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We launched Pop Culture Happy Hour 15 years ago this summer, and when each of us began we had a lot of pent-up hot takes.
So we thought we'd play back some of our earliest moments and see how they've held up since.
I'm Linda Holmes.
And I'm Stephen Thompson.
Today, on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we are breaking open a time capsule to revisit some of our memorable early moments.
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Joining us today are our wonderful co-hosts, Aisha Harris.
Hey, Aisha.
Hello, Stephen.
It is a pleasure.
Also, Glenn Weldon.
Hey, Glenn.
Shut up.
Leave me alone.
I'll be in my room.
See, I'm 15.
15 is the joke there.
That's the joke I did just then, seconds ago.
We are sullentines.
Love it.
This is how this episode is going to play out.
For each of us.
Our producer, Liz Metzger, found a piece of tape from our first few months on the show.
Then we'll see how that clip has ended.
Aged like this clip from our very first What's Making Us Happy segment with our pal and founding host, Trey Graham.
I'm really just falling in love seriously for the first time with Netflix instant streaming.
It's changing behind.
I stopped paying for cable a few months ago and it used to bother me a little bit, but there's so much now on the Netflix that I can just get.
Oh, wow.
This is how old this show is.
Netflix, who knew?
People still referred to it as Netflix Instant Streaming.
Yeah.
Because it was somewhat new.
Nice.
Nice.
Tech pioneered.
Who knew that this show would be such a treasure trove of old takes?
Mm-hmm.
We love you, Trey.
We do love Trey.
And hey, he was right about Netflix instant streaming.
Yes, he was.
Now Linda Holmes.
You and I created Pop Culture Happy Hour in the summer of 2010, while drinking beers in my living room.
True.
So this clip is from one of our earliest shows, October 2010 to be exact.
I'm not a big horror movie fan.
I hear you.
I am a scary movie fan to a degree, but definitely not a grisly horror.
I mean, has that changed much?
I was going to say, that feels like that's still somewhat true.
You have definitely done a fair bit of work.
Have you been on Linda's journey recently?
Come on now.
So I think what happened is a friend of mine recently quoted his wife to me, saying you reach a certain age and your life either gets substantially bigger or substantially smaller.
And so it's important to remain open to changing your mind about things and all that stuff.
Because this is what I used to say.
I used to say I like a scary movie but I don't like things that are real gory or bloody.
But then I would be like well but I like Die Hard.
And that's like very bloody.
And then like I saw John Wick and I was like, well, I like John Wick and that's extremely brutal.
So what exactly is going on?
And I started to.
Sometimes, because of this show, I started to see horror movies that I otherwise probably would not have seen.
What I have learned is that this was not really true.
It's not true that I'm not a horror movie person.
And it took me a while to refine this until I was saying what I really mean.
I don't like incredibly bleak horror where the monsters win.
Yeah, sure.
Like, there is a subgenre of, like, home invasion horror where gradually just everybody gets killed.
That kind of thing, just, I don't want that.
But...
Being more open to this idea and, of course, spending a lot of time around not only you guys, but also a lot of our panelists.
Jordan Cruciola.
I would specifically shout out Jordan Cruciola.
Yes, yes.
Has really gotten me to think more deeply about this kind of thing.
And now I consider myself to be a horror movie person in many cases.
Just sub pieces of it are not my speed.
But as we tape this, I've done two horror movies this week.
And so it's like I do it now.
It's all good now.
So, yeah, I have outgrown this take, I am happy to say.
Or at least I have narrowed it down a lot.
Because, like, yeah, gory, no.
But y'all know how much I loved Fight or Flight.
And that's an incredibly bloody movie.
That is an incredibly bloody movie.
So...
Would you say that what you've experienced isn't necessarily like?
I love gory movies so much as like I've learned to embrace violence?
Yes, exactly.
No, it's – I mean –
I have narrowed the lane that I consider not mine.
That's what I would say.
Welcome to the dark side.
It is nice over here.
That counts as growth.
Absolutely.
I mean, there was a time Linda, for a considerable run of this show where, kind of by default, I became the host who talked about Evil Dead Rise.
Yeah.
I've kind of been on a little bit of a similar journey especially, I think, in part just kind of tapping into Jordan Cruciola's incredible enthusiasm for horror.
Yeah.
And your daughters.
And my daughter as well.
Dad, have you ever seen a movie called The Human Centipede?
Oh, God.
I agree.
I know you did do that.
And as you can imagine, this is part of my long-term plan to replace you.
