The Iron Giant

We are who we choose to be, and if Brad Bird hadn't chosen to be a pain in the ass, we'd never have The Iron Giant. This week, Chris & Lizzie are joined by Alex Steed of the You Are Good podcast to explore the complex history of The Iron Giant. From children's stories to profound loss, The Iron Giant's journey to our homes was one of falling apart and coming back together again. *Please note that today's episode includes mention of suicide and domestic violence. *CORRECTIONS: Chris mispronounces composer George Bruns' name as "Burns". The first Disney animated film to extensively use CGI was "The Great Mouse Detective" (1986). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one, let alone your child's favorite retro film about nuclear holocaust. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzy.

• 2:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Here as always with Chris, but Chris, we've got a special guest with us today. We do have a very, very special guest. I am very excited because we are joined by Alex Steed of the absolutely wonderful You Are Good podcast, which we had the pleasure of guesting on. He's also the host of the OC Again Rewatch podcast. So for all you guys looking to head to California sometime soon, check that one out. As I mentioned, we had the honor of joining Alex on You Are Good to talk about Galaxy Quest, one of my favorite movies of all time. And so I thought it only fitting to have Alex on What Went Wrong for another one of my favorite movies

• 2:54Chris Winterbauer?

  of all time, The Iron Giant, because it's all about me. Alex, thank you for joining us.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It's perfect because I was a Beatnik Manor child. So this is a deeply resonant text.

• 3:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I am excited. Well, speaking of, so Alex, we'll let you go first and then Lizzie. Had you seen The Iron Giant before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or rewatching it for today's podcast?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  I loved The Iron Giant and I, because I have a soul and I, I saw it originally in the theater the day after I got my wisdom teeth out. And so I was chemically vulnerable and I balled for not just the last bit where it is the time to ball. I balled for maybe the last full act of the movie. And then later I would take like young, there were a couple of screenings of this a handful of years ago, and I would take sort of like young family members to go see it who'd never seen it before. Like this is a, I watched a behind the scenes special about it and

• 4:05Speaker 02

  they said something to the effect of, if this is a movie that you love, this is a movie that you become an evangelist for, especially like for people who are close to you. And that's like very much been my experience. And then to, you know, the points I made earlier, it takes place in Maine. So that is huge. Not a lot of media unless. It's by Stephen King, takes place in Maine. So you're always very happy to see it when it happens. Stephen King, of course, Murder She Wrote, Dark Shadows, like, that's what we got. And then, yeah, it's huge. I love this movie so, so much. I was happy to watch it again and love it all the same, if not more.

• 4:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie?

• 4:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I suppose I'm ready to be evangelized because I don't have a soul. I had never seen this. I know, I know, you guys, I'm sorry. I, I had never seen the Iron Giant before. I was very excited to watch it. And I watched it last night. I gotta tell you guys, I did not like this. It's not that I hated it at all.

• 5:11Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Well, Lizzie's not gonna be joining us for the rest of the podcast.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Lizzie, I'm so sorry I started like that.

• 5:18Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's good. You're not wrong. You're not wrong, I think. Maybe this is why. All I could think the whole time I was watching it is like, this is not for children. This is not made for children. I don't, I would be very curious to hear, because it sounds like, Chris, you probably did watch this when you were a kid. I just couldn't believe how much of it is about nuclear warfare and like relatively complicated concepts of nuclear warfare. The whole last act, Mansley is just trying to blow up a child as well as the whole town. And they keep telling him like, but the kid's with him. And he's like, aim the missile right at the child's head. That's a lot of the

• 5:58Lizzie Bassett?

  movie. That being said, wonderful voice cast. I wish we could see more of Jennifer Aniston doing voices. I really enjoyed her. I thought the animation was beautiful. I loved sort of the depth to it, which is something we talked a little bit about with, you know, Toy Story, obviously. This looks very hand drawn. Chris, I'm sure you'll talk about it. But really gorgeous. I too enjoyed that it was in, I believe, the fictional town of Rockwell, Maine. Although there is a rock port.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  There sure is.

• 6:28Lizzie Bassett?

  But yeah, I don't know. I just, to me, it felt a bit like a, like a pastiche of so many other movies that to me were maybe a little bit more successful at appealing to both adults and children. Like, there's so much E.T. in this. And that was the big one that stood out to me, where it just, it felt like it missed a bit of the fun and games that E.T. has. And the other thing I felt while watching it is I was like, I wonder if I would have enjoyed this more had this been live action.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 7:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is not to say that the animation wasn't beautiful. Something about the animation made it feel so like it was geared towards children. And then the plot itself is so very, like, depressing and, you know, warfare-based and, and like, military-industrial complex-focused that it felt a little incongruous to me. So that was my take on The Iron Giant. Loved Vin Diesel. Loved it.

• 7:29Chris Winterbauer?

  One of his, one of his best roles.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Three.

• 7:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Family.

• 7:34Chris Winterbauer?

  When he plays one, one word, yeah.

• 7:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I do actually love it.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  He's great in this. I, I took a screenshot of like a behind the scenes of him voice, during like voice cast stuff. And he's like, it's for the sound effect. It's for like the folio or whatever. But he's like eating like cabbage or something and wearing his sunglasses in a dark room. He's sober. Tastefully wearing a long sleeve shirt, as my friend said.

• 7:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for him. He's also, I will say, also really good in Saving Private Ryan, which would have been around the same time. So.

• 8:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about the timing of that. So I vehemently disagree with Lizzie. And this movie is a masterpiece. Although I have a theory, Lizzie, as to why. I have a slightly gendered theory.

• 8:21Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I think you're right. I actually, I was thinking that I do think that this, I understand why this would appeal to boys a lot more than girls.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  You mean Terminator 2 Meteet, you think would be a?

• 8:31Chris Winterbauer?

  That's, that is what this is.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Terminator 2 and ET, so, you know, in Terminator 2, we got Linda Hamilton, though.

• 8:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I do think that, as we will get to, the pitch that Brad Bird came up with for this movie, which is an adaptation, it speaks to something that I think, so I saw this in theaters, I was 10 years old, this movie blew my mind and I, I loved it. I loved that it didn't talk down to me, it also made me cry at that age, but it got down to an idea, which is, at least I can speak for myself, at that age, I was very interested in playing war, playing guns. And I really thought this notion of what if a gun had a soul, was really beautiful. And this idea that the war at the end ends up being self-inflicted is really,

• 9:20Chris Winterbauer?

  you know, kind of poetic and the sacrifice that the Iron Giant makes and that your strength is not in offense, but in defense, right? It's in protecting the things that you love. And, and I also found, especially at the time, the animation particularly moving because it, it was the first film that I really felt successfully combined 3D animation and 2D animation in a really organic way. The Iron Giant is done three dimensionally and then the rest of the animation is traditional, you know, 2D cell animation. So, I loved this movie for, I loved it when I was 10, I love it now. I actually, while Lizzie, I agree with you, I think the plot elements are very adult. I actually think the message

• 10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  is more appropriate for kids than the message of Toy Story even. The message of, of the Iron Giant, you are who you choose to be, is a wonderful message, I, I think, for kids and it's something I'm excited to share with my daughter and I hope she likes it and wants to talk about it. Whereas I actually think Toy Story is a slightly more complicated message, which is, you kind of have to accept who you are, independent of where you fall in the loving order, you know, of those around you, et cetera, and, you know, the existential crisis that Buzz goes through, for example. So, I agree with you, I think the plot is somewhat more adult. I do, I think the themes are appropriately.

• 10:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Geared toward both children and adults, but I wonder if there's, and I would be curious if our audience feels this way, if there is a slightly gender bias, you know, to this movie, because to me, it really felt like it was aimed at little boys who are so obsessed with turning everything into a gun. And I was definitely one of those little boys. Not that girls can't do that either. I just, it's definitely a gendered thing. But maybe, Lizzie, I can convert you to a believer that the Iron Giant, while maybe not your cup of tea, was and remains a unique and incredible accomplishment of animation and an important piece of animation history.

• 11:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I feel certain that you can, that I will not deny. Can I say one other thing about this movie?

• 11:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:36Lizzie Bassett?

  No, this is a good thing. One of my favorite things about this was how much of the DNA of The Incredibles that you can see in it.

• 11:43Chris Winterbauer?

  That will briefly come up. There are some Brad Bird ideas of individualism versus family, et cetera, you know.

• 11:50Lizzie Bassett?

  The retro setting, a lot of the dialogue, the way that they talk, like some of the setups. Yeah, it was very, you can tell how he stepped from this to The Incredibles. And I do, I love The Incredibles very much.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I won't get into partisan politics, but I did feel like while watching this, that this movie should be force fed to everyone in Congress and the executive branch, like, like the end of A Clockwork Orange. Like, I think that their eyes should be pried open and they should watch it and forcefully receive this, the message of this movie.

• 12:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm fine with that.

• 12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's funny. I watched The House of Dynamite last night and I was like, I actually think Congress should watch this before House of Dynamite, personally.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  I also, Lizzie, it's so funny that you, I think you're right that the message is sort of intense for, not the message, but the, the delivery and applause sort of intense for kids. Chris, I think you're right with regard to who it appeals to. And just what's so wild to me, watching this is like, again, this is about sort of nuclear anxiety, of course.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  But the fact that, as the thesis is that Chris had spoken to, what if a gun had a soul? Thinking about the fact that it is so regular now for children at the youngest ages to have to carry backpacks suited to understanding if there's guns in them and go through drills just in case someone's coming into the school to hurt them in one way or another, makes this so scarily more resonant than when it was like a Cold War, like a nuclear anxiety film.

• 13:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I wonder if that is maybe what gave me a hard time with it, just because I did not see this when I was younger and I did not see it around the time that it came out. And there was something about how war-based this movie was and how much everything revolves around, like, yeah, the whole thing is that he's a weapon, but that he can choose whether or not he's a weapon and, you know, who controls him and if he controls himself and all that. But yeah, I think maybe where my brain was going was like, kids already have to, you know, deal with this stuff so much. And these days, I think a nuclear threat is maybe more present than it was when this movie came out. This movie was almost not parodying it,

• 14:04Lizzie Bassett?

  but it is a little bit. When it shows the like duck and cover sequence early on, you know, that's almost like a remember when they had to do this type thing? And now watching it, it's like, God, my kid's gonna have to go to school and she's gonna have to do drills. And like, there was an element of it that depressed me a little bit that I wonder if maybe it wouldn't have had I seen this when it came out.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's talk about the details.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Can't wait.

