Dub Talk 270: Carole & Tuesday

0:00 hello and welcome to dub talk idol i'm your judge for tonight jets and before we start tonight's auditions let's go over the rules for our contestants number one top talk idol may contain diagrams and content not suitable for younger audiences we don't do clean versions on this show so viewer discretion is advised second tonight's episode will contain spoilers for all of carol and tuesday and may contain spoilers for other anime series so be careful if you haven't finished them and thirdly these are the opinions expressed by the individual judges tonight do not reflect loads of damn talk idol as a whole all right and sir you can introduce yourself and start singing you know i'm talking michael weber's in

0:45 from california and i've got the perfect number for tonight i will be your demonstr stop atrocious it said it worth it a dark thought this is why anime is a mistake screw this out [Music] hello and welcome to dub talk where a group of dads got together to talk about the terrible things of music and even worse things and dubs that's complete garbage really anyway i am jet cowell and i'm joined

1:31 tonight by jackson yes i'm just here to have a good time listen to some good music i hope i know abdul oh my gosh i am so excited to be here i am here on mars and i just think that you uh you two right now are the cutest things ever this is gonna be so amazing when did i get a gender change oh thank you baby let me tell you let me tell you that show ruled some people's lives way more than it should have back in was it like 2004 2005. just reap that brought back all kinds of memories thank you for that jet my grade school had a betting pool going uh so uh anyway we're here today to

2:18 critique two honestly names of carolyn tuesday so if you're not familiar with these guys here's a tits of it fifty years have passed since mankind began migrating to the new frontier mars and today is where most cultures produced by ai and people are content to be passive consumers there is a girl scraping and scraping olivia in the metropolis of alba city is working to part-time down while trying to become a musician she's always felt like something is missing her name is carol there's another girl born to a wealthy family and a provincial town of herschel city she dreams of becoming a musician but nobody around her understands she feels like the loneliest person in the world her name is tuesday a chance meeting brings them together honestly it all sort of sounds like a

3:04 bit of problems but the label is under studio bones that they got produced by uh martha nobu hori and chidi watanabe if those names sound familiar to you it's because the director behind the back anime and watanabe has directed such hits as samurai sham blue freestanding and he hits eagle combo bebop okay all right i think i'm done with this whole stick all right i gotta lift a few good minutes out of it and would you believe they got together for bone's 20th anniversary to make this uh good on them that that um pretty pretty excellent choice given one that i received music it is it is like can you what i don't know what you guys did for your 20th birthday but mine was nowhere near cool

3:49 enough to get an anime base to celebrate around it so good on bones for sticking around that long yeah it may have just been drinking in my dorm room i don't i don't remember that night i mean i'm pretty sure there was drinking going on here too there's a lot going on in this series this um uh yeah surprise to everyone yes this is another shinichiro watanabe series set in outer space with music in it what are the odds yeah he has a particular brand he is very good at that brand and he sits with it that he is and uh yeah i'm glad you shouted out um i can never pronounce his name correctly um hiro

4:35 that guy the one on screen there uh because uh and jax remembers this too we had a fun little episode on the beck anime about a year ago and uh i think we did rehash some of the same talking points that we did in this series that we did in that one yeah somehow i'm on a musical-based episode again i i don't thankfully you guys haven't been able to judge my musical taste thus far oh don't worry i don't worry you'll get to spend plenty of time because i know that's enough to give my music no no here here's how we're going to judge both of your musical tastes is that we're uh you're going to go to youtube and we're going to look at the automated mixtape that it makes up you know the one that collects all of the music videos that you've watched the most and that's how we're going to judge your music taste i'm going to do the

5:22 same thing for myself right now what pops up i mean i mean i'll try to you can just i mean alternatively you can just say whatever your favorite song is in this year and that'll be a pretty good indication do you have a favorite song uh i mean is it uh i mean i said i mean pretty i mean honestly almost all the other songs are really good uh the final uh the final dog at the end is really good oh i love that yeah i do just love a good uh scream from your soul you know about the oppression of society or just screaming [ __ ] [ __ ] [Applause] [Laughter] since we're not going to get to talk about those characters uh fun story uh i was watching this show down in the

6:07 basement of our house and i thought i was all alone and i was uh because everyone was watching something else but suddenly everyone started gravitating downstairs just as the episode with the music competition was starting and i didn't know this was coming i had no idea all of a sudden the mermaid sisters show up and what what do i start hearing [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] and jennifer looks at me the kids start looking at me like what are you watching i thought i was alone it's not my fault and noah slept on the couch that night that he did in fact he's still sleeping on the couch so that i hope you people watching this appreciate this well you have a whole barbershop quartet

6:53 there to uh keep you company i thought they were good they should have won it all carol and tuesday are fine they're like beats here at best those four should have won mermaid sisters got robbed you're saying absolutely i stand i stand mermaid sisters acapella is underrated i'm sorry this has nothing to do with why we're here tonight uh yeah so the three of us are here to talk about this show because we all happen to share a birthday in august so yeah we decided to do this how they kind of combined birthday episodes so uh happy birthday fellas yeah i bet about two months ago i slept slid into your dms and said we should we should do a thing we should all get together and uh have a party yeah this is that part yeah sing about it

7:38 with robots and and uh antidepressant medications but not too many just enough just what the doctor prescribes everyone so uh yeah since this is uh this is the dub talk podcast right so i'm assuming we're going to be talking about the english dub of the show uh yep and as i add as always you cannot have a dub without adr staff so uh well sardis went off by giving our general thoughts on the voice directed and adapted script for this dub so for the first half of the show the dubs adr director was one erica mendez who has directed dubs for such anime as

