The Hacker Movie Canon: Real Genius

Lindsay, did you even, had you heard of it? Did you know that it existed? Literally never heard of it. Yeah. So I'm very glad my eyes have been opened. It's a a very 80s artifact, like not specifically in the war games way of the technology and you know, that sort of thing, but just the sort of goofy, you know, let's have a gratuitous scene with a bunch of people in bikinis and like the the dopey things like that that were just such a thing in the 80s. What was your what was your first impression after while you were watching it Lens?

I think it was exactly what you just said. Like it's a very like encapsulate. It's like a very much an 80s movie. Like even just the humor I thought was really refreshing compared to a lot of the movies that I see nowadays where, you know, it's a little more witty. I would say I, you know, I really liked it. I didn't realize that was Val Kilmer's. Like, I think it was like a second or third movie. Like he was looking really young in that. Yeah.

Yeah. I thought it was great. Yeah, it's such a fun movie. Like, you know, you can just kind of like vibe with it the whole time. There's yes, there's a space laser involved and things like that, but there's not really any stakes in the movie. You know, it's just a bunch of goofballs at like a knock off Caltech slash MIT university just playing pranks on each other and, you know, being goofballs with some, you know, good-natured stuff thrown in. I I love it so much.

Wendy, I know that I mentioned earlier the reason we wanted to have you on both because we love you and you have like a specific sort of connection to this movie. I don't know if you want to get into it now or maybe we can talk about it when we we talk about the actual plot. It's up to you. Well, we can start. I mean, yeah, this is it. You know, everybody's got their own, you know, hacker movie that for them symbolizes hackers, whether it's war games or hackers or sneakers or, you know, you name it. But this is my hacker movie.

And it's it's mostly because I used to hang out with a bunch of ARPANET hackers in the 80s and they were just like these characters. And I think part of it is because back then, yeah, there weren't any stakes. It wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, we were being chased by evil people and we weren't fighting anybody. There were no break insurance. It was it was just us being goofballs. And we would do everything from, you know, back then there wasn't a lot of access management or anything. And we all, we all knew that if we wanted to log into certain machines, we could just do what we called RMS ING in Richard M Stallman just set his password to RMS. And so we just knew we could log in as RMS when it, whenever we needed access to a particular server someplace on the ARPANET, you know, so it was very

carefree. There was a lot of maker stuff going on. We would, there was a lot of physical exploration of, of buildings, not just, you know, the steam tunnels under Pacific Tech, but you know, the actual tunnels at MIT. Anytime we went to a a hotel, some of us would start, you know, going exploring through places they weren't supposed to be.

We called it vatting. It was kind of there, there was a text based game called ADV and this was kind of ADV sideways. So we called it vatting, kind of like adventure. So, you know, they would like, climb, try to find a place where they could get underneath the hotel swimming pool and then bang on it with a hammer. And we'd break into the linen closets and get everybody extra pillows and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So it was a lot of high jinks, just like the movie. And that's why I, I, you know, I feel so close to it. Yeah, it's funny because the anybody who knows you now and doesn't know sort of the your back story, which, you know, I happen to know, would, yeah, probably wouldn't have guessed any of that stuff about you.

You know, that you were, you know, a little bit more mischievous in your in your early days. You know, that's something that maybe they might guess about me, but maybe not you. So, yeah, I, I love that that sort of, it's not really text in this movie, but it's sort of the subtext of like that's who these folks are, you know, Chris Knight and Mitch, not so much Mitch Taylor, but Chris Knight and all the, the students who are at Pacific Tech when, when Mitch the the 15 year old prodigy gets there.

Oh, we had a Mitch Taylor. We had a young person hanging out with us. That's another story which I might have told you, but we won't bring it up in this family podcast. This is not a family podcast, but yeah, it, it, there's such a good sort of, it's not a like get your crew together movie. The way that sneakers is where, you know, they have this person who does this and this person who does that. It's just a bunch of really smart people who were kind of screwing around while they kind of, you know, wander their way towards advanced degrees or whatever it is and try not to build space weapons.

But there is kind of that the hacker ethos underlying this in not so much the technological way, but more of that exploratory and let's see how far we can push things without really getting in too much trouble. Both in terms of like, you know, yeah, the steam tunnels. But also like later on towards the end where Laszlo is brute forcing the satellite system to, you know, make sure that they blow up the professor's house and not, you know, the the target that they're trying to hit.