• 14:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So The Iron Giant is a 1999 animated movie directed by, as we mentioned, Brad Bird. It was written by Tim McCanley, who did receive the screenplay credit. Brad Bird was also a writer on this movie, as was Brent Forrester, who was also uncredited. Brad Bird did receive the screen story credit. And as you mentioned, Alex, it is based on the book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. It was produced by Alison Abate, Des McCanniff, and executive produced by Pete Townsend of The Who.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  For my favorite reason ever. Can't wait.

• 15:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Quick sidebar on Pete Townsend before we dive in. Because this is a children's movie, I do think it's important to mention in 2003, a few years after The Iron Giant came out, Townsend was put on a sex offenders register for a few years after he admitted to the police that he had used his credit card to access a website with child sexual abuse images. Okay, we're gonna leave it at that and get back to The Iron Giant. It stars Eli Marionthal as Hogarth Hughes, Vin Diesel as The Iron Giant, one of his first major roles, Jennifer Aniston as Annie Hughes, Harry Connick Jr. with our Patrick

• 15:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Wilson Best Looking Guy from Your Hometown Award, Harry Connick Jr., accomplished musician and wonderful actor, Christopher McDonald chewing up all the scenery still in the show as Kent Mansley, John Mahoney as General Rogard, and many, many more. It was released by Warner Brothers on August 6, 1999.

• 16:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my birthday.

• 16:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, wow.

• 16:05Lizzie Bassett?

  A gift for me.

• 16:06Chris Winterbauer?

  A gift for Lizzie. And as always, the IMDb logline reads, "A young boy befriends a giant robot from outer space that a paranoid government agent wants to destroy." Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, The Giant's Dream, which Alex, you probably just watched, the making of documentary, 2024 Q and A with Brad Bird at Retro Replay, 1999, the year that changed cinema, that's a screening hosted by Landmark Theaters, Letters of Ted Hughes, the book compilation, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. Now, two brief disclaimers. As you may have gleaned, today's episode will include, unfortunately, discussions of

• 16:48Chris Winterbauer?

  suicide, matricide, and domestic abuse, and we will be talking a little bit, you know, about Sylvia Plath as well, and I'm excited to get into that in an unexpected way. Today's story, I think, is very much about how things all too often fall apart, like the Iron Giant does in this movie, and how sometimes we can put them back together. But the Iron Giant doesn't start in Maine, unfortunately, sorry, Alex, sorry, Lizzie, nor does his story start in California. It doesn't even start in the United States. It starts in England with a bedtime story, which poet Ted Hughes made up for his kids about a very giant iron man. He was taller than a house.

• 17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  He had eyes like headlamps that changed color with his mood, and he ate barbed wire like spaghetti. Perhaps most important of all, when he fell apart, he could simply put himself back together, piece by piece. And for the Hughes children, Frida and Nicholas, things had fallen apart. Now, several sources claim that Hughes wrote the book to help his kids cope with the death of their mother, who, if you're unfamiliar, was the singularly talented Sylvia Plath. Lizzie, do you have much experience with Sylvia Plath? Any, you want to do a brief two-sentence on Sylvia Plath?

• 18:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course I have experience with Sylvia Plath. I was once a teenage girl. Sylvia Plath was a really, really amazing poet, author. Her probably most famous work is "The Bell Jar", which, if you've never read it, you should. Semi-autobiographical, although not exactly. Her poetry was really, you know, I joked that it's something that tends to appeal to teenage girls. I think it appeals to everyone, everywhere. It's, it's-

• 18:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I reread "The Bell Jar", it's so good.

• 18:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing. "The Bell Jar" is incredible.

• 18:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also so funny.

• 18:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she is very funny.

• 18:41Chris Winterbauer?

  She's so funny. It's like "Fleabag", 1963.

• 18:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. "Fleabag" actually is a fantastic reference for Sylvia Plath. She's very sharp. She's very quick. She is not afraid of things that are physically gross, which was unusual, whether that's, you know, like sexual things, physical things, menstruation.

• 19:01Lizzie Bassett?

  But talks about it in a very human way, was not afraid of, you know, discussing violence, both emotional and physical. And she also struggled her whole life with anxiety and depression. And very tragically, she did end her own life, quite famously, I believe, by putting her head in the oven.

• 19:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Indeed. In July of 1962, basically, she discovered that her husband Ted Hughes was having an affair with their friend, Asia Wevel. Plath was that winter left alone to fend for their two children. One was two years old, one was basically nine months, I believe. It was one of the coldest winters on record. Pipes froze, there's no TV, excuse me, there's no telephone. And she's writing poetry when she can around taking care of the kids. And it was in that winter when her first novel, The Bell Jar, was published in the United Kingdom. It wasn't published in the United States until years later.

• 19:54Lizzie Bassett?

  And to be clear, she was American, not British.

• 19:56Chris Winterbauer?

  She was American, that's right. And she's living in the English countryside by herself, while her husband is off with another woman. The Bell Jar was not well received when it first came out. It was a big, collective, critical shrug. And it was described as juvenile by many people. Later, as you mentioned, Lizzie, it would be recognized as, I'm not trying to be reductive, but it was kind of the female Catcher in the Rye, I think, is how a lot of people have seen it. That February, she committed suicide, as you mentioned, basically carbon monoxide asphyxiation. She was 30 years old. And so eventually Ted Hughes wrote this story of the Iron Man down. So the original story does share some DNA with

• 20:37Chris Winterbauer?

  the movie, but it was pretty different. So it was divided into five chapters to be read over five nights. There is a boy named Hogarth, which is where our name comes from. Although at first, he betrays the Iron Man. So he basically sets, helps set up a trap for the Iron Man to fall into, so the farmers can trap him. But then he feels bad about this. He takes the Iron Man to a scrapyard. The Iron Man gets to eat all he wants. And then there's a giant space bat angel dragon the size of Australia that appears in the sky and lands on Australia. And there's a big battle between the Iron Man and the Space Dragon, where they compete about who's tougher. And he lies on hot, uh, like coals, basically. And the Space Dragon lies on the sun.

• 21:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And then the Iron Man wins and the Space Dragon lives on the moon and sings for us for the rest of time. And it gets a little out there. It feels very much like a fairy tale. There's a lot of dream logic. Uh, it's very loose. It's very, it's not grounded in our world, I think, in the way that the final film is. So it gets published in 1968, and it was renamed in the United States, the Iron Giant. Any guesses as to why?

• 21:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Iron Man?

• 21:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, because of Marvel's Iron Man. Exactly, yeah, which was, uh, already an existing character. So in 1968, that is the same year that an 11-year-old boy named Brad Bird began animating his first short film. So Brad Bird's from Montana. And like a lot of young kids, he loved to draw. And it's not that his drawings were particularly great, but they were really unique for one reason. If you read them sequentially, they told a story. So where most kids, probably myself included, would spend a lot of time trying to make one drawing, you know, look great, he's making drawings that are actually telling stories. And so he falls in love with Disney films, like The Jungle Book, which came out in 1967.

• 22:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And he had a family connection to composer George Burns. And if you guys don't know the name George Burns, he's like maybe the most prolific Disney composer of the mid 20th century. Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, Sword in the Stone, Jungle Book, Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Works. So he goes to Disney, tours the studio, and he meets the Nine Old Men. These were the core animators who had worked at the studio from the 20s to the 80s. Couple of years later, Brad Bird sends in one of his early animations. Disney gives him an internship. He is on his way. He's the wunderkind. And he knows, one day, I'm gonna join the Nine Old Men. But the problem is, things at Disney were starting to fall apart.

• 23:18Lizzie Bassett?

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• 24:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 25:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, we just talked about this on Toy Story. Can you talk a little bit about what happened at Disney after the death of Walt Disney in 1966?

• 25:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, I can. They entered into the Dark Ages of Disney, which was the time between, you know, the movies of the, I believe, 50s to mid 60s that we know of as sort of, well, really 30s through early 60s that we know of as kind of the classic Disney films, into a period where Disney really was not having a lot of hits in terms of movies. They were very focused on things that they felt were more surefire income providers, like theme parks, for example. This is when, you know, Disneyland opens, Disney World, all that. And also that they became more focused on the art than they did the story behind the movies. So it's called the Dark Ages because they just, they didn't have a lot of hits and they were really struggling in the animated film department.

• 25:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Alex, do you have any favorite Disney films? Anything stick out at you? Just from any time, I'm just curious.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Not from the classic era, but from the Ashman revival era. Like, that's kind of when I came online. So The Little Mermaid, probably the biggest of them.

• 26:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. So the Renaissance, that's a great movie. My daughter is The Little Mermaid today for Halloween.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I woke, it is Halloween, and I went outside today and almost like a storybook, a little girl saw me and she goes, "Happy Halloween, I'm going to Snow White." And I was like, "Oh, my God, I love it."

• 26:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So cute.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  But it wasn't until we started doing the show and sort of researching and understanding the history behind these things that I could understand that The Little Mermaid was my favorite and also Little Shop of Horrors. And it wasn't until, you know, 30 years later, did I realize that they are structurally the same because they were created by the same person.

• 26:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So you're talking about the Disney or the 2D animation Renaissance, right? Which will come in about 15 or 20 years. But things at Disney, as you mentioned, Lizzie, don't feel how they once did. And one of the people that felt that Disney had lost its way was a man named Don Bluth. And I'm sure you guys know the name Don Bluth and Don Bluth Animation. He was at Disney. And like you said, Lizzie, he felt that they were focusing way too much on the humor, on getting laughs, on... On setting up theme park rides and not on the story, which is what he had fallen in love with. So in the late 70s, he and a dozen other animators or so just flee the studio in the middle of the night, basically.

• 27:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And this is right after Brad Bird has shown up with a box of his things for his first big job at Disney. So Brad Bird shows up right when everyone's like, time to get out of here, kid. So Don Bluth and his friends leave and they set up a new studio. And meanwhile, Brad Bird's going, what's, what is this? This isn't the Disney I toured when I was 11. This isn't the Disney I interned at. And the thing about Brad Bird, he wasn't saying that to himself. He was saying it to everybody around him, including his bosses. He was just saying like, you guys aren't standing up for the Disney principles that the old Disney masters taught us.

• 28:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God. Corporations love that.

• 28:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, these guys have been at the company for decades. They're basically saying, shut the fuck up to this kid. And he didn't shut up. And so they fired him. And so Brad Bird was very quickly fired from his dream job at Disney. And meanwhile, Don Bluth is busy. He and his compatriots release one of my faves, The Secret of Nim, if you guys haven't seen it.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Oh, my, Lizzie, if you're looking for a movie to haunt children that is reanimated.

