A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-six — SHATTERED VISAGE

Chris and Glen discuss Dean Motter & Mark Askwith's 1988 four-volume comic book sequel to the unclassifiable and unforgettable TV series.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-five — THE PHANTOM

An increasingly besotted Glen & unceasingly bemused Chris wax purple on The Phantom, 1996’s two-fisted failed franchise starter with Billy Zane as the 30s comic strip hero who coulda been called WHITE PANTHER & Patty McG as the Ghost Who Walks™ ’s… Ghost Dad?

The Phantom

Screenplay by Jeffrey Boam

Directed by Simon Wincer

Released June 7, 1996

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-four — SCANNERS

Democracy dies in dorkiness this week as the brilliant Washington Post columnist, essayist, playwright and retired (?) Emo Sith Lord Alexandra Petri joins us to solve the riddle of David Cronenberg's 1981 swollen-headed cult classic Scanners, featuring 24 minutes of a possibly first-billed, maybe third-billed, but unequivocally box-named-on-the poster Patty McG as a, um, North American mad scientist named... Dr. Ruth. Glen is determined to spark an international incident by dismissing Steven Lack, the picture's aptly named lead player, as "Canadian hot" while assessing future Lion in Winter star Michael Ironside as "Philadelphia hot."

It's a ripe program, this one. Ripe indeed.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-two — ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ

I wish I knew you actually painted this portrait of Patrick McGoohan’s sadistic, unnamed warned, attributed in the 1979 film Escape From Alcatraz to the character of Doc as played by Roberts Blossom.

Maximum Fun? More like maximum security! Maximum Fun podcast network founder and San Francisco native Jesse Thorn joins us this week to tunnel through the crumbling walls of Escape From Alcatraz, the 1979 Clint Eastwood-starring dramatization of the real 1962 prison break, featuring Patty McG as…The Warden. Stunt casting doesn’t get any stuntier, though Glen and I differ on exactly how much The Artist Formerly Known Only as Number Six contributes to the 115-minute picture in his roughly 10 minutes of screen time.

Also, am I the only person on this dang podcast who respects Eastwood as an artist? Sure, I hated his film Richard Jewell, and I said in my 2019 review that the then-89-year-old’s make-a-movie-every-year working tempo may have contributed to the declining quality of his ouvre. But you can’t just dismiss the guy who made Unforgiven and A Perfect World and Bird and so many others, outside of the westerns and cop thrillers and middling airport novel adaptations that his name conjures up.

I never saw The Mule, but I heard he has not one but two threesomes in that movie, which my parents saw at the cheap seniors-only early-afternoon weekday show. That’s reason enough for me to choose anything else from his 45-film, 50-year feature film directing resume next time I feel like clearing up one of my Eastwood blind spots.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-one — McG on Columbo

Director and guest star Patty MG pulls Peter Falk’s strings in the 1975 Columbo episode “Identity Crisis.”

DID YOU KNOW that Columbophiles are properly nomenclatured Columboheads or Trenchcoatheads?

DID YOU KNOW that fans who divide their sympathies equally among Patrick McGoohan and Peter Falk are formally designated McGalks?

The source of these incontrovertible revelations, the great Linda Holmes, joins us to investigate Patty McG’s historic run as a four-time Columbo killer / five-time Columbo director. Brandon Routh, the George Lazenby of Supermen despite being admirably heighted to the role, also gets a surprising quotient of airtime on this typically tangent-tolerant episode of our private, personal, by-hand, punchcard-driven podcast!

Read Linda's November 2020 essay on her pandemic discovery of Columbo here. And follow her on Twitter, obviously.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Suicide Squad" and What's Making Us Happy

Margot Robbie, Daniela Melchior, Idris Elba, a shark-man voiced by Sylvester Stallone, and David Dastmalchian are most of the lineup of The Suicide Squad. (Warner Bros/DC Comics)

Wednesday was my birthday, and it was not the first time I’d spent part of my birthday talking about a James Gunn comic book movie on Pop Culture Happy Hour. In 2014, I reported to the now-long-since-demolished-and-replaced NPR headquarters to talk about the just-released Guardians of the Galaxy before heading off to dinner at Oyamel. This year, I skipped the studio — we all skipped the studio — but still joined a panel chaired by my A Degree Absolute! co-host Glen Weldon and allies Daisy Rosario and Ronald Young, Jr. to dissect (it’s a grisly movie) The Suicide Squad.

Glen and I two-handed its kinda-sorta precursor, the definite article-free Suicide Squad, in 2016. I also wrote a review of that film for NPR. God, what a rotten year that was.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty-one — "LOST" in America with Jen Chaney

Vulture TV critic and noted Lindelofologist Jen Chaney joins us to examine the influence of The Prisoner on subsequent stranded-by-the-seaside puzzle-box shows like LOST. Plus we once again pop The Hatch on the mailbag.

Read Jen's definitive oral history of the LOST finale here! Follow her on Twitter here!

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode twenty — Fall Out

Patty McG has claimed he was driven out of England after this puzzling final episode of The Prisoner debuted on Feb. 1, 1968. McGoohan admitted to financier Lew Grade that he'd been bluffing a year prior when he told the moneyman that he had an ending in mind for the strange new series he'd proposed.

While this episode certainly reflects its creator's exasperation and exhaustion, it's more satisfying than any conventional resolution of the show's myriad mysteries could possibly have been... isn't it?

"Fall Out"

Written and directed by Patrick McGoohan

Original airdate February 1, 1968