8:26 the regular magic high school visitor arc maggie record and i want to hear pancreas and the back half of the dub was directed by kyle mccarley who was a voice director as great pretender and vampire to garden both also served as the scriptwriters for the dub and their commandos to spend dub scripts for shoes like food apocrypha little woods academia and personified the animation while carmel carly has had dump scrapes on such anime as dear king super crooks and the netflix sub of finland saga so is it is it sad that you mentioned a bunch of anime there and i have seen literally none of them don't feel too bad there's a lot of enemy out there there's too much anime

9:13 yeah so before we dig too deep into this i do want to take the time to talk about something important oh is it time is it time already the floor is yours uh yeah i wanted to get this out of the way all right so uh i wanted to talk about some of the casting in this stuff uh mainly uh carol and angela who are two black characters being played by non-black voice actresses this isn't a conversation i particularly want to have and i do certain types of people get mad if you bring this sort of thing up and frankly they can jump it but uh it's important to bring up for a couple of reasons first being that it's honestly pretty ridiculous and frankly inexcusable especially for a dub that

10:00 came out in 2019 i know this does sort of predate the larger conversation people started having about casting more authentically when it comes to voice acting but that's still nowhere close to being an excuse here and i can right probably guarantee you pretty much any other recording studio that really does anime wouldn't have made this call so it's kind of baffling studio that's been around as long as mag zoom would do this and it's not even a matter of not having any black voice actresses on their regular casting full for auditions because a few of them are actually in this dub like other characters so it just looks weird that the attempt wasn't made for whatever reason and i mean even if they didn't want to hire one of them it also could have been a pretty cool opportunity for some other black voice actresses to get a big break

10:46 and it kind of sucks that this apparently wasn't taken into consideration at all and also just like being real by pause i gotta say as a black person by itself i mean i've kind of learned to roll with the reality that anime isn't always best at depicting people like me so it kind of sucks it you know but when you look at a series that actually put in that effort and even centers around two black characters it kind of sucks that consideration didn't translate completely into the dub and uh secondly even if you're the person who does not care about this sort of thing literally at all in which case i don't know why you'd be watching this show why are you here and this show is probably not for you but uh but even uh but even if you're the kind of person who does not care about this or anything at all it's a pretty bad look because this is

11:33 literally a show about the importance of diversity and no i'm not exaggerating about this in any way when i say this it is literally a part it shows seems like it's literally about immigrants and how like the martial arts are just kind of trying to make their way in the world the villains are literally a couple of evil billionaires trying to deport immigrants so they could have noticed on the planet and you know the deportation squad is literally abrahavian advice like the show is not subtle about who it's criticizing no it does not it is right up there with pro-mares um we're going to ha i forget what the name they gave but it was also like a almost the freezer force [Music] thank you thank you for for the anti-immigrant uh police in that movie as well to literally use ice yeah

12:18 uh yeah and like even does it go for carol uh die bree x i hope i didn't butcher that is also black so i guarantee you she would have been tired of watching i mean or he didn't care you know at least a little bit about diversity and authenticity so again it kind of sucks it wasn't completely carried over to the dub to be clear i'm not faulting kind of the actors here i thought they did a pretty good job in the circumstances and i know voice asking for anime isn't exactly high ping works i'm not going to blame anyone for you know trying to put food on the table i'm also not playing beginning of the adr directors here because from everything i've been told over the years like eight hour directors and banks who have very little or no say at all about casting anyway

13:03 why would lay blame on here in this case would be the casting director uh mommy akana who is the regular casting director in bank zoom and well i've heard like some not great things about her secondhand over the years i don't know her and i don't want to sit here and actively demonize her or wear choices that's a fan not a casting director and i don't know much about anything about what goes into these other decisions but regardless of why she made it particular coal i don't think it was a very good one and uh yeah it's just well it's kind of disappointing and uh to her credit i do think she has gotten better about this sort of thing over the years and yeah with the current landscape of english subs for anime being what they are bank zoom is

13:50 apparently one of those studios that's actually because they do what is that when it comes to anime these days but uh even so it's so doesn't change the fact that there were problems with how this year was casting well i do generally like this sound but i think i could you know discuss in a good faith not breaking this up i think it's important to have these kind of conversations because regardless of what some people might tell you acknowledging that diversity is important could usually lead to a better end project and uh also on that note well i know i zeroed in on carol and angelo for this particular conversation i do also want to know that this show does have a lot of queer wrapping up and while not all of it is particularly great i do also think it would have been good to have more queer actors at the time for those characters besides

14:35 uh maybe alex clark is guts his ex who did a pretty good job there and that's also another point i'd maybe knock off the dub but uh yeah that's more that's it for my soapboxing sorry if it went a little long and i promised the rest of the episodes would be pretty fun but i'm glad but i need to get that out of the way before we turn it absolutely yeah yeah it's good to address that now because that anyone who knows anything about this series probably is uh aware of that controversy and it's good to address that up front it's the same reason why we we devoted a section of the miss kobayashi's dragon maid episode to like discuss that controversy and like okay we're done with that let's move on to talking about stuff that's not that yeah yeah like this was this was a pain point for that discussion in particular and it

15:23 really did like start this conversation and start making change because people did make noise about it and did get upset and then uh we held uh bang zum's feet to the fire and change was actually enacted later down the line so they're not making these same mistakes as often which is why it's important to have these conversations exactly yeah you mentioned jet that uh discussions weren't quite as heated in 2019 as they are now it was definitely this show that kind of helped spark that discussion so yeah yeah yeah not this year particularly but i do remember it was a pretty big talking point right it's it's good that if this was cast now in 2022 and they decided to dub it now they would probably take the i almost guarantee they would take that into

16:08 consideration like i was prepared to make the like devil's advocate defense that they're trying to match the voices because part of the stuff is that uh all the singing is originally in english they had guest singers and guest artists provide the vocals for all the music uh but that's not really the case it's not really a voice match to uh the music yeah i mean at best i can see it being a case i'm trying to voice matt's judy say you but like even then again i i know i like vaguely alluded to this but like there are black voice actors in this dub some who i know have a similar vocal register to that too uh the actress is playing carol and angela so i know they probably

