Episode 227 - Double Dragon: LIVE!

[JulyDiaz 2797]

Live from Philadelphia, Paul, June, and Jason discuss the 1994 live action film Double Dragon based on the video game series. They talk about Alyssa Milano’s pants, weather man Andy Dick, Bo Abobo, and more.

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NOTE: If early listeners could please post Corrections and Omissions for this episode by Friday, November 22nd 10:30 AM PST. Thanks!

[Cameron H. 23786]

18 hours ago, JulyDiaz said:

NOTE: If early listeners could please post Corrections and Omissions for this episode by Friday, November 22nd 10:30 AM PST. Thanks!

Happy Thanksgiving, Paul, HDTGM, and everyone at Earwolf

[AlmostAGhost 2718]

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

[Hiny Rugburn 25]

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.

[TrueBreenius 38]

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? 

[grudlian. 4725]

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.

[Archetypo 9]

Foundation jacks like the ones sold at Jack City have been in use for quite some time as a way to level a building before repairing a sagging floor or sinking foundation. In areas like Florida, where sinkholes are prevalent, specialized companies can raise the sinking portions of a building's foundation and inject concrete beneath it to level it. They can also be used by do-it-yourselfers to replace sagging floor joists.

[Cameron H. 23786]

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

[theworstbuddhist 572]

1 minute ago, Cameron H. said:

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

I strongly suspect we will be watching this tonight (by which I mean my wife and I, not you and I, though you are more than welcome)

[theworstbuddhist 572]

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

[grudlian. 4725]

25 minutes ago, Cameron H. said:

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

I normally hate Christmas romance movies but I might have to check this out. 

[theworstbuddhist 572]

Wow. Ordinarily I tune out the Second Opinion songs, especially if they're just skinning some old pop song, but Molly was excellent.

[pscudese 701]

Satori’s main job was to keep both Dragon medallions safe. She hid one half with the monks, which Lash finds “somewhere in China.” 

Now where is the other half??? Oh just around her neck! Why did she not hid the other half somewhere else?! Carelessly wearing it around her neck almost led it to be snatched by Bo Adobo at the very beginning! 
 

Shame on you Satori!

[pscudese 701]

6 hours ago, TrueBreenius said:

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? 

But also what about the insanity around the truck having the ability of full schematics of the city and the exact design of the Lee’s car during the first chase scene?!

The system had boxes (which the truck crashed into) already generated in the game! 

 

[ChunkStyle 1160]

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.

 

[WWDKM 4]

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.  

[theworstbuddhist 572]

4 minutes ago, WWDKM said:

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.  

Oh, so Ed and Joe are the Jack City guys? That makes total sense, they used to do movie-based skits on their show all the time. Man I miss that show.

[Blast Hardcheese 636]

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.

[Wil Dride 121]

It looks like they just sewed a piece of fabric from the bottom of the each of the jean short pocket liners to the top of the pant legs, for whatever reason they'd have for doing that. Of course the camouflage jackets are like  the tribe from Crystal Skull in that they are only useful for that very specific movie reveal and wouldn't make sense for the characters in any other situation.

[Rollo Tomasi 22]

https://www.vulture.com/2016/12/every-video-game-movie-ranked-bad-to-worse.html

I don't know if this list has ever been discussed on the podcast/message boards before, but when I came across it I had to laugh that the "best" video game to movie adaptations are all HDTGM movies.  Even Double Dragon squeaks into the top third.

[DrGuts1003 462]

Another joke that the hosts (yup, still referring to Paul, Jason, and June as "the hosts") missed is when a news anchor mentions that the river has caught on fire again, which is a reference to the Cuyahoga River which has caught on fire at least a dozen times including famously in 1969 when both Time Magazine and National Geographic did a news story on it and it led to the creation of the EPA.  The Cuyahoga River is in Cleveland, which is where Double Dragon was filmed.

[tomten3000 34]

12 hours ago, AlmostAGhost said:

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

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

[tomten3000 34]

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.

[AlmostAGhost 2718]

15 minutes ago, tomten3000 said:

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

this is the content we crave

[tomten3000 34]

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.