But, you know.
I'm leaning more and more into rom-coms.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
There you go.
We're just doing a body switch Freaky Friday stuff.
The freakiest Friday.
All right.
Thank you, Linda Holmes.
Well, it looks like I'm up next.
I'm going to go a slightly different direction with my clip, which is from August of 2010, where we're kind of talking about cultural figures who have maybe fallen out of favor with the public.
Has the public also turned on Jack Black?
Yes.
Who you could argue.
I think very possibly.
You could argue that Jack Black does the same shtick.
I think if you saw a trailer right now with Jack Black, it's very possible that you would see maybe not as extreme a reaction, but certainly a lot of people who would suddenly be like, oh no, never mind.
I'm out.
Well, you got in the background, you got Jesse Eisenberg as the thinking man's Michael Cera.
I don't think you have anybody like that for Jack Black, I think.
Actually, I'm going to nominate Zach Galifianakis.
Really?
Oh, that's a good point.
That's an excellent point.
If Galifianakis does a string of just obnoxious, annoying movies, I could see the audience turning on that guy.
Oh, yeah.
Is Zach Galifianakis the new Robin Williams?
Well, certainly not yet.
Certainly not yet.
Is he tomorrow's Robin Williams?
That's a good question we'll just have to wait and see.
What a time.
All right.
Go tiptoeing through that minefield for us, won't you, Stephen?
Well, and I feel like we should clarify, we were talking about the phenomenon of audiences, kind of turning on people that they had previously enjoyed.
I think one of the people we were talking about was M. Night Shyamalan.
And the experience of going to the movies and seeing the trailer for an M Night Shyamalan movie, and when the name M Night Shyamalan came up, the audience laughed.
And so we were kind of talking at the time about figures who have reached an audience saturation point where the audience is sick of their crap.
I decided, well, I think that's where audiences are with Jack Black.
And that was based on the extremely chilly critical and commercial reception to the 2009 movie Year One.
Oh, boy.
That was Jack Black and Michael Cera –
Saw it.
Hated it.
And so many people hated it.
And it's so interesting in terms of like.
What makes this such a bad take, I think, is this idea that the career arc of a movie actor is a simple bell curve.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
You know, it's sort of an overly simple take.
Jack Black was kind of at that a little bit of a low ebb in his career, not only with Year One, you know, like he was in like that Gulliver's Travels movie.
Gulliver's Travels?
That Gulliver's Travels movie, Gulliver's Travels.
But it seemed like people were tiring of him.
But the fact of the matter is, actors tend to get a lot of swings at the pinata.
If they're lucky.
If they're lucky.
So, like, the audience says maybe they needed a little break from Jack Black.
Yeah.
But it's very interesting to kind of look at that take as a snapshot of history of like everybody's tired of Jack Black, when in fact you know Jack Black made a bad movie or two.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then Bernie, the Richard Linklater movie came out not too long after that.
Which he's very good at.
Sometimes people do get oversaturated on certain performers and it takes time for them to kind of dig themselves out of that hole.
Some more than others.
Yeah.
I also think, like, to some extent, your observation wasn't unfounded, Stephen.
It's just it was an of the moment take.
And of course, now we see he's doing perfectly.
Great even, perhaps more than he was back then.
Yeah.
Well, and I think also like if you go back to a lot of people first noticed him in High Fidelity with John Cusack.
And I think if you look at high fidelity and you look at him in high fidelity, you don't necessarily look at that and think I see a long 40 or 50 year career of doing that.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And so I think it took other things.
It took him doing School of Rock, which has a little bit more of a fully rounded person, doing The Holiday, the rom-com.
Doing a lot of voice acting.
Doing a lot of voice acting, doing Bernie, doing all this kind of stuff.
To kind of get past what the initial kind of thing seemed to be.
Right.
But this is still a phenomenon.
I mean, we still get glutted on certain performers.
I would argue that we are living in kind of the immediate aftermath of a James Corden phenomenon.
Glut.
And he used to be in everything.
You look around, I don't see him anywhere.
I worry and I sincerely worry that Pedro Pascal, people love him.
I'm wondering that too.
We are reaching a saturation point.
Well, you're already getting the jokes about how he's in everything, which are often the precursor to the complaints that he's in everything.
Well, and like so many cultural phenomena, you can't discount the awesome power of coincidence.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
It's just that all those films happen to come out at the same time.
Right.
And I would also note, by the way, in passing, that one of the people that Glenn mentioned during that conversation was Jesse Eisenberg.