16:54 could have played those characters but yeah again i'm not a casting director i do not know why the choice was made i just don't take over the predatory good one in this case yeah and of course uh this is a very diverse uh work in general of course like a lot of watanabe's work has been like this even when he's just a music producer on like michiko and hodgin if i if i'm not being a liar like that this is a consistent theme for him as well oh so oh yeah oh yeah he's been like very upright about how he feels about that so it it definitely misses the mark not incorpora not incorporating that same worldly view into uh the english dub

17:41 which is very sad considering that uh japan is a lot more homogeneous uh racial wise than america is and the show is very clearly trying to emulate the the appeal of american music or the very least western music because you've got all of the song titles all of the episodes are named after what are they named after uh rex from the english-speaking world right and some of it's from uh um britain a lot of it's from america and so it's definitely the intent was to make the cast and the music as diverse as the countries that it's emulating so yeah it is a shame that that mark got missed when it came to the casting side of things yeah so um i guess moving slightly

18:29 away from that conversation uh i don't want to say that like as far as the actual voice direction here goes i do think that eric and kyle both did a pretty good job here this is a very uh this is a very solid stopping dumb on the whole like that's a black everyone sounds pretty well directed the performances are really solid there's no one i would like that's a aside aside from the kind of complaints there's no performance here i would really like to actively complain about no no uh i will pick on one more casting thing that's much more petty uh what was the keith silverskins scene store score for this dub because i counted like 10 bit parts that were

19:17 i was okay okay to be fair he's literally in like everything it's like if you need someone to play bet characters and they caliw you just call up keeps over son yeah jack i don't want to pick on him hard but he's very easy to pick out of a crowd and he's he was popping up a lot so it's like in american cartoons uh when you're just listening for the tom kenny background character roles and he's like there he is there he is there's all over the place like take a shot every time you hear tom kenny it's the same thing in this dub with keith silverstein it's a real where's waldo yeah although i mean i think the uh to counter that a little bit in looking at the cast that we're going to talk about

20:03 here none of the main speaking characters are double cast uh there's no one that i can see here who has you know is covering two or more named characters everybody got their own voice actor yeah yeah it tends to be the case with uh union dues rates you you work so many guaranteed hours you'd need to record a bunch of parts to fill fill those in it it just happens oh god do we have a lot of characters in this whole thing it's a two-court treat people yeah so yep i think direction is solid and script is also pretty fun admittedly there were a couple of points where i felt like maybe it could be like

20:48 a little punch here just you know giving the nature of the shoe but i said but it had enough fun with the dialogue that i like never had too many complaints about that and then there were some pretty like fun one lighter sprinkles without it especially just everything toby says [Laughter] [ __ ] might be my favorite curse word it's very versatile versatile yeah they definitely uh reserved the more colorful language for the the older crotchety characters um everybody else seems to have a very similar vocabulary um there's like everyone is like kind of just nice speaking patterns uh not a whole lot of forgive the pun color in a lot of their

21:35 languages and uh yeah it doesn't feel like there was a whole lot of localization that needed to be done in turning this into english because there's not a whole lot of plot points that need to be adapted in a way that make it easy to understand and the world um because this takes place on mars this takes place in the future on mars there's a lot of technology but the characters don't spend a whole lot of time describing it there's like maybe a little bit with dao where he has to describe what he's doing to try to help angela's performance but aside from that we don't hear a whole lot of descriptions about the robots that uh repossess the house or the delivery drones or the camera bots or basically all the billion other robots that are in are scattered around this world yeah i mean there isn't much uh techno babble

22:21 in this it's all just kind of magic yeah i mean if you do want the explanation uh you could probably just watch combo bebop because i'm pretty sure this takes place in the same universe more than likely they definitely [ __ ] the same holodome uh you know everyone's living on mars to the point that when they break the the weather machine uh the temperature starts to go down because hey in real life mars is freezing cold yeah and enemy that you know um it also has the same currency so yeah [Applause] you know the nice woolong trilogy uh where space dandy is the far future i i don't know if it quite lines up timeline wise this this country is way too clean to be related to the cowboy bebop future okay i mean uh it's clean if you have

23:08 money if you don't yeah if you live in uh mars new york city yeah because it feels like this is the um like soon after that lunar gate explosion happened because they haven't really talked about populating other planets and there's uh i think they actually they celebrate a new year in the show and it's like we've been on this planet for like 50 years now or something like that so a little before the the timeline of cowboy bebop if you want to get pedantic about it earth is consistently a [ __ ] that's that's true ah that is true you think that was commentary you know it did take me a while to realize that the moon in the sky is actually the earth

23:53 uh in the night sky that bugged the hell out of me because like the moon i'm sorry the earth is not that big from mars perspective it's the same way that mars is not that big in our night sky it shouldn't look like a moon just to tell you what kind of sci-fi series this is i i guess so i mean i was expecting shout outs to the actual moons of mars you know but nope we can't have that we gotta make earth look like it's way closer than it really is yeah but i did want to mention one uh thing with the writing uh before we move off of them like there's a lot of uh manipulative characters in this dub and the the writing is getting real good like zeroing in on

24:39 the language that they use to get what they want uh which i thought was uh really well executed so i want to shout that out particularly in the first half of the series uh because it did not be up i agree that one's pretty well done did it bother you that the the manipulative characters uh that their voices were not made uh i suppose more maniacal sounding than they could have oh oh no it's definitely given who some of those characters are i think um i think they have to make them sound i guess as realistic as you could yeah i'm not relying on the uh voice in those scenarios to convey that convey

