B is I'm supposed to tell you you're breaking in a new partner in on this?

Partner again?

Yeah, some cat he's on loan from Dope.

Real burnout on the ragged edge.

Oh, perfect.

Gone, gone.

Rog, meet your new partner.

I'm too old for In a world overflowing with movies, we need a hero.

Someone to separate the bad from the movie.

Watches all the movies from comedy to drama on the don't forget the action.

She'll watch until the end and then she'll give you her reaction.

Movie should know the movie should know.

Critical sequels remake some trivia and movie.

Should know the movie.

Hi everyone, I'm Em and welcome to verbal diorama, episode 279, lethal weapon.

This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't.

That's not too old for this sh.

Bugger.

Plum Fairy.

And as always, welcome to Verbal Diorama.

Whether you are a brand new listener to this podcast.

Welcome back regular returning listeners.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast.

I am, as always, so happy to have you here just generally, but also for the history and legacy of Lethal Weapon.

And a huge thank you to everyone who is a regular returning listener and have continued to listen to and support this podcast over the last almost six years now.

Thank you for your support.

It means so much.

Hopefully if you are a brand new listener, you may start to become a regular returning listener.

That's the goal.

I am just getting back into the swing of doing regular episodes again.

Last month, the month of November, I did a whole month of rerun episodes for a few reasons really.

Sometimes it's difficult for listeners to find older episodes because, I mean, this is episode 279.

There's a lot of older episodes out there.

Many people haven't listened to older episodes, but also wanted to take the opportunity to have a bit of an extended break.

So I had a couple of weeks off and the other couple of weeks I have used to work on December's episodes, so I'm now working three weeks in advance, which is great for me.

And hopefully regular listeners will not notice much of a difference other than the patrons get episodes even earlier than they did before.

I'm going to come back to the Patreon a bit later.

But this month is obviously December, it's Christmas season and the last episode was on Dungeons and Dragons, Honor Among Thieves.

And if you think it may not have been the most festive start, well, like I said in that episode.

Porine is a very Christmassy scent when it comes to Lethal Weapon.

Obviously it always tends to appear on the Is it a Christmas movie?

List Pretty perennially, alongside its slightly younger cousin, Die Hard.

Die Hard, as we know, is definitely a Christmas movie.

And if you want to listen to episode 235, you can find out more about that particular Christmas classic.

But there are several links between this movie and Die Hard.

And not just because that action movie set at Christmas.

Although that is the obvious one.

When I was thinking of movies to cover over the festive season, obviously Dungeons and Dragons was number one on the festive Christmas list.

But it just made sense to do this one just before Christmas.

Because what screams Christmas more than a buddy cop movie?

Here is the trailer for Lethal Weapon.

He's the criminal's worst nightmare.

A cop who enjoys the danger.

No guns, no jujitsu.

Just bring him down.

Do you really wanna jump?

Well, then that's fine with me.

Come on.

Wait.

What do you mean, wait a minute?

He was ready to retire.

Now he's gonna wish he had gone.

Raj, meet your new partner.

New pun, too old footage.

If these guys can just stand each other.

What you got in there, boy?

And Smith?

A lot of old timers carry those.

The bad guys don't stand your chance.

Don't kill anybody.

Don't kill anybody.

I'm too old for this.

Are you as good as you say you are?

Nobody can touch me.

Suppose we better register you as a Lethal Weapon.

You ever met anybody you didn't kill?

Well, I haven't killed you yet.

Martin Reeks and Roger Murtaugh are two LA cops who both served in Vietnam.

They hate to work with partners.

They have nothing in common and they've been assigned to work together.

Riggs is a widower with a death wish.

Murtagh is a devoted family man with a solid reputation.

As they investigate a suicide which turns out to be murder, they realize they're dealing with trained mercenaries running a lucrative drug smuggling network with routes to the war in Vietnam.

Let's run through the cast.

We have Mel Gibson as Martin Reeks, Danny Glover as Roger Murtagh, Gary Busey as Mr.

Joshua Mitchell Ryan as General Peter McAllister, Tom Atkins as Michael Hunsucker, Darlene Love as Trish Murtaugh, Tracy Wolf as Rhianne Murtagh and Mary Ellen Traynor as Stephanie Woods.

Lethal Weapon was written by Shane Black and directed by Richard Donner.

If we think back in history, the greatest double acts are often mismatched.

Think Lauren Hardy, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, French and Saunders, Bert and Ernie.

While comedy double acts have been a thing since late 19th century vaudeville, Abbott and Costello in the 1930s and here in the UK in the 60s and 70s era with the Two Ronnies, Morecombe and Wise, American double act saw a resurgence in the 70s with Saturday Night Live providing an outlet for comedians to appear in double act sketches which led to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi creating the Blues Brothers.

You might think buddy cop movies were born in the 80s, but the earliest was probably Akira Kurosawa's 1949 noir Stray Dogs, starring Toshiro Mifune as the newly promoted detective Murakami, who's paired up with veteran detective Saito, played by Takashi Shimura, to search Tokyo for his stolen Colt pistol.

It established the two detectives from different backgrounds and different personalities come together to work a case trope.

Buddy cop movies didn't need to be rooted in comedy either.

1967's in the Heat of the Night dealt with racial tensions in small town America and starred Sidney Poitier as a black police officer who then becomes a suspect in a murder investigation and Rod Steiger as the prejudiced white police chief who reluctantly teams up with him to clear his name.

The foundation of the modern buddy cop movie as well as the movie that made Eddie Murphy a star was 48 hours, when Nick Nolte plays the stern cop and Murphy as the convict he lets out of jail for 48 hours, hence the title, to help him catch his former partner.

The mismatched characters and mix of action and humor laid the foundations for Lethal Weapon to come along and perfect five years later.

What distinguishes Lethal Weapon is that it ultimately became the subversion of the movies it would eventually inspire the stereotype of the button down veteran and the world I'm partner they are forced to work with has been around for a while, but Shane Black's screenplay and the lead's performances prioritize substance over style and it goes remarkably deep for a buddy cop movie.

This is a movie that talks about depression, grief, suicidal thoughts and ptsd.

It's a mass market macho action movie that deals with trauma and not just any trauma, but male trauma as well as the power of found family.

Even if the dinners aren't great.

Bear in mind too, 1987 is also the year of Predator, the ultimate exercise in macho male man badassery.

Check out episode 267 for more on that.

But also RoboCop, the ultimate in satire masquerading as a sci fi action film as well as go back to Eddie Murphy.

Beverly Hills COP2 in 1987 was a great year for action movies, but the story of Lethal Weapon naturally starts with Shane Black, who would go