Bullied Nostalgia: Small Soldiers

So. Many of our fans to watch, oh look, now they're being. Bashed I guess. That's what we should expect on the Bullied Nostalgia Podcast.

It's that time of the month. You're tuning in for another episode of the Bullied Nostalgia Podcast, the show where two Gen. ZS bully the childhoods of two millennials after watching the slop that they enjoyed as kids. In one corner we have the old fogies, Jonathan Nesbitt and myself. I'm Timothy Nesbitt and representing the younger demographic we have Kylin Nesbitt.

I don't know if I might pick that up. Whatever, we'll stick with that. Nothing and Chance Nesbitt

Today's episode is all about unfair fights as we tackle 1998's small soldiers. But before we do, here's a friendly reminder that you can find us on all socials by searching Bullied Pod. Our e-mail being bullied [email protected] and our merch store can be found by searching Bullied Pod on redbubble.com. Chance for people who've never seen Small Soldiers, What is this movie? Small Soldiers is a movie about points that become much smarter than so supposed to. In an attempt to finish what their characters are designed to do.

The commando elite who are supposed to kill these bad guy aliens go off the rails and start doing whatever they can to kill their opposing aliens, including harming the human beings. It's up to the Gorgonites and the humans to defend themselves against the 9 inch commando evil doers. Chance makes this movie sound a lot more succinct than it is. Yeah, it goes all over the place. It's safe to say that this movie really doesn't know what it wants to be, but we can get into that stuff. Essentially, it had a $40 million budget and made $72 million at the box office.

So it pretty much broke even once you account for marketing and all that other stuff. But the movie was originally intended to be for teenagers. When you factor in all of the toy and merchandising that went into it. In real life though, they really wanted kids to have this movie be really accessible. And so this movie got butchered in the edit to be super kid friendly. Now that paid off massively on the back end. They would say that they made way more money off the real toys than this movie made at the box office, but it all leads to a kind of messy viewing experience.

You've referenced in the past Chance when we watched Witches asking if it was meant to be a kids horror movie or if it was really funny or whatever. This movie shifts in tone and audience pretty regularly throughout the film, and it doesn't really ever feel like it knows what it wants to be. Yeah, about every 20 minutes or so in this movie, somebody gets stabbed in the. Yeah, that's I found very interesting. You can tell that there is something up with the age rating. Early on in the movie, 1 of the main kids, Alan gets his hair glass rated really bad.

I'm like, whoa, he got hit with a saw blade. I'm not surprised they did that. And then later on somebody shoots spark plugs at him and four dig into his quad. Whoa. Who's this four? It makes sense when you say that because this movie was intended for a different audience. Before we get into the meat and the potatoes of it, John, of course grew up with this movie. Chance you'd seen it once before. This is brand new for Kai. Let's start with John. What was it like going back to this movie? I think when it came out probably felt like it was Toy Story movie.

What if toys were alive and had sentience? More edgy and grown up and cool. So I do remember thinking this movie was pretty cool but I never rewatched it. I don't have memories of seeing this movie multiple times. We never owned it or anything like that. Revisiting it now, I don't have a lot of positive things to say about the movie. I felt like there was a lot of moments, but I think the movie had a lot of potential. Great idea, not necessarily executed the best. I can definitely get behind that.

They've tried to launch a remake or a new movie of this for a while and I completely buy into that. I think this movie is mid to its core, but it is based on a ton of great ideas and principles. Will get into the puppets and stuff in a little bit here, but I agree, John, I think that this movie isn't the sum of its parts. It has the potential to be really good, but it's just really not as good as it should or could have. Been yeah, I had read that the most recent remake was supposed to be Toy Mageddon, but when Disney bought Fox they cancelled.

The project. Chance what did you remember about this movie? I remembered that the movie ended with a big fight. I remembered that the commandos were the bad guys, but I guess beyond that I didn't really remember much in retrospect. OK. There's a lot of wasted time. I think this movie's an hour and 45 minutes. You could easily cut this down to a tight 70 minutes. It would be much. Better an hour and 10 minutes. Think so? Do you really think that there's not 30 minutes a waste of time in that movie?