So. Yeah, or getting free coffee from the vending machine by using, by using the frozen liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen, Yeah, just everything like that or, you know, creating, not that we ever did this, but creating the the. The ice slide. Ice slide. Yeah, yeah, just for fun. And then it sublimated. So no harm, no foul. Right. It disappeared really quickly. No water, straight to gas. Yeah, the. Explosion. Right.

Yeah, almost. There was going to be an explosion, Yeah. Lindsay, did you know anything about, I don't know if you if you looked into this at all when you were watching the movie or looked it up on IMDb or anything. Do you know about like the MIT pranks and that kind of stuff that that a lot of this is based on? No. Oh. OK, this is even better then. Based on actual pranks. Yeah, very, very loosely. So there's this whole tradition at MIT specifically, and I think also Caltech, if I'm not wrong, Wendy, where the students do pranks that they called hacks. And this started in like I, I want to see like the 50s, sixties.

And they're very elaborate in a lot of cases. If you look them up, probably one of the most famous ones at MIT is they, the students got a full size car and put it on top of the MIT Dome. I forget the name. Of that building 1 car. It was, it was a car that they painted like a police car with the working lights and sirens. And it was on top of the MIT Dome, whatever that building is called, I can't remember, but it's the one at the top of the MIT quad in Cambridge. There's all kinds of other ones.

If you look it up. There's there's an MIT museum exhibit dedicated to all this stuff. Most of them are, you know, relatively harmless. They. Take a lot of engineering and a lot of planning, which is what these students are so good at. Right in the whole that's. Very. Impressive. Yeah. And that's kind of where the really early origins of the hacker ethos came from is these are called hacks. The people that did them were called hackers.

It had nothing to do with technology. You know, it's sort of moved that way later on towards the phone system and the computer networks later on. But part of the whole culture was you weren't supposed to actually do any damage. Sometimes they would actually leave instructions on how to, like, unwind what they had done. You know, here's how you can get this car off the roof of your building. Or, you know, sometimes it has something to do with, like, street lights or things like that, you know, very clever and very creative stuff, but not, you know, not harmful and not damaging.

So there's that whole back story to it, too. That's so interesting. And you know, to Wendy's point, like I feel like so many of the hacker scenes that we see in movies nowadays just don't encapsulate that at all, right? It's just, you know, the hacker in the hoodie, like, you know, doing their thing very serious. But when I think of, you know, real genius or I think of, you know, other like war games or some of these other movies that we talk about like that kind of tongue in cheek cap you go lucky, like hijinks, you know, backdrop is is something that really is important.

I think so. I love that. Yeah, it's, I think it's really important too, because, you know, even in war games, the last one we did, Matthew Broderick isn't really trying to. He's trying to get a video game. Like he's trying to get early access to a video game is how that thing all starts. You know, there's no real harm involved. Yes, he's stealing some IPI guess, but he's not literally trying to start a thermonuclear war or, you know, cause any actual property damage. He just wants access to a new video game. You know, in sneakers is a different story, but yeah, it sort of goes after that when you get to the movie Hackers or the net or things like that.

Darker overtime. Very much so both the story and like the aesthetic of the movies themselves. Like if you try to watch the movie Hackers now, like every scene is dark or there's neon in it or that you know, it's a very 90s thing with the techno soundtrack and all that kind of stuff too. But you know, this is you could tell even if you didn't know what year this was made, 1985, you look at it and you're like, that movie is that. Is so 80s. Mid 80s yes, the feathered hair which you mentioned to me like offline Lindsay, like yeah Val Kilmer, everybody like Mitch Taylor's hair is just incredible like the. Oh yeah.

The the butt cut with the the feather. Oh, it's incredible. I love it. So 80s, Yeah, every. It's not just the girls, it's mostly the guys had those haircuts, you know, little known fact. Yeah. To you mention Lynn's, this is Val Kilmer's kind of definitely his breakout role. I think he had been in Top Secret before this, which was, you know, a spoof and was, I mean, it did well, but it's not like one of those movies. It's lived on forever. But this made him a star. And then immediately after this, he was in Top Gun and then it, you know, Willow and, you know, eventually my favorite movie of all time, Heat and a few Tombstone, which I love as well.

But there were no real stars in this movie when it came out. Maybe William Atherton was the biggest name in this movie, don't you think? Wendy? Yeah, it was Ghostbusters. Before or after this? Yes, it was before this. OK, so, yeah, I mean, he he plays played such a wonderful jerk in both of those roles. And Dave Lewis was just saying the other day that he he's pretty sure that any actor that can play a Jackass like that has got to be the nicest person in the world in real life.