• 28:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Here you go.

• 28:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Sign me up.

• 28:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Secret of Nim and the animated adaptation of Watership Down.

• 28:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I have seen that.

• 28:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, my God.

• 28:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Talk about trauma. Yeah.

• 28:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I saw that when I was five years old at a friend's birthday party. And when the hills ran red with blood as the dogs were tearing them apart. Yeah, that was, that was a lot.

• 29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  An American Tale, another favorite of mine, and The Land Before Time.

• 29:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 29:10Chris Winterbauer?

  A classic produced by Steven Spielberg. Now, Bluth's defection from Disney is seen by some historians as the move that sparked the 2D animation renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s. This is more commonly called the Disney Renaissance, and it is an incredible run of films that dominated the box office and Oscars, and things just really in animation came back together. So Alex, you mentioned for Disney, the breakout movie was The Little Mermaid. That was the movie that turned, this was under Katzenberg and Eisner, this turns the studio around, and then you just have this crazy run. Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, but you also have things like The Rescuers Down Under, and even other studios like Warner Brothers, they're getting into television.

• 29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Steven Spielberg's got Tiny Toon's Adventures, Animaniacs, Paramount, Fox, Universal, everybody's reviving their long-dead animation units. Ralph Bakshi, Hanna-Barbera, you've got Fern Gully, The Swan Princess, The Page Master, The Real Stinky Cats Don't Dance, you got all of them. They're, everybody's putting out these movies because they're making a ton of money. Like, the thing I think that people forget is Aladdin made $500 million at the box office. Oh my god. These movies were incredibly profitable. And so in late 1996, to consolidate their film businesses, Time Warner acquires Turner

• 30:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Broadcasting, and so they merge Warner Brothers with Turner Broadcasting. And in this deal, they get CNN, the Atlanta Braves, Cartoon Network, the Warner Brother Library, pre-1947, the MGM Library, and maybe most important to our story, the last three months of a young Brad Bird's contract. So Brad Bird didn't build his reputation inside of Disney, he built it in animated television, and he was known for making TV episodes that felt like movies. So he'd attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg back in the early 80s, so this would have been a few years after he was let go from Disney.

• 31:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And there was this segment of his test reel called Family Dog that centered on this pet's perspective of his dysfunctional family. And Steven Spielberg thinks it's really great. So Bird joins Amblin, and he starts working as a writer on Amazing Stories. Are you guys familiar with the Spielberg show Amazing Stories? Alex, you want to give any sort of little log line?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  It was like kind of a, Ken, this was a time when like family entertainment was slightly terrifying.

• 31:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  It was like a lot of, um, like a kind of like an anthology series that was family programming that also kind of had the vibe of the Poltergeist.

• 31:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, it was like family anthology Twilight Zone.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Like it, it, it was weirdly dark in certain episodes. It was very Amblene and that like Goonies can be a little dark or Temple of Doom was extremely dark, right? You know, you have some of these Amblene films really rode that PG 13 line. So he co-writes an episode, he storyboards another segment of Family Dog, and this gets adapted into a standalone episode of Amazing Stories. So it's a fully animated episode of Family Dog. And it's really weird. It's really funny. It's like very dark. Basically, it's kind of from the perspective of this little dog that was designed by Tim Burton. So it has a Frankenweenie kind of design. And the dog's family is horrifying. The kid is kind of like Sid in Toy Story. He chases the dog around with a vacuum.

• 32:45Chris Winterbauer?

  The mom definitely has some ennui and is struggling with her suburban life. The dad is just watching Cheerleaders on television. Long story short, like the dog fails to be a guard dog. So they take it to this weird institute to learn how to be a guard dog. And then he becomes such a good guard dog that he like starts a life of crime with these criminals and starts robbing people. It's a very, very weird show, but it became a favorite. Not only was it a ratings hit, but a lot of people in the animation industry really loved it because it's got this really offbeat sense of humor, this like really honest look at an American family. It's a little dark. It's got really cool cinematography, especially for an animated show. Like it's very dynamic. It moves a lot.

• 33:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And so Brad Bird spends a lot of his time on the feature side, just in development hell. All of his projects like get noted to death, but two producers, James L. Brooks and Sam Simon, take notice of him and they poach him for The Simpsons. And so he goes and joins The Simpsons and that's where he learns how to work on crazy timelines with a really small team. So they spun the family dog into a TV show without Bird's involvement. Basically, he wanted more control than he was gonna have. That show got panned and Bird really wanted to make movies. And it's during this time that he wrote the first draft of The Incredibles.

• 34:02Lizzie Bassett?

  The Incredibles? What?

• 34:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, about 10 years, uh, too early. So he tried to tackle a different movie called Raygun. G U N N. It was this like film noir, action movie detective in the future, scene from 1939, right? Very much the Art Deco, modern, sort of Rocketeer vibes, I think is how I would describe it. And he's working at Raygun at Turner when they merge with Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't really wanna, we're really not really interested in this, Brad." And Brad's like, "Okay, great, I'm just gonna get fired again. I'm gonna have to go do something else." And they say, "Well, hold on, stick around. We have a lot of projects in development. Do you wanna work on one of these?"

• 34:46Chris Winterbauer?

  And Brad Bird is not very excited because, as he put it, Warner Brothers at that time had like 45 projects in development. And if you have that many projects in development, you have nothing in development. Because it tells you that you're not focusing on anything. You're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. So they said, "Pick some spaghetti off the wall and choose which one you wanna do." And one of the pieces of spaghetti that he picked was the Iron Giant. So how did the Iron Giant end up at Warner Brothers in the mid, early to mid 90s for Brad Bird to pick up? And how did it get there from 1968 England? And it's a little bit of an unusual story and it involves Pete Townsend of The Who.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  So this is, this was my favorite thing to learn about this.

• 35:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so weird. Okay, so 1976, the story's been out for a few years. This is just before John Bluth's gonna bail on Disney. Pete Townsend, lead guitarist of The Who, was trying to start a publishing company. And his business partner was handing him examples of types of stories he thought they should focus on. And one of the stories he gave him was the Iron Man, or as it was called in the US, the Iron Giant. Townsend loved it. But he doesn't option it. A few years go by. He starts working as an editor for a publishing house that has published a lot of Ted Hughes's work, and he remembers the Iron Man. So he goes to Hughes and he says, I want to turn the Iron Man into, Alex, do you know this part?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, it's, I forget what, I forget if it's the same title, but he basically wants to turn it into a Pete Townsend penned musical.

• 36:23Chris Winterbauer?

  A rock opera musical for the stage.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie's face is skepticism.

• 36:29Lizzie Bassett?

  That's fine.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I do want to say, though, if just based on, you know, who properties that became rock operas.

• 36:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, have we all seen Tommy?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Right. This is what I, what I, there is a reality in which the Iron Giant is directed by Ken Russell, and I want to see that movie, but we're not, that didn't happen. This is where we went.

• 36:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. So Ted Hughes, I think, probably said, I have no idea how that you're gonna do this, but he said, sure. You know, he said, go for it. It's been eight years. I don't think anybody else has approached him that I could find about adapting this. And it doesn't seem like Townsend really had a novel angle on the story. In my opinion, he kind of picked just the most obvious one, which is the Iron Giant or the Iron Man and Space Bat are parents. The Iron Man is a stand-in for Ted Hughes. The Space Bat is Sylvia Plath, and Hogarth represents their children. Again, Lizzie's face is how I feel about it, too, which is, this is not interesting, and it's reductive. Now, Hughes, to his credit, had reservations about this. He thought this was too specific,

• 37:36Chris Winterbauer?

  and it actually is not, was not his intention in how he wrote it. He wasn't alone, Lizzie. Don't worry. Nobody wanted to stage this show.

• 37:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody.

• 37:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Space Bat versus Iron Man?

• 37:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But Townsend was undeterred, so he packaged the music. He wrote for it as its own concept album, which was released in 1989 called The Iron Man, the Musical. And I listened to it. Do you guys wanna hear?

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:05Chris Winterbauer?

  A little bit?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  I didn't know it was out.

• 38:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, it's been out.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 38:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It's been out for quite some time. Came out the year I was born.

• 38:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Been out for me and Chris's entire lives.

• 38:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Here we go. I picked this one because the chorus has the words Iron Man in it.

• 38:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 38:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Listeners, if you wanna listen along, you can open up Spotify, YouTube, and type in "Over the Top" by Pete Townsend from the Iron Man the Musical album.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Wow. Got some Randy Newman in there.

• 38:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It is like, wait, I'm sorry. Are you guys familiar? This is gonna be relevant, I promise. Are you familiar with the fact that Robert Pattinson recorded two songs for the original Twilight soundtrack? I've got a reason for this.

• 38:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, because of you.

• 38:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay. That was so unintelligible. That's like what famously the songs that Robert Pattinson recorded are. You cannot understand a single word he's saying. It's like,

• 39:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I have no idea what Pete Townsend was saying in any of that, other than, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Look, Townsend wrote this whole album. You can listen to it. I'd listened to it once all the way through. Again, it's not, it's, it's not that it's, it's just, it's hard to imagine the movie that goes with it, is how I would describe it.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 39:25Chris Winterbauer?

  But you can see it because he hired an animation company to help him make a short film as a music video for one of the songs, "A Friend is a Friend." It's a mix of live action and stop motion animation. It shows the story up until the part where the Iron Man escapes from the trap that Hogarth set for him. Long story short, the album flops, but over in Ireland, English animator Richard Basely, remember that name, was working on The Tiny King and Queen in a movie I quite liked, Thumbelina.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 39:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Not sure if he has, remember that one? And couldn't shake a particular feeling that the Iron Man would make a great animated feature film.

• 40:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And Basely worked at Don Bluth Studios. So he calls his boss and says, here is a 10 point outline, complete with character designs. This is exactly the type of movie that we should be doing. It's, it's not a Disney movie. It's something different.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  It's very nuclear war heavy.

• 40:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very, there's a lot of nu-

• 40:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Kids are gonna love it.

• 40:25Chris Winterbauer?

  There's guns. Um, it's very difficult to, to understand some of the-

• 40:30Speaker 02

  It's funny, this feels optimistic for a Don Bluth movie, honestly.

• 40:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It does, I agree, but that's kind of my point is it does kind of feel-

• 40:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true, I guess.

• 40:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Don, Don, like in his wheelhouse, in my opinion.

• 40:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Um, you've made a good point now that I think about The Land Before Time, the most depressing movie I've ever seen, where you literally know they're just all going to die at the end of it. Yeah.

