On the Tropes EP1: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Hey tropers!
We're headed all the way back to Episode 1 of On The Tropes to get the blogspot caught up. You can check out the most recent episodes in the links at bottom of this post.

In this one we talked about the Fourth Wall and what it means to break it. Topics included Shakespeare to Dora the Explorer, Hot Tub Time Machine, and Pixar outtakes.

Top 5 Breaking The Fourth Wall Moments: This list had everything from comics to cartoons, Oscar winners and cult classics.

Tropesvial Pursuit: The guys played a trivia game with a chance for the audience to participate.

http://onthetropes.podomatic.com/
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WikiSandbox/OTT

I, For One, Welcome Our New On The Tropes Overlords

Dear fans, listeners, party people, foreign dignitaries, and John,

The Beast Duel has been around roughly a decade now. It went from kids bullshitting about sharks and wolves in an Akron coffee shop to this very blog for years. Last fall, it became an underground, renegade podcast, prolific and ahead of its time the way Van Gogh was.

But the times are a-changin'. This isn't to say the Beast Duel is gone.  It's being rebuilt, stronger, like the Six Million Dollar Man.

We're making changes; we've teamed up with tvtropes.org, an online community that have helped movie nerds delve deep into the rabbit holes of storytelling conventions for years. The new show, On the Tropes, will be more of what you loved about the Beast Duels Radio Hour; film discussion, top 5 lists, and Beast Duels.

You can keep checking right here for the written word of our own Dedwin Hedon, Eva Destruction, Cir L'Bert Jr, and other guest writers.

But most importantly, what these changes mean are the things you've loved about Beast Duels are growing; we're building a community. So stick with us, it's gonna be fuckin bananas.

So as always, stay safe, and for chrissake, don't get bit.

And watch the fuck out for Krampus (Krampus!)

Watch yourselves,
Nick

Episode 23: Henchmen!

The dude's re-attempt the Henchmen episode, discuss new vehicles, and plan a bachelor party while talking about Rocksteady, Bebop and other minions of our favorite villains.

This week's duel pits the Foot Soldiers from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. the Putty Patrollers from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

Last, we close out with our top 1 vs. 100 Fight Scenes Ever.

Can you classify Pokemon as henchmen? Evolving into a better killing machine for their "trainers"?

Episode 22: Villains!

Top 5 Villains from AFI Top 50 Villains List: The Gang talk Godfather I vs. II, gay chicken with Keyser Soze, we actually agree with the American Film Institute, and go after that old lady from Titanic.

Top 5 Villains not on the AFI Top 50 Villains List: The bad British accents get even worse as the Gang name the best villains in recent times.

Mosquitoes Big as Canned Hams

I’m terrified of bees. If there’s a bee within five yards of me and I am aware of it, I freak out like a tiny female child. When people see this, they usually have one of two reactions. They either assume that I am deathly allergic to bee stings and it is a matter of life and death if one is near me, or they just think I’m a pussy.

The truth is that when I was a small child, I watched as my mother was carried away by a giant bee. Not only that, but right afterwards, I got stung on the leg by a bee and it hurt like a sonovabitch. Really! Have you ever been stung? It sucks!

Popular culture is obsessed with how disgusting, creepy and weird insects are. Remember the flies in the Ring movies? How about the moths in Mama? Miniature monsters, some no bigger than a fingernail, covered with their crispy exoskeleton, crawling on, flying around, biting and annoying anything larger than they are.

Video games, like the fallout series, which takes place in a post apocalyptic world makes you fight giant bees and scorpions, mutated into raccoon-sized pests. The first two Bioshock titles gave the player the ability to drink a special drug and control a swarm of bees, sending them to sting and bite their enemies, distracting or killing them.

A few years after the disappearance of my mother I went on a camping trip with my father and a few friends in Missouri. The thought of mosquitoes as big as canned hams is more than a joke there. The bugs are fucking big, they wouldn't be able to comfortably land on you to feast. Each time they bite, it seems like they take a pint of blood, so three or four pricks and you could be a goner.

Bugs aren't just simple annoyances though, swarms of locusts can destroy a whole state’s worth of crops in a week. Enough termites and your house just might come crashing down around you. One tiny bug brought in on a boat from another country could cause havoc as far as crops and foliage is concerned. No wonder so many products are designed to rid our lives of these horrors.

I recall another lovely anecdote from my childhood that I bring you now. When I was young, I watched a movie where a giant spider destroys a town. The great thing about the movie was that you could clearly see the cart under the body that moved the spider ad the gears that made the legs move up and down. It was hilarious. It makes me think about how hard it is to represent such a reprehensible creature on film. Either bad computer generated graphics, bad makeup, bad delivery, something is always wrong with bugs in movies. Maybe it’s just because nothing i more horrible to us as the real terror that is insects.