And I think the same thing in some ways happened with Jesse Eisenberg, which is –
He started doing some different kinds of things which helped kind of get over that hump of people being like I've seen this guy.
I've seen what this guy does.
And now you get him in stuff like Real Pain and those kinds of things that are not quite doing, the social network thing that I think for a while was the whole thing kind of picture of him.
And Zach Galifianakis is in the Lilo and Stitch remake.
Yes, he was.
Good for Zach Galifianakis.
All right.
Well, that was not my hottest take.
Aisha Harris.
Now, Aisha, you started appearing on Pop Culture Happy Hour in 2016.
You became a full-time Pop Culture Happy Hour host in 2020.
We thought we would split the difference and play a clip from April of 2018.
Maybe I'm being hyperbolic here, but I feel like to some extent it is.
There is no precedent for Beyonce and how much she continues to just keep getting better and better this late in her career and still stay relevant forever.
Obviously there have been other artists before her who you know still turned out great performances in their later careers.
She's 36!
Yeah, but she's been around for 20 years now.
I know, I know.
Destiny Child's first album came out in 97, I think.
So she's been around for 20 years.
It's true.
It's true.
She has.
Now it's almost 30.
I don't see a hot take there.
I see a pretty cold take.
I'm glad to know we're marking seven years of giving Aisha a hard time about being young and us being old.
I don't know if this is so much a hot take as it's just a very on brand for me take.
I agree that Beyonce kept getting better.
Renaissance might be her.
Like if I were to put Homecoming.
So to be clear, we were talking about Homecoming.
Amazing Coachella performance.
That had to get originally had to be postponed because she got pregnant, and then she turned it out and she it's one of the greatest things ever committed to video.
So she did that.
She did Renaissance.
I will say Calvary Carter.
Really?
Calvary Carter is probably one of my least favorite things that Beyonce has ever done as a whole.
There's some bops, but I don't think it's firing all cylinders.
But act three is coming as of this moment.
There are rumors it could be a rock album.
I stand by this take.
I still think she has surpassed most pop stars in her ability to absolutely continue to sort of if not completely reinvent herself, at least reimagine, and like she still seems to care.
She hasn't checked out.
And I think it's so easy for that to happen and so easy for especially women unfortunately, to quote unquote age out of being a pop star.
Madonna has successfully done it, but so few others have been able to do that.
And Beyonce.
I'm still always looking forward to what she's doing, even if Cowboy Carter was not my thing.
Okay.
I do think it's interesting that you bring up the example of Madonna as somebody who has done it successfully.
Because I do feel like Madonna did hit a point where she stopped trying to one-up herself.
Yes.
Like she managed to continue churning out records that were successful, but it wasn't necessarily like upping the ante on the stuff that came before.
And I do think Beyonce, you know, did kind of reach a point where, like how do you get bigger than Homecoming?
How do you get bigger than like bringing in all these marching bands from HBCUs and doing this career retrospective that is this incredibly dynamic live performance?
Like now she seems to be in kind of her genre exercise phase.
Yeah.
And in some ways, it does still feel like she's able to one-up herself.
She did win Album of the Year at the Grammys this year.
But there is this question of when do you stop trying to one-up yourself, because there does come a point at which it's basically impossible.
Yeah, yeah.
I also think Beyonce is not the type of person who would ever not try to.
She's just way too try hard for that.
And she owes it.
She also seems to be a person who's very tolerant of the experience of being spectacularly famous, which not everybody is.
Some people, I think, genuinely tire of a certain level of attention after a certain period of time and you see a little bit of pulling back from them.
And she seems to have a very high tolerance for being one of the most famous people in the world, one of the most scrutinized people in the world.
She seems to have found a way to.
I mean, I think she achieves a lot of privacy for the amount of fame that she has.
A billion dollars will get you that kind of privacy.
Exactly.
That's what I mean is, I think she's figured out a way to leverage her money into a life that is manageable for her, that prevents her from being like I can't do this anymore, which for some people, I think is one of the reasons why they may eventually pull back a little bit.
Yeah, so let's see.
Linda, your clip showed you evolving, I would say, in your tastes.
Stephen, you were wrong, but that's just a kind of as you say, it's kind of a dice roll, because it's a snapshot of a time right.
And Aisha on brand, but I think you'd agree that you're take has nuanced because of time and because of the different stuff that she's put out, and so that's interesting.
I wonder if any of these takes, I wonder if Glenn, you're setting up some sort of segue to your.
I wonder if any of these takes are going to prove to be absolutely right then and now.