• 40:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No one dies in this. You're right. It's great.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  We do talk about death a lot, though. Like, oh, it's like, killing's bad, but we're all gonna die, me included. And the kids will hate me too.

• 41:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He lost his dad in the Korean War. How much more do we need to say? All right. Don Bluth, though, couldn't see it. Maybe there wasn't enough death. I don't know why. He said he felt there wasn't enough material for a full length movie. And I do think that's true if you just go by the book. I read the book and I, I think it works really well as a kid's nighttime fairy tale. If you did a straight adaptation, it would be a mess. He thinks maybe it's a short film. But Pete Townsend wasn't done. And for better or worse, we kind of owe this movie to Pete Townsend in a lot of ways. So back in England, Ted, Ted Hughes' phone starts ringing off the hook and it's reporters.

• 41:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And they go, what's it like working with Pete Townsend on the Iron Man musical? And Ted Hughes says, I have no idea what you're talking about. That idea never went anywhere. Turns out it did. Townsend had reworked the script with theater director David Thacker and the musical was already in rehearsals at a theater in London. And it was a consolation prize. Lizzie- Basically, they wanted to do Tommy, but that wasn't available. And Pete said, "Well, I have Iron Man." And they said, "Okay, fine."

• 42:11Lizzie Bassett?

  And they did. And it wasn't available, why? Because the rest of the band was like, "No?"

• 42:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe because Tommy was still running in the United States, in New York. So they went with the Iron Giant, and they made some changes. The Space Bat became a sexy Space Bat.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Ooh, yeah.

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And there were modern messages about things like fast food and pollution.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Wait, we know that the Space Bat is a stand-in for Sylvia Plath. And then we say that the upgrade is sexy.

• 42:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Sexy Sylvia Plath.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  It's too much.

• 42:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great. It's great.

• 42:45Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what Sylvia Plath would have loved to be memorialized as? A sexy Space Bat.

• 42:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I am the Arrow.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  I'm so sad Halloween's tonight, because that would be my costume if I had some time to prepare.

• 42:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you know what? She would have liked that, I think. The Halloween costume.

• 43:00Chris Winterbauer?

  She absolutely would have.

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• 43:44Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. The show opened on November 25, 1993, and it was panned so hard. Critics, nobody liked it. There were a lot of problems. Number one was that Townsend had told everybody that it was going to be better than Tommy. And he was like, "This is going to be the best thing. Since Tommy is going to be better than Tommy." But it was not. The other thing is, it was impossible to understand what was happening. So, Lizzie, you mentioned, you can't understand what he's saying in the songs. And if you had not read the books, there was no other explanation of the plot. They didn't put a plot summary in the brochure, in the...

• 44:16Lizzie Bassett?

  The playbill.

• 44:17Chris Winterbauer?

  In the playbill. They didn't put the summary of the plot in the playbill. So nobody knew what was happening. Even Ted Hughes said, "If he hadn't written it, he wouldn't know what was happening."

• 44:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 44:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So the bad reviews killed the musical's chances of getting funding. And so it reaches a dead end. Until Dez McCanniff, who was the co-writer and director of Tommy and had been helping on Iron Man, says, "Maybe it's not a musical, maybe it's an animated feature." And it's important to remember, animated musicals are breaking box office records in the United States. This is immediately after Aladdin has hit $500 million. Townsend's in, Ted Hughes says, "Sure." So they go to Bruce Berman, president of Worldwide Theatrical Production at Warner Brothers, and he says, "Of course, we're developing everything. Let's take some more spaghetti." But to be clear, this makes a lot of sense. This is a pretty beloved children's story

• 45:10Chris Winterbauer?

  with a musical legend attached, you know, to make the music. And they've already made the entire album, so theoretically Warner Brothers won't have to pay for that again as they go forward into production.

• 45:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Did they listen to it, though?

• 45:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know, probably not. So they make a few changes. They decided to move the story from England to Maine. Brad Bird has also said that he came up with that, so take that with a grain of salt. This is when they decide to combine cell animation and computer graphics. Now, do you guys know one of the first instances when this was done on a Disney movie?

• 45:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it The Lion King?

• 45:45Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it was Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom scene. Do you guys remember when they danced in the ballroom? The ballroom is done in 3D, is CGI 3D. And it would be done really effectively in Tarzan with all the trees that he goes parkouring on in that movie.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Because, can I ask you a question, Chris, a movie magician? The reason for doing this, right, as I understood it from watching this documentary, is like matching two-dimensional like movement through space is like very, very difficult to coordinate through actual animation techniques. So like what a computer adds in this situation is essentially like physics, understanding that like animators, isn't necessarily like coming naturally to like two-dimensional animators. Is like that the reason why we started doing this?

• 46:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think so. They specifically wanted to make the Iron Giant have a weight. So they wanted to make sure that when he moved, it felt like he was heavy. That's difficult to do in 2D, and it's a lot easier to do in 3D. That may tie into the physics, as you mentioned. So like, when his arms swing, and they like swing through three dimensional space, it looks like they have, there's some actual density there. Whereas if you do it in two dimensional space, things can look a little weightless as they just dance across the screen. And then I think, like in the case of Beauty and the Beast, for example, that moment was just so kind of like, oh my gosh, the world opens up in this ballroom scene as they fall in love. And wow, the camera's sweeping around them, right?

• 47:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's through three dimensional space in a way that would be really difficult, if not impossible, with traditional 2D animation. Yeah, and so like if the background is, it's again, it's like with the parallax and the rotating perspectives, if the background's having to move while the heroes are moving as well, that becomes really difficult with 2D animation. But if your background can be a 3D asset that you can move the camera through, that becomes much more achievable. And the flip side.

• 47:38Lizzie Bassett?

  To me, at least, one of the easiest places to to spot it in the Iron Giant is like when you see the giant come into the town, looking over the the houses of Rockwell.

• 47:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, amongst many other moments. So the space bat, I want to be clear, is still very much a part of this. I don't know if she's sexy or not, but they're even considering a third. Yeah, they're considering a third animation type, which is claymation for the space bat.

• 48:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 48:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It's still gonna be a rock musical. And I would like to share one of the early design options that they looked at for the Iron Giant, because it was a very different animation style. And I'm curious to hear what you guys think. And listeners, if you're interested in seeing what we're talking about, we will post it to our Patreon for free. So you can go to our Patreon, check out the Iron Giant posts, and you can find this illustration there.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Really?

• 48:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  This bums me out.

• 48:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't, I guess I don't hate it. It's a little sort of like, it's like Tim Burton meets The Wizard of Ozzy.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  He kinda looks like a rooster.

• 48:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Chris Winterbauer?

  He does look like a rooster. I don't like it at all. It makes me upset.

• 48:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I, I, no disrespect to the artists, and they may have just been following a directive. I think it looks so zany and weird and not grounded. It looks like a, it looks like a Saturday morning cartoon to me as opposed to like a feature film, in my opinion. So they're adapting this story and I just don't think it's working. I don't have a sense that it's in development hell because of this, but based on what we finally get versus where they were, I think the problem is this movie has no heart. Right? It has no reason to exist right now. They've basically just adapted the original book straight up. And there's not really like a core idea to it. They needed someone to give the Iron Giant a heart.

• 49:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And you alluded to this at the beginning, Alex, but in 1994, Brad Bird was very much still putting his heart back together. So in 1989, Brad Bird's older sister, Susan, was fatally shot in her home by her estranged husband in a murder-suicide. Her obituary called for any memorial contributions to be made to the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence or Handgun Control, Incorporated. She and Brad Bird had been extremely close and Brad Bird was lost. He says he retreated from the world for a while and then he read The Iron Giant and he had an epiphany. And I'll read his quote. "What if a thing developed a soul?

• 50:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And what if that thing found out that it was designed to kill, but it didn't want to kill? What if a gun had a soul and didn't want to be a gun?"

• 50:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So Brad Bird went back to Warner Brothers. He didn't run anything by his development executives. He went straight to the heads of the movie division and he pitched the Iron Giant. It's 1957, Sputnik's in the air. The Cold War is on and there's absolute paranoia about the Russians. This giant thing splashes down in the middle of the ocean and a lonely kid, he's telling the giant about life. The giant is like a newborn child who one day discovers that he has this terrible power. You have rock and roll paranoia and government agents and the army and robots. How is that not great for animation? Let Disney do the fairy princesses. You know, that's fine, but why can't we do something that's very different? End quote.

• 51:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a great pitch.

• 51:13Chris Winterbauer?

  He wanted to cut the space bat, add in new characters, a single mother, a beatnik, a G-Man. Halfway through the pitch, one of the executives elbows another one like, "Write this down." And they did, write it down. Brad Bird wrapped up and Warner Brothers said, "All right, we'll do it." But there was one big problem. Brad Bird had never directed a movie before. And Brad Bird had a reputation for being an asshole.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  I left this behind the scenes documentary, thanking God I never worked for Brad Bird.

• 51:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 51:51Chris Winterbauer?

  An incredibly brilliant storyteller.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Truly.

• 51:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Who, by his own admission, I think, is incredibly difficult to work with. I would especially imagine top down to manage. He'd been fired from Disney for being a pain in the ass. And according to one source, when Bird was in contract negotiations at Warner Brothers, the head of animation got calls from other people in the industry warning him that they were, quote, "playing with fire." Which may be why they hired a second writer while they were making Brad Bird's deal to make this movie. So Tim McCanley's had written two or three scripts for Warner Brothers. They'd optioned Secondhand Lions, which wouldn't be made until 2003. And he'd done a few revisions for other films. He gets a call.

• 52:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Studio head Lorenzo di Bonaventura sends him the CD of Pete Townsend's Iron Man Rock Opera. So very much still thinking it's gonna be a Pete Townsend rock opera. And Warner Brothers sets up a meeting. Here's his recounting of the conversation. Warner Brothers, Brad Bird just told us how to do the Iron Giant, but they're giving us two months to make this deal and we want to hire you as a writer now. McCanley's, well, can I meet with Bird? Warner's, no, he won't meet with anyone while we're making the deal. McCanley's, what is his pitch? Warner's, well, we have somebody writing up what we remember. McCanley's, excuse me? End quote. The most haphazard process. So it seems like Warner Brothers wants to get a writer on before Bird is fully hired

• 53:18Chris Winterbauer?

  so that Bird cannot interfere with the process of bringing a writer on. Let's discuss some of the key contributions that McCanley's makes because they're very important. He makes Dean an artist who lives in a scrapyard where he makes art.