25:25 intention like that i don't think they're trying to hide their intentions so right if it doesn't get everything like that that's what i mean yeah there's uh you know there are some characters in cowboy bebop not to go back to that show over and over but where the the evilness was like ramped up a lot more as a much more cartoony universe this is show that feels like they're definitely aiming for a a more grounded reality yeah there was cartoony chair the most cartoony side of characters in this dub are probably the ones who are the most explicitly evil and also guts i guess mermaid sisters are pretty cartoony yeah i was gonna say that the ones who are like the most camp are the ones who get to be the most uh over-the-top acting

26:10 that we do get some good faces off of carol and tuesday themselves it's just our opinion but yeah a lot of the like animation is very realism focused uh practically rotoscoped i know you'd be the expert here but the like musical performances are uh pretty true to life kind of in how they move like the drawings kind of mishmash around the screen because it looks like they're oh i'm trying to match like the 3d elements to it yeah i was going to say i don't think they're rotoscoped i'm pretty sure those stage performances are um they're 3d renderings because the the movements and the frame count goes up way higher and you can see like the the slight

26:56 stiffness that comes when you have characters on a rig that is separate from the non-musical performances where yeah you get those crazy facial expressions um but that's kind of a common trope in most anime these days if you watch anything that has an idol performance a stage performance a band performance uh even going back to back when they have uh to you know animate the the stage performances they tend to use uh cg they're 3d to keep the realism element as much as they can i really only spot it when they're like in interfacing with the instruments themselves like uh carol playing the piano like that's the only spot i'm really like noticing the the 3d rig i think the rest of it is like a good illusion of 2d animation

27:45 yeah i mean i would have been surprised if a lot of it was i mean did it this is still both we're talking about that it is i can't get out of this without talking about the visual elements excuse me for going off on that attachment oh no it's cool did you have anything else you want to add noah as far as the script writing and the acting um i'm going to have a surprisingly short amount of notes on the individual actors because everyone is consistently good throughout all of this um both erica and kyle seem to grasp the grounded reality aspect that is necessary for this kind of show because it's it is both a rise to the top musician story which we've all heard and

28:31 enjoyed before but it's also got a lot of commentary on the current political climate um i say current because even though this was made back in the late 2010s we're still dealing with a lot of those elements today so yeah the more over the top aspect and the uh way that it's directed is meant to make you almost forget that you're even watching a dubbed performance or an animated series of any kind which i think they succeeded at there are many times where my i'm watching animation mode just kind of turned off and you just enjoy the audio as you would any performance there's a there's a lot of characters in

29:16 this whole thing aren't there yeah uh so yeah so uh we should uh probably get to them uh so so for the first batch of characters i need to ask are you ready for american idol oh wait no no this is called marge brightest yeah let's go with that no copyright on the moon are we going to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism mars we can do what we want uh somewhere in the universe tim curry is growing right now uh so anyway you can't have a fake american idol without some competitors and judges so let's run them down

30:02 uh we've got pewter and social media star who wants to become a singer and make himself even more proper aware which you know next to the discrimination against immigrants and that's what's impressive thing about this series it is the implication that instagram will be the one social media platform to endure through the space age from here yeah that's the only one that gets the uh drop like their logo gets dropped no tick tock no youtube it's all just instagram we have truly failed as a species i mean well that that was yeah well before this show there's an canon instagram account for carol on tuesday you could follow right now yeah and so continuing we also have uh cybele a singer who is very interested in

30:47 tuesday and a bit too aggressive about it uh yeah uh there's also ggk a singer who believes he's one with the universe catherine are seven cowell standing because you know you can't not have one of those in these he's gotta choose he needed jugs to be a heel and then uh there's benito who serves as a very nice judge and shakti who is an ai robot dog who got brought out of the guest judge because literally why not hey you telling me right now that if there was a robot dog just starring on the voice that you wouldn't tune into that right away oh absolutely i rest my case what's the voice

31:34 oh i don't watch tv no no that's good that's good okay actually you know jet we're not gonna tell jackson we're gonna allow him to live in a world where he doesn't need to know about that because that's a happier world than what you and i live in uh so anyway playing pyoter we have eric timber playing sabell with laura stahl playing gtk as well lee playing kathryn is referred to lemons playing for detail with zuckerholtz is david vincent uh eric kimber has played those characters as harvey the arita in excel world rio de quisay in kirkland's basketball and speed of sound sonic and one punch man laura stalls his points and characters as ray and brahma zebraland sister and academic drive and dorothy the great pretender

32:19 only his points as characters as erica karasawa and durarap yuki cross and vampire knight and rinton saka for books of the fate franchise algor holts explains those characters as awesome as r toby naruto john pierre paul de raphael junior's bizarre adventures throughout his creators and inspectors that he got up for most modern iterations of the loop on the third franchise stephen vincent has placed his characters as fond of the dodd a gun at sword grim jaw and bleach and skeleton oda in buko's three dogs as for roberto levin's catherine is the only character credited to her name but i'm pretty sure this is an alias uh normally we try to water elise's outdoor shell and i can say much older

33:05 kind of we're dealing with but in this case i am pretty confident the actor in question was the elite police saying player but how prolific she was they kind of want to give credit where it's due or what's it in this case i guess so yeah yeah can't we'll get them in uh trouble with the union now yeah that's it uh so uh uh two i feel like we could probably get the judges out of the way first why do you call them bad jojo's they're not all bad well well one of them is very bad very bad sybil is a bad bad person

33:51 laura seems to be having the most fun with that character oh yeah symbol is very bad person also again like uh not a great stereotype but yeah long story short uh stalkers are not welcome ladies and gentlemen uh if you've got an unhealthy obsession with a celebrity musician a youtuber person go touch some grass because they they don't want to be your friend you're not entitled to their friendship don't get what this girl does yeah it kind of felt like sybil was there because uh they really wanted carol and doozy do i guess like have some kind of fuller go but didn't want to be like

