Correction: Escape From L.A. came out after Double Dragon. So it looks like that movie ripped this one off.

I really loved Alyssa Milano's slow burn plan of altering the profit split between the gangs, waiting for them to notice their pay stubs were different, and then assuming the gangs would riot and overthrow Robert Patrick. Especially her restraint in just bumping up one gang's split by like 15%. I guess to be fair in this world one of those gangs would have been all accountants so they'd notice. It also shows that the communistic economic model that Robert Patrick established really seemed to be thriving up to that point. They totally controlled the nights of New Angeles with each gang taking an exactly even split.

To all my Holiday Romance nerds, have you seen this????

The person asking Amazon to send them Bruce Lee movies doesn't make sense but the is a very tenuous connection between Double Dragon and Bruce Lee. Characters in the original Double Dragon game are named after characters in Enter The Dragon. There is a Williams, Roper and Lee in both. Neither Williams or Roper made it to the Double Dragon movie because they were just generic bad guys you fought several of in the game.

This movie was bonkers. A specific detail that I have been hung up on for the past week is the fact that the computer system in the car that pulls up people's personal data lists their statistics (e.g. height and weight) in metric measurements (cm and kg, respectively). Did the earthquake cause America to abandon the imperial measurement system? Does the collapse of freedom units in Los Angeles have anything to do with the simultaneous deterioration of civic society, or is it simply coincidental?

I don't have much to say about the movie but I just want to plug how great Mark Dacoscos is in Brotherhood of the Wolf.

As others have said the soundtrack outlasts the movie (except for the piano duet -- that works wonderfully for me on the screen and not so much on the soundtrack). It also seems a little strange that Zac would be a rope master during his duet with Zendaya. It would have worked for me more if he had taken a "leap of faith" and let her hold him to show his love for her instead of him matching her in some spots. My other big part is Charity's role over all. Her character was great as a kid and on the rooftop where he gives his daughter the projector. She was good during the hammering song and when she shows that she bought the 3 tickets. After that she kind of disappears. It would have been good to see a slow burn on her part where he succeeds more and more and they show her increasing loneliness before she leaves him. Then she takes him back at first chance? I admit the entire movie charmed the socks off me the first time, to the point I saw it several more times in the theater. However watching it since points up the holes more. (Granted most movies do that and I try not to binge-watch TV shows for the same reason.) This was a great pick and I appreciate the chance to revisit it.

I want to bump this up because Paul Rudd was on Conan's podcast and they talked about how Rudd always shows a clip from "Mac and Me" when he's on Conan. He mentioned the other option was "Baby Geniuses" and it made me want to see it. Rudd approved!

you just hit the nail on the head