That's his theory. I always think about that because he, Atherton was this same kind of character in Ghostbusters, you know, kind of an officious jerk in this. And then also in Die Hard a couple years later, he's the the jerk TV reporter. You. Know who Maclean's wife eventually punches in the face, which is just great but it I, you know, somehow it got typecast as like the biggest 80s, you know, Jackass. But yeah, probably a very nice guy.

Who knows? But yeah, nobody else in the rest of the cast was really a name. It was, you know. No, no. And I I don't think the movie was really sold on anybody's name. It didn't do very well at the box box office. I went and looked that up. It was like or 85 when this came out. Was a tough year. It's like Back to the Future, Beverly Hills Cop, The Goonies, Rocky 4, like some all time Classics came out that year. Real Genius was way down the list at like #65 or something like that.

But I think it's, it's definitely lived on in the hacker community as a, a classic. And it's one of those movies that you you will always find on, you know, TBS or something like that on a Saturday afternoon. And it's just, it's super fun to just drop into at any point. So Lindsay, when you you really didn't have any idea of what the plot was when you sat down to watch? Not really. I mean, yeah. So I knew there was some sort of like, you know, like college aspect to it, having seen the trailer. But yeah, I I had no idea what I was in for. Yeah, the, I'd love to.

I always forget the beginning where there's the whole, you know, kind of spooky military meeting with the CIA guys and the government contractors. And they're just like, oh, it's both immoral and unethical. That's great. When can we have it? You know, talking about this? And the one guy going, I urge you to stop. Right, yes, There has to be the one person that's protesting and he walks out the door and the CIA guys like, OK, well, I guess we have to kill him now. Yeah.

Yeah. Liberate. Liberate. Yes. Yes. Not liquidate. Liberate, which is also like, such a 80s movie trope of just the government, you know, the shadowy government agencies doing things you're not really sure about. But it always has something to do with, like, off the books assassinations or, you know, some weird military program that we're paying for but we don't really know what it's doing. Yeah. And the then we sort of, we move into the Mitch Taylor portion of the program where you just have this like very buttoned up kid at a science fair explaining like a a brand new laser technology.

And this is where, this is where we meet Atherton's character, Jerry Hathaway. I think his last name is who is somehow they don't really explain it, but he's like a celebrity. Everybody knows who he is. He's like signing audit. On that. Because he was on the TV show. Yeah, I, I, yeah, I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm Professor Hathaway with everything. Everything is the name of the. TV Nova. You know, parody. Right. But very clearly, like a public access cable show where it's just him, You know, the one episode that they show us is before Kent spoils, that is him trying to explain what the colon is. Yeah, in the.

And he's supposed to be like a physics professor. Like, why is he explaining human anatomy to people? But. Well, because he's with everything. He knows everything, yes. Yes. But I I love when he walks in and, you know, everybody gets excited and and the the little teacher, she gets so excited and she wants to ask him. This is one of my favorite lines. You know, she said, I have a quit. Oh, actually, no, that way She she's she wants to know what Einstein is really like. And and halfway says dead.

Dead. Yes. And then he moves on and, and, and Mitch's mom at, at you know, she said, I saw your, your, your show on radioactive isotopes and I have a question. And Jose Anne, she says, is that your real hair? And now every time I I preface something with why I want to ask somebody question, I really want to go straight to is that your real hair? But you know, too many, too few people will get it. I would have gotten it, but you can't ask me that question, obviously. Yeah, yeah, there are so many.

I and I had forgotten this. I hadn't seen this movie in a couple years, probably. I'd forgotten how much of the dialogue is just set up Punchline. It's so there. Especially Val Kilmer's dialogue, you know, which he was. He didn't do a ton of these type of comedies after this really. Like he was more of a dramatic actor for most of his career. But he's really good at this, you know, he's he's. So. Come on.

Yeah, of course he's really good as like the smart ass, you know, he never like, they don't really play up his looks or how handsome he is or anything like that. It's more of him just being like this really smart, charismatic guy, you know who everybody kind of it's, you know, the classic everybody wants to be him type guy, you know? Yeah. I was, I loved his dialogue.

Like the the cha cha scene. Yeah, when you like just to set up and the build and then like just cracking the joke. Yeah, it's great. One step forward. No, no, I'm sorry. One step back. 1. Step forward, yeah. And now step back. And now we're trying. Yes, yeah. It's great. Yeah, it is. You can tell that whoever the writers were had a really good time writing those. The the dialogue for for Val Kilmer, he gets all the obviously all the home run lines, but you know, there's a few for Mitch, there's a few for Jordan as well. Who this that I wanted to ask you about Jordan as well, Wendy. She reminds me of about 700 different people I know in the hacker community, you know, just like over caffeinated, hyper smart, want to tell you everything that they know all the time in like 4 seconds.