34:36 super super melodramatic about it so i guess that's what simple was there for and i mean it animated that respect she like does the job it's just kind of like yeah and this every time it's kind of a little annoying yeah but but for what it's worth i didn't think laura saul did like a good job with the performance like sounding you know appropriately like obsessive and clingy in a way that is kind of like unsettling so i think in that respect it worked pretty well and also and also while symbol is like a not good person i do sort of appreciate the gimmick of her like singing french i thought that was really pretty but i think she was also trying to go for a believably androgynous uh voice which um

35:25 i'm not sure if that was one of the um lgbt elements that uh watanabe was trying to include into the show but it definitely uh helped set the range of female characters that we had because none of the other female characters are really you know androgynous they're either uh you know explicitly female or uh non-binary yeah yeah basically we have we have other better lesbians in this show to stan oh we we will get to them yes we will yeah but you know that's haircut this is also a part of representation you can let them be baddies as well uh oh man you have to use that term baddies ah yeah yeah that's been forever ruined

36:12 by certain people did you hear about this jackson what what about the word bat baddies being um co-opted oh was this oh i do know what this story is now this was drama i tried to ignore yeah and we won't get into the details but long story short some people on the internet people have uh started to use the word baddies as a term for like hot girls not the way that it's supposed to be used but that term so um yeah i can't that word's going to take a little getting used to for me they can't have it they can't have it but they can't have it i mean that's i mean it has been i mean that term has been around in that way for like quite a while but it is kind of annoying for sure yeah anyways the joke i was going to make is you can't just bite things to claim them as your own

37:02 you can't no yeah noah do you have some explaining to do well that's how jen got me i i assume that's how all girls get their prank you might want to check that marriage certificate yeah uh so um uh also liked uh bella lee as a youtube cave she didn't like freak a whole lot but it actually did a good job of you know making that a skater sound like very perfury or a fake kind of way which i guess sort of adds to the game again i and i also thought the ddk had like a couple of i thought our songs are pretty good yeah i've never heard mello do that kind of a voice before that like this very low commanding

37:47 uh ethereal voice i've never heard her do that before in tune with the universe yeah to be fair i've never seen a character like this in anything before so unique character calls for unique voice uh yeah that while it wasn't like you don't well you know they didn't go too deep into whatever character did sort of ask any whole like greater story about like immigrants kind of you know like you know kind of trying to find their way on mars because he was also in a like similar situation before she got into competition i thought that was interesting yeah at this point they're still being a little bit subtle so they're sprinkling in characters like ggk to uh to uh show other walks of life you

38:34 know you need some you need some variety in the contestants especially even at the semifinals yep and then we have uh eric cameron who is currently having a lot of fun playing this character so much he's he is so fun like uh sophie no that's not the word that's yeah it's camp he's very camp it's reminding me of like boy band or like male idol uh kind of oh definitely yeah what i appreciate is that it would be very easy to make this character be like extremely mean but like well he is like well he's pretty full of himself like a little obnoxious he's like never particularly it it's antagonistic in any way towards like carolyn toothy or anyone else really he's just kind of like doing his own thing and i thought

39:20 that was like pretty interesting yeah yeah he's just here for attention and he's getting lots of it so he's happy i am very uh intrigued that uh the the staff who made the show are on the older side i think that's fair to say but they definitely retained the um that the modern generation and this goes for us too even though we're a little older love attention the entire internet culture is about gaining attention and the approval of others so i'm glad that they embody that in this character because that's not really what carol and tuesday are all about so it had to go to a different character yeah even uh catherine was one over pow-pow question um did any of you guys think that it was gonna be a twist that

40:05 katherine was pyotr's mother there was like some body language and the way that their uh characters were designed that made me think like this is gonna be like one of those uh twist reveals that uh that that he's her son or something at the end but i was thinking too hard about it yeah uh so uh two things over teddy does this i thought uh dog laura holt and david vincent did like a pretty good job as like ebenito and choctee over here like coco girls like playing the very very nice one and like doing a good job of sounding very very over the top nice in a way that is also got a little annoying and it was very

40:51 well done yeah very very true to the uh inspiration very true and then david visited this being a very chill ai robot i would like some real like some really good load letters about like oh you know like what would i know about having a soul yeah he starts up he introduces himself as i am going to judge your performance as a robot would and then when all uh carol two zero explained that we wanted to inject soul into our music all david's got to say is i thought it was really good i thought there was a lot of soul but what would i know about having a soul cute left track catchphrase it inputs uh push a button out comes the catchphrase

41:37 was a lot of uh that character i think yeah and almost uh the same is true for uh catherine a little bit because she's she's saying every single time oh this was a real hard decision this was the most difficult decision yet that that's that's showmanship you know that then television you gotta build up the suspense if you think it's one-sided one person's definitely gonna win no one's gonna watch it you gotta make people think that it was a tough choice yeah but yeah and do her credit she died because uh she didn't give the impression somebody does like take her job very seriously i thought that was proof i thought that was reflected in roberta's performance here television scripting that is kind of the sensation i was getting from

42:22 this stretch of the show that makes sense yeah i don't appreciate that since he was he like most prominent of the of the three judges here you do kind of see her a little bit past this arc like patrick early uh when it comes to carol and tuesday trying to get their first contract and her like i guess not trying to actively screw them over but you know kind of being like oh well you know you've gotta like understand that like uh record labels get to have control and that's just business mm-hmm and i thought that like roberto got that across pretty well she also got the the heart nose dumb you're late um and the rules dictate that you should be disqualified and you know she's not

43:08 budging from that but it's not in a mean vindictive way it's in the very much like if i bend the rules for you i have to bend it for everyone and then it's anarchy yeah but this is a 90s feel good movie so i'm going to bend the rules this time okay i mean to be fair that actually was a good song that is like next to mother that is probably my like favorite song from uh carolyn to the particular uh their first one if we are having this discussion it's the uh opening uh kiss me for me oh yeah yeah kiss me is also good uh i didn't really care for these that could not be that much that is probably the worst song from those two i feel