• 53:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I loved.

• 53:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He makes paranoia the real enemy of the story instead of Russia. And most importantly, and this is a reflection of that, he changes the ending. According to the version of Brad Bird's pitch that the executives wrote down, the movie would end with the US and Russia throwing nukes at each other over the horizon. The giant stops it, but in the process dies. And McCanley says, you can't kill ET. Let's do an ET with the ending and we bring him back. Have the giant save the day in a much smaller one missile kind of way, removing the part where the US and Russia are sending the nukes at each other. It's self inflicted. The United States paranoia gets the best of itself. So Brad Bird's deal gets finalized on a Friday. And on Monday, McCanley's comes into the office and Bird just goes, who are you? And McCanley says, hey, I'm here to write your script.

• 54:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And Bird goes, no, I'm writing the script. And McCanley says, look, whatever you want to do, I'm here to work for you. And I've worked on five movies at Warner Brothers and they all got greenlit because I know how these guys think and I can get your movie greenlit. Plus I got my own movie. To make called Dancer Texas. This is just a gig. But Brad Bird says, fine, fine, fine. But just so we're clear. We're not making a musical and McCandless probably has the Townsend CD on him at this point in time. He's like, excuse me, we were hired to do a musical with Pete Townsend. He is our executive producer. He already wrote the songs like this is the album. This is what we were here to do. And Brad was like, I don't care. We're not doing it. We're flying to see him on Thursday and I'm telling him that we're not doing it.

• 55:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So they've got storyboard artists waiting. They're scheduled to meet with Townsend on Thursday. They lock themselves in a room for 12 hours a day to break the story. They start comparing their Hollywood scars. They quickly become friends and they fly to London. And they say, Pete, we love you. We're not using your songs. And he says, that's fine. I already got paid. And that was the end of Pete Townsend's involvement in the Iron Giant.

• 55:24Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  I would watch like a 12 hour documentary about like high profile musicians involvement in animated movies. Because it's

• 55:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Sting and Emperor's New Groove.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. It's always weird. It's never not weird.

• 55:43Chris Winterbauer?

  How about the fact that Cats Don't Dance was supposed to be a star vehicle for Michael Jackson? And then he just pulled out of the movie and it bombed like these. Yes, it's always weird. Because animation takes forever. And I think, you know, pop stars are on a cadence where they are not waiting around forever. For something to finish.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It would be amazing. So they fly back to Los Angeles. There's 200 artists ready to roll and they have two months to finish a script. Now, by 1996, Disney animated films had gotten expensive. So $30 million in the late eighties, you know, Little Mermaid, that's cute, Aladdin. 96, Hunchback of Notre Dame, $70 million. Hercules, $85 million. Mulan, $90 million.

• 56:33Chris Winterbauer?

  For a few reasons.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Paper was so expensive.

• 56:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Just it was a paper shortage everywhere.

• 56:40Chris Winterbauer?

  People were expensive. So the Disney Renaissance and competition with DreamWorks in particular had sparked all of this wage competition, right? If you wanted the best artists, you had to pay them like the best artists. And Warner Brothers just couldn't afford to do that. When Turner and Warner Brothers merged, we talked about this, Cats Don't Dance, which was a Turner Broadcasting animated movie, was in post. That came out and oh my God, did it flop. It made three and a half million dollars against a $32 million budget.

• 57:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 57:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So the budget for Warner Brothers Family Entertainment's first fully animated feature film, Quest for Camelot, was set at $40 million, which was basically less than half of what Disney was paying. And this was going to be true for the Iron Giant as well. So they basically had to find a team of young artists, new artists, retired artists that we could pull out of retirement. It was going to be this ragtag crew of underdogs. But the good thing was Brad Bird is kind of like this comics comic of animators. So that Amazing Stories episode he'd done, The Family Dog, was kind of the stuff of legend. And so there were a lot of people that wanted to go work with Brad Bird, and he had a lot of contacts, like through The Simpsons. And, you know, some of these artists

• 57:51Chris Winterbauer?

  that they pulled in, they got some, I think, underrated talent because they were getting an opportunity that they couldn't get at Disney. So Dean Wellins was one of the artists. He said, "If you looked at my resume at that point, you would have said, 'You're not allowed in the building.'" Dean Wellins went on to do Treasure Planet, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Frozen, so many more movies. So I think they're getting some really great animators who just don't have the resumes to go to a DreamWorks or to go to a Disney. But they did get a couple of big names. And one of those names was Richard Basely, who we discussed, had that first idea to do the Iron Giant as an animated feature. So he had graduated from Don Bluth and he had gotten his dream job. He was now a lead

• 58:34Chris Winterbauer?

  animator at Disney, working on Hercules.

• 58:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 58:38Chris Winterbauer?

  His buddy calls him up and says, "Hey, Brad Bird's making the Iron Giant at Warner Brothers." So Basely comes in for a meeting with Brad Bird, and he's blown away by Bird's take. And Bird leans back, puts his feet on the desk and says, Do you want to keep making the same old musical over and over? Or come make something new? And to everybody's shock, Basley leaves Disney to go work at the Backwater Warner Brothers production of The Iron Giant. But Basley said, "Never before had I been so excited or so sure about how good a project was going to be."

• 59:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, let's talk about the giant, because the giant looks great. I think the giant is designed really wonderfully. It's very expressive without being distracting in any way. And Brad Bird called in a heavy hitter that we've discussed before on this podcast. So director, producer, and visual effects artist Joe Johnston. I'm sure you guys are familiar with some of his work. He directed The Rocketeer, Jumanji, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  That all makes so much sense.

• 59:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And do you know how he broke into Hollywood?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 59:49Chris Winterbauer?

  One of his first big jobs was designing the Millennium Falcon on Star Wars.

• 59:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 59:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Joe Johnston has had such an amazing career. He's so talented because he's able to lend so much to other people's projects, but also helm projects of his own. And I think that's such a unique skill set to be able to do both of those things. So Bird asks Johnston, "Hey, can you just like moonlight for us for a little bit?" So he did the first drawings of what Brad Bird considers "our giant." And then these sketches were refined by production designer Mark Whiting and animator Steve Markowski. So they ditched lips and tongue, which were just getting in the way. And they say, "All he needs to show emotion is a combination of movable upper and lower eyelids, right? So they can kind of do this and this and make him look like his eyes are expressing in some way. And a jaw that can slide up and down at the back."

• 1:00:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And all of a sudden, they have this really emotive character. And now they just need to find his voice. So mid 90s.

• 1:00:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Warner Brothers is thinking, we're gonna need some big names on this movie. Like, if we're gonna compete, you know, Toy Story, Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, two of the biggest stars at the time. We gotta get some big stars. And Brad Bird says, I don't care about anybody on your list. I want my people. I don't give a shit. And Warner Brothers says, Brad, the only way we're gonna go to your people is if everybody on our list says no. And that's the only way we're gonna go to your people. You can actually hear him complaining about this in that documentary, Alex. Like, there's this moment where he says, the pressure's on for me to approve it. It doesn't matter whether they're appropriate or not. I gotta go through them before I can go to my choice. He's so upset about it.

• 1:01:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there was one studio suggestion that Brad Bird actually liked, who did end up cast in the movie. If you guys could guess who both Warner Brothers and Brad Bird liked that ends up in this movie, who would you guess it is?

• 1:01:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Harry Connick Jr.

• 1:01:44Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  I unfortunately know the answer is Jennifer Aniston.

• 1:01:47Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. It's Jennifer Aniston. Enormous star off of Friends, fifth season at this point in time. I still think has proven to be maybe the underrated comedic motor of much of that show. She is an incredible performer.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  An amazing physical comedian, just incredible.

• 1:02:06Chris Winterbauer?

  I think she and David Schwimmer are two of the best physical comedians of the 1990s. They are amazing. They, what they can do is unparalleled. So this was her first voice acting role. And like you said, Lizzie, where is her voice acting career?

• 1:02:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. She's really good. She's really good. She's just a great actress in general.

• 1:02:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Okay. So Alex, I won't ask you this because I think you probably know. But for Dean, Lizzie, the studio wanted an actor who was not a musician, but was a very good dancer.

• 1:02:36Lizzie Bassett?

  John Travolta.

• 1:02:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good, John Travolta for Dean. Who, you know what? Harry Connick Jr. is great. He would have been good. I think Travolta would have been good.

• 1:02:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Definitely.

• 1:02:46Chris Winterbauer?

  But Bird always wanted Harry Connick Jr. because he's so good in Independence Day. I'm guessing it was more Hope Floats that he was going to it. Both great. Now for Kent, the studio wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger or, I believe, Jennifer Aniston's then boyfriend, Brad Pitt.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  The Arnold Schwarzenegger thing for that character makes no sense to me. Like that that character would be Austrian makes no sense.

• 1:03:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you're not getting any other accent out of Arnold.

• 1:03:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, it's a tough one. Now, they went with Christopher McDonald. Happy Gilmore, Leave It To Beaver, Flubber. He's perfect in this. And for Hogarth, they just saw everybody. And they ultimately chose 12 year old actor Eli Marionthal. He'd been in a few movies. He was in The Slums of Beverly Hills. And she was actually rapping his role as Stifler's little brother in American Pie. I don't know if you guys remember that character.

• 1:03:43Lizzie Bassett?

  He's really good in this.

• 1:03:44Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great. His voice is like just rough enough, but still young, you know, that it really works. And then, of course, for the Iron Giant, they cast a then unknown Vin Diesel. He had done Saving Private Ryan, but it hadn't come out yet. And it was actually because he was friends with one of the production assistants. And the production assistant suggested his name. And Brad Bird just fell in love with his voice.

• 1:04:06Lizzie Bassett?

  It's an amazing voice. Like, come on, if you heard Vin Diesel for the first time and you need someone to play a metal eating giant alien, there's no other choice. Cinema.

• 1:04:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no, he's great. I agree with this. They say you can hear his heart when he speaks. And so they knew even they were going to electronically modulate the voice, you'd still hear his heart. And I completely agree. Now, one of the big problems that they had run into on Quest for Camelot is that they were trying to imitate the Disney model. And the Disney model has a lot of bureaucracy, right? There's like a lot of processes and everything's very formalized. But with Warner Brothers, they didn't have that many animators. So it really just meant they had all these middle management people, it sounds like. And they were caught, you know, basically picking over everything that was being done. So everything was being watched very closely, but they had to move really quickly. And these two things are at odds, right? They have half the budget of a Disney film. And so while a Disney movie might take five years to make, they have about two and a half years to make The Iron Giant.

