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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and it's just us today, and that's okay because we're just gonna be sitting around rapping about one of our favorite things to talk about, and that is movies.
Let's go to the movies.
You have a little Katharine Hepburn thing going on there.
Ethel Merman? Katharine Hepburn.
It was Katharine Hepburn singing Ethel Merman.
Ok, that's how I think that.
Yeah, we are going to the movies Chuck, in particular a specific kind of movie that the more I dug into the more I realized is one of my favorite types of movies.
Oh yeah? Yeah, disaster movies.
I had no idea, but remember we were talking and this whole thing was kicked off by me watching the day after tomorrow a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah yeah. And I was like, yeah that's one of my favorite movies and the reason why is because I love disaster movies.
Love them. Yeah I like a lot of these.
It's not my favorite genre overall.
But like I found myself saying like oh yeah that was pretty good or I like that alright.
But generally if we're in this this is a sub genre of action movies and I think I prefer action movies overall more than disaster movies.
Okay. Alright well yeah we'll get into that because it is a sub genre of action.
And it makes a lot of sense.
Disaster movies are packed with action, and there are some that are like okay, this is definitely a disaster film, like The Towering Inferno. Oh yeah, obvi.
Okay, then there's also movies like Speed, and Speed checks off a lot of the boxes.
Eh, not a disaster movie.
You would not call it a disaster movie, even though it really could, if you really wedged it in there it would qualify.
But there's just a couple little things that are different that make it definitely an action movie, and then you have other ones like the birds, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Not a disaster movie, to me.
It ends up on lists.
It's part of the animal attack subgenre of disaster films, which is a subgenre of action.
Yeah, it's interesting because I'm sure you did the same thing when reading off some of these.
It's sort of like just a gut feeling sometimes, and you can't say exactly what it is that you feel personally like doesn't count, but someone else might think it counts.
It's not like this is something you can say is very cut and dry, you know?
Right, and because of that, I looked everywhere on the internet to try to cobble together this list of basically the basic defining characteristics of disaster films. Yeah.
And it was hard. Nobody's ever sat down and said, here they are, some people have kinda piecemeal, but that people don't talk that much about disaster films, which I find sad.
Well, maybe this can be that and maybe you can like, I don't know, start a website joshdefinesdisaster .com.
And I'll just put this article on there and that'll be that.
Alright, should we go through some of these because you did a bang -up job?
Thank you. The first thing you needed in a disaster movie is a disaster.
Sure. But this can be a lot of different things.
A lot of time it's a human -made thing And that varies from climate change movies, which we've seen a lot more of lately, to like pandemics.
And sometimes, I guess some things like Towering Inferno are a bit of a mashup, because you can have the threat of a structural collapse.
So that is a human made thing, but it might be brought upon by like a fire or flood or something.
Yes. There's overlap.
Nobody said you can pin down disaster movies pretty easily.
That's right. What else?
There's like, extra terrestrial is a big one, it can be an alien attack, it can be a comet or an asteroid headed toward earth, transportation is huge.
People love screwing up cruise ships and trains and boats and airplanes.
Love it. One of the other things about it, too, the disaster is ongoing, right?
So it's not like the people survive a five minute earthquake, and then the rest of the movie, they all like, go out to dinner and everything's fine.
They spend the rest of the movie negotiating all the problems that that disaster created.
So they're negotiating sub -disasters, or it can be like an ongoing disaster, like a flood or something like that.
Like that can happen the entire movie.
But one way or another, the entire movie takes place over some sort of disaster in all of its after effects.
Yeah, for sure. Impending or in, in what, in?
Oh, that's a good point, too.
Yeah, sometimes there's a lot of lead up to it.
Yeah, exactly. But what, what am I looking for in process, in progress?
Sure. Oh, good Lord. It's usually a pretty large disaster.
And for me, this is like, can be a real big differentiator in my personal opinion.
But again, it's a gut check.
Like sometimes if it's just a local thing, to me I'm like, well that's not really a disaster movie because it has to be more big and sweeping to truly qualify.
But then sometimes it is sort of a smaller thing and I feel like it does qualify.
So like in the case of like a bridge collapse or a collapse tunnel or like Daylight, Stallone's movie about the, wasn't that one of the New York tunnels was collapsing or collapsed, like I considered that a disaster movie.
so I'm contradicting myself and that's what makes this all fun.
Yeah, I'm one end of the spectrum.
The world can actually be ending.
That can be the premise, or like you said, a little tunnel collapse.
The rest of the world's just going on business as usual.
It cares. Exactly. Let them die.
Like that guy in airplane?
I don't remember that.
What happened? There was a debate TV show on the news or something like that, and one was like, we need to take better care of people and the FAA has to step it up.
And the other guy was presenting CounterPoint.
He was like, I say let them die.
It's way funnier in the movie.
Yeah, obviously surviving the disaster is a big part of the plot point.
We know some people won't make it out alive, but usually like most of the A -list cast will make it out alive unless they're really trying to like pull one over on you in a scream sort of way.
Yes, and you teased something just now, some people will definitely not survive and one of the things about disaster movies is all you have to do is basically see one and the next one, maybe you don't even need to see a second one, you can pick out very quickly who is going to die, who is going to live, and the reason why is because stereotypes are pervasive in disaster movies.