43:57 yeah it's not bad it's just kind of like it's very kind of forgettable pop compared to all the other songs yeah if we want to talk about the music for just a second or for the insert song specifically i didn't really feel there were any bad songs there were just some that were a little more forgettable than others i found a lot of it like easy listening like uh we mentioned that it's appealing to uh american taste particularly like i could believe this uh play was filling out a top 40 quite like across the entire uh repertoire of the show in this day and age maybe not this day and age but it is like there it is like a nostalgic feeling for a lot of these songs like i i would put this on and go like go for a drive type of

44:44 uh sound just listening to the radio but but the ultimate question jackson is it better than the beck mongolian chop squad soundtrack no and uh i'm gonna try to describe why uh i had i learned this concept or i'm still in this concept from a different podcast of the variety of songs that you can broadly uh drop into three categories of ballads uh belters and uh ballads belters and what was the third one badass bangers bangers so there there are a lot of ballads in this show uh yes uh

45:29 not a lot of bangers the the occasional bop and the occasional belter but not really it's a it's a lot of it's a lot of balance of just like easy listening uh guitar souls and acoustic solos so i was appreciating a lot of the uh variety uh across that otherwise so like carol and tuesday are aren't my favorite uh musicians in this i probably liked uh character we'll talk about later a lot more i don't feel like that's a controversial statement uh because it's yeah it's definitely not for everyone and i don't feel like their kind of music is the kind that uh we in this day and age would choose to listen to on loop it's definitely good for like um

46:16 you know like you've heard the the fleetwood mac album rumors right i must have i don't know it by name but i'm sure if you played three notes from it oh it's it's the one with all the hit songs on it i've got don't stop thinking about tomorrow go your own way um and uh in the middle of there of that great album is the song songbird which is like a slow soft cool song that kind of is the closest to the carol and tuesday sound to it so like i'm imagining if you had an album that was all song birds and there were no um uh secondhand news or any other songs in there then it wouldn't be as big of a pop cuz you're right you need bops and bangers as much as you need ballads

47:03 yeah uh so we need to move out through the depth yeah section leave american idol behind tangent tangent yep uh so now that we talked about the water bees it's not to move on to the big musicians in this show so we've got skip collins crystal desmond flora ezekiel and johnny earned again so skip is a popular singer who is equated with crystal uh crystal is another popular singer who carol and tuesday both look up to desmond is a reclusive non-binary singer who has generally cut themselves off from the world uh flora is a singer who caro adolescent child and was also augusta's former partner ezekiel is a popular rapper who was later revealed to me carol's childhood

47:49 freddie mayor who integrated to mars like she did but has also gone through harder times and lastly erdogan is the most popular dj at mars he was extremely full of himself and holding bit of a guards against carolyn tuesday when they started the fire at his house after he did you know what fair you know what that's that's a reasonable grudge to hold but i mean i mean he was also really he was also really mean but like they didn't but by the way jeff you didn't introduce him correctly you don't just introduce him as johnny eddergan you gotta go dj anagan [Music] he he enters the stage by going gone

48:34 gone the form of man become the dj hetragon there you go we the best music yeah so uh playing skip we have imari williams and for crystal we have christina valenzuela for desmond we have patrick science up our floor we have rebecca thomas playing ezekiel with a robinson and lancia erdogan is played by ray chase uh the mario williams has played those characters as lev aldridge in 86 zod and berserk 2017 and a whole horse and joseph is our adventure stardust crusaders actresses of valenzuela his wife's character that's hobra and paula maggie madoka and hunter hunter 2011 and louise in a

49:20 familiar room zero patrick science explains his characters as luke valentine announcing ultimate mao and german god and lobsters in fairy tale rebecca thomas his place his character said she didn't eat at 86. sister krona in the promised liberland and valkyrie united needed zero zeta robinson explains his characters as vanitas in the case studies basketball and dealing with my journeys and lastly ray chase is playing since characters as russell elliott and will took got to buy both of the orphans possibility to go to and march comes into kawaii and karate see what mr is about to i'm just mad that they they didn't introduce these characters earlier in the show like i feel like these

50:06 characters are like a wide range of interesting talent and personalities and they're used so sparingly you know uh yeah okay i mean to be okay i mean to be fair most i think like most of them at least half of them are introduced in the first half of the show and then bike directions just kind of like we introduced throughout the second half but i guess it'd be fair like when dudes other characters are producing the second half they need to we do like say something important about like the whole immigrant story right yeah like skip gets introduced in the music festival that they don't get to a premiere in except they kind of do um and yeah he's just kind of introduced and that's it until we need him again uh and then desmond flora and ezekiel aren't

50:52 introduced until like the last third of the show yeah yeah i did find the second half of this show a lot more interesting uh which you know works against the netflix uh release model for the show because i think i dropped it originally uh having watched only the first half and then had to wait six months for the second half to come out and then i just didn't uh didn't pick it back up when it when it came back which is unfortunate i mean that does say quite a bit that uh what you saw in the show wasn't intriguing enough to make you want to pick it back up when the second half dropped right exactly because the first half is primarily focused on this uh

51:38 american idol uh parody practically yeah so and and then we get into the good [ __ ] in the second half of like why we make music and and [ __ ] well and that's also uh the one that really amps up the uh the more political commentary section of it there are bits and pieces of it in the first half of it but yeah you're right it was much more focused on the the pageantry and the learning about the music industry side of it uh yeah i guess we're like well you know we got that we need cairo today to like make their way to music industry so we could like them get to the actually important stuff yeah i guess i just again it's just there's a wide range of characters here that unlike shows like uh unlike episodic series where you have