And you're just like, Oh my God, hang on, hold on, just take take a breath. Like when we meet her, she just spouts off this like stream of consciousness dialogue at Mitch about how she never sleeps. And then she comes back and she knitted him a sweater like overnight and he's just like what? I'm sorry, what? What's wrong with you? Yeah, yeah. And, and the The thing is that one of the people I, I hung out with was the model, or at least one of the models, but probably the model for Jordan, for real. Her her name is Phyllis Lee and she went by Lyra Lynn at the time.

And she did so many of the things that were written into Jordan's character. You know, she was into making things. She loved to spin her own yarn. She worked on making. I think it's called a ring shawl, one that is crocheted so fine that you can pass it through a wedding ring. And I actually have two, I still have two placemats that she crocheted for me for as a wedding present. And she was always into, she played, she did hardware hacking, she played soccer.

She had a, a Newfoundland puppy named Fezzic. And apparently when, when the screenwriters interviewed her, she was wearing a sweater that she had made. She had knitted it overnight because she was cold. And so, you know, it was it was so, so true to life. And in the show notes, I think we're going to include a link to a Slate article that she wrote explaining about, you know, that that time and her role in in helping to to be the model for Jordan and why it was, you know, some people didn't like the character. It didn't like the characterization because it was, it was kind of modeling women in tech as ones, as women that have to fit the fit themselves into the tech scene, like by being one of the guys, like they

couldn't be as feminine as as they wanted to be, you know? And I felt the same way during that period of time. I felt like I had to fit in as one of the guys because I was like usually the only woman in there. Yeah, I, I can sort of see that, that point of view very well because they do, you know, she wears overalls through the whole movie. She's got a very short haircut. You know, she's, she doesn't hang out with any other women. She's the only real female character in the movie aside from, you know, a couple of ancillary.

She's the only main female character really. And they do sort of portray her as just one of the guys, which, you know, is cool. But you can tell even in the 1985 sort of era, she's not super comfortable with that. You know, she's like, well, I'm not exactly like you guys, you know, yeah, I'm really smart and I do this stuff. But I can also knit you a sweater, and I can do this, you know, a bunch of other cool shit. But they show her, like, stripping the wooden floor in her room at one point at, like, 2:00 in the morning.

She's just. Yeah. And she creates A rebreather to to play with in the pool and the. Pool scene, Yeah. So it's like they felt like they needed a token female character in there and they said, well, let let's not make her too much like one of the boys. Let's let's have her knit and then let's, let's you know, I don't know if we should spoil what happens later or not. I mean, you know, Mitch kisses her. So, you know, it's like she's the love interest because you can't have a woman in those movies who wasn't a love interest.

Like she had no purpose for being there except to be the love interest, which is also annoying. But you know, that was the 80s and there was no, there was no sex in this movie was PG And I, you know, I can tell you that in the real hacker scene back then, there was a lot of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. So there was only a little bit of rock'n'roll in this movie and that was it. Yeah. You never really see like, obviously this is supposed to be, you know, an elite Technical University where the kids are just like essentially just studying all the time and working on like insane research projects and that sort of stuff. And they have the one, the pool scene that we've referenced a couple times, which is just, it's so funny. And I look forward to it every time I watch this movie because it's so incongruous.

They just like take over in a lecture hall. And I guess Chris did it like Val Kilmer's character set this up because he he sets up the laser to, you know, bounce all over campus. And then there's a beam splitter that has like a neon sign for this tanning Invitational, which is just a hilarious name for this indoor pool party. But yeah, they take take over a lecture hall and he invites a bunch of bunch of girls from the beautician college down the road. Yeah, it's full of beauty.

Right, yes. And they're all just like dancing. And it's like this big scandal that Mitch is there instead of being in the lab, and he's eventually just like, sitting in the, you know, in the seat in the auditorium until Jordan comes in and, like, drags him into the pool. Yeah, yeah. And of course that that's the only time that you see Chris Knight actually, you know, doing anything with women. And the the most does is he, you know, he comes up to 1 and and takes the the burger out of her hands and says, don't eat that.