• 1:05:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So Bird tells the team, we're going to be tough on everybody. You'll hate us in the short run and you'll love us in the long run.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  I do love that disclaimer. When he said that, I was like, that's good. I have a feeling you're going to live up to this promise.

• 1:05:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  But I do like the acknowledgement. That's all I need if I'm working in a situation like that is let me know upfront what we're in for.

• 1:05:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly, and they did, I think, change things in a slightly more transparent way. They went to this method where they were openly critiquing everybody's work together. And so it's, nobody was maybe beyond reproach. And it was about, okay, we're going to get to the best idea by airing everything out. This actually became a lot more efficient. And they saved money by spending a lot more time on storyboarding and then animating only once things were really, really, really finalized in the storyboarding state. And so to convince the studio that they knew what they were doing, they also came up with a new way to make their story reels. And story reels were, you know, storyboards played in, you know, sequential order with voiceover animation and music and sound effects behind them.

• 1:06:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, I'm sure you came across that on Toy Story. This is very, a common way to show, this is what this reel of the film is going to look like when it's finally animated. So they actually brought these into a very new computer program called After Effects.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  This is why.

• 1:06:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Nobody had heard about, right? Right? Alex, I mean, you probably, I mean, have you used After Effects?

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Oh, sure, absolutely. I mean, it's like, I was in commercial video production for a long time and you use After Effects for so many different things, but just to know that this was novel and this was like how they were setting themselves apart from Disney technologically was, was incredible to me.

• 1:06:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's like using this technology to make the demonstration, like the rough versions or the pre-vises that much more dynamic and that much more convincing, which then gave them a better idea of what the final product looked like. So they would have fewer issues with the final animation and they would have to reanimate it fewer times as a result. And then they needed to figure out how to integrate the 3D and the 2D elements. So as I mentioned in Beauty and the Beast, Brad Bird felt like you could see the styles clash, like the ballroom looked too clean relative to the animation. So they actually created a program that would introduce imperfect hand-drawn lines into the computer-generated Iron Giant so that it would fit in better with the 2D animated world.

• 1:07:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's like, rather than enhance the quality of the 2D, let's degrade the quality of the 3D to bring them together.

• 1:07:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Things behind closed doors, though, were tense because of the budget. And this is between Brad Bird and Alison Abate. And so one of the animators apparently described it as like a little kid hiding up in his bedroom while mom and dad were fighting because his office was right next to their offices. And Abate was very polite about it. She basically said, you know, Bird's vision for the movie is bigger than the time and the money that we have. And like, her responsibility is to keep this thing under budget. And his responsibility is to make the greatest possible movie that anybody has ever seen, because that is Brad Bird's determination at this point in time. And this is when kind of both the best thing in the world and the worst thing in the world happens. And that's on May 15th, 1998, they release Quest for Camelot.

• 1:08:21Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the first fully animated feature for the studio. Did either of you guys see this movie?

• 1:08:25Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  I didn't even know it existed.

• 1:08:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you and most of America, because this movie bombed. It had an incredible voice cast. Carrie Elwes, Gary Oldman, Eric Idle, Don Rickles, Jane Seymour, Celine Dion, Pierce Brosnan, Jaleel White, Gabriel Byrne, Bronson Pinchot. Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  I want to know, this is my time that I've said on other shows, but I was once blocked on Twitter by Eric Idle. Because I joked that I thought that if George Harrison was still alive, he would have turned to QAnon and someone brought him into it and he blocked me immediately. So this is, but this is my time to share this fact to it.

• 1:09:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's an appropriate time.

• 1:09:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That's amazing.

• 1:09:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Retroactively, that's why Eric Idle's movie bombed.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  You'd think he could take a joke, but no, I understand.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no. He was probably just thinking to himself, well, I did not come up with this.

• 1:09:18Lizzie Bassett?

  A famously unfunny man.

• 1:09:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So Quest for Camelot had been expensive. It had gone over budget, $40 million, still less than a Disney movie, but it only brought in $38 million. It also had-

• 1:09:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I have seen this.

• 1:09:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Have you seen this? I may have. I don't remember it at all.

• 1:09:34Lizzie Bassett?

  The imagery looks familiar.

• 1:09:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a musical.

• 1:09:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a little janky.

• 1:09:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It had, it had a really tough production.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I can see. Yeah, I, I know this exists.

• 1:09:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they reassigned animators from Space Jam to this, like away from this movie to Space Jam. I mean, because, and then Space Jam made a lot of money and so this movie lost its animators. It, one of its directors was fired. Uh, one of the effects supervisors were called. The head of layout was kicked out, the head of background, the executive producer, the producer, the director, all the heads rolled. But what's interesting is I get the sense that Quest for Camelot actually gave the Iron Giant a lot of air support. Because this was the troubled child at the studio, Quest for Camelot. And then after Quest for Camelot bombed, the studio cleaned house. So the animators are busy on the Iron Giant, so they can all of the executives above them. And all of a sudden, it's not top-heavy anymore.

• 1:10:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Brad Bird said it was kind of like having Free Run of the Titanic. And he uses that metaphor because after the Iron Giant, Warner Brothers has decided they're going to shut down their animation division. So the Iron Giant is the last movie in the house.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  And it sounded like that, that they were already, they already had cold feet about animation because of things, sort of like the scenario you just described. And so that relationship between Abate and Bird was so contentious in part because not only is she doing the sort of, um, liaising that a producer has to do in representing the studio interests. The studio is already very weird about what they're doing with the future of animation. And there's that part in the documentary where they're like, you know, this, that documentary, I think, was pulled from footage that was shot right after the movie came out. And they're like, what was it like working with Brad? And she's just like, I have to think for a minute. I hated working with Brad.

• 1:11:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for her.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  I really felt for her more than I ever feel for someone who's representing studio interests. Not because, not just because of that contentious relationship, but just thinking about being someone who is trying to balance delivering the creative product of someone who's clearly a visionary, something that would become. A masterpiece for them. And then also having to balance the uncertainty of a studio seems like a horrifying position.

• 1:11:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, because on the one hand, she's probably saying, Brad, I want to help you. But also, Brad, if you don't shut up, they're going to kill this movie. Like, they don't care. They don't care about animation, right? This isn't Disney where they need to release an animated movie every year on a two-year cadence, and they're not going to kill this project. Warner Brothers is looking for every excuse to get out of the animation business at this point in time. So I agree. It's like, on the one hand, she's trying to keep it on life support. You know, and I'm sure, but I'm sure Brad can't see that because he just sees her as an impediment. And he's, you know, if you're not helping him. I might get my, the sense I get with Brad Bird is he's kind of the type of person where if you're not helping him, you're, you're in his way.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And, and so I agree. I think that would be an impossible position to be in. Doesn't sound like it was a great experience for her, although she's gone on to do, to produce some incredible and animated films. She's continued in animation. So I think it just wasn't a good relationship between the two of them. Now, they did all of a sudden have a lot of creative freedom because of this. So the movie continues to come together and they make some important changes. So there's the deer scene, Lizzie, where the Iron Giant witnesses the death for the first time. In the first version, they went with more of like of mice and men. And the giant, the giant accidentally killed the deer.

• 1:13:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he lennied the deer.

• 1:13:18Chris Winterbauer?

  He lennied the deer. And they said that was too sad and too dark. So then they toyed with the idea of them just finding the deer dead. And then they landed on the hunters and then we understand the gun and it works very well. According to Brad Bird, his favorite moment of the Iron Giant happened during post-production. They're in the editing room. All the lead crew members are watching the scene where Hogarth teaches the Iron Giant about souls. And there is not a dry eye in the house.

• 1:13:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Except mine.

• 1:13:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, except for Lizzie.

• 1:13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Quick thing on the score. Bird scores the film with a collection of Bernard Herrmann cues. That's for you, David. 50s and 60s sci-fi film musical score. And then Michael Kamen comes in to score the film. He goes to Eastern Europe in search of an old-fashioned sounding orchestra, which he ended up finding with the Czech Philharmonic. And He said, "They recorded it without using sync." So there was no like click track or anything like that. They recorded it just playing the music and then laid it in on top. Now, as the movie rounds third base, another shoe drops. And I'm sure this was frustrating for you to watch as it was for me, Alex. The downside of all of this freedom is that the Iron Giant is an orphan. And they won't give it a release date.

• 1:14:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's been aiming for the summer of 1999 this entire time. And you can see early casting documents, early scripts, and they're all saying, "Summer of 99, summer of 99." And they're entering 99, right? Winter of 99, January, February. And they're clearing all these hurdles and they don't have a release date. There's no release date for this movie, which is insane. They do these release dates a year in advance. Abate said she was at toy fairs and licensing fairs. And they'd say, "When are you coming out? This is great." And she says, "I don't know." And because she doesn't know, she can't get self-space at Toys R Us. She can't get a Happy Meals deal. And all of these deals were so important to the animated movies at the time. And Bird said that there was a lot of concern about marketing the movie because there were no sidekick characters.

• 1:15:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So there was like only one character that could be made into merchandise, which was the Iron Giant. Nobody wanted the Hogarth toy or the... Although a Kent Mansley, "I work for the government" toy would be really funny.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Sexy space bat, this is where that would have come in.

• 1:15:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Bring her back.

• 1:15:29Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what they're like, "Could we get a mold of Sylvia Plath? And could we..."

• 1:15:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Could it be sexier? Could it be more of a bat?

• 1:15:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I think this is, I think the problem, there's two problems that Warner Brothers is dealing with. The first problem is Tarzan. So Tarzan is Disney's animated summer tent pole for 1999. It is like everything that the Iron Giant is not, right? It is a recognizable name. It has a killer soundtrack by Phil Collins.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 1:16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Who all the youngsters love.

• 1:16:03Lizzie Bassett?

  We did.

• 1:16:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, it was a great, actually a great, I really liked that soundtrack.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, my girlfriend from high school, who was a cheerleader that only wore pink, loved Phil Collins because of that movie. And it was so funny and anachronistic just to see that happen.

• 1:16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It was great. It had also incredible 3D backgrounds, which looked like paintings. They developed this really cool software that allowed the trees, even though they were three-dimensional, to be given this painterly, like, living tissue look as Tarzan is parkouring across them. It is an 800-pound gorilla. It cost a then-record $130 million to make. The most expensive animated film ever made, and Disney was spending another, at least $70 million, to market it. Toys, books, plushies, McDonald's Happy Meals, even a banana-flavored chocolate bar with Nestle that I remember, I think I remember trying one or hearing about it. It sounded horrible.