Sure. I'm just saying I don't know of many theatrical releases that are 70 minutes. That's pretty short. That's. What I'm saying that you could make a movie 70 minutes long. Is it OK if I play out the characters who's in the movie? Absolutely. Just let me ask Kai. Before Kai, you'd never seen this movie. Did you have any frame of reference? Did you have any clue what you were walking into this movie? Felt kind of like the first half of Toy Story Three. It was weird. There was a lot of time spent on the people related.

To the toys. Where it was just such a long period of time where the point of the movie never really started happening. We can talk about the movie's format and stuff when we get into it. I was just wondering what your first impressions were. Did you know what this movie was before watching? No, the end result of this movie is that things are now the same as they were before the movie. Except there are. 5 little action figures. Out on a boat somewhere. Yeah, and some families got some money. Let's hop over to John.

John, you wanted to tell us a little bit about the characters. Janson Kyer making reference to this company that sells military tech. So we have the CEO who's kind of a greedy billionaire who's now trying to buy up this toy company. We have two toy designers that we get to meet. The One Cooler toy designer designs these Commandos. The geekier. Toy designer creates these gorgonites which are like alien creatures. Anyways. Then the company buys this and they put their chips, these toys and like Chance was saying before, the toys have this programmed into them that their enemies with each other.

They get to meet our protagonists. When these toys get early delivery to a toy store and this is a young preteen boy. He gets to check out the toys and then the girl he has a crush on comes and finds out about the toys. You get to know each of the action figures on either side of the line. Then main commander of the bad guys is Chip Hazard, and the main alien of the good guys, the Gorgonites, is Archer. Like Chance was saying, these commandos are set out to really kill these Gorgonite toys, and that means they're willing to kill the humans that are protecting the Gorgonites.

We vaporize all Gorgonite. That's a pretty good impression. Thank you. Kirsten Dunst is back playing the female lead in this movie. We, of course, met her in Jumanji. We like to circle back to the same actresses and actors as much as possible. Gregory Smith, I'm not sure how many things I've seen him in. He's the main character, but he was in the movie Patriot. He was one of Mel Gibson's sons with Heath Ledger. Yeah, there is a full cast here. I think for me, the one who steals the show, though, is Phil Hartman.

He plays Kirsten Dunst's dad. He was a phenomenal comedic actor. He, of course, met a tragic end in real life, but just one of the funniest guys in TV and movies. And he steals the show in this movie, too. He's annoying. He's kind of a bad guy, but he's very funny when he's setting up his. You didn't like watching him, Chance. No, I really didn't. I didn't like any of the parents. I found most of the characters in this movie frustrating and that includes him. Oh yeah, you're allowed to be frustrated with him.

He's slimy, obnoxious, difficult. He's not a good person. But. No, but I also think I don't know if he fits the plot of this movie. Maybe I'm not as upset at his acting. I was essentially saying that when he's on screen, your attention is on him specifically. Tim, you were saying that we like to circle back to certain people the dad of the main boy in this movie, The actor's name is Kevin Dunn. I recognize him best as being the dad in the Transformers movie but also the owner of Missy. Oh my goodness.

Beethoven's Second. You're right. Good. For you. I didn't clock that but well noticed. Praise Beethoven. Do you think he ended up happy at the end of that movie? Beethoven's Second. Yeah, like. I thought you were going to ask, do you think he ended up happy after doing those movies? Do you think he feels proud of what he's done? Definitely not the Transformers movie. So Phil Hartman, in the scene when he's setting up his satellite dish, John, he talks about changing the chroma on the TV. That was a weird memory to me.

I had forgotten that that was a thing. Chance and Kai, back in the day, on old TV's, there was a knob you could turn that would change the colors of your TV. If you were bored you could change all your orange and Blues to be pink and green, and sometimes you just watch TV with everything pink and green because you could. Yes. I think the trouble is anytime you're watching the live action human and you play with the chromats, now they have either pink skin or orange skin. Sorry that was way off tangent, but.

I do appreciate the flashback, I'd also forgotten about that. As John and Chance have both kind of told us, this movie is about toys that have chips implanted in them that they can think for themselves. And when you're buying action figures, those action figures literally start to think that they are action figures, kind of think like Buzz Lightyear in the original Toy Story. And so they think that their purpose is to fight the other toys and they'll they'll essentially go on murder sprees and attempt to do that.

