Episode 191 - Rad: LIVE!

[EvRobert 1684]

Damn you Jason for mentioning the Rad soundtrack was on Spotify. I have a new workout mix now

[jimkiler 84]

Speaking of this guy and his henchmen - if they were wanting to secure an endorsement deal with a winner of the Hellrace, why didn't they just wait until after the race was over and then propose it to the guy who won? Why did they have find the person first and then make sure they win the race? It didn't make sense to me.

 

BMX racing was too big so the winner would not be affordable to the guy and his henchmen. They did mention Coke as a sponsor so this guy did not want to get gouged from the hell track winner.

[Louisjab 50]

I'm a bit confused about Christian's job within this movie.

 

Her sponsor brought her there for a show and tell thing, but she stays for the whole thing and doesn't appear to ever be working, except for the bike boogeying.

 

She spend the rest of the movie completely helping team Rad. Also, her sponsor: Mongoose bikes! she wears her mongoose outfit during the race, but for the rest of the movie, there is no mention of her helping her sponsor rival.

[Chainsaw Starring Nic Cage 95]

I watched the Vimeo copy and there's a moment where, thanks to a really terrible editing choice, I thought the movie was going to be WAY darker than it actually was.

 

When Cru gets called out to the car for his audience with Duke Best, he's excited and nervous. He gets in and Duke says, "How would you like to be responsible for bringing BMX to all of the small towns in the USA?"

 

It then immediately cuts away -- to a nothing scene with Bart Taylor's two groupies mocking a local store.

 

We cut back to the car. Cru is now mad and Duke Best is pleading, "You don't understand it's the chance of a lifetime!"

 

The movie doesn't explain what happened in the car AT ALL. Cru just angrily says, "You and me, we don't think the same, not at all" and runs out of the car - with Best calling after him, "You'll regret this!"

 

In the moment, I presumed that Duke Best had sexually propositioned Cru. "Hey, you can be my new Bart Taylor Jr. and work the small town circuit, if you'll submit to being my own personal BMX bandit."

 

It takes the movie another 3-4 minutes to explain that Duke only proposed that Cru should throw the race for money, but why keep that a secret? Why not show that scene? Because, instead, they just showed a young teen get into a car with an old man, cut away, and then came back to the young man saying "no, no, no, no, no."

 

WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO THINK?

 

That sounds like a deliberate 80's choice to make people think he was doing just that.

[Chainsaw Starring Nic Cage 95]

 

I really hope that town isn't dumping solid waste into the lake but with those corrupt fat cats in charge, anything is possible.

 

Solid waste if they were lucky. Guys, all of those kids got leukemia, and DIED BEFORE THEY WERE 40!

[Crummy Scrimmage 188]

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXSUKNCNCMo

 

Bizarre. This is not the first time that a Simpsons bit has paralleled my life. I saw an episode where a kid sings My Ding-a-Ling at a talent show. I DID THAT many years prior. Did a lot of kids perform that song at talent shows, or did I cross paths with one of the writers in my childhood???

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

A movie of Paperboy would be even crazier than Rad. The game has the literal grim reaper try stopping you from delivering newspapers. Can you imagine Cru getting stopped on the Hell Track by death himself?

 

For those who haven't seen it:

 

Plus if Death doesn't kill you, a tornado will:

 

A Paperboy movie would also explain one of the other puzzling things about the game: if you're able to finish your paper route, you then go on a "training course" full of obstacles and opportunities for stunt jumps. That never seemed to have much relevance to newspaper delivery, even in a suburban neighborhood that's Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey meets Twister:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FL6SyBlySc

 

And if Rad and Paperboy were the same franchise, it would probably be the all time champion of the movie with the most versions of a tie-in game! The crew thought that Lawnmower Man getting 3 different games was excessive (for that particular movie, it is), and the most games for a HDGTM movie I could find was 9 for Spider-Man 3. But that pales to the cross-pRadform cornucopia of 25 different versions listed on Paperboy's Wikipedia page:

• Arcade
  
• BBC Micro
  
• Acorn Electron
  
• Commodore 16
  
• Commodore 64
  
• Commodore Plus/4
  
• Amstrad CPC
  
• ZX Spectrum
  
• Apple II
  
• TRS-80 Color Computer
  
• MS-DOS
  
• Apple IIGS
  
• NES/Famicom
  
• Amiga
  
• Atari Lynx
  
• Atari ST
  
• Master System
  
• Game Gear
  
• Sega Genesis
  
• Game Boy
  
• Game Boy Color
  
• Nintendo 64
  
• Mobile phone
  
• Xbox 360
  
• iPhone/iPod Touch
  

[joel_rosenbaum 1269]

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

One I thing I thought was odd about 'Rad' was the log-line: in a movie that features some quintessentially '80's music, including a whole slew of Australian royalty Johnny Farnham and Real Life's 'Send Me an Angel', the log-line of this film is:

 

"A Hometown Kid on His BMX Against the Best in the World. At Helltrack… The Heat Is On."

 

With a line like that, how do they not include Glenn Frey's 'The Heat is On'? It was a huge hit in 1984, and would have fit this movie perfectly for a training montage. Do you think they couldn't get the rights so subbed in a Johnny Farnham B-side instead?

 

A year later, Can't Buy Me Love was planning to be called Boy Rents Girl until they got the rights to use the Beatles song. Isn't it standard practice for movies to use a placeholder name if they can't get permission to use a song?

