In this episode, Jon and Andrew go toe to toe with Peter Jackson’s version of the Eighth Wonder of the World himself – King Kong! To be honest, it’s not the height that bothered us, but the length.  Of his movie, that is.  (Head out of the gutter, people.)  This was the first episode of our “Ax-To-Grind” series, where we take aim at particular movies from the past that we have some pointed things to say about – those things can be good and bad, and we definitely have more than enough of both with this.  We also contextualize this in terms of how our perceptions of movies like this have changed, in that we used to root for movies like this – that try to make middlebrow popular culture into high art – but nowadays see how that trend may have done more harm than good. Andrew also talks about how he made his own edit of the movie and about what he cut out from it, and Jon throws in some script level revisions he feels would have made the film better. This may have been our funniest episode to date, too, but it’s still packed with our trademark insight – both personal and intellectual.  Just don’t say the word “slobberknocker” around Andrew.  It’s kind of his “Martha” now. Explicit language.

Content Advisory: SLOBBERKNOCKER~! (and how it’s not what Andrew thought it was, speaking of heads-in-gutters), editing Peter Jackson (who couldn’t edit himself if God or Christopher Hitchens came down), the awesomeness of Kong (and Andy Serkis), how not to reference Orson Welles, good ideas on paper, bad ideas in practice, the ethics of portraying Skull Island’s natives, characters reading the screenplay to other characters and making us watch, learning to trust moments, the Erotic Adventures of Jimmy and the First Mate, losing a pet, revisiting The Hobbit, and THERE ARE THREE T-REXES!!!