Episode 21: Insects!

Meet the Beast: The gang talk insect movies including Arachnophobia, the Mist and Bug, and steroids in baseball.

Beast Duel: We play a new game called Dead Or Alive, and this week's Beast Duel: Antz vs. A Bug's Life.

Top 5 Scenes That Make Your Skin Crawl: We honor the octopus scene from Oldboy as our Hall Of Fame pick, Alain Delon is the best-looking version of Ron Swanson, and special guest Nely tells a story.

You Are Watching You

Remember the days when surveillance was difficult? Leg work was required to find out where your mark was at all times. You followed them around, you snooped through their things when they weren't around, trying to find out any little piece of information that could make your work and the overall reason for it, worth it.

Believe it or not, there was actually a time in history when having a camera pointed at you 24/7 was a bad thing. People feared the idea of someone they didn't know personally or at all watching them go about private things like eating, sleeping and bathing.

Yeah, I’m with you that shit is cray. Now everybody makes sure to upload their meals to tumblr, check in wherever they are, and update their friends, family and complete strangers with their every movement. Every time they update our phones and computers, they make it easier than ever to share, stream and upload our lives, second by second, step by step.

In the 2000's, cameras began being installed at intersections in major metropolitan areas all over the US. Of course, this made people freak out. Who could have access to these cameras? Would they be used for more than the red-light patrols they were explained away as? Is this the government overstepping their bounds and taking us one step closer to a police state where any wrongdoing is instantly punished?

Ask the people who have been fired from their jobs because they posted some nonsense on Facebook or Twitter and because they use their real name, they are held accountable for everything they say digitally in their irl lives.

Explain this to me, why does the government need to tap your phone and use drones to spy on you, when you willingly post everything about yourself to unprotected websites? So you know how easy it is to take away everything someone has by removing access to their Facebook page? All anyone needs is the email address of the account and they can create a new password in a matter of moments. Don’t you ever remember hearing all those stories in the news of [insert email provider here] being hacked and losing millions of users personal info? Yeah it happens all the time. How long until all those nudes you uploaded to share with one person are smeared across your grandmas timeline and you’re getting a call from your boss telling you to clean out your desk, they don’t need someone from their company posting pictures of themselves all over the interwebs?

So before you check in at McDonald’s and notify your stalker that you’re grabbing a quick cup of coffee, ask yourself why George Orwell didn't have an Instagram.

Episode 20: Big Brother

It's the Big Brother episode of the Beast Duels Radio Hour. Lock yourself in as we look at government conspiracies and control in films and possibly in real life.

Meet the Beast: The gang talk Big Brother, 1984 and what it's like to have rats on your face.

Beast Duel: The gang pose the question: Could R. P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest overthrow the government of 1984?

Top 5 Places You Wouldn't Want To Live: The gang talk dystopian societies they wouldn't want to live in and pay homage to the late, great Roger Ebert.

It Came From That Weird Guy's Basement

Have you ever walked out of your house and witnessed mayhem? Giant shoe prints smashed into the street. Homes partially knocked down. Your car smashed into a pancake of electronics and metal.

How had you slept through this? You marvel at the sheer panic and catastrophe as you yank your smartphone out of your pocket and pull up your favorite social networking site to see countless posts about a fifty foot tall robot destroying most of (insert town here).

The creature has since disappeared.

Come at me, bro!

Whether it’s a backyard inventor down the street, attempting to construct a machine to wash his car, do the laundry and change the channel on his TV, a psychotic engineer bent on world domination or a pervert who decided to mess around with the computer brain of his RealDoll, the danger of man-made inventions running amok and wiping man off the face of the earth is a totally realistic fear in our modern day society. In the real world, the cute, eighteen inch tall robot you see dancing on the morning news could actually end up being your taskmaster or your murderer one day. One moment you could be watching a showcase of a new robot designed to seamlessly cook, prepare and sell you a burger in under a minute, and the next you could be picking your teeth up off the floor and hear the screams of people watching the same machine carrying your girlfriend as it climbs the side of the Empire State building.

Ultimately, everything made by man does have the potential to be evil and destructive because that is the nature of man as well. Everything we have created to build and to better can be used to destroy and worsen anything around it.

Even with countless video games, movies, television shows, books and comics focusing on the extermination of the human race by out of control machines, I would assume that more of humanity is fearful of a zombie apocalypse than an all out war with machinery. I myself would say that one of those options is slightly more plausible in our current, technology driven age than the other. Rather than keeping your favorite crowbar or katana close by, I’d advise 24/7 access to a Super Soaker as a more reasonable preparation.

This guy is ready.

Of course, you could ignore this article as silly fantasy and go on with your life. But if one day you wake up to find your legs missing because your roomba ate them in your sleep, don’t come crying to me about it. You brought it all on yourself.