Don't you realize that these can give you really large breasts? And he looks down and goes, Oh no, I'm too late. Yeah. And that's that's about as racy as it gets. It is, yeah. Lindsay, were you expecting like more dopey 80s gratuitous stuff in this? You know, I think it it a little bit just because I, you know, I, I kind of know like the different types of 80s movies that I've seen so far, but like, I was kind of expecting a little bit more of those types of like pool scenes. It didn't come as a shock, you know, So, you know, I for me at least, like I felt like that was they did a good job because that was pretty limited from my perspective to maybe like that scene.

And like the other scene where with the there was like one other scene with the daughter of like the person in the CIA, a little weird, but you know, it's, it's just like kind of classic 80s movies. Very much so, yeah. I mean, this is at a time when all of those 80s comedies were just, you know, essentially just sex comedies. Like that was just what they were. And this is like the rare example. I mean, this came out the same year as Weird Science, which I don't know if you've ever seen that lens, but that's like kind of a, you know, it's Anthony Michael Hall.

I can't remember the other kids name, but they're like nerdy kids who build like the perfect woman out of a computer program and she comes to life, you know, literal like teenage boy fantasy type stuff. You know, it's kind of like the flip side of this coin. I think, you know, like this movie could have gone down that road, but instead it's just more of like the, you know, it's got some social commentary about we shouldn't be building space lasers to do like targeted assassinations. But you know, that's, they do sort of like, it's so funny I, I forget how little of that plot is actually in this movie. It's the first like 4 minutes and then the very end. And that's basically it.

You know, there's the pressure on Jerry to get this done from the CIA. Like every 20 minutes they're yelling at him. And, and they're threatening to expose him because apparently, yeah, he's been siphoning off some of those funds to have. To build his house, yeah. Yeah. Diverting funds from the CIA is not a, you know, that's a career limiting move. Usually, I would think The rest of it is just sort of, you know, a series of clever pranks and set pieces that they kind of string together with this, you know, defense contract plot thing. Wendy, what's your what's the the stunt or the prank that you enjoy the most out of all the ones in this movie? Oh gosh, I mean, I really love when they, when they knockout Kent and they install, they install a transmitter in his braces.

It's like who has braces in college? You know, they had, they had to have a nerd with braces. I, I, I love that. I, I thought it was really impressive what they had built for Laszlo Hollyfields, his, his room deep down in the steam tunnels and, and everything that you needed to get down there. And every time we go in there, I'm when I'm watching the movie with somebody else and he's working on a workstation, they go, oh, that's a symbolics.

You know, that that was totally a thing. And there were people who are working on those in the 80s. So there were a lot of call outs to to things that, you know, I really still identify with, I guess. Yeah, I think my favorite one is always when they disassemble Kent's car and put it in his room, which, you know, is just great and I think is a direct homage to those MIT pranks that that I was mentioning earlier. Yeah, you know, it's great.

Everything they do to Kent is just delightful 'cause he's, you know, he's such a weasel, obviously. Yeah. But yet, Linds, what did you think of like the the Laszlo character that that's what we were talking about in the War games episode where I was trying to describe like this guy that lives in their closet and you were like, what on what the hell are you idiots talking about? Well, even when you were talking about because Weight Lotus, I've watched all the, you know, and I was still like, which character are you talking about? But then as soon as I saw him, I was like, OK, that's the guy in Weight Lotus.

Napoleon Dynamite, like all the other ones. So yeah, I did. I liked that aspect of it was just funny, like the just the randomness of it at first. Like when he's walking in the room and Mitch like has his mirror to like, he's like he's coming in. Yeah. But I what I liked the most about that character though, is like, I felt like, yes, there was a little bit of a plot of, you know, pranks and lasers and all of that, but like, just like the pressure versus like goofing off that, you know, you feel in college and higher Ed or even just like in your career. And I felt like that having that character in this movie was like a good like pointing out of, you know, you just you can't be too serious.

You need to have like empathy and all these different aspects. So like, I liked the layer that, you know, the inclusion of his character brought to the movie. And he was, he was pretty autism coded in, in that John Grise, the the actor was also in, he played a very similar character in the in the Pretender series. I don't know if you saw that one. That was a 90s series. No I haven't. Was that a sci-fi type? Yeah, it was a sci-fi thing.

And again, very shy, you know, kind of withdrawn, but everybody loves him and they kind of take care of him. Yeah, he's. It's so funny because there's no real set up for it. You just see him walk out of the closet one time as Mitch is like putting his stuff away or something. And then he goes to talk to to Val Kilmer's character. He's like, you know, there's a guy that lives in our closet and Val's like, oh, you see him too. Yeah, kind of confirming, like, I'm not crazy. This guy actually exists. And then he describes him as like, Oh yeah, he was the guy in the 70's, the guy before Chris Knight, I guess we're supposed to think, and just cracked under the pressure and now just lives in the steam tunnels and has that little like mousetrap car that goes down.

