VMI first birthday celebrations transcript
Hear this episode at VMIpod.com/first-birthday
JOY: Hello Helen.
HZ: Hello Jenny! Gosh, what a wondrous occasion: we've reached one year of Veronica Mars Investigations.
JOY: Happy birthday to us.
HZ: Thank you.
JOY: What a year it's been.
HZ: What a fine time to launch a podcast, right when Veronica Mars, beloved series, rebooted for a season that everyone seems to really hate.
JOY: I liked it.
HZ: I'm looking forward to us recapping it, but it was good to launch on a tide of badwill towards the whole thing. And for us to launch with a pilot that drove most of our core listenership away forever.
JOY: Farewell.
HZ: But I'm glad that we persisted, because look at us now.
JOY: Look at us now. Did we really scare away the core of the Veronica Mars viewership? The diehards?
HZ: Or maybe five, but just five who were angry enough for a legion.
JOY: A very loud five. Yeah, well, the people who are left - that means you, listener - are the ones who rock.
HZ: Not a lot of people would know listening to this podcast, but before we started the podcast, we had only met twice.
JOY: Isn't that frickin wild?
HZ: Isn't it frickin wild.
JOY: That's frickin wild.
HZ: I'm not trying to copy you or anything, but we're very much in sync in thinking it's frickin wild.
JOY: You know, there I was, in Seattle, at my first podcast convention, trying to fit in, and our mutual friend, Sheriff of the pod Hrishikesh Hirway, had a cookie party in his hotel room, which is the Hrishiest thing I could possibly think of.
HZ: And not just any cookie party: Tim Tam slams, which Australians will be familiar with and it's a slightly harrowing thing to do with a cookie and a hot drink in that one will disintegrate into the other, with faecal visual effects. What an unpropitious way for us to begin! Also I remember during that cookie party you looked rather dubious of me, and rightly.
JOY: Whaaaat?
HZ: I think your face just expressed, "Is this person shitting me?"
JOY: Because of your hostmanship, your supreme delivery of tea unto you any who would have wanted tea?
HZ: I am very good in a late night hotel situation at getting a tolerable cup of tea out of a coffee maker. I'm useful to have around in that way.
JOY: You did a great job. You had a vast selection of teas ready to rock and roll.
HZ: Yes, I do.
JOY: You got somebody to get at their coffee maker from their hotel room so then we were running two coffee making tea machines at once. It was a real pro operation.
HZ: Well, you remember when people used to hang out in rooms together, right?
JOY: I distantly recall that being a thing.
HZ: But I think you were trying to figure out whether I was good or evil. And that's probably a lifelong calculation.
JOY: No way, I knew you were good, I'm just shy!
HZ: OK! I thought you were just onto my bullshit.
JOY: No, that came later. And your bullshit is my favourite of all the bullshit.
HZ: What an accolade.
JOY: Also my Tim Tam disintegrated in such a way, like probably the messiest, most embarrassing way that it could have.
HZ: That's the only way it does that.
JOY: That was our meet-cute.
HZ: And who could have predicted then as you tried to salvage some cookie out of some tea, that just a few months later you would be enmeshed in a TV recap podcast?
JOY: Yes. Our lives suddenly and inextricably intertwined: you, me, Neptune, three strands being braided together in an infinity loop shaped braid thing.
HZ: Put them in the merch store! To celebrate the first birthday of the show - and also we must be just over halfway in the task of getting through Veronica Mars - task? Exercise? Duty? Calling?
JOY: Hurdle. Herculean trial.
HZ: We're past the halfway point anyway. So to celebrate, I've cobbled together some outtakes from the last year, most of which seem to be about animals.
JOY: I like what I like.
HZ: And I like to cut that out and save it.
JOY: Helen's been keeping a careful little pile of all my scraps. Honestly, this very special episode has everything. It's got bears from the country. It's got owls in the city. It's got a continent-roaming horse. Multiple dogs named Frank. The whole thing.
HZ: It also has brief appearances by Lo Dodds out of the LoDown, and Joanna Robinson, special guest from Season 1 Episode 18: Weapons of Mass Destruction. So shall we clippify?
JOY: Let us clippify! We, your humble hosts, submit for your consideration, as we like to say here in Los Angeles, some stuff that we recorded that you haven't heard because Helen edited it out. Ta da!
OUTTAKES
JOY: You told me like yesterday that Kristen Bell also has a dog named Frank. How about that shit?
HZ: Yeah. How do you feel about it? I think he was already named Frank when she obtained the dog because she went to a puppy cafe and she and her kid fell in love with Frank the dog and kept him. Is that a bit like stealing the cups from a cafe?
JOY: Or it's like - have you ever seen the episode of 30 Rock where Tina Fey is dating Jon Hamm and they go into a restaurant and he's like, "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna get the croque madame and a sarsaparilla," and I can't emember what he actually wants to order. But she's like, "That's not on the menu. You can't order that," and he's like, "No no no, I can totally." And he orders it and they run out to assemble the thing, because he's so hot they can't say no. That's what this makes me think of, somebody walking into a store, like, "I am famous and I want that thing that maybe isn't for sale, just make it happen. And this is what I've become accustomed to. The world is my oyster. I shall not want." Collecting dogs wherever you go.
HZ: What if you're walking the same dog park as Kristen Bell and her Frank and she's like, "I want that Frank" and then you're powerless to say no, because she's an A-list celebrity?
JOY: She can try to take my Frank. She can fucking try. She's welcome to try.
HZ: Wouldn't tangle with Jenny Owen Youngs.
JOY: I would really just have to stick my hand out against her forehead.
HZ: Yeah. You do have the advantage of height and reach.
JOY: Because she's so small, she would not be able to reach me.
HZ: Have you ever been to an animal cafe of any kind?
JOY: I have not. Have you?
HZ: I have been to an owl cafe in Japan, but I wouldn't have chosen it. I was with some friends and their kids and their kids saw it and they were like, "I've got to go, got to go." And it was amazing to be close to so many incredible owls. But they are in a windowless room, chained to little branches, and so it's very depressing. I felt very badly.
JOY: I hate that. Also birds, man.
HZ: I took one, of course.
JOY: Of course you took one. You're Helen Zaltzman, famous podcaster.
HZ: "Give me that fucking owl!" Would have pecked me in the eye.
JOY: Birds. You can't trust them, man, why would you want to commit to being in an enclosed space with them? They've got scaly little feet.
HZ: Claws.
JOY: Hollow little bones, beady little eyes. No way to know where their allegiances lie or what their true motives are: they're unknowable, and thus best kept at a distance.
HZ: Owls can kill dogs. They could probably take on a human if they were feeling frisky, or if they had a lot of pent up fury as a result of being in this dark room. And then with the cat and puppy cafés, I just feel like that's animal courtesans.
JOY: Thinking about owls being able to kill dogs, first of all, fuck that. Second of all, just made me think of the famous American murder case, which also the first episode of Criminal is about.
HZ: Yes. And the documentary The Staircase.
JOY: Mm hmm. All about one of one of the theories of how this woman died is that an owl attacked her head and caused her to fall down the stairs and die. So I guess it's possible that they can take out humans under the right circumstances, maybe, allegedly.
HZ: I'm not going to test it.
JOY: Let's not.
JOY: In my favourite show, and yours, Helen, Xena: Warrior Princess, Xena's horse Argo is repeatedly gender flipped, depending on who is writing the script of this week's episode. Argo goes back and forth between he and she for a while, for like three seasons.
HZ: I'm not an expert on equine anatomy, but -
JOY: It seems relatively simple.
HZ: A horse's silhouette can often be fairly simply deduced as to the horse sex. Although no one asked Argo how Argo identifies.
JOY: That's also true.
HZ: Anyway, I don't know whether there were any physical clues to argo, but was there any reason for the horse to be any particular gender? Is there ever?
JOY: I mean, I think the horse that that that worked on the show was female. And so I think people who were like maybe more tapped into... Like more regular riders would correctly refer to her as 'she' in the script. But what's weird is that Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor, the stars of the show, nobody ever brought it up. The producers of the show, nobody ever corrected it and made it one thing. Maybe Argo is gender fluid. Maybe I should've been thinking of that.
HZ: Maybe if they were raised speaking languages which have no gendered pronouns - I've got some friends whose first language had no gendered pronouns. And so now when they're speaking English, which does, they're like, "I use them interchangeably because they essentially mean nothing to me.".
JOY: Wow, cool!
HZ: Lucy Lawless did grow up in New Zealand - although at the time Māori was still an oppressed language, so she probably wasn't raised with that as her first language. But! Just saying, if you're trying to make a backstory for it, could it be that whatever language they speak in Xenaland before they learnt English would have no gendered pronouns?
JOY: I love that.
HZ: Especially for horses.
JOY: Sold!
HZ: So here's a sad tale.
JOY: Here we go.
HZ: When I was four in my first year at school, there was the school hampster. And it was my turn to take it home for the holidays. And it escaped its cage and threw itself down our stairs and hid under a cupboard and eventually died.
LO DODDS: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh Helen.
JOY: Helen, that sucks.
HZ: I was not prosecuted.
JOY: Thank God.
HZ: But RIP Snoozy.
JOY: Snoozy!
LO DODDS: I actually have a similar hamster tale, but it was my hamster and I let my little cousin play with it and he squeezed it basically until it had internal bleeding, when he would not give it back to us, squeezed it and threw it across the room. It lived for like two days.
HZ: Did it sue him?
LO DODDS: I wish I could sue him. He was only two at the time.
HZ: Intent. Intent is all, isn't it?
LO DODDS: We've gone down a dark road.
JOY: I'm going to have to bring a lawsuit against the LoDown for intentionally inflicting emotional distress upon me.
LO DODDS: It was negligent at best infliction. It was very it was very upsetting to me. Mr. Shim. He was buried in a Vans shoe box in our backyard.
HZ: At least Snoozy chose his own dispatch.
HZ: Duped or, as we would say in Britain, 'dyuped'. But I'm trying to translate, because, American show.
JOY: Dyuped. How am I doing? Dyuped, dyuped.
HZ: You don't have to say it. You can say 'duped'.
JOY: I want to learn your ways, Helen.
HZ: Don't. It's not the better way. I'm just saying, in case people were like, "Doop, is she talking about the mid-90s one hit wonder?" There was a song called 'Doop' by a band called Doop but spelt 'Doop'.
JOY: Spelled how?
HZ: D O O P. And it was like a kind of Charleston-y number but in 90s kind of techno style.
JOY: Fascinating. Thank you for clarifying.
HZ: The only lyric was the word 'doop'. Over and over again. Doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop.
JOY: Wow, this sounds like a nightmare of a song.
HZ: It would be the kind of thing where if you were in the waiting room of hell, it would be playing on a loop.
JOY: Got it. OK.
HZ: What's in a snickerdoodle? We don't have those in Britain.
LO DODDS: It's like a sugar cookie that's like rolled in cinnamon and sugar. Jenny, have you had these? What else is in them?
JOY: That sounds right.
HZ: Don't waste my time.
LO DODDS: And also, it's such an amazing name that you think there should be a Snickers in them. It's like when I discovered that the English people make Rice Krispie treats with Mars bars instead of just marshmallows.
HZ: Yep. You're welcome.
JOY: What??
LO DODDS: Yeah. They melt candy bars to make their Rice Krispie treats. I'd never seen anything like it. It's like the best thing ever.
HZ: Yeah. We don't fuck around. We're going to die properly.
HZ: And hitting an after party at Chuck E. Cheese, I'm Helen Zaltzman.
JOY: I want everybody to know that Helen chose that line just thinking about cheese, and not thinking about any other implications.
HZ: No. What have I missed? Is it a notorious pickup spot?
JOY: It's definitely a place you don't go without children, I guess? Adults don't go there.
HZ: That'll be why I haven't been. Is it like the bar in Gremlins but instead of gremlins, it's children?
JOY: It's like... OK. Imagine a cornucopia of germs, and cheese, and a ball pit. Do you have ball pits in the UK?
HZ: Unfortunately so. Now I'm imagining a giant fondue full of plastic balls. It's bad.
JOY: Please don't. It's not that bad.
HZ: It's a Swiss nightmare.
JOY: There's a guy - there's this mouse, there's this big mouse who loves pizza, his name is Chuck E. Cheese and he welcomes you into his -
HZ: Charles Edward Cheese.
JOY: Charles Edward Cheese welcomes you into his fine pizza dining establishment.
HZ: It's a pizza place?
JOY: It's a pizza place, where kids go to have pizza parties, jump in the ball pit, play, I don't know, whack-a-mole probably. I have never been to a Chuck E. Cheese proper, but I have been to ShowBiz Pizza Place, which, I think they were competitors for a while. Then Chuck E Cheese Pizza Time Theatre declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984, was purchased by ShowBiz, and then I think ShowBiz kind of like rolled over into the Chuck E. Cheese brand. I don't think there are ShowBizzes anymore.
HZ: So Charles Edward Cheese had to give up his estate.
JOY: Exactly. And ShowBiz was sort of like a similar deal. That's like where I went when I was a kid. I have horrifying memories. It's like a rundown Disney ride kind of joint. It's the same deal, pizza and then sort of like dinner theatre performed by animatronic animal puppet things.
HZ: I'm out. I'm out!
JOY: But like in the 80s, so you can imagine how much it might feel like you're about to get like axe murdered or something, just based on the jerkiness of the joints and the maniacal look in all of the animatronic mice eyes, you know?
HZ: So it's like a kind of Westworld for kids?
JOY: Oh my God. Yeah. For kids, with pizza, very early days of Westworld before things were like nice and refined.
HZ: Like a kiddie pool full of liquid cheese. This is all I can picture. I don't like it. Don't make me go there, Jenny.
JOY: I urge you to stop thinking about a kiddie pool full of cheese.
HZ: Now I'm imagining like an Ibiza foam party, but with fondue. It's getting worse, Jenny! The mental pictures are just getting worse.
JOY: No, no no no no. Helen, can I just do one thing for you?
HZ: Oh, no. You've already done so much, Jenny.
JOY: I'm going to send you a picture. So Chuck E. Cheese - Charles edward Cheese - is the face of Chuck E. Cheese, right? Yeah. And then I want you to see this guy, who is the face of ShowBiz Pizza.
HZ: Oh! No.
JOY: What do you think about this? What do you think about the face of ShowBiz Pizza?
HZ: It's telling me to go somewhere else. It's telling me to run. It's telling me to hide.
JOY: This bear. I just felt that we couldn't possibly continue without you having more context for animatronic animal pizza restaurants.
HZ: This has really put dairy into perspective for me.
HZ: Just to pause here, Jenny: would you mind describing the face of ShowBiz Pizza? Paint a picture with words. Snap a verbal photograph.
JOY: Imagine you're a child, back in your childhood bedroom, the blankets pulled up to your chin. It's late. Your nightlight is casting long shadows every which way, you know? You have a feeling that you can't shake. It's quiet in the back of your mind, like a little news ticker running across the bottom of the screen of your brain. But it's getting louder and louder. You know there's something underneath your bed. You know it's there.
HZ: I don't want to see it.
JOY: Two giant bloodshot eyes. Set above a cartoon bear snout.
HZ: Why?
JOY: Beneath which yawns a gaping maw containing but one tooth!
HZ: The maw, it does gape.
JOY: This bear's wearing overalls and it's coming for your blood, Helen! It is terrifying. It has a horrifying visage. I can't believe they made this animatronic bear for children. It's so scary to look upon.
HZ: It's like a normal looking mascot died and was buried in Pet Sematery and then came back to life, but changed.
JOY: A hundred percent. Yeah. That's exactly what it's like, Helen I learnt after we taped this episode, that Chuck E. Cheese's middle name is not Charles Edward Cheese. It's actually Charles Entertainment Cheese. ‘Entertainment’ is his middle name.
HZ: It's already kind of a coincidence that 'Cheese' would be his surname and that would be such a big part of his business, so I'm not buying 'Entertainment'.
JOY: OK. I guess it's probably his stage name.
HZ: It would be like if Elon Musk's middle name was Elon Paypal Musk or Elon Tesla Musk, which actually it could be.
JOY: I mean, it probably is now if it wasn't already.
HZ: Well, those were some outtakes. But coming up, we have something that I've been waiting to make you for...oh, since ever before I even had dial-up internet: it's the montage of us explaining outdated technologies!
MONTAGE OF OUTDATED TECHNOLOGIES
1-03
JOY: The place that Justin is working is a video rental store. And for our younger listeners: this is like IRL Netflix.
HZ: Imagine every Netflix show was turned into a black cuboid and put in a room. And instead of your watch list, you just went and walked past all these black cubes and then selected one. And then you could take it home in return for money, for like 48 hours.
JOY: And you had to watch the thing you picked, instead of, for example. flipping through ‘recommended for you’s on Netflix for the duration of an amount of time in which you could have watched an entire movie. Doesn't that sound wild?
HZ: What fun! Probably gonna come back in like vinyl shops.
JOY: Any time.
1-02
JOY: Remember printing stuff out? So for our younger listeners, printing something out -
HZ: It’s like when a cloud condenses into rain, but for words on a computer.
JOY: And solid, not liquid.
HZ: Sorry, yes: it’s like when clouds condense into rain, then the rain forms into a sheet of ice. With words on it. Better?
JOY: So beautiful. The poetry of Helen Zaltzman, everyone.
1-03
HZ: Veronica takes advantage of John Smith driving a convertible car and steals a post-it note from it displaying the same handwriting as in the letter. And kids, this might be like, you get a text from an unknown number, but you match the emoji style to some other - to a Whatsapp you got?
JOY: Sure. Yes, yes, this is correct.
1-15
HZ: Well, kids, a postcard: it's like dumping someone by text, but there's a picture attached and it takes days to get there. And a postmark is like an IP address that tells you approximately where the postcard was sent from.
1-04
HZ: And she's filming with a camcorder - so kids, a camcorder. It was like a phone that only did one thing, which was making videos, but it would make the videos solid in the form of little tapes. Can you picture this?
JOY: Mmm, more plastic rectangles like in the last episode, but smaller.
HZ: Imagine a cereal box made out of black plastic -
JOY: - of memories -
HZ: - shoved into your phone, that only does one thing.
2-03
JOY: Okay, now kids. A phonebook was like Facebook, kind of, or LinkedIn. Everyone you know is in there, but only within a certain geographic region.
HZ: It's like Tinder in that it's regional.
JOY: You look them up by their name and it tells you their phone number and where they live. What a terrible system.
1-10
HZ: No. And then Connor's phone rings in the flashback - kids, that was when your phone made a noise like when the alarm goes off. But what the noise was telling you is that someone's calling you, which was like them sending you a WhatsApp message but with their mouths and live rather than recorded, if that makes sense.
JOY: That makes some sense.
HZ: Go to a museum and ask them about it.
1-13
HZ: Dime Bag's hotel room has got one of those fancy landline phones when they used to bother making those still: a Bang and Olufsen Beocom which looks like a kind of curved bone, appropriately enough. You can still get one for £624.
JOY: Holy shit. That’s an expensive phone!
HZ: If you want a prestige landline. Kids, a landline was like a phone that forced you to speak to people.
JOY: Yeah, yeah. And also was was connected by a cord to something that was stationary so you couldn't take it with you into the bathroom or wherever you take your phone.
1-13
HZ: And kids - a telegram was like when you sent a text, but on paper, and you spelled out punctuation rather than using no punctuation at all.
JOY: Right. Wow. How about that. Well done, Helen.
HZ: Thank you.
1-13
JOY: Kids, a club is like Tinder but everyone is all in the same room together and there's like loud music. And instead of swiping on people you might like buy someone a drink or try to start a conversation with them.
HZ: Or dance up to them, physically swipe them.
JOY: I... ok.
HZ: It was a more forward time.
JOY: "Physically swipe them" leaves too much to the - there's just too much possibility in that phrase, but I do love dancing up to people.
HZ You would saunter up to them doing your flashback hands in time to the music.
JOY: Works every time, Helen.
HZ: And that's how babies are made.
2-08
JOY: She wants RadioShack goods. RadioShack was a store that used to exist.
HZ: And radios were like podcasts coming out of a brick.
1-18
HZ: We learn his family has wifi because his dad works for Kane Software, so they get all the latest technology - and kids. There was a world before wifi. It was dreadful. JOY: Yeah. Many moons ago, when your children were babies.
HZ: We had to get the internet out of taps. Faucets, sorry.
JOY: Yeah, you would hook a hose up to the kitchen faucet and just run it.
HZ: Between 5 o'clock and 5.15 every week on Saturday.
JOY: A loud noise would happen that was sort of like <modem noise> -
HZ: That was really good.
JOY: Thank you - as the internet connection would flow from your kitchen faucet directly into your your desktop computer which was plugged into the wall. And then you could look at dragonslayer.com.
JR: Can I try to make a sound? Yes, I think it goes like this. <slightly more convincing impression of a dial up modem>.
HZ: That was like a human theramin at one point. I loved it.
JR: Delete that.
JOY: No no no! We're taking this show on the road, Joanna.
2-08
JOY: Would we be remiss if we didn't say that, kids, an MP3 player was like a phone without a phone or any apps - like a phone, but it only has the function of the Apple Music app and that's it.
HZ: Or, it's like that record player that you bought at Urban Outfitters, but a lot smaller and you didn't need to put records on it.
1-05
HZ: So, kids, a fax is like an email made flesh.
JOY: Oh my god, an email made flesh, truly.
JOY: Helen, listening back to this montage, I couldn't believe... I mean, education has always been my passion. I didn't realise we were building such a beautiful catalogue to help young people understand the world that preceded them.
HZ: They're not going to be taught in history class for ever such a long time, if ever. In Britain, there was a very long running police-based soap opera/drama called The Bill. And someone my husband knows did a kind of study on it, because it was this document of the changing face of computers. So initially, like when you had a desk, there was no computer on it. If there was a computer, which there may well not have been, it was taking up a whole room on its own. And then there were desktops, then there were laptops, and then there were like barely anything again. And now I think The Bill is cancelled, so ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
JOY: The circle of life, in so many ways.
HZ: Thank you ever so much as well for the use of your great song on that. Also featued on BoJack Horseman.
JOY: I can't believe a song I wrote has now been on two of my favourite shows, BoJack Horseman and Veronica Mars Investigations. What an honour.
HZ: Let's see where we can get it next. Have you still got contacts at Switched at Birth?
JOY: Surely Switched at Birth has long been done.
HZ: Everything's getting rebooted.
JOY: Oh my God. Well, I guess I can try.
HZ: Please.
JOY: Okay.
HZ: Don't count yourself out. But thank you also for joining us, sweet listener to the pod.
JOY: Yeah. We care about you.
HZ: What a bunch of champs.
JOY: Yeah. Thanks for sticking around.
HZ: Thank you for sticking around. Thank YOU for sticking around, Jenny.
JOY: Thank you for sticking around, Helen!
HZ: Well, where else would I go?
JOY: I don't know. There's probably better stuff you could do with your time. But I'm glad that you for some reason continue to choose to spend it here with me.
HZ: It's a great pleasure for me, Jenny. An honour and a pleasure.
JOY: The pleasure's mine. Actually, let's agree to share the pleasure.
HZ: Right. Yeah. How would you rate your first year of Veronica Mars out of five, Jenny?
JOY: Ten out of five!
HZ: Wow!
JOY: Ten out of five Keiths a-smugging.
HZ: Oh, well, I'll give it ten out of five Cliffs getting out of handcuffs. For you.
JOY: The best thing that's happened so far. This thing that's happened so far! Cliff handcuffed to that bed. Hell, yeah.
HZ: That was some outtakes and shit of Veronica Mars Investigations. The case remains open.