Like you have like the dumb, brawny guy.
Or, you know, a smart scientist. Damsels in distress.
To this day, disaster movies are sexist. I could not come up with a single disaster movie where the hero was a woman.
Not a single one in all the decades of disaster movies.
It's men, most of the main characters and leads are men.
And the woman is basically there to essentially be saved and maybe help out some.
Yeah, I mean, I guess more recently, they may throw you a bone with like a woman as president, then she's like commissioning the team of men to usually solve the problem.
Good point. Right, so you know very quickly who the hero is, but there's also plenty of other people who are like, I think they're going to live.
And you can really kind of cut them into three moral categories, good, bad, and redeemable.
And redeemable can be like the guy's ex -wife's new boyfriend, who you hate, but really he actually turns out to be a good guy.
He probably dies, but he'll die a good noble death.
He could also not die and become like a sidekick.
And then there's the shady rich people, often the people who are responsible for the disaster through their greed or something like that.
You know they're going to die a very bad death.
And the point is it's a really simplistic way of looking at humans.
And I think that's one of the reassuring things about it that make them enjoyable.
Yeah, for sure. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't bring up a little bit of a prickly topic for our African -American listeners.
It has long been a movie trope in horror movies, disaster movies or whatever, where the black characters will die almost certainly.
And usually first. And that has become such a trope, it's become a joke and lampooned in like, you know, the parody movies and stuff.
But we have to mention that.
And what I'm curious about, and hopefully we'll hear from some of our listeners, if that has now become so ridiculous and crossed over to where it's now just sort of funny and expected and a movie thing and not truly upsetting.
right so I'm curious how our African American listeners feel about this at this point in 2025.
Yeah, there's usually about as many black characters as there are women characters in disaster movies.
Yeah. But like you said similarly, they're often the president like Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover or something like that.
Yeah, I'd vote for Morgan Freeman.
Yeah for sure but I heard the reason you know he wears those diamond studs in his ears all the time.
Yeah, he's been rocking those for a while.
I heard the reason why it's an old pirates thing where you wear some sort of jewelry or whatever, so that if you die away from home, you have enough currency or value or something on you to pay for your funeral.
That's why he does that?
That's what I heard. That's incredible.
Yeah, it makes you wanna vote for him even more, huh?
I just wanna hear that State of the Union.
Yeah, whatever speech he's delivering it would be really smooth.
I was going to try and bust that out of Morgan Freeman, but I just, I think it would have, I would embarrass myself.
I've never tried. So it's never good to launch into your first attempt live on the air.
Well maybe we'll workshop it off air.
Well, we had to talk about the hero.
The hero most times is not like a typical hero.
It's usually an Everyman kind of character who just like Armageddon, for instance, they put together a rough and tumble team, dirty dozen style that wasn't a bunch of elite problem solvers.
They were like oil rig guys, right?
Like drillers. Yeah.
They weren't even astronauts for Pete's sake.
Yeah. They had to train them.
I only saw Armageddon once so I'm pulling a lot of this from distant memory.
Yeah. I'm more a deep impact dude.
Oh yeah? That's what I heard. As a matter of fact, I'm not entirely certain I've ever seen Armageddon.
It was okay. It was fairly schlocky, big budget sort of stuff.
You just described almost every single disaster movie ever made and the response too, your judgment of it, almost every single disaster movie ever made.
They don't get you to jump off the couch at the end and scream bravo or encore.
you know what I mean?
You just kind of like them, they're just kind of fun.
Yeah, it's a summer movie, Popcorn Fair, I still love these kinds of movies.
I think there's a place for all kinds of movies and I still love going to the theater and seeing this sort of big budget like it.
Probably isn't a great film, but it might be a fun movie.
Right, so within the structure, these constrictions people have learned over the years how to kind of play with them and make new forms of disaster films. And a really good example I think, So we said that either a big disaster affects tons of people, or a small disaster affects a little amount of people.
Something that kind of combines the two is Leave the World Behind, the Ethan Hawke movie.
I don't know that one.
Oh, it's great. It was on Netflix.
OK. Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts.
So basically, there's a cyberattack that just causes civilization to essentially collapse.
But we're just following, like, two families who are kind of having to figure out what to do and what's going on and all that.
I like that approach. Yeah, it was it was definitely worth seeing.
And then other ones, rather than having kind of a schlocky humor, that really started to develop in the late 70s.
And then I kind of turned into like, quips, I guess in the 90s.
Yeah. There's some very, very serious ones to like The Impossible, not a schlocky depiction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Incredible movie, though.
It is. It's so, it's probably the most realistic film I've ever seen in my life.
Yeah. I mean, I remember, I think I remember when it came out, we might have even talked about that on the air at some point when we did the tsunami episode with the, how they recreated that was just harrowing.
Exactly. So that's disaster films in a nutshell and I feel like we could probably take a break here and then come back and talk about the history of disaster films. What do you think?
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So, unlike some other things, disaster films are one of those things you can explore and that there is an actual beginning, and it's not like this thing developed over time, there were disaster films. Because there's these definitions, these characteristics that you have to have, there were films along the way that just happened to have those.
And the first one was Deluge from 1933, where if you watch it, there's several minutes of New York City being destroyed by a tsunami, and it's pretty impressive for 1933.