• 1:17:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I remember the toys, for sure.

• 1:17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And then if they waited too long, Pixar was dropping Toy Story 2 in November.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:14Chris Winterbauer?

  The other problem is that Warner Brothers was pouring money into live action, specifically Wicca Wicca Wild Wild West.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  The big spider from Superman Returns.

• 1:17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Yeah, the noted Kevin Kline, Will Smith buddy comedy.

• 1:17:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Which we will cover.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  Thank God.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  We're gonna cover it. I mean, on paper, totally should've worked. Men in Black was a total unexpected hit. This is Will Smith. He's one of the biggest stars on the planet.

• 1:17:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Men in Black made sense, though.

• 1:17:48Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, the script didn't make sense, but I'm just saying the elements kind of made sense. It was him and Barry Sonnenfeld returning to do it again. And they also had had The Matrix break out huge for them in March, so I think they really thought, okay, wow, we're gonna be going into, you know, big into live action, and Harry Potter was just on the horizon, et cetera. Nobody's thinking about The Iron Giant. Somebody on the crew decides to do something about it, and they leak a rough cut to Ain't It Cool News? And at first Brad Bird is pissed, and then they published their review. And they said that the studio's in danger of making a massive mistake. There's a film that they've had yet to pay any attention to, something they've spent no time or money or energy on, and has the potential to be the greatest success out of any of these year's releases.

• 1:18:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm writing, of course, about Brad Bird's debut feature, one of the finest animated films I've ever seen, The Iron Giant.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Can I say something about that, Chris? That I was really impressed by is that... As you said earlier, they invested so much into the storyboards and into the sort of the, you know, giving it life via After Effects, et cetera, because Bird had since learned that, you know, the less revisions you have to do later, the more money you're ultimately going to save. So because they had something that was so structured, they were able to share that as rough cut with Ain't It Cool that they wouldn't have had otherwise, had he not had that foresight, because they didn't share the finished movie with Ain't It Cool. They finished like the skeleton of the movie and still, I forget

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  who that, it's Mortieri, but I forgot the name of that reviewer. He had said, he's like, I watched this. It was like the skeleton of this movie and I was still crying at the end of it, which, which led to that sort of movie saving review.

• 1:19:32Chris Winterbauer?

  The other thing too, that I think is important to remember is the, what should have been an advantage is that you could also share this internally with marketing really early on. Marketing would then have months and months and months and months of time to develop a campaign that's complimentary to the movie and really tease it up in the right way. I mean, I completely empathize. I know some people in film marketing where they say, you know, we get the movie, we get, we're getting the movie 60 days before it drops, 45, and we gotta turn around a trailer and, you know, TikTok stuff and promotional materials. It's crazy.

• 1:20:04Lizzie Bassett?

  This was even the same, you know, I, I worked at Wondery for several years. This was the same on these big podcast drops too. It would be like, oh yeah, we have this, you know, limited series that we've spent X amount of money on and it's this huge big deal. It's like, okay, well can we hear it? It's like, no. You know, and that was something that had to be changed over time because yeah, they, they do need a lot of time to be able to figure out how to market something.

• 1:20:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So they finally agreed to test screen the movie in April of 1999. According to Bird, it just tests off the charts, highest testing in 15 years. I do want to say, a lot of the movies we covered, the director says, "Best test in 15 years." Like, it seems like a little bit of a, "I believe it, I'm just saying," something to remember. Now, the studio realizes this movie's gonna be great, and now we want more time to market it. "We're gonna, let's release it in 2000." And I think by his own admission, Brad Pitt was arrogant, and he was tired.

• 1:21:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Brad Bird.

• 1:21:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was, Brad Bird and Brad Pitt, Brad Bird was arrogant.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  I have something to say about Brad Pitt right now.

• 1:21:18Lizzie Bassett?

  So do I.

• 1:21:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was angry, and he basically said, "Look, you guys had years to get ready for this. It's time to release it." So they schedule it for August 6, 1999. Lizzie's, and they say, "There's this little girl."

• 1:21:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Who is not gonna like this movie that much.

• 1:21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  She's turning 10, she's not gonna see it, but we should definitely do it on her birthday. She's not gonna see it. So it gives the marketing team less than four months to promote it. Brad Bird and his team are convinced, "Doesn't matter, this thing's gonna be a hit." They throw a big rap party, marketing starts rolling out. Brad Bird's like, "I don't love the trailer." By the way, I'm guessing he threw a stink about it. I'm guessing it was not just like he let it roll off his back. I'm guessing he went to them and said, "This is the problem with the trailer." But he figures the movie tested so well, word of mouth's gonna carry it through. Iron Giant comes out on August 6, 1999, and the critics love it. Ebert says, "This is a movie that is trying to move animation in a new direction. It's so different than Disney.

• 1:22:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It tells a story with no sidekicks, no songs, no dancing teacups." By the way, he loves Disney, he was just saying it's very different than Disney, whereas DreamWorks is doing something a little closer to Disney. Brad Bird is very excited. He goes to a theater in LA, and it has a Johnny Rockets next door. You guys remember Johnny Rockets?

• 1:22:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:22:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, marketing had told him, "We're putting giant, Iron Giant posters into Johnny Rockets. Totally fits in with the retro vibe." So he goes into the Johnny Rockets. There's no Iron Giant poster. He says, all right, well, maybe they missed this one. I mean, it is a big one in LA, but maybe they missed it. He goes up to the box office. There's 10 theaters. Each has the logo, you know, backlit with the movie with its font on it. Iron Giant is playing in Theater 10 and the Iron Giant has been written on a white piece of paper that is taped to that marquee box up there. He goes up the escalator and there's big banners for all the movies releasing that weekend. No Iron Giant. Looks around. There it is.

• 1:23:14Chris Winterbauer?

  A 3D standee of the giant and one of its legs has been ripped off.

• 1:23:23Chris Winterbauer?

  The Iron Giant opened wide on the same day as The Sixth Sense.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:23:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Which pulled in $26 million that weekend. The Iron Giant made 5.7. It was good for ninth place.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:23:38Chris Winterbauer?

  The Iron Giant was broken.

• 1:23:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Here's what's sort of surprising about like on, at a face level, it doesn't make sense that The Sixth Sense would pull away from something like The Iron Giant. You're talking about what's, you know, technically a horror movie-ish.

• 1:23:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it got a lot of those 10, 11, 12, 13 years.

• 1:24:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's the thing.

• 1:24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Cause Haley Joel.

• 1:24:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and also like this is, The Sixth Sense, I think, when we talked about it, like, it's a pretty safe, you know, almost entry level.

• 1:24:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Gateway horror.

• 1:24:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's gateway horror and, and this is something, The Iron Giant, first of all, Sixth Sense, I think, appealed to both boys and girls. At a face level, The Iron Giant may be a little bit more difficult to market towards girls, at least at that time. And yeah, I, I never would have thought about that, but I can completely see why The Sixth Sense would destroy this movie.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  And Lizzie, the vibe, like, speaking of Bird's annoyance with the marketing campaign, the vibe of the commercials for this movie were like, get ready this summer for a new form of heavy metal. Like, it was not.

• 1:24:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not nostalgic. It was not wide-eyed and. In kind of introspective, it was very much like, this is a big robot. And he's got a stomp, stomp, stomp.

• 1:24:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I remember. I remember big old robot. And yeah, not much else.

• 1:25:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you like monster trucks?

• 1:25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Kinda.

• 1:25:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you like Godzilla?

• 1:25:05Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what I like more? Ghosts. Ghosts and Toni Collette.

• 1:25:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Are you a little girl that lives in Maine? You're gonna love this movie.

• 1:25:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, okay. Well, the funny thing about Brad Bird, as I mentioned, is that he's kind of this comics comic of animators, right? People in the know know how good his stuff is, even though he hasn't directed a movie yet until The Iron Giant. And what's interesting is that people in the know knew that The Iron Giant was great. That fall, The Iron Giant cleaned up at the 27th Annual Annie Awards, which are basically the Oscars for animation. It was nominated for 15 and it won nine.

• 1:25:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:25:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Meaning it won more than a third of all of the categories in the competition. It beat out Tarzan, it beat out A Bug's Life. It won Best Animated Theatrical Feature, Best Character Animation, Best Effects Animation, Best Music in an Animated Feature Production, Best Production Design in an Animated Feature Production, Storyboardy Voice Acting Writing and Best Directing in an Animated Feature Production. Now Warner Brothers, to their credit, knew we messed up a little bit with the release of this movie. So they revamped for the home video release. According to the Wall Street Journal, they cross-promoted with the Pokemon movie, very smart. They did a tie-in with Honey Nut Cheerios, AOL and General Motors, all of my favorite brands as a child.

• 1:26:26Chris Winterbauer?

  They got the backing of three congressmen and the founder of Action for Children's Television, Peggy Charon, who very much loved this movie and also said that the campaign for it originally, the theatrical one, was the, quote, "worst ad campaign I've seen in a long time," end quote. So The Iron Giant was released on VHS and DVD on November 23rd, 1999. All in all, I read that they spent $35 million promoting the home video release of this movie.

• 1:26:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:26:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And it paid off. It became a cult classic. As you mentioned, Alex, people evangelize this movie to their friends and family. And this is where I really grew familiar with it. I did see it in theaters, but I would watch it. On Cartoon Network, they would do these 24-hour rerun movie marathons of The Iron Giant on Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, starting in the early 2000s. Now, the movie was dedicated to Brad Bird's sister, Susan Bird, and it was also dedicated to Ted Hughes. Hughes did not live to see the film, but he did read the script and was very pleased before he passed away. Now, Brad Bird, we're going to cover more of his movies, so we don't need to do his full legacy. But, you know, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol. Very, very good live-action film.

• 1:27:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Incredibles 2, and he's currently in production on Raygun.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Full circle.

• 1:27:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So that movie came full circle.

• 1:27:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:27:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, before we end, there's just this, there's one part of the story that has bugged me, because the version of the story that I'd always heard was, this was based on a story written to comfort Ted Hughes' kids.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  I'm so glad you're talking about this.