And like the whole thing that he's built in there, which is very, you know, obviously like an exaggerated version. But you know, Wendy, you'd sort of described some of those pranks or explorations and there were also just people like that hanging around, especially like we probably all three of us know people like that who, you know, went to some place like MIT or Berkeley or places like that and incredibly smart.

But that was not the environment for them. You know, they just like the that kind of structure doesn't work for them or whatever it happens to be and they're off doing brilliant things. You know, maybe not winning the whatever the sweepstakes was the McDonald's or thing that he was doing, the auto pen to enter, which is another like thing that I kind of always forget about this movie that Laszlo is down there, You know, figuring out the odds of how to win every or 30% of the prizes in this this sweepstakes, including a Winnebago. Yeah, and then there was the, you know, the wish fulfilment character, the the one other woman who had like lines in there and and her whole purpose was to try to seduce all the smart guys.

The top 10, yes. Yeah. Yeah, Chris meets her at the very beginning of the movie when he's doing a tour of whatever that defense contractor company that, you know, Hathaway is going to set him up with a job for. And he says, oh, and you know, how many of the top 10 have you met? And she's like 7. You would make 8 like, Oh well, OK. And then she ends up with Laszlo at the end and yeah, perfect. Yeah, you that does feel like a a movie studio note where some, you know, executive was like, we need can we get a pretty blonde woman to like, you know, throw in here just for a couple scenes.

These nerds never get any action. Clearly they don't movie after movie. And yeah, it totally wasn't true. Right. Yeah. Especially someone who looks like Val Kilmer. Mitch, you can understand he's 15, but you know. Yeah, Wendy, I know you have like a a connection in the University of Texas, which kind of, I have a feeling there were probably some pranks that might have gone on at UT. That seems like an environment where there might have been some shenanigans. I could see some involving maybe a cow mascot or something along those lines.

But. Yeah, that that was more, you know, football related. It wasn't. It wasn't the nerds blowing off steam. And in fact, when, when I was at UT, that's it, it UT was one of the few universities and defense contractors and so on that were, were on the ARPANET at that time. So that's how I got to meet the folks from Stanford and Berkeley and, and MIT and so and, and Rutgers. So I I hung out with them because there wasn't really that much of a local scene. Yeah, I feel like the kind of harmless pranks, you know, a lot of these are pretty elaborate and probably did some damage to the dorms or whatever.

Like they do stick a laser right through the head of a statue at one point. But just kind of those good nature, you know, pranks have gone the way of the dinosaur. Those don't really exist anymore. You know, now you probably get in a lot of serious trouble for any of the stuff that they did. Yeah, that's the that's the trouble. Especially something destructive like that, like that powerful laser. And yeah, I don't think we're letting undergrads play with lasers these days, are we? I I have no idea.

Probably not, no. It seems like a terrible idea. Yeah. It does strike me that you only really see, I think, maybe two people that have computers in this movie. You know, Laszlo has his workstation down in the steam tunnel. Chris, or I'm sorry, Kent has one and Chris has one. Chris is never turned on as far as I know, I think. It's and there's one in the lab. OK, right. Yes. And Kent is, you know, falling asleep while he's having that dream with the transmitter in his in his teeth. But it's not a very technology centric movie. You know, a lot of it is is sort of centered on sort of the, you know, the hacker ethos that that we've been talking about it just kind of the playfulness and trying to figure out the way that things work and how to how to push the envelope. Yeah, yeah.

I mean with almost anything you see there it there is it's like, what can we do with this? Like again in the in the 80s, one, one of the hackers I hung out with was was Hobbit, Hobbit who who wrote the original net cat. And I remember one time we were driving, we were on a road trip from New Jersey up to New Hampshire and he started dismantling the the rental car. He was in the back seat.

He started taking it apart while we were driving. And I'm like, Hobbit, knock it off. But you know, this is the the sort of thing that no matter what they had or you know, what was in front of them, they'd like what be like, what can I do with this? Yeah, it's when I was in College in the 90s, like, like I had a computer, but there were plenty. I, you know, I think I was still even in the minority, you know, most people were going to the computer lab if they needed to, you know, print out a paper or write a paper or something like that.

We had VAC systems at my university was like the if you wanted to go use the vax, you could in like a timeshare and it cost money. You know, you had to have an account and it costs like, I don't even remember what it was. But obviously by the time you got to college lands, everybody had a computer. But yeah. Yeah, it was very different for for me, I would say. But and now, I mean people in college these days, like, you know, it's it's even more kind of further down the line.