Yeah, for sure. And it also sort of, as you will see, and usually they're the schlockier ones, but you get a lot of these one word title disaster movies.
Right. Especially in the seventies.
But then again, as we'll see in the nineties, Resurgent, things like Tornado, Flood, stuff like that.
Yeah. You put an exclamation point at the end of a natural disaster or a force of nature in your set.
So I didn't know, I didn't know any of these early, early ones, but one from 1936, it was called the San Francisco, right?
And it was made 30 years after the 1906 earthquake, and about that earthquake.
Yes, but it's also, apparently people break into song in it here or there, so it's sometimes listed as a musical drama.
There's another one called Old Chicago about the 1871 Chicago fire that came in 1938.
Titanic apparently was a favorite subject of early disaster films, and actually stayed that way over time, but it wasn't until nuclear anxieties really started to develop as the Cold War picked up.
And it was reflected in movies that people started imagining what would happen if all these nuclear weapons went off.
Yeah, that actually kind of created the first crop of what you could really point to is the earliest disaster films. Yeah, kind of like the ones as we know it.
In the early 60s, voyage to the bottom of the sea was one in 61, when a nuke powered sub.
There was radiation fire coming from space.
They were going to bomb that radiation fire from below.
Like anytime you're using a nuclear bomb to, you know, launch it into a disaster, like I feel like that's happened a couple of times at least. For sure.
What else? There's the day the earth caught fire?
Not a good day. No, that kind of wondered what would happen if a couple of nuclear bomb tests that happened to be carried out simultaneously by the US and the Soviet Union, what would happen?
And they said, oh, well, probably the Earth's axis would be shifted and we would be knocked out of orbit and we would start heading toward the sun. That is cut and dry disaster plot.
Yeah, for sure. Also, in the sixties, we had crack in the world.
And for me one of the great movie titles of all time, Panic in Year Zero such a great title.
It is a great title.
And then of course The Birds an undisputed disaster film.
Yeah I take issue with that.
The Knight of the Living Dead is listed.
That is not a disaster movie.
Well that's a great question because is a zombie apocalypse that a handful of survivors have to survive and negotiate, that's an ongoing disaster you have a group of people from different walks of life sometimes stereotype coming together.
their lives intersect through this disaster, and then they have to survive.
Some people do, some people don't.
There's a hero. I mean, in that sense, Night of the Living Dead definitely qualifies.
World War Z would qualify.
Yeah, I think that there's like a, I mean, there's room for debate there, like those could also be horror monster movies too.
Yeah, I consider those sub -genes, I think as soon as you add any zombie, it becomes something else.
Something else entirely.
That's again, these are all just my dumb opinions.
Did you see Godzilla minus one?
No. But I've heard a lot about it.
Is it garbage or great?
No, it's great. It has a great plot, great acting, great dialogue, and then the action sequences are unbelievable.
I gotta check that out then.
It's a really good movie.
Again, is it a disaster movie?
If you add Godzilla, I don't know.
Could make it a monster movie.
Let's see what Chuck says, Chuck?
Monster movie. Okay.
It is officially a monster movie then.
Well you know I did host a movie show for a couple of years.
I know you did. That's why I deferred to you.
That makes me an expert.
The 70s is when really things start get cooking with all manner of disaster movies from things like The Andromeda Strain in 1971.
You know a Michael Crichton novel.
So, one of his early novels, it was adapted.
I tried to watch that the other day and the animal torture.
I couldn't get past man.
Yeah, that's when they just didn't care about depicting that stuff with any kind of tenderness at all You know, well, I stopped the movie and went and looked it up Like did they actually kill this monkey in these rats?
Did they and no luckily they did not in the ASPCA was on hand and signed off on it.
But what they did was they Suffocated it with carbon dioxide until it Passed out and then the moment it passed out they cut and then they revived it but that that monkey was still suffering from asphyxiation during that those moments where they filmed it it's Awful did someone do mouth the monkey resuscitation?
Well, there's this there's a when the monkey dies if you look closely Before they cut there's a shadow of somebody moving toward it already serious So I think they used a little tiny oxygen mass to revive God, but it's yeah.
Yeah, I mean that makes it a little better and that they didn't kill him but they still portrayed them.
So I couldn't finish that movie.
Yeah, I don't blame you.
I never saw it, but I remember that kind of as a holdover, it came out the year I was born.
But I remember it just being a thing.
So, okay, yes, you said we started off with Andromeda'll Stream, right?
Yeah, Airport was in 1970.
And that's the one that kicked off a huge...
I mean it had sequels, it led to Airport 75, Airport 77, and then Concord, colon, Airport 79, which all eventually led to Airplane as, I mean that had to be their first spoof, right?
Like disaster spoof?
That's as far as I could tell unless I would qualify or include Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as a disaster spoof.
And I'm not sure if that came out before or after Airplane.
I think it was before.
But Airport was a very lauded film, it got 10 Oscar nods, it actually won Helen Hayes won for Supporting Actress, and this is something that we'll see over and over again.
Most of these movies, they make a huge, huge return on, even if they cost a lot to make.
Like that costs 10 million bucks in 1970, which was a lot, but it brought in 100 million dollars in 1970.