52:24 like characters who don't come back in other episodes this show does and he had the opportunity to integrate them throughout the show in more interesting ways like we're not going to talk about them but there's a backup band that carol and tuesday get and they just pick them up off the river they show up for a little bit and that's it you know like they're not built up it's just poof they're there yeah they aren't the focus of the show what do you want from messages oh this is the carol and tuesday show i i didn't think that whole of you guys i did that whole thing it was like pretty funny that's like where we're like hey we need a bunch of things why can't we need a backup band they find them and i thought they were like it was like it was easy we just went with them a little bit and they just had to throw it up at us give them a little valentine's chocolate and their putty in your hands

53:12 that is true uh so um getting into these characters i feel like we could probably start with skipping crystals as they are uh in not uh indeed joe quite as much as the others but i didn't like but i didn't like both of them a lot uh i've already i always like i've always liked mario williams and like pretty much everything he does anything he did i think he doesn't edit he brings a pretty good uh quality to skimpy just makes him sound like a pretty dow do earth dude yeah he's he's got a lot of great presence even though he's like very uh soft spoken so i i enjoyed uh whenever he was on screen he definitely provides a a professional feel uh because they're we're dealing with performers who are

53:58 pros they are being paid for what they're doing and he's introduced at a point where carol and tuesday aren't sure if they're going to be able to do well in front of an audience so then we get imari conveying the sense of confidence that a seasoned performer needs to have if you're going to perform music in front of a live audience yeah in front of your ex-girlfriend i almost forgot about that part that's a great bit of characterization where uh crystal and skip were an item at one point and he's still performing uh the songs that she wrote or produced as it were uh yeah yeah i do think they have like yeah i didn't have like pretty decent odd screen chemistry whatever like they're around each other and i thought that was like pretty interesting

54:44 two times they're on screen together yeah and while again he wasn't like indeed back after each of you as much as i wish he was like uh emory did nail the important scenes um that he needed to particularly that's particularly the ones where he's like uh helping carolyn tuesday uh black producer first single i thought that whole thing was pretty fun like hey you guys actually got to be the proof what are we going to do like 36 tries that's a new record as anybody with any winner scene wearing like he's like walking down the street with his buddies and like he's getting harassed by the cops because they don't like his music and i thought that scene was uh very true to life and a lot of this is a

55:30 little on the nose isn't it where it escalates very quickly for no good goddamn reason yep andy barry uh got different straights of that across really really well and uh that was very well done and uh yeah uh christina's uh crystal isn't really given um like a cork i didn't feel like um there's no like i kind of expected that with a show like this that there may be like um pastiches of real life musicians interjected into the characters and i couldn't really get a grasp on who crystal was supposed to be like if she was supposed to be like a real life person or was just an amalgamation of nice popular singer person

56:16 it it's showing my ignorance but i was getting beyonce vibes off of her uh potentially yeah yeah really yeah not not so much the uh puttering on it beyonce but uh the that kind of uh ballad vibe to her uh music like current number one is is the vibe that they're going for with this character okay yeah um it's definitely yeah it's definitely supposed to be an an american performer of some kind um yeah uh right now that's i thought kid i thought that christina did a good job of you know giving her like a pretty like a pretty good sentence a pretty good sense of presence where you could

57:02 tell that like yeah this is a really popular singer who was like very clearly like earned her reputation in um and her career and uh that all comes off pretty well whenever crystal's like addressed like with other characters as as a new anyone kind of news by the whole bit where like she agreed to do it what kind of dudes they didn't get like really nervous about the possibility that like she won't like the time because she's turned down other people before and then like and i'd like seeing her instagram with her like every headphones on i thought that was pretty funny this track is golden which that's got to be breaking some nda of some kind i okay okay i mean she didn't see what she was

57:48 listening to so you know that's true there are voice actors who say like i'm recording today without saying what they're actually recording so okay i guess you're right you get a lot of oh my god i've been waiting i've been wanting to work on this property for ages and then no further information you can get away with that now i'm sorry uh are you got anything else on christina uh not another good day we might do next character so i don't get this character or rather i don't get what purpose he serves in the narrative i don't get desmond why desmond was introduced uh as uh i mean i guess

58:34 what did i may wanted to have more uh done by their rep i guess that kind of scene while they were hearing well see yeah it was a bit of an awkward inclusion compared to like some of the other characters here but they did like as i mean i didn't like desperate for the most part they seemed like and they seemed pretty they seemed pretty chill i think they are one of the first other characters to say like this is why i make music this is why i do the things i do i i want to leave my mark on on the world like you get you get a couple other people of like we want to express ourselves and this and that but he's but they are one of the first to really zero in on that and try to pass

59:19 that message along dude but yeah there's that sense and patrick does an interesting job uh with their uh their cork you know to make them stand out from the other characters um but it also seemed like it was a section for them to explain the more sci-fi elements of this a little bit like some people's bodies just kind of have a reaction to the mars landscape some people it makes them it blurs their gender a little bit more uh readjust their brain chemistry a little bit and they feel uh more themselves which to be fair it's it's more progressive than some other shows i don't know if you've ever seen this anime called basquatch but it's a show about basketball and outer space and one

1:00:06 of the quirks of growing up on the moon is that some of the women become more endowed due to the low gravity so i didn't uh need to stoop to those levels in this show oh yeah i watched a few episodes of fast squash and then yeah i definitely noticed that every female character that you had very large assets do they make reference to that or is that just a running joke about this i think it's yeah it's not just a running joke i mean it's a character feature in that show but they do actually stop to explain it at one point i did think uh patrick's ice was an interesting uh casting choice here because the singing voice is like very