This movie is very much the 90s version of Gremlins. It's about a kid who brings a small thing home and it ends up creating more of them. Essentially try and kill families in the neighborhood and. Interesting, Tim. When I was watching it I was like, this feels like gremlins and.

Then I. Look into it and it's the same director, yeah. In. Comparison Chip Hazard looks really bad in some scenes, but I think they are very fun as a crew. I think the bad guys are a lot more interested. I actually appreciated them. Was anybody else kind of terrified of that one guy Brick bazooka? He's got like that wide grin that never goes away. They are. Horrifying, but I think it adds to it. They're good, bad guys. I appreciated the Mando team dynamics at the end of the movie. Bad guys find out that they can just go to toy stores and get way more bad guys, and as soon as now there's 1000 bad guys, they lose.

Their personality. Yeah, they lose. Yeah, I agree. No significant. Everything was disposable. I didn't feel us engaged at that. Point. Yeah, yeah. I enjoyed how Duke Bazooka or whatever his name was, his legs come off in one scene. Instead they perform again on the spot amputation, but later there's 100,000 dolls that all have microchips in them and you're like OK, so I don't care about any of these dolls. And then there's 100,000 Rick Bazookas and nothing matters anymore. Yeah, we'll talk about death later, but I just wanted to bring up the toys because I wanted to talk a little bit about the puppetry.

All of the puppets were made by Stan Winston, I mean the goat. Each of the characters had at least three puppets, depending on what the needs were. So that meant that Stan Winston and his team had to makeover 200 puppets in four months. Crazy, which is. Wild designs for the toy characters were rushed ahead of time so that actual toy manufacturers could replicate them to make. Oh wait, this is a documentary he actually did. But yes, there is some computer graphics in there here and there which I think is pretty visible.

You can tell when it's computer graphics. But the puppetry, as Chance was already saying, the toys look really cool. They look like they are toys that are given life all of a sudden. I'm a huge fan of the special effects. These characters just look so that I already mentioned Archer, he's the best, which actually I'm going to mention that brings up a gripe of mine. Some of the Gorgonites look very interesting or very fun, but the programming of the Gorgonites is that they will always hide and they will always lose.

But that also means they're. Cowardly. And they try to run away from everything. That means for most of the movie they're in a trash can, which is just not a good way to sell me on these ragtag heroes. 100% agree. Chance I felt that to. Me. Well, and I think that that is something that I've always found to be true about this movie. When they're fighting the big battle at the end, we get the song. Whoa, yeah. What is it good for? And there's a real messaging that this movie is teaching you that violence is bad, but all the good guys are lame.

And Chip Hazard and his crew are way cooler. They. Are the best, yeah. It's one of these things where it's like, oh, so the lesson here is people who think war is bad are lame. So. Powers and weaklings, A lot of them. Yeah, I mean, that was my take away as a kid. When I saw this movie, when it first came out, I was like, oh, the good guys are all really lame. I know I'm not supposed to chip Hazard's really cool. Well, I guess I'll go fight in the Afghan war. Yeah, it's really weird. Because they threw.

Away some pretty cool designs, there's this. One guy whose gimmick? Is that he got torn apart by the Commando elites. So he's all Frankenstein together and I'm like, oh, that guy's design is awesome. And that's like all the screen time he gets. Yes. So that character's name is Navigator, and I always watch for it because when they're pitching the toys at the beginning, you get to see what Navigator was supposed to look like, but almost immediately the toy gets trashed. And then Frank, or whatever he calls him, is the toy that actually gets some screen time.

But that leads really nicely into the biggest gripe about this whole movie, and that's that there's no consistent rules or laws when it comes to death. It's really hard to gauge if a person's dead or not, or if life even matters. Navigator is the first person to literally get torn limb from limb. Sorry toy, not person. Right, the first person to get toyed limb from limb. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, that. Was good chance so navigator gets torn limb from limb and thrown in the garbage but then they just put him back together kind of like SIDS toys and Toy Story and all of a sudden he's fine and.

