64 years ago, The Flintstones became the first ever animated prime time sitcom in the US, and 30 years ago, the live-action film was released. A live action adaptation of The Flintstones first came about in 1985, but it wouldn't be 'til Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment acquired the rights in 1992 that the project started moving forward, but by that point eight writers had already had a crack at the script... Once Spielberg, and mega fan director Brian Levant, got involved, many more...

The history and legacy of Shakespeare in Love is long-winded and complicated, but how is it that a movie can be wholly and completely tarnished by one man? I don't know. It's a mystery. From its beginnings as a project for Universal starring Julia Roberts, to it being shut down after spending $6 million and losing Julia Roberts, to being resurrected in the worst possible way by actual real-life villain Harvey Weinstein; the story of Shakespeare in Love has comedy, romance and tragedy, just...

After making The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, Stephen Sommers wanted to make a small movie; no monsters, no action, no visual effects, just something simple, but then he started thinking about all the Universal monster movies he loved as a child, and came up with a collective story of three monsters, connected by one man - Van Helsing - but not the Abraham Van Helsing you knew.... Gabriel Van Helsing would be serving alongside Dracula with the Knights of the Holy Order before having to kill...

Great Scott, it’s the 250th episode! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads, and if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to get the history and legacy of Back to the Future! It's a story of how Romancing the Stone, Coca-Cola's takeover of Columbia and Double Indemnity came together to make Back to the Future a possibility. Back in the days when Ronald Reagan, the actor! was president and you needed a nuclear reaction to generation 1.21 jigowatts of...

In 1993, before they were acquired by Eidos, a little games developer in Derby called Core Design were working on their new action adventure game. It was an Indiana Jones-style 3D platformer; revolutionary for its time, and not just because of the immense 3D world and cleverly designed levels, but the protagonist was a woman. Her name was Lara Croft, and the game was Tomb Raider. In the mid-90s, Lara Croft became a virtual celebrity, and while Eidos demanded more and more Tomb Raider games,...

Sport biopics are usually only reserved for well known big-name sportspeople from yesteryear - people like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, James Hunt and Niki Lauda, or stories based in reality with fictional characters. What makes Fighting with My Family, and Paige’s story so different, is that not only did she achieve the WWE Divas Champion at the tender age of 21, she also won that title just ten years ago, and she comes from a working class family from Norwich, that had just so happened to...

For Women's History Month and Mother's Day, here in the UK, silence is deafening for a spec script written in an unconventional way, that happened to get picked up by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company. Taking inspiration from silent movies from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, as well as horror classics like Jaws, Alien and Alfred Hitchcock's filmography, A Quiet Place started life as an almost dialogue free script, written in 2016. The original screenplay can be...

It's International Women’s Day tomorrow, and if we’re talking about someone who represents feminism, women’s rights, gender equality and reproductive rights, there’s no fictional character used to represent this as frequently on International Women’s Day than Wonder Woman. A character born from polyamory, first-wave feminism and also linked to the very first birth control clinic in the United States; Wonder Woman was the only one of DC's top tier heroes to not have her own solo headline...

The final episode of Animation Season 2024, and one of Walt Disney's crowning achievements in animation: Sleeping Beauty. Doing another princess movie after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella seemed like the obvious choice, but it was also risky. Walt Disney didn't want to make the same thing again, and wanted to wow the public with yet another cinematic visual masterpiece to prove Disney were the pioneering animation studio. A "moving illustration". To do this he enlisted Eyvind...

5 years, 244 episodes, 258 histories and legacies. I guess I need to crack on and do some more... Thank you to you all for supporting me over five years of podcasting. Huge thanks to Russell, Brett, Tracy, Josh, KT, Oti, Jack, Scott and Zack for being kind enough to send me some messages of congratulations. Lots of love to you all! Thanks for listening!

For the final fifth birthday episode, Disney could see that motion capture was quickly becoming the next big thing for animation, and they wanted in. They teamed up with Robert Zemeckis to make A Christmas Carol, and then Mars Needs Moms, based on a children's book, written to persuade a young child to eat his vegetables. But Mars Needs Moms would not only be incredibly dark for a family animated film, and venture deep into the realms of the uncanny valley, it would also become a huge box...

Sir Patrick Stewart has never had a role that could officially be described as "poop", until now. For the second fifth birthday episode, The Emoji Movie was Sony's $1 million winning bid on making a movie all about those little characters you use on WhatsApp instead of actual words, and to ensure this was completed before anyone else had a chance, it came together in under two years! Unfortunately, it was a critical disaster. Insert shocked face emoji here!