Yeah, and so that really caught the attention of the studio bosses, they were like, Let's do that again.
And like you said, there were three sequels to it.
This is probably one of my favorite movie franchises.
Yeah, I would make the case that the sequels, at least the first two sequels, are better than the original.
I didn't see any of these.
They're so great. I watched 77 and 79 in the last 24 hours.
Oh really? I love them so much. And airport 75 is probably the best of the bunch. All right, I'll check that out.
And airport 77, of course, brings in the Bermuda Triangle because I think 1977 was peak Bermuda Triangle paranoia.
Yeah, for sure. And then that Concorde, the Airport 79, the Concorde, people keep shooting missiles at it.
They have to take like evasive action.
And you're like, okay, this is definitely when the genre really started to die or died.
It had already started.
But one of the big things that airport kicked off in addition to eye popping box office returns was that huge cast where you recognize every single person, Especially, if you were alive at the time and an adult at the time you would recognize everybody in there.
Sometimes there were cameos.
And what they were following, Airport was based on a novel by Arthur Haley, and he had written Hotel, one of his things was a ton of different characters whose lives kind of intersect in this issue or this problem or this disaster.
So basically Arthur Haley, the novelist, inadvertently invented the disaster film through like his format.
Yeah, and you know, movie posters back then reflected that too, because I remember stuff like Towering Inferno, they would be the more artistic, like the Inferno, the building on fire.
But then like at the top or the bottom, they would literally just have frames of people's faces of the cast, just tagged on there.
Look at all the star power.
And as time went on, the stars got a little shlockier.
In Concord, Charo makes a hilarious, one -minute cameo.
J .J. Walker is one of the major, minor characters.
He smokes grass the whole time.
I think in Earthquake, which we'll talk about in a second, Walter Matthau makes this inexplicable cameo a few times where he's dressed like a 70's pimp with a curly wig and everything and he's drunk out of his mind.
Well, that's his character Like they were definitely known for cameos But yeah, the sweeping huge casts of generally a list and then former a list stars That was a big hallmark of disaster films that came around in the 70s Yeah You know they're trying to appeal to a broad demographic so they would definitely bring back like some of the stars from like the golden age of Hollywood when they were in in their later years would be in these like Fred Astaire Was in one of them right?
Yes he I can't remember I think he might have been in the Towering Inferno. Yeah so you know they're clearly trying to appeal to all age groups.
Another thing a lot of these had in common at least in the 1970s was a man named Irwin Allen, the master of disaster.
He came up in the 1950s but he really hit his stride in the 70s with things like Poseidon Adventure, aforementioned Towering Inferno. Each of those was the top box office hit of their respective years.
Poseidon Adventure very famously was about an ocean liner that flips upside down and sinks basically.
So everybody is upside down on this boat, on this ship trying to try and get out while they're underwater.
Pretty great. Yeah.
And it's a bunch of different people who are stereotypes from different walks of life who are led out to safety by an everyman.
In this case a priest named Gene Hackman.
That's not the character's name, that's the actor's name.
That'd be pretty coincidental that Gene Hackman played a character by the name Gene Hackman.
Such a brutal, tragic, very upsetting end for such a wonderful person.
Yeah, upsetting is definitely a good word for it.
Yeah, God, can't stop thinking about it sometimes.
You should probably try to.
I think that would be for the best. I know.
Towering Inferno, of course, you know, we mentioned there was a fire.
If you don't know this movie, you should check it out for sure.
So it's one of the good ones.
But faulty wiring, of course, makes it catch fire.
People are trapped at the top.
But you've also got, sometimes it can work in other mini disasters within it, and that's the case here where there's a flood scene because they're trying to douse the fire, and then all of a sudden you've got a flood to reckon with.
That's like a prestige disaster film.
They played it straight ahead.
There's no schlock to it.
The cast was just amazing.
And they did something that would be picked up, again, in the 90s and then today's disaster films where they had two heroes who kinda had to work together.
One was Paul Newman who played the architect of this 135 -floor skyscraper.
Just totally fictional at the time especially.
And then Steve McQueen was this fire chief and they had to work together to figure out how to get the people out of this building and keep the, or quench the fire.
Man, McQueen and Paul Newman, does it get any better than that?
Not really, maybe Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Yeah, that's been done too.
Weren't they Butch Cassidy and Sonance Kid?
Oh, yeah, that was great.
Okay, so yes, if you see one disaster movie, see The Towering Inferno. Yeah, agreed.
If you want to see one that's kind of super schlocky if you want to go down that avenue, you could start with earthquake from 1974.
Yeah. Old Charlton Heston was in that one.
People are, in this case again, trapped in a skyscraper once again.
But this time it's an earthquake.
A lot of, you know when you see these earthquake movies, they're always shaking the camera.
But what's funny is if you ever see them being shot, obviously nothing is moving except the camera.
So the people are all just going, whoa, on just solid ground.
It's all just fun. So earthquake did not really mean to be schlocky.
it just kind of ended up being schlocky.
He did a great job of doing it, unintentionally.
And it wasn't the film that like led to the end of the 70s boom but it was definitely one of the early signals that this is not, this party is not going to last forever.
And it's a good movie, I watched it last night.
No, I watched it early this morning.
Aw man. And Charlton Heston, who's a regular in these disaster movies, he did great.
Everyone did really good in it.
It was just some of the premises and then also some of the special effects.
Like, there's a scene where the earthquake tremors are rocking the street in LA.
And they're just pushing over the facades.
So you can see that it's just this cardboard facade coming down, stuff like that.
And then there's a very famous elevator scene.
Yeah, that's on YouTube.
Where it drops like all the way down, killing everyone inside.
But the way they show the impact is they just freeze the frame.
and then some animated blood splatters across the screen for some reason.
Yeah, it looks really really bad and is so abrupt and jarring and weird. But it's, like I said, that part is on YouTube if you just type in earthquake movie elevator scene.
Thank you. It's a good scene if someone is taking the time to clip it out and put it on YouTube.
Right, yeah it is definitely worth it.
But okay, you wanna take a break now and come back and talk about the end of the 70s or push on through until the 90s?
Yeah. Let's maybe push on and then we'll stop at the 90s.
Okay. Sounds good. So like I said it was kind of clear fairly early on that this wasn't going to last forever and it definitely did not make it out of the decade.
It really kind of came to an ugly end starting around 1978.
Yeah. And you know one person's great disaster movie is another person's schlock.
It all kinda depends, because some of the ones listed here is sort of being the lazier versions, Avalanche and Meteor, or that's not one movie, that would be pretty great though actually.
It'd be Meteor, then Avalanche, probably, but those are two different movies.
The Hindenburg, I thought that was okay, from being a kid and watching it.
I didn't see that one.
Haven't revisited, but then Rollercoaster, I, as a child, loved, loved that movie about a terrorist. Oh I've not seen it.
It's, you know, again I don't know if it holds up but it's about a terrorist that's gonna blow up a roller coaster, you know, he's targeting an amusement park so.
Are the people on the rollercoaster having to go on it like or stay on it over and over again like it can't stop or something like that?
I don't think so but, like, there's the bomber is in the park and just, you know, I'm having these fleeting memories.
It's probably terrible but, you know, as a, you know, 10 or 11 year old it was great.
Yeah. Yeah, I gotcha.
And then there's Flood with an exclamation point.
Shout out to Laura who helped us with this who came up with this list of lazily named disaster movies, kinda like they were phoning it in.
Yeah, RollerCoaster isn't the best name.
I'll admit it. Okay, all right.
I'm gonna watch that one though.
All right. But a lot of people who think about this kind of stuff point to the swarm from 1978 as the one that was like, yeah, this is over.
Not only was this over, but Irwin Allen's career was over because he had not one, not two, but three disaster film flops from 1978 to 1980 and that really ended the boom.
Yeah, that was pretty much it.
The Swarm, I don't know if Nicolas Cage, if they were referencing or paying homage to that with the bees thing.
Later in The Wicker Man, it became a very popular meme.
The bees. I didn't know that.
Yeah from Nicolas Cage but in this movie in The Swarm there's a pilot that yells Bees, bees, millions of bees!
Right and the bees take down an Air Force helicopter.
Of course they do. And the way that they're overcome is somebody figures out how I think it's Michael Caine leading the cast, he's the hero.
He figures out that they can lead these bees out to an oil slick in the ocean and then set the oil slick on fire and no more bees.
Hey, I think that's a pretty descent, you know, disaster movie solution.
Okay, fair enough. But I was reading a criticism of that movie by Tyler Sage, I think on a site called Ultimate Classic Rock of all things.
And Tyler Sage says that the cast seems either faintly embarrassed by the proceedings or confused about what's supposed to be actually happening.
That's all you need to know.
Like that's not supposed to happen in a movie, you know?
No, it's not. So Alan had a black mark on his record with that, with the Swarm, and then beyond the Poseidon Adventure, they tried to recapture that magic in the 1979 movie, released seven years later, even though it took place the very next day of the original movie.
Yeah, and that was Michael Caine too, but also Sally Field, Telly Savalas, Peter Boyle, and like, if your cast like that can't keep a movie, like, make it good, then there's something really wrong with it.
Oh, I thought you were about to say Afloat.
I almost did, and then I was like, no, Josh, do not say that.
He did produce perhaps one of the worst entries Irwin Allen did of the genre with, I don't think it was the swan song, but it was definitely the end in 1980.
A movie called When Time Ran Out that did have Paul Newman.
It was about a volcano at an Island resort, but he was very much forced into this movie because of his contract.
I don't think he at all wanted to make it.
They cut the budget, Warner Brothers did, so they didn't even have the money to make it look okay, and it was just, it was really bad.
There's a pretty good quote in here, too, right?
Yeah, the eruption, when it finally comes, is a wonderfully cheesy amalgam of wobbly back projection, bathtub tidal wave, and scared expressions from the cast. Oh, man.
So then, because of all this, because these movies just got worse and worse, But then also like the high drama that was played straight, it was just ripe for parody.
And like you said, Airplane was the one that, you really don't need to mention any other parody.
It's it as far as disaster film parodies go, it just completely captured it perfectly.
Yeah, and that movie holds up pretty well, I have to say, it's still a fun watch, yeah.
For sure. Okay, I think we've made it to the end of the 70s.