• 1:28:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Brad Bird was dealing with the death of his sister, and then he made this movie. And that's technically, factually true. But I didn't really know much about Ted Hughes, and I didn't know much about Sylvia Plath before researching this project. And we don't need to do a giant addendum, but it's important, I think, to give a little more context. So Ted Hughes published this story in 1968. He and Sylvia Plath had a very tumultuous relationship. Sylvia Plath did attempt suicide at least one time before she was with Ted Hughes. It's possible one time shortly before her successful final attempt. So let's go chronologically. About a year after the book was published,

• 1:28:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Osia Weevil, with whom Hughes had had the affair that precipitated the end of his relationship with Plath, committed suicide in the exact same way that Sylvia Plath had, asphyxiation from a gas stove. She also killed their child, four-year-old Alexandra Tatiana Elise, nicknamed Shura, that is Ted Hughes's third child. There were never any criminal charges or anything brought against Ted Hughes, but I, I do think it's important to mention that this exact circumstance repeated itself with him a second time. And more important, in 2017, previously unpublished correspondence between Sylvia Plath and her former therapist alleged abuse at the hands of Ted Hughes.

• 1:29:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He obviously has passed away, can't defend himself. This is... These these letters have been reviewed and released and whatnot. You can find that information online. And so Ted Hughes didn't really strike me as a hero as I was kind of going through this and reading more about Plath and whatnot. And so I decided I need to reread some of Plath's stuff, too. Because, again, I don't know, I just felt like I needed a more complete picture. And so I reread The Bell Jar. And it's so good, so great. And she's so funny. I mean, it's so tragic, but it is so funny at the same time. It's such a not sob story.

• 1:30:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It's just like, she remains endlessly witty even as the book gets so dark. And what was interesting is that I found that there was this really intriguing strand of DNA that The Bell Jar shares with The Iron Giant film. And in a lot of ways, I think that the film is much more sophisticated than the book it's based on. And so in The Bell Jar, Lizzie, I'm sure you remember this, Esther, the main character, thinly veiled, perhaps, Sylvia, is told by her dullard love interest at the beginning, who gets fat when he has tuberculosis. It's so funny. I need to reread this. It's so funny. The suitor's mother says, and I'm paraphrasing, "What a man wants is a mate, and what a woman wants is infinite security.

• 1:30:55Chris Winterbauer?

  A man is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is, is the place the arrow shoots from." And then Esther laments, "That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket." And so what I wanted to end with, and I'm so sad that we lost Sylvia Plath so young, she was such a talent, but what I love about The Iron Giant is that it allows something that we all, or someone that we all have a preconception of what they're supposed to be, to choose what they are. And The Iron Giant chooses to be Superman. And Sylvia Plath, I think, very much was rebelling against what everybody was wanting

• 1:31:40Chris Winterbauer?

  her to be. And in her posthumously published poem, Ariel, if you guys read it, one of the last lines is, "I am the arrow." And so.

• 1:31:52Chris Winterbauer?

  To Sylvia Plath, the Arrow, and to Iron Giant, the Superman, that is our coverage of the Iron Giant.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  What a beautiful way to tie that together.

• 1:31:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Tenuous, but maybe, maybe we got there.

• 1:32:01Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, maybe you got me to love the Iron Giant.

• 1:32:04Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Alex, we do something at the end of every episode called What Went Right, where you can pick any element of the movie. It could be a particular individual involved. It could be an aspect of the finished film, anything that you feel went particularly right. You can go first, you can go second, you can go last. I'll, I'll tee it up. Lizzie, maybe, do you want to lead in?

• 1:32:26Lizzie Bassett?

  My What Went Right, as far as this story today, I think, is Tim McAnlis. I, you know, when you talked about the additions that he made to this story, I don't think that this movie works at all without those adjustments. They're so smart and they bring so much heart to this. And that's no knock against Brad Bird, against the original story, against anything, but he feels a bit like an unsung hero in this to have come in and have been able to impact this the way that he did, because those are, those are some major changes that, you know, might seem sort of minor in the scope of things, but they really affect the movie as a whole.

• 1:33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's a great, great selection. Man, it's hard. You know what? I'm just going to do it because I feel like no one's going to pick him because he's prickly, but I'm going to pick Brad Bird because, you know,

• 1:33:23Chris Winterbauer?

  he does seem like a tough son of a bitch to work with, watching that documentary. But man, is he good and he's talented. And I think he brought out the best in a lot of people. And, and then, so I will give it to Brad Bird. And with that, all of the wonderful animators on this movie who maybe weren't going to get it, who, who didn't get a shot somewhere else, you know what I mean? Or somebody said they were over the hill or whatever it is. There's so much talent in this world and it's, certain opportunities are gate kept in Hollywood in so many horrible ways. And so one thing that I'm thrilled by is that this- 2D Renaissance allowed for more opportunities, you know, at this point in time. I have friends who are writers right now and have been unemployed because there's no writers rooms,

• 1:34:07Chris Winterbauer?

  you know, rolling right now for television, who are just, they're amazing writers. And you put them in a room and they'll come up with a story that'll do everything you want, you know, to an audience, but there's just not the opportunity. And so I'll give it to Brad Bird, who created a lot of opportunity through his passion for this project. And just sidebar, Alison Abate, just God bless, like, God bless you. That must have been brutal. And I'm saying, I say that with my, the whole of my heart. That must have been so stressful. And also, if you're a producer or an executive who cares about your projects, which so many do, and I know sometimes we tend to demonize certain studio executives, but the real good ones, like, they care so much.

• 1:34:47Chris Winterbauer?

  She must have just been popping Tums throughout that whole goddamn movie to deal with the indigestion of having to serve, you know, the two masters in that instance. So, um, anyway, that's mine.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, just echoing the, the stuff about Brad Bird. That's the thing I was oscillating between while I was watching that documentary is that, is the understanding that if you're up against sort of like a commercial venture like the studio and trying to deliver an artistic vision, every day is going to be a fight. But also, um, the myth that you have to be a prick to be an auteur is very much a myth. So that was an interesting sort of oscillation I was going through while watching that. But I'm very grateful that he fought to make this because I love this movie. Mine is not a person, it's just the simplicity of the message, which is what you were saying earlier, Chris. I think that it's, there are particularly in the nineties, which was like, be yourself,

• 1:35:44Speaker 02

  just be yourself, be eccentric, do the thing, whatever. Like, that was everywhere. We didn't need another version of that.

• 1:35:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Terrible advice.

• 1:35:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't be your weird ass self.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  I like the very conservative message of like, you are what you do. I think that that is like extremely important.

• 1:36:03Chris Winterbauer?

  You are the sum of your actions.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  You're the sum of your actions now more than ever. And it's not too late to change your actions to be what you ultimately want to be. And I think that that is a beautiful, an incredibly important message. And that's why this resonated. And I think that just the simplicity of that and the reminder that comes with that is something that gives this a little more weight every time I watch it.

• 1:36:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Beautifully put.

• 1:36:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining us. Tell the folks, I mean, they can find you on You Are Good, they can find you on.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  The OC again.

• 1:36:37Chris Winterbauer?

  The OC again.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Can I say a thing just quickly about what went right about your show? The last time you were on my show, I maybe embarrassingly talked about how much I love you guys. I love you both so much. You're incredible. This show's incredible. The thing I want, and David, David Bowman, unseen, sort of unseen hero of the show as well. Love David's scores for your movies, Chris. But we were talking earlier and Jesse, I was introduced to Jesse, who does a lot of the research on your show. And I think what your show does so well is the research. I'm such a research nerd. Anytime I listen to a show and I hear there's one source, I get preemptively angry. Anytime I hear reading from Wikipedia, straight up, I get preemptive.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  Yours is the gold standard. And I'm sure Jesse isn't always recognized as a part of that because you two are ahead of that show. So I want to cheer you two for doing it. But also, this is to the researchers, this is to the archivists, you all are wonderful. We really appreciate your work. So thank you guys for making such a high standard of a show. I love, love, love what you do.

• 1:37:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you. Yes. Shout out to Jesse and I'll shout out our other researcher as well, Laura, who

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  Hell yeah, Laura.

• 1:37:50Lizzie Bassett?

  They both do amazing work.

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

  You, it's truly why I point at your show as what I think great shows are to many, many people who are getting into this sort of thing every single time. So, thank you.

• 1:38:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank you.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  So, you are good as a feelings podcast about movies. The OC again is kind of an OC rewatch show, but really we're just remembering what was going on by way of pop culture at that time.

• 1:38:12Chris Winterbauer?

  A lot.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  Tune in.

• 1:38:13Chris Winterbauer?

  A lot of not great stuff, too.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  A lot of not great stuff and a lot of great stuff.

• 1:38:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Really interesting times.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, thank you so much for having me. I love the show, obviously, and I love this movie and to get to talk, talk about it with you too is such a blessing.

• 1:38:28Lizzie Bassett?

  We loved having you.

• 1:38:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you. If you guys are enjoying this podcast, there are a few easy ways to support us. Number one, leave us a rating and review on whatever pod catcher you are listening to this show on. Number two, hit follow or subscribe on that pod catcher so you can get every episode every Monday and sometimes Friday. Number three, if you'd like some additional bonus content, you can now get our bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts. You can sign up within Apple Podcasts for $4.99 a month and you will get at least one bonus episode every month. To be clear, these bonus episodes are a slight variation of our normal episodes. We typically cover movies that have been recently released and they're a bit more

• 1:39:10Chris Winterbauer?

  skewed towards a review with a little bit of a history of how that movie came into existence. If you guys want even more, you can join our Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with listeners like you. You can head to www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. You can join for free. You can see updates, musings, et cetera, from us. For $5, you get all of our bonus episodes and an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you get an Iron Giant style shout out, just like one of these.

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  Angelina Renee Cook

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  Ben Shindelman Blaze Emmerich Brian Donahue Brittany Morris Brooke Carolyn Smith Cindy Grisby Chris Neal Chris Saka David Frisco Latte DB Smith Darren Dalegongley Don Shalwell Ellen Singletary Em Zoria Evan Downey

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  Fungy Jargie Phil Mitz, yourself Hank Insane Darren and Mia The Broken Glass Case Grace Potter Half Great Howl James McAvoy Jason Frankel JJ Rockin' Dog Jory Hill Piper Jose Salto Camila Kanaba Kate Ellington Kathleen Olsen

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  Amy O'Gus, Lotta McCoy Marla La Lena L.J. Leah Howes Matthew Jacobson Michael McGrath Nate the Knife Nathan Sentinel Rosemary Southwery Royal Jeller Sid, just Sid Scott Boshina So Man Chagani Steve Winterbauer Suzanne Johnson The Provost Family The O's Sound Like O's

• 1:42:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of What Went Wrong. Next week, we are coming back with our first holiday movie of this holiday season, Bad Santa. So if you guys want to get down with the feel bad movie of the year, I think I stole that from the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo marketing. Join us next week for Bad Santa.

• 1:42:39Speaker 05

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer.