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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather examine This Is Spinal Tap, a movie for its time, for our time, and/or for all time. We discuss what is dated and what is enduring about the mockumentary rockumentary, and we spend a minute waxing sentimental about the eleventh anniversary of the OTI Podcast.
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Glad I was able to find a podcast that brings a little “upstairs” overthinking to our “downstairs” pop culture. Here’s to eleven more years. Cheers.
I have to laugh at the mention of looking back at prior work and cringing, and honestly have a lot of respect for people who are able to do that in public. I have a (version control) repository of notes on possible projects I’ve been keeping since around 2006 and, even though it’s thankfully not public, I look at some of it and shudder at the bitter little person who managed to convince himself that (among other things) anarchy could be a stable system. I never made it back to the beginning of the Overthinking It back-catalog (I kept losing my place), but I’m sure none of it is that bad…
In any case, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie, but I half-wonder if the “look at how dumb these guys are” angle was intended to be a commentary on drug-addled musicians. It’s not a long walk from “dumb people jokes” to “stoner jokes,” after all, and the latter seems like the sort of weird place a studio or the MPAA might draw an arbitrary line.
Or maybe not. Either way, a happy eleventh (which is, indeed, one more) and many more!
Narrowly missed the opportunity to discuss what it means (both for the integrity of the ranking system and more generally) that IMDB’s rating scale for TIST goes to 11…
https://www.reddit.com/r/music/comments/db9999