They've got their own phones. Like it makes me think of how different this movie would have been if it if it was said in 2025 or something. So I don't. Think you could no do that sort. Of I think you're right. No, even just the the technology aspect of it and even just the the whole plot line of the government contracting part of it, you know, technology transfer, which was like a a huge thing in the 80s. I mean, as you said, when the a lot of universities were doing that kind of work.

I'm sure there are some now, but that's not exactly the way that it works anymore. I don't think our universities are building lasers for Intel agencies. But yeah, it's even, you know, five years later, I don't think this movie would have worked very well, you know, even in 90, because every, like, the Internet existed then. It wasn't everywhere, but it was on a lot of university campuses. And it certainly would have been available at, you know, Pacific Tech. You know those dudes would have been spending all their time. Yeah, it would have been all busy. Even if they were in the same lab, they would all be busy messaging each other from their terminals. Yes, messaging the person 4 feet away from you. Yes, Yeah, and giggling.

Which is even. Like the pranks in like the modern world, I would say like are much more like digitized or, you know, go through online. Like I think now we have like memes, we have TikTok, we have all these ways of people doing like, you know, tongue in cheek things, but it's just not the, it's not the same, I would say. The closest thing that I can think of is like when Devi and Alam posted about how to how to put a different sound chip. I think in the the traffic light pedestrian crossing have it say something else.

Yeah. Yeah, somebody went and did it. Right. I mean, yeah, a lot of it now is more focused on, you know, things like, I don't even know, they'd have to be individual products, like the kind of stuff that, you know, folks like Joe Grand do or things like that that are, you know, creative projects. You know, like Joe builds the the badges for Defcon every year that do all kinds of cool shit or he does like all kinds of other projects. And there's tons of hardware hackers that do the same thing. But they're not, you know, so they're more private. They're more they're not as like public facing as this kind of stuff would be, you know, but it does have that aspect of they all sort of like band together in the middle of the movie to get back at Kent because he had screwed Chris out of, you know, he had messed up the optics on the laser. And then towards the end of the movie, they all band together to get back at Hathaway because they figure out that he had tricked them into building this

this weapon. They just thought it was like a proof of concept, I guess. I don't they they weren't paying. Attention to what they thought it was for. But it. Was they didn't care and they wanted to build it. Right. Yeah, that was kind of it. It was for the thrill of the chase, essentially. You know, we could build a cool laser that nobody else can build because we're the smartest people on Earth. So they do that. They didn't realize it was going to be used as a space laser, which is just, it's a great 80s movie device. Which leads to the absolute brilliant end scene where there's a throwaway thing in the earlier in the movie that I had forgotten completely about where Chris shows up at Hathaway's house and he's eating a bag of popcorn. And Hathaway says, is that popcorn? Don't bring that in my house.

I hate popcorn. And you're just like, OK, that's a weird line of dialogue. And he just throws it on the ground or whatever and then. Chekhov's Popcorn. Chekhov's Popcorn in the biggest way possible. They just get a giant jiffy pop. Ball. Popcorn and put it in his new house and you know aim the space laser ad and destroy the house which is amazing. And if you go and read how they did that practically, you know, not with a real laser, but they were literally popping popcorn for like 3 months straight leading up to this, to this stunt to film it. And they still had to bring in like popcorn manufacturers had to help them by bringing in extra popcorn. To do this is absolutely amazing. Yeah, just because they could.

They never stopped to think whether they should and that sort of thing. Another thing we, we used to play with was, I don't know if you've heard of Oobleck, a mixture of cornstarch and water, which is makes a non Newtonian fluid. So if you hit it really hard, it, it becomes solid. If you, if you play with it very slowly, it, it moves like liquid. We used to play with that in like bathtubs. We did it in in one hotel bathtub and we actually broke the bathtub because we were hitting on wanging on it with a hammer and you know, just, it just forcibly unseeded the the tub and we went. Oops.

It kind of snuck out of there, yeah. So all kinds of shenanigans, everything just about except for ones and zeros. Yeah, it sounds like it. That kind of sounds like the slime that kids were making like 8 or 10 years ago. It was like a big thing. Totally into that. Yeah, mine too. We definitely replaced a carpet in my son's room because of that crap. Yeah, not great.