The first real disaster boom has come and gone and things quiet down throughout the 80s, and we'll let you think about this quietly through this ad break.
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All right, we're back and we're gonna talk about the resurgence of disaster movies in the 1990s.
And I may have mentioned it on this show before, I'm not sure, but this is one of my legendary predictions, my friend.
I can't remember it, but it was one of the very, very, very early 90s disaster flicks came out.
I wish I could have pinpointed which one it was.
But I remember very distinctly at the time in college telling my friends, I was like, you watch. I was like, they're gonna start making all of these movies again, just like they did in the 70s.
And there's gonna be a ton of disaster movies.
And it literally happened like starting that year.
Man, did you hear that from the ghost standing in the middle of the street?
No, no, no, no. She whispered it to you.
It was probably pre -ghost but yes, Sharknado.
Jared from Subway, Hugh Jackman and disaster movies, but the only four things I've ever predicted.
I don't know. I think some more are going to come to the fore over the coming years.
Chuck Stradamus. It could only have been one of just a few movies because… I can't remember what it was.
Yeah. This whole, this 90s disaster boom started and peaked and within a two -year period.
And it got started off, you could say in retrospect, it was started off by outbreak.
which came out in 1995, it's an epidemic disaster movie.
Yeah, that counts, I think.
Most people don't point to that and say, that kicked it off.
It's more like, they say, Twister, or Independence Day, in 1996 kicked it off.
And then, yes, you would definitely lump Outbreak into it.
But it was probably one of those two movies.
Yeah, there was a movie called Avalanche in 1994, so they were dabbling in that world, but it was not a big movie at all, as far as like capturing attention, I think Twister for sure.
And that may have been the one actually where I was like, oh man, because that is what I think of is like typical disaster.
I know this is controversial, but I'm not sure I put Independence Day in disaster movies.
There's something about when you add like zombies or aliens and stuff, it just tweaks it slightly for me from classic disaster, but again, just my opinion.
Well, okay, so even if you accept, and not with an A, but at EX, Independence Day from this list, then you still have Twister.
I think it was Twister.
I remember the entire country was talking about Twister.
I famously said, Emily's favorite movies of all time are every independent film ever made and Twister.
Yeah. And I mean, it's a really good movie.
Bill Paxton's amazing in it.
Helen Hunt does great too like it's a good movie.
And one of the reasons I think that it did kick off that second boom in disaster movies was that you could take the disaster formula but then apply emerging CGI computer assisted special effects that were at the time it was like holy cow we can do this now.
Like the White House being blown up by the alien ship in Independence Day like you just had not seen stuff like that before, this was all very new, and they were using it sparingly enough too that it didn't look fake.
Yeah, for sure. It was like those were really great special effects at the time, Twister looked really, really good.
We should also mention too, I know we didn't go over this, but it's just now occurring to me, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Twister is also kind of a classic disaster movie trope character, which is sort of a side character to the guy in the chair, you ever heard that?
Like the computer expert that just literally sits in a chair the entire movie and figures stuff out.
Yeah and usually has a smart mouth.
Always, this is sort of an adjacent thing though, Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character which is sort of, he's not in a chair but it's the wisecracking irreverent kind of you know, he's wearing the Hawaiian shirt when everyone else has on like tactical gear.
That's you know, but super smart in figuring stuff out.
I'm not sure what they call that in disaster movies, but it's their version of Guy in the Chair, I think.
I don't think people have written enough about disaster movies for anyone to name it, so call them what you want.
A Hoffman. There you go.
He was the Hoffman of the movie and maybe one of the first. We gotta talk about Titanic.
It's a disaster movie, but it's got so much story and romance.
It's definitely a sub -genre within it, I think.
Bill Paxton was in that, too.
Yeah. RIP man, what a great guy.
Oh, I forgot he was gone.
That was so sad. Umm...
Yeah, it was sad. So, one of the other things, too, that fueled this 90's resurgence of the disaster boom is that these movies, some of them, Titanic, Independence Day, Twister, they're among the highest grossing films of all time.
So just like in the 70's, studios were like, we can spend lavishly in a production, but we're still gonna make back 10 times or more what we put into it." So they're like, good, let's start making disaster films. And very quickly after some of these really creative, original disaster films, you could see in theaters virtually at the same time, disaster films about the exact same topic.
Yeah, that was the thing for a little while.
I think I was still getting premiere magazine at the time.
And I remember they started writing about you know these productions being kind of out trying to out race one another to get to the box office first, maybe to their disadvantage as a production.
But very famously that the two biggest examples are I guess four are Armageddon and Deep Impact about a meteor striking the earth you know to basically wipe out humanity.
Right. And then Dante's Peak and Volcano, neither of those were that great.
No, they weren't I don't, was Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones, is that the one?
Yeah and Anne Hesh, RIP again.
Yeah and Dante's peak was Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.
Oh Linda Hamilton, that's right.
And that's a really good example of just how disaster films minimize women and their contributions.
Linda Hamilton was well known by this time as a female action star.
Like she was in the Terminator movie, she was a total B .A. Yeah, Sarah Connor.
Right. And in this movie, apparently, she's like a single mom who's totally dependent on Pierce Brosnan to help her and her kids.
She's like, she whimpers at times, like.
That's just one of the big problems with the genre.