Quite famously a movie that almost destroyed DreamWorks by losing $125 million, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas doesn't deserve its negative reputation as a box office bomb, and the final traditional 2D animated film from the studio. It instead deserves to be featured as one of the fifth birthday episodes of this podcast. Only five years late, too!

The Black Cauldron is notorious for being one of Disney's darkest and scariest movies, and it is, but there's a beauty in its darkness that's unrivalled. The score does feel mismatched in places and the characters aren't very well-developed, but there's something truly ambitious there, and the animation has moments of sheer awe-inspiring brilliance. It really is a work of visual art. But you can see the behind-the-scenes troubles even in its animation - while some scenes are some of the most...

Based on ND Stevenson's graphic novel, Nimona started life with Blue Sky Studios, and when Blue Sky was acquired by Disney in its purchase of 20th Century Fox, originally Nimona's production continued. When Disney officially cancelled Nimona, it came as no surprise to the team working on the movie. While officially the reasons for cancellation were financial, rumours swirled that Disney didn't like the LGBTQ themes, and opposed a same-sex kiss. But Nimona, and the crew behind the movie,...

Guillermo del Toro once said “No single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio.” And this is coming from a guy who loves his passion projects. So much so that you could arguably say that every Guillermo del Toro project is a passion project, but not every Guillermo del Toro passion project gets made... It took fifteen years for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio to finally reach the big and small screen, in a year with two other Pinocchio adaptations -...

Based on Cressida Cowell's childhood experiences of living in a remote cottage in Scotland, her How to Train Your Dragon series of books was a wild success, and so naturally Hollywood came calling. The writer/director team of Lilo and Stitch came on board the project, and the whole mythology surrounding the island inhabitants of Berk, and the mythology and biology surrounding its dragon neighbours, was built from the ground up. How to Train Your Dragon not only has the style, the substance,...

Animation Season returns... with one of Pixar's most important movies, and one with a prescient message. Andrew Stanton had pitched an idea about the last robot on earth back in 1994. It would take eight years for the project to materialise properly, and was originally conceived as Robinson Crusoe and The Last Man on Earth, becoming a Planet of the Apes-style humans-as-aliens reveal, before its robotic love story blossomed, and along with it, a stark warning for the future of humanity, our...

John Hughes' pair of 1989 comedies Uncle Buck and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation would become integral to the production of his next screenplay, Home Alone, based on the simple idea of "what would it be like if I left one of my young children home alone while I went on vacation?" It really was a case of lightning in a bottle, with the perfect John Hughes screenplay, a young and willing director in Chris Columbus, the perfect cast, led by the-then eight-year-old Macaulay Culkin, in a...

The story of Die Hard starts in the mid-sixties, and the film adaptation of a dark film noir detective drama novel, The Detective, starring Frank Sinatra. That film warranted a sequel, but the sequel novel Nothing Lasts Forever would take eleven years to be written, and its film adaptation would take a further nine years to make it to the big screen, with some major changes. Gone was Frank Sinatra reprising his role, and the death of the character's on-screen daughter. The dark, depressing...

A fairy-tale English cottage set in a tranquil country garden. Snuggle up by an old stone fireplace and enjoy a cup of cocoa. An enchanting oasis of tranquillity in a quiet English hamlet, just forty minutes from exciting London. No, it's not Verbal Diorama HQ, but the description of Iris Simpkins' traditional English country cottage in The Holiday, the quintessential Christmas romantic comedy that only seems to get better and more appreciated with age. You could say it has gumption. Derided...

Street Fighter is one of those movies that does feel lacking, incomplete, and cut to shreds, and then you realise it is indeed all of those things because of the various issues on set. Capcom’s constant demands, Raúl Julia's illness and recovery from surgery, Jean-Claude Van Damme's regular absences from set, and a constantly changing filming schedule, not to mention the MPAA requesting constant cuts to give it the all important PG-13 rating. Under different circumstances, Street Fighter...

A first time writer-director, in the right place at the right time, developed a story about a troubled young man, in the wrong place at the right time, as Donnie Darko became a dark twisted tale of cultural significance against a mind-bending plot, and resulting controversy surrounding its use of gun wielding after Columbine, and imagery of a plane crash just after 9/11. These factors would mean it would flop when it did eventually reach US cinemas in October 2001, however Donnie Darko would...

Technically the first ever quadruple-bill episode (if you also count the Richard Donner cut of Superman II, which we do), as voted for by Patrons of this podcast for, on the history and legacy of Superman II, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, Superman III & Superman IV: The Quest for Peace ! The sequels to the previous episode on Superman SUPERMAN II was inevitable after Richard Donner completed 75% of the movie, filmed at the same time as Superman (1978). His work on the sequel was...