Fine, he has to go to a therapist now. Seems really emotionally broken up about it. Yeah, as Kai told us, Bazooka gets some pieces hopped off or dislocated and they're able to repair him. But then Nick Nitro gets shoved in a Garburator and his feet First his feet get broken off, but then that is too much for him to survive. He dies, but they're able to use his microchip and infuse his evil thoughts into Barbie dolls. Dozens of them, in fact. I don't think it's his evil thoughts, I think that they are naturally.

Barbie dolls and then. They have to take them through camps to teach them the evilness. They are Barbie dolls. They talk about Barbie dolls. And program. Them to be that way. Yeah, and then Nick Nitro's brain, even though it was dead in him, allows dozens of Barbies to come to life. Then they all drive into a ditch on a car and all of them die except Chip Hazard. And then he goes to the store and gets a bunch more, and they all die to tennis balls and stuff. So it's really hard to understand what it actually takes to kill one of these.

I also feel like the stakes are changing with how dangerous the commando toys are. In some instances, they're shooting literal rockets and blowing up trees, and then in other instances, they might be throwing a paper clip at you like it, just like these commandos really wanted to. They could just have killed these kids. Yeah. Yeah, it's really a step down from the chainsaws and stuff that they add, Yeah. Exactly Speaking of. Their Voltron chainsaw car? Awesome. Again. The bad guys are the best part of this movie.

They're really. Sends bad messaging. Yeah, I agree. If they came out with a new movie, this is wild to say, but I wouldn't even want the Gorgonites to be in it. I'd just be like, OK, let's go back to Commando Elite. Just do gremlins, no good guys. Just do gremlins. Exactly. Bad guys. Well, there was that one pitch that was like, what if there was a new movie of this? Yeah, some people did some animation tests and stuff and they look pretty sick. They're very cool. Yeah, it just goes to so the technology was already solid 20 years ago.

Now I just imagine how good of a movie people could make with this. And in that 1-2 minute clip of the Gorgonites in that potential animation test, the Gorgonites get more character than they did in the entire movie. There's that Gorgonite who pulls a gun towards the commando elites and the big boss says no, don't shoot. And then they run away and it's like, OK, they're debating whether it's worth it to attack. They have a. Code yeah. Exactly. In this movie, it's kind of like the opposite. They won't fight because they're scared, but then they will fight.

I feel like the Gorgonites, other than hiding and trying to survive, it's unclear what they value. Because when Archer first comes to life in the Boys house, he decides to search the Internet to learn all of American history. And you're like, oh, I wonder what he'll do with that. They start the movie and saying they love to learn. And caught on the nerd. Yeah, but he doesn't really do anything with that knowledge A. Picture of a park and they think of Gorgon listeners at home. Gorgon or Gorgon? Is the name of the home territory of the Gorgon.

Island. So when they see a picture of a park, that's all the research they do. I don't know, a lot of the stuff Archer was looking at in Encarta was war related. I think when they escape, he's going to commit a lot of atrocities. Also, the Gorgonites were confronted by their makers. The two toy sales guys are like, we're your God, we created you. You think that the Gorgonites would then be like, oh, this is our purpose, but no, we have to go on a little boat at the end of the movie. It didn't make sense.

Speaking of how this movie ends, I was shocked that in the final edit of this movie, The last line that is uttered is a Titanic joke. What when the toys are in the boat, do they see something? That's the last line of the. Movie to an iceberg. Like what? Who signed off on that crap? Oh, I do.

Don't leave that with me to think about as the credits roll. That's the last line of your movie. That's terrible. Terrible. This was mentioned earlier, but the big greasy billionaire, you'd expect him to be put behind bars or there to be some like outcome or consequence of his thousands of toys trying to kill people. But the final scene before the Gorgonites go off on the boat is he just comes and writes. Everyone checks. And then he makes a bunch of money selling it to anti terrorism. That's what I'm saying for an anti war movie.

Nobody gets their comeuppance. Everybody somehow gets a happy ending, even Chip Hazard. It's like you get to go kill terrorists now. I think this movie would do so much better if it came at it from the cynical angle. Imagine this whole movie, but instead it's had the tone of Starship Troopers. Who here has seen Starship Troopers? Oh yeah. OK, Kai hasn't. What's wild is, and I don't know if I've told you this before, chance when Starship Troopers came out, it wasn't wildly understood that that was satire.

So. Did not do well. It did not do well. I saw that movie in theaters and I was like, oh, that's not a very good movie. It seems disingenuous. Yeah, it turns out that's the whole point. That's the movie. Disingenuous. A lot of this movie is on the kick of Starship Troopers, where they tell the joke and then you realize, oh, wait, you actually believe that you're not being sarcastic. Wait, you're not joking. And that's how the tone of this movie feels to me. I hope we don't hit an iceberg. Are you trying to steal my bit?

What's going on here? I'm the voices guy. Going back to. Our talk about programming. Yeah, the. Gorgonites programmed to be pacifists. Why? Well, they think their programming. Is to. Hide and run away. I actually understand that concept. The bad guys, their whole thing is hide and run away. I think there are villains in media who are portrayed like that. They've gone into hiding and think of all the evil they could do, you know? So we have to find and stop them kind of deal. But I find that. Kind of dumb because half of the aliens are designed to kill.

Things. One of them's a slingshot, one of them has a big gun in his arm, the other one has a big rock for a hand. Just when? His name is. Dude, Archer is one of. The bone arrows, yeah. I don't think it makes sense. My other thing to say is at the end of the movie The way that they get rid of all of the commando elite is by creating an EMP the power pole. I've done some onion peas and there is like a 0.1% chance that. This would. Work the way it did in the movie, in the real. World. So you're. Saying there's a chance.

All right, let's hop over to closing Kai. What's your verdict on this movie? I have a lot of issues with it, but I don't know what the first course of action is. Having a horde of bad guys was never the play. There's only one set of bad guy toys, and then you can get attached to the bad guys and be more afraid of them. This is Brick Bazooka, and Brick Bazooka has had his legs come off and yet he's still coming after us, so he must be a strong. The other thing is the Gorgonites should not have been pathetic.

If you're keeping the Gorgonites, they should have a code, as we talked about earlier. Well, they don't want to kill, but they still have defensive instincts. There's also the statement of every time Gorgon's get into a fight we lose and I'm like OK that's interesting. You have a 5 foot tall giant. I feel like you can make the statement that they always lose, but that doesn't mean they can't fight back and the situation is. Different. I guess. It would have been a lot nicer if their moral code wasn't we're too afraid to do anything and their moral code was we don't want to hurt anybody or we don't want to kill.

But that's not what we got. Yeah. So those are the two changes. I would make think that there is a lot you could do with like the runtime. And I'm sure that this was a completely different movie, but having the Gorgonites be useless was not the play. OK. Chance where does this movie fall in your grading scale? There's a lot of this movie I do not like, but if I sat down with a bunch of my college buddies this could easily be a 3 or 4. Negative. Oh, that's a good question. Is this a negative or not?

Generally this is probably a two or three on my scale, but if you're with the right guys this could easily be a -4. I think you should rank a movie in both the positive and negative aspect at the same time. Are we going back to the well guys of joking about how much? Work. No. You said that this movie is either A3 or a -4. That's understandable. I think the way I'm going to do it is if something scales more in a negative or a positive, I'll probably just go with that. If the movie is a -5 but a +2, I'm just going to mention that's a -5.

I guess to be fair, we don't really get movies that are high. In both regards. Yeah, it seems unnecessary. Just so I'm just going to say it's a -4. I love some of the puppetry. I love. Chip Hazard and those guys watching this movie, There's a part of it is like these guys should win. If you like Starship Troopers, you'll like Chip Hazard and his dudes. I did. But if you're watching this by yourself, probably not gonna have a good. Time, Jonathan. Talk to us about the nostalgia that this movie brought back.

Yeah, it's a movie of its time. It made sense in 1998 to be really cool and the kind of thing that someone who was 9 or 10 like me would love. But watching it now just makes me more nostalgic for better movies because this was really like, what if Gremlins and Toy Story had a baby? And Gremlins and Toy Story are just way better movies. Is this the first? Movie that you've had nostalgia for that you didn't. Like. I don't know, I think must be the mood I'm in tonight. I don't want to play devil's advocate.

I guess I think because I only had seen this movie a handful of times as a kid, it wasn't a movie we owned. If it's a movie we owned, I can't not like it. I've watched it so many times. So this one's more susceptible to my criticism, but I'm glad I rewatched it. But I don't think I'll ever watch it again. And we've been making some comments about, oh, it's actually the bad guys are cooler. It's interesting when you look at all the marketing chip hazard, the commando is way more front and center than virture the your dog rabbit warrior.

He's kind of a cat. Was looking at the different movie posters. One has all the commandos on it, another one has Chip front and center with Archer in the background in the name is Soldiers. And so I really do think that totally in how the movie was filmed. But I think even how it was designed for people to consume it, like it's supposed to be about the bad guys and these cool army toys. It's interesting. It's funny that you say that we didn't own this movie because I was kind of under the impression that we did.

So it must have been maybe Michael Martin that owned it because I definitely remember this VHS. I've seen this movie a lot of times, I don't know how many but quite a few over the years. So just by that metric I cannot say I will never watch this movie again. If history has taught me anything, I will see it again. That said, it is mid mid mid mid. Like there's nothing special about it. Chance giving it a four is a minor heart attack to me. That's a. Lot this is a 2. We watched a lot of MST3K growing up.

I could easily see this big very fun time to make fun. But I guess. A real. Question, Dad. Go ahead. As a. Kid, did you like this? You mentioned you've seen it a lot, and that might just be like it was one of the movies we had. I guess. Before you realize this was a bad movie, did you have fond? Feelings for it? I think I always found this movie to be mid. This movie would have come out when I was in junior high and I talk about the first movie that I can remember that I knew was bad. I went to see Batman and Robin in the theaters.

I was in junior high at the time as well, and there were other girls in my class who also went to the movie at the same time. And I remember feeling embarrassed that they knew that I was at that movie, which is funny because they were also at that movie, so they should have felt the same things. I would ask them about it now as adults, but there's no way they remember this core memory like I do. Small Soldiers never gave me that same feeling. It would have come out around the same time. I would have been around the same age.

But I never came out of this movie thinking, Oh my goodness, that was amazing. I think I had the same feeling as everyone. And that was, I don't really think that that movie was for me. Don't think this movie is for anyone as we kind of talked about was mutilated in the edit and it's made into this very kid friendly movie that is not for kids. It was just an Ave. by which to sell toys. And when we're done our call tonight I will send you guys a link to the video that Kai was referencing. People tried to pitch a small soldiers movie and they made the two-minute little demo reel and it is so cool.

It makes me want that movie. And so whenever I watch this movie, I think, oh, I wish I was watching something else. I wish I was watching a better version of this. I love gremlins. I love gremlins too because it's insane. This is in that same family. This is the natural evolution of gremlins to the point where the gremlins in this movie are actually the most interesting, likable characters. I would love to see a better version of this. I have no intention of watching it again, but I'm sure I will at some point.

Let's wrap it up then. This is our 49th episode, which means that our next episode will be our 50th episode celebration where we will be talking about shows that we watched that are new, but we'll also be looking back at the 49 episodes leading up to that. Does anybody have anything they want to add? Kids, do you want to do like a line from each one of the toys in this movie? Ocula doesn't say anything, he just makes. Really weird. Gestures, you know. His. Name. I know his name. His name is Ocula.

I think he's the first toy they say or whatever. I couldn't tell you the rest of them. Did any of the Gorgonites look like dinosaurs to you guys?

Are you just trying to get this in every episode of the season? I appreciate you, John. You're welcome. I can't believe, Dad, you were trying to make a joke about dinosaurs and Inigo Montoya's line. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepared to die. And he was sitting there prepared to hmm. And he couldn't come up with a joke? It's right there. It's dinosaur. I think that might be my favorite line in this movie is when every character says Gorgon at at least 75. Times all right with that, we'll see our listeners on the other side of the 50 and look out for weirdos.

Beethoven. Sorry, say your thing. Grandma, it's Tim every time it's. My favorite one. It's so dumb. Don't forget to bleed in and out. Grandma. Adventure, Jamie, Adventure. It has to be the last thing that we say. So if there's anything else you guys want to say it say it now. Grandma, I hope we don't hit an iceberg. That's why you wanted us to not say anything else, because you had to end it like that. Yeah, yeah. Terrible.

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