1:00:51 high and ephemeral and they're like to play the uh gender spectrum and portray that they're getting a very low voice to patrick sites uh to do the voice otherwise i do think patrick did a good job by doing the whole like uh addressing his voice again it would have been you know bad today maybe try to catch an actual bod by that reactor here but it is what it is that's true um i mean the the devil's advocate argument on that about you know you didn't cast enough uh openly queer people is that you know there may be queer people in this cast you just aren't out about that kind of thing i i mean i do i mean i know there were

1:01:37 definitely a couple like in the cali area at the time who they could have baby cats in but uh that didn't happen for whatever reason yeah matching making sure to uh try to match the characters uh gender identity definitely wasn't a high priority in the casting for this yeah i think for example some of the people that we uh some lgbtq people in this show uh that we know of now we didn't know of at the time that is also true yeah like this was um uh what was this before the the netflix dub of evangelion came out yes this was 2019 that this came out okay yeah so this was uh before we had a very prominent um

1:02:22 character i mean uh i mean that i mean uh casey bad bitten bags and stuff uh well before ava so i mean i know i know okay okay i mean a bit of okay i mean it'd be completely i guess with this character it might have not been the exact vocal say vocal register as to say you i guess but like uh but you know it's also but you know you also don't always have to match that but you know it is what it is i guess yeah it's not uh it wasn't a high priority for them but like you were saying jackson it was kind of interesting getting against typecast getting patrick sites of all people you know germany himself to voice the

1:03:08 more higher pitched non-binary character probably never get that ever again he has played other uh female characters uh for example like i've just been playing either somnium files where he plays mama uh the a bar uh uh my bar hostess uh for lack of a better term informant uh i would say that this is better representation than mama in that first game uh but uh i do i do like mama a lot but the jokes can't be a little bit they're more mean about her weight than anything else oh that okay that's not cool yeah exactly right you know what also isn't cool drug dependency

1:03:54 uh yeah uh flora goes through a plot because yeah you can't have a show you know talking about musicians without uh i guess i'll make it to this topic at least a little bit we already had one alcoholic in the cast so yeah we've got to have someone who's had a substance abuse problem this is the one that gets the tv documentary about their fall from grace but do they get them for do they get to interview them for the documentary well they're still alive so they haven't made this documentary yet right but the uh would floor be interested in being interviewed for it isn't the question no uh but uh anyway i thought uh rebecca tom is in a pretty uh good job here

1:04:41 uh portraying uh for during you know her early days i would guess when uh as i i wanted to do that we're just kind of like getting started and then like later when we see her in the present after she's like had her fall from great to see him like sounds a lot shakier and more but city and i thought that uh rebecca thomas got that across pretty well and uh i don't know why i thought that episode on the whole was like really interesting yeah that was a that was a strong episode that was really touching uh seriously she has a fantastic singing voice like unlike any other ones that we hear in the cast that floor is akin to uh musical royalty as far as this show's concerned

1:05:27 i think where her influence is far-reaching yeah inspirations uh yeah uh there's actually going to uh go into a also the criticism of the dub script it's more of a act it's more of a well you know hindsight is footage what anything uh because there is a point uh earlier in the show where like that's where gus is like uh talking to carol after like so after tuesday is uh fourthly taken back home by her mom and gus is talking about like a partner he had who like there's a partner he had who like he broke things off with and how like he regretted never being able to bend that relationship at the time gus referred to that person with male burnout but in

1:06:13 hindsight it is really obvious he was talking about flora and and i'm pretty sure the uh netflix subs caught on to this because it did you because he subs use female pronouns for this person and uh did not so i'm guessing it's a case where like they did i guess it's the case where they didn't know ahead of time and they weren't able to go back and correct that it seems like a case of we dubbed this in two chunks we had different directors for both chunks i mean for god's sakes the name of the episode is called a natural woman but i don't know about that i don't know if that helps in the scenario right now

1:07:00 um but yeah um what what else we got here um oh wow can we talk about ezekiel too oh oh oh yeah because you know there's every not good that that monster robinson but th this right here like this is the character i feel has the bangers you know we're just talking about the three types of music this is the bangers hip-hop yeah uh i have pretty good rap really good and a really good representation of rap as has a tool to uh you know talk about politics i get really excited about wordplay uh in music so this this was my [ __ ] i was all up in it was yeah it was good mars backwards is ram s did you know

1:07:46 that not until this song came out and his entire inclusion addresses something that had been bugging me about the whole show like not just the dub but like the direction of the show in that the premise in the second half is that we're going to use music to address injustices and they do it with i'm sorry to say it they do it with we are the world mars edition but that's not what's actually fixing anything ezekiel's music is the one that's actually addressing the injustices and you know getting up in people's faces and making them think about it i didn't think they were going to play we are the world straight i didn't think i i had more faith in the show than that oh you poor child

1:08:35 i gotta be asked what it was getting towards the end of the show and i was thinking like okay i see the premise how are they going to resolve this like what what can these people do and you know what came to my mind the pandemic imagine music video i i was going to say the pandemic cowboy bebop uh tank rendition by many musical artists including the yokocano oh no that was good that actually did show unity in the trying time it did you're right um uh but whereas uh what we needed in this time was we don't need a happy ballad like we are the world we needed actual change we need activism we need

1:09:20 uh you know stop the bad evil person from bad immigrant policies we we need acknowledgement that shit's [ __ ] yeah basically yeah and and like i said before we start recording uh here in america we are just recording this soon after the uh the midterm primaries uh just ended where we are encouraged to go vote against the injustices of the world but you guys are like always in election season oh yeah up here in canada like as i understand it the elections canada is working very hard all the time so the prime minister can call an election and a month later the election's over it's it's a great system it sounds like a great system yeah we even have

1:10:05 more than two parties see it would be so easy to have more than two parties here in america if that was the standard already i feel like we're too late you know we've already uh eaten into the two-party system and it would take multiple generations to change people's minds on that we're just it's too late for us so sorry sorry to get briefly political but my uh my grandpa did was a member of one that third party for example uh here

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