Like if you can just kinda hold your nose and make it through stuff like that, then you can enjoy them, but if you focus on things like that, you're probably not gonna like disaster films. Yeah, agreed, what a waste of Linda Hamilton.
What a shame. I gotta shout out a few more that weren't listed here from the 90s.
Hard Rain, remember that one Christian Slater and Minnie Driver.
No. It was a flood movie, you know what was it about?
It's about a very hard rain.
Okay. Just won't stop raining.
Shout out, friend of the show, Minnie Driver.
Listen to her wonderful podcast on our own network, Minnie Questions.
Very nice. I don't know if you remember this one.
Firestorm, with NFL legend Howie Long.
No. Yeah, that was one of the bad ones.
I think he was like a forest fire, like a fire jumper kind of guy.
So far these ones you're shouting out sound like RifBased, candidates.
They probably are. And then also some of the one word titles.
There was a movie called Tornado.
There was a TV movie called Tornado Warning that starred Gerald McCraney from Simon and Simon. Nice, I love that guy.
There was another movie called Flood, a second movie called Flood and then there was one from 1999 which is sort of when things started to peter out called Storm with Luke Perry and Martin Sheen.
Wow that is that's some 90s casting it's a mini driver and christian slater that screams 90s pretty hard too.
Yeah for sure. But like you said there's one other thing the 90s definitely contributed to the hero scientist where it wasn't it wasn't necessarily some you know tough dude it was the guy who had the smarts to figure out how to deal with this or knew what was coming that's another trope from disaster films especially now usually the hero is the only one who can see the impending disaster no one here to leave him and then he ends up having to save everybody else's took us because no one believed him and didn't take any measures to to thwart the disaster from happening right And once again you are saying
he because all of these movies failed the Bechdel test. For sure.
100 percent. And there's also a thing that popped up in the 90s, which was the, like, the rival scientist. If there was a hero scientist, a lot of times there was an anti, well, not anti hero because that's still the hero just the anti -scientist who is still a scientist. I'm clumsily working my way through this, but they thwart the hero.
So, it's like usually a government scientist or something or maybe an official and they dismiss everything like the hero scientist is saying.
It can also be a government official very frequently.
They get their come -up pretty commonly in 90s on disaster movies.
Yeah. What do you call Die Hard?
That's not a disaster movie, is it?
I've seen it listed.
Yeah, I guess it could be.
To me it's just a straight -ahead action film.
I totally agree. But it does it slash Christmas movie.
Like you would say all the people in all the people in Nakatomi Plaza That's a disaster to them.
Yeah, the world's going about its business as usual, but to them inside They're in the midst of a disaster.
They after survive.
I don't know. I think just I don't know I I think so the same thing was speed in speed Keanu Reeves.
The hero was a SWAT member right?
Not in every person right die -hard John McClane.
He's a cop even though he's off his beat He's still a cop.
Like, the hero has to be some sort of everyman who may or may not possess some special sort of skills or knowledge that helped him overcome this problem.
And then his mettle that he may not even have known that was there is tapped and he leads other people to safety.
Yeah, for sure. But, you know, as the 90s wore on with things like Luke Perry's movie R .I .P.
once again in 99, things really kind of stopped in the wake of 9 -11.
It just wasn't something that people wanted to see for a little while.
So there was there was a lull.
You knew it would come back.
Early 2000s had a few of them here and there.
There was one called the core in 2003 where the inner core of the earth ceases to rotate And scientists, once again, have to bomb it to get that thing kick started, just like using the paddles in the ER.
Clear! Yep. What was it?
2003? So yeah, the very next year was The Day After Tomorrow.
And that to me is the bridge between the 90s disaster films and the ones that kicked off in the 2010s.
It is awesome. It's got a great cast, the scientists are the heroes, there's a bunch of different stuff going on.
the world is being threatened.
There's amazing special effects of things just going haywire.
There's wolves? There's wolves, yep.
And then that scene of the tsunami flooding New York, there's a shot that's the exact same shot in Deluge of the tsunami coming to New York.
Oh, interesting. So I've read that it was probably an homage to that.
Oh, that's kinda cool.
Yeah, I thought so too.
2009, it was a pretty big year.
this when they really started to come back to a G you know pre 2010s with the the movie the Mayan calendar anxiety movie 2012 came out.
Do you remember that?
Yeah? That was Roland Emmerich, right?
Yes, no, but I mean do you remember living in that time where people actually like a little nervous about was like y2k light Yeah, I mean we did a podcast on it.
We totally did yeah Yeah, and if I remember correctly we told her by totally fine the Maya calendar doesn't actually say the world's gonna end cuz a new calendar starts.
That's right and we're all here right now so thankfully that came true.
2012 was not a great movie but it did because of the the scope of like just the world ending they could be they could be like hey let's just do any disaster we want anywhere all across the world.
Not a great movie I watched that one yesterday too.
I didn't think it was very good.
Oh I liked it a lot I think to me and I know you know this but to me 2012 is basically up there with the towering inferno as far as best examples of a disaster film go.
Okay my favorite disaster film is not listed here but it is from the 2010's.
As far as being an actual great great film is Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion.
Yeah that is a good one.