All right, I'm not going to argue that building a costume with your parents is not a great memory, but all y'all are not seeing this from the kid's perspective.
You're seeing this from the scrim of adulthood and look at all these wonderful memories that we're not building.
This may be true for other costumes, but for a superhero costume, it is not about dressing as Iron Man.
It is about being Iron Man.
And every inch, every nanosecond you get away from that perfect ideal is a little death.
So what needs to happen is for it to be... Okay, Ayn Rand.
No, no, no, no, no. has to happen is you have to get as close as possible.
So when I'm six years old, I go to my mom and I say, Batman, I'm going to be Batman this year.
And she says to me well, we'll take your brother's old gray sweatpants and his gray sweatshirt and we'll magic marker a bat on your chest.
I said, we'll do what now?
Excuse me?
Here's the thing.
I am still right.
I still would not have ceded the ground that I did at the top of that clip, where I said oh, building a customs with your parents is a great memory.
I don't believe that now.
I didn't believe that then.
Sorry, what was the context?
So the topic here was Halloween and Halloween costumes.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not what I was talking about.
Because there was a Target ad at the time that showed a mom making an Iron Man costume for her kid out of, like you know, little push lights and all kinds of things that she had bought.
And she put together a homemade Iron Man costume.
And I took the position that the homemade Iron Man costume was more... Made with love.
Soulful.
Meaningful and soulful.
Glenn took the position that the chat GPT of Halloween costumes was the way to go in order to satisfy your child.
Okay.
Ayesha, what you missed there?
Before that clip, there was a conversation where all three of my fellow hosts were just dewy-eyed is the right word.
They were all I'm going to say it bum-fuzzled.
Bum-fuzzled, I say by the scrim of nostalgia where they were just talking about oh, and when I see a little person come up to my door and it's clear that it was homemade, it's made with love and that's.
Wrong then, it's wrong now.
That story about Batman was true.
And because I rejected my mom's offer probably not kindly we went to Woolworths and we bought what Linda's talking about, which is a Ben Cooper Batman costume.
Now, if you're too young to remember, Ben Cooper costumes were basically... vinyl smocks.
They were terrible.
And the masks had a little slit where your mouth was and you couldn't help but put your tongue against it.
And on the chest, the word Batman on the mask that had the word Batman, which is not how he rolls.
But it was so much closer to the target, closer to the bone than its sweatshirt.
I would be able to look in the mirror and my imagination would be able to bridge the gap between what I saw in the mirror and Batman.
And today it's...
I'm even more right now because maybe not at a CBS, maybe not at a spirit Halloween store that used to be a Radio Shack.
But online, there is a thriving cosplay cottage industry.
Etsy.
Etsy is big for that.
They get it down.
They are exacting.
And again, I think I grew up in the wrong time.
I mean, I envy these kids today.
Although those costumes are like a hundred times more expensive than they were back then.
Commit to the bid, I said.
My mother made me a Florence Nightingale costume with a blue dress and an apron with a red cross on it.
My mother made me a fairy costume and my mother made my dress for the bicentennial.
In 1976, when I was a little teeny thing, she made my little thing with the puffy sleeves and the little hat, the little like white puffy hat.
So listen.
I feel like we need to share these photos.
I want to see these photos.
But Linda, if you wanted to go as Iron Man, she couldn't source the Kevlar.
You know, there's no place she could get that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
My family split the difference.
We didn't.
Well, my parents were not making me costumes and we did not have Spirit Halloween or Woolworths.
But Party City was where we got all of our costumes.
I agree with your take, Glenn.
I'm with you.
If I had been on that episode, which I was not, I would have absolutely been on your side.
I'm sorry.
I'm not dewy eyed about this.
Exactly.
They don't have Florence Nightingale costumes at Party City.
They did have nurse costumes, for sure.
Not a generic nurse, Ayesha.
I was Florence Nightingale.
I don't think Florence Nightingale is copyrighted.
I don't think they have to say war nurse.
I was Florence Nightingale TM.
I'm sure, Glenn, you would agree.
You were right then.
You're right now.
Uh-huh.
There we go.
Yes.
You're here.
I knew right now, right there, about that.
All right.
Well, we want to know your early pop culture happy hour memories.
We want to know your early hot takes.
Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Aisha Harris, Linda Holmes, Glenn Weldon, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you.
Happy anniversary.
See you in 15 more years, hopefully.
He insulted my mother, but that's okay.
And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio.
And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free.
So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes.
This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
Hello Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.
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