Yeah. What are all these boxes of Borax doing here? Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. Did So Linds, you had no idea about the that the popcorn stunt was. Well, yeah, what's funny is because I went up, I went and looked it up after and saw that fact, the production fact that you just mentioned. But I, I had no idea that was actual popcorn. And I was like, what? You know, sort of, you know, material are they using for this that's going to cause everyone to get cancer down the road.

I was like very compared to the staff for the actors. Well, they said that like, they, they coated it all with some like liquid to make it fire retardant because they were really worried about it somehow catching on fire. Which you see, I'm sure you know, some creative editing or whatever. But you see at the end, there's just all these extras like jumping into this, the mounds of popcorn and like shoving it in their faces. And I'm just like, Oh my God, are any of these people still alive? Who knows what was happening then? It was 1984, you know, Not a lot of hygiene standards on movie sets, I would imagine.

Yeah, yeah, Boomers, Gen. X, you know, drinking from from the the garden hose, all that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. Nobody knew where we were, Wendy. Nobody knew where we were. It's hard to believe. Go ahead, Linds. Well, then I was going to say it just led to like the best scene, which was like the the end credit scene when the song you know, everyone's going to rule the world comes out and you're just like, this is awesome. Everyone's like eating popcorn out of the air.

I would love to see, you know, sequel. It's obviously 40 years too late now. But like, where did Laszlo go? He said they were going to Wyoming because that that blonde woman had she, she said. Like a little vacation place in Wyoming. Or something, you know she was a prepper. Yes, she said. A survival place, that's what it was, yes, which is another, you know, 80s like thing of, you know, when everybody else gets annihilated by nuclear bombs. I'll be fine in Wyoming, but yeah, them driving from California to to Wyoming in the Winnebago, I'd I'd watch that movie, The road trip movie with Laszlo and yes, and the the woman whose name I don't even think we ever get her name.

What's her name? I'm not sure, maybe. Yeah, Cherry, Cherry. Yeah, there we go. Sounds right. Yeah, Yeah. And any, anything else, Wendy, what did we forget? Any, any parting thoughts that you wanted to to give us? I think we we dug into your lore with this, but is there anything that we glossed over? You can't think of anything?

Yeah, just that I'm, I'm just so very sad that there are so many good lines from this that I, I just can't come out and post or say because nobody will get them. So I, I'm really glad that we're doing this podcast and hopefully more people will want to watch the movie if they haven't seen it before. Yeah, there's a lot of. I wrote down a whole bunch of the quotes in my notes because, you know, like we said, it's just like a kind of A1 liner machine for a lot of it. I mean a lot of them are just Chris Knight talking to. People for example is under H for toy. Yes, when he's touring that the defense contractor, the guy says you are Chris Knight, aren't you? And he says, I hope so.

I'm wearing his underwear. I'm wearing his underwear. I, I, I do use that line when somebody asked me, are you Wendy Nathan? It's so good. They're just I, I don't know who the the joke writers were for this. It, it really has like the the 80s stand up comic feel to it where, you know, maybe they brought in, you know, like Howie Mandel or something for like 2 days to write 1 liners. I don't know but. Yeah, the one that I thought of was when the professor was like, I want to see more of you. And Chris was just like, I'll fine, I'll gain weight. Yeah, there was a mixture of the 80s stand up and the kind of surreal jokes that, you know, kind of came out with the Far side or, or with even earlier in the 70s Clebonne who who drew really bizarre cartoons of cats.

Yeah, there's a lot of very absurdist stuff in there with, you know, Chris is always wandering around in these T-shirts, like the I Love Toxic Waste T-shirt, which I definitely owned in, you know, about 1988. I wish I still had it, honestly. But and there's, there's so many other ones, one that says like surf Nicaragua, which, you know, so incongruous. But in all the graffiti in the, in the hallway in their dorm, which I kept trying to like freeze frame and read, but they never really give you a good head on shot. It's always like, you know, oblique, sort of. You can get a little bit of it.

But yeah, there's a there's a ton of little Easter eggs in there too. He's always wearing like Bunny slippers and goofy shit like that. There's a, there's a bunch of comic books lying around that I guess have some people, you know, of sort of identified the theme of some of the comic books that are sitting around in their room to some of the themes in the movie and things like that. So. It must have been so much fun dressing that set. And doing the. Costumes and everything. Especially Chris and Mitch's room and and Laszlo's lair, you know?

Yeah. Must have been a blast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this again, one of my favorites and I'm so glad we got to share this with you. Wendy. It's great to see you. And, you know, thank you so much for coming on. You were a big part of Decipher from the beginning, so it's great to great to have you here. Yeah, thank you. It's so great to hang out with you too again. All right. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for coming on.