It is I mean it's a disaster movie but it doesn't play like one because it is so realistically scary and doesn't have that sort of summer movie kind of schlocky appeal, but it's a disaster movie for sure.
Did you, like me, detect a note of hostility when the medical examiner pulls Gwyneth Paltrow's face like roughly off of her skull during her autopsy?
I don't remember that part.
It seemed like that was gratuitous.
Like, Soderbergh had a problem with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Gwyneth Paltrow? Oh, maybe so.
Yeah that was a really good movie too and that would be an example of some of the highbrow ones that started to come out in 2010 Like we said, The Impossible.
There was a Korean one called Pandora that came out in 2007 about a nuclear meltdown.
Sulli about a Captain Chelsea Sullenberger's landing at the Hudson River where not one person died.
I didn't see that one.
The plane, I should say, landed a plane.
Yeah that was Hanks right?
Yeah, yeah, he was in every single movie that was out at one point.
I think yeah. He went through a string of playing real -life characters Here and there.
That's right. Some of those weren't great, but I did like the the one about the the Somali pirates captain what whatever his name was.
Mm -hmm Captain Hoffman Yeah, that was it so one of the other things that that the 2010 onward Disaster Films did was at the very least the studios figured out like hey, these are kind of like easily translated internationally.
And we don't mean the dialogue's translated easily, although it definitely is.
And because everything's so morally cut and dried, people anywhere can get what they're seeing, even though it's an American made film about Americans.
But also in these movies that are like a worldwide catastrophe, you have the opportunity to take down landmarks all over the world.
So in France, they can see the Eiffel Tower going down and they're like, whoa, France, you know?
And then one of the other things, too, is because of these huge all -star casts, you can easily cast foreign actors or actors who are really big in the country they hail from and that'll up the box office too in that country.
Yeah, it's all a formula.
The Rock started being in a lot of these.
It was one of the few movies I've ever walked out on was San Andreas in 2015 With Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
I did not think it was very good at all He followed that a few years later.
You liked it. I didn't see it in theaters, though I think if I paid 20 bucks to see it, I probably would have been upset Yeah, and then he was in skyscraper not to be outdone by San Andreas another not -so -great movie a few years later in 2018 But again, some people love all the rocks stuff.
Sure which is my dumb opinion.
I had an idea or a thought that I wanted to share Chuck let's hear it about the 2010s boom, it didn't burn out in one decade it's still they're still making straight ahead 2010 style disaster films and I was thinking that the reason why is because there's so many more studios now putting out so many different types of movies that it hasn't become a glut of so so movies, or even if there are so so disaster movies, there's still room to make other good ones, rather than just three or four studios going all in on disaster films for the same few years.
Yeah, just spacing them out as, you know, like just something you can return to that's a pretty dependable release, but not like, hey, let's release nine of these in the next two years.
Exactly. There's a wider variety, so it's been allowed to just kinda continue on.
And in my opinion it's gotten better, like Leave the World Behind was really good.
The Wave, a Norwegian one that came out in 2016 was, like, highly acclaimed.
Don't Look Up, did you see that, the satire from Adam McKay?
Yes, I did. It was pretty good, actually, I liked it a lot.
But it satirizes government and people not taking climate change seriously.
And it's a disaster film, but it's not a parody of disaster films. It uses disaster films to satirize that stuff.
Yeah, which is an interesting take for sure.
You got anything else?
No, I feel like I need to watch more.
I didn't actually watch any full disaster films again in preparation like you did.
So this has inspired me to go back and watch some of those from the 70s that I never saw.
Definitely watch Earthquake and watch Airport 75.
75 and I still haven't seen Towering Inferno. Oh, I definitely see that too.
Yeah all right. Done.
Okay great. Well since Chuck agreed to see some movies that I thought he should see, we've unlocked listener mail.
I'm going to call this follow -up to Morgana the Kissing Bandit.
Hey Chuck and Josh and all that help make your show awesome.
My wife and I are long -time listeners but first time writers.
My wife Jennifer and I love having you entertain and educate us, especially on long distance trips with the family.
You help keep us awake and focused with the pleasant side effect of putting our five -year -old Ben and seven -year -old Eleanor asleep.
That's great. I love it when we can lull children to sleep.
We live to give. We are on spring break traveling to my in -laws' house right now and during the drive one of our episodes we listened to was Morgana the kissing bandit.
When we arrived at our destination, I asked my father -in -law if he remembers her since he is the biggest sports enthusiast I know.
Get this dude. He said, of course.
He sees her all the time because she lives down the street.
What? What? You ended your podcast with a mention that you didn't know she was still alive and what happened to her and we wanted to let you know she's still alive and enjoying retirement with a full life.
That is awesome. And, cherry on top, this is written to us by John Ritter.
Wow. My mind is coming apart at the seams right now, Chuck.
Maybe best listener mail ever, so big hello to John Ritter and your wife Jennifer and Ben and Eleanor.
Yes. Hello and happy travels to you guys and hats off to your dad too for knowing Morgana the kissing bandit.
Yeah and hats off to Morgana.
I'm glad you're I'm glad you're doing great.
Hopefully this message gets to you.
Yes this message brought to you by John Ritter.
If you want to be like John and get in touch with us you can send us an email send it off to stuffpodcast .ihartradio .com.
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