 

But if they really wanted the perfect video game and song tie-in, they shouldn't have looked to Paperboy, Frogger, Glenn Frey or the Beatles, but to the "really rad" hip-hop beats of this Nintendo classic - released the same year as Rad in Japan only, they could have built the movie around a preview of the American version just like how The Wizard gave a sneak peek at Super Mario Bros. 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGZv30buf-U

[gigi-tastic 2322]

 

- The parade they threw before the race was really boring, just a bunch of cars driving down the road

 

The really small town near my grandparents has a 4th of July parade every year that's pretty much this exact parade but with more John Deere tractors and firetrucks . In fact this parade is probably fancier than our town's parade is. I might actually be working at this year's parade for my local library since it's a part of our library system and we're trying to get people to vote on a millage next month. If only we could get someone to do some sweet sweet bike dancing we would get that vote passed for sure.

[gigi-tastic 2322]

 

Bed Bug City!

I honestly thought they found them floating in the river

[gigi-tastic 2322]

What makes the SAT conflict even less substantial is that the SATs are an industry, a product that is sold to students and schools, so it behooves them to have as many kids as possible take the test every year. They are also not dumb-dumbs and know that students who are in the process of applying to college are probably KINDA FUCKING BUSY, so there are multiple test-taking opportunities every semester for most school districts. Even if students can't make it to the test session in their own school district, or their school is too small to host one, they are given the opportunity to travel to a neighboring district to take the test.

 

What would have made Helltrack have more urgency is if there was a SAT session later that afternoon and Cru agreed to take the test after he finished the race, meaning he would have to rush to the nearest school, on his bike, to make it in time. Maybe that was a stipulation that his mom could give him for participation in Helltrack; that he take the the SATs that semester or else she would not sign the consent form. That way, you establish a better relationship between Cru and his mom, make Cru more sympathetic because he is willing to acquiesce to the VERY REASONABLE request from his very patient mother that he at least take the SATs, and you eliminate the unnecessary business of trying to forge his mom's signature. Maybe you still include a gag about his sister saying, "oh, well now I don't have to forge her signature for you AGAIN" or something. Also, you could have the already-exhausted Cru racing to get to the school to take the SATs, which itself would be another test of his endurance and BMXing abilities, above and beyond any of the other Helltrack competitors. Pass one test to take another!

 

EXACTLY! I didn't take the SAT's but I did take the ACT's and since I had missed the og test date at my school because I was on homebound schooling( I was constantly sick). I just ended up going to a make up date like 3 months later at a nearby school and taking it . When I was there there were several people retaking the test because you can pay to retake the SAT's and ACT's. So even if Cru took the test and flunked it he could technically take it again. In fact it would probably behoove him to take it later because now he has something to write about for his essay portion (depending on the questions available) .

[gigi-tastic 2322]

Ok can we talk about how the opening song Break the Ice is clearly the 80's guy version of Let if Go from Frozen?

 

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

Send Me An Angel is amazing in how perfectly it captures the era it came from. You could insert that song into any movie from the 80's and it would fucking work.

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

I wish I had found this sooner, but it looks like ol' Ben Grimm was a huge fan of Rad...

[DeathToMikeyBay 130]

This is one thing that bugged me about Stranger Things. It's supposed to be the 80s, but all the kids are riding around on vintage 60s and 70s bikes*. I don't think I ever saw a single kid riding anything like that during the 80s. It was all Huffy kids bikes modeled after BMX models. It was like the prop designer, rather than actually looking at what bikes kids rode in the 80s, just watched older kids movies taking place in the 50s-60s like It, Stand By Me, and The Sandlot and just used the exact same bikes there.

Come to think of it, the recent It movie had the same issue. It was supposed to be the 80s, but the kids were riding the same old bikes that the kids were in the 1990 tv movie that took place in the 60s.

 

* plus every single kid was using a light on their bike. THIS NEVER HAPPENED. I never saw one single kid use a bike light in the 80s. They would have been made fun of and called a wuss. At best a kid's bike had reflectors on it. That was as far as bike safety went back then.

[Ofcoursemyhorse 1043]

21 hours ago, DeathToMikeyBay said:

This is one thing that bugged me about Stranger Things. It's supposed to be the 80s, but all the kids are riding around on vintage 60s and 70s bikes*. I don't think I ever saw a single kid riding anything like that during the 80s. It was all Huffy kids bikes modeled after BMX models. It was like the prop designer, rather than actually looking at what bikes kids rode in the 80s, just watched older kids movies taking place in the 50s-60s like It, Stand By Me, and The Sandlot and just used the exact same bikes there.

Come to think of it, the recent It movie had the same issue. It was supposed to be the 80s, but the kids were riding the same old bikes that the kids were in the 1990 tv movie that took place in the 60s.

 

* plus every single kid was using a light on their bike. THIS NEVER HAPPENED. I never saw one single kid use a bike light in the 80s. They would have been made fun of and called a wuss. At best a kid's bike had reflectors on it. That was as far as bike safety went back then.

 

You're 100% correct, at the same time I totally understand why they did it. You can't film those scenes of them cruising down the street together and not have it look completely awkward. 

Because of how small the frames are on those bikes it's almost impossible to sit on the seat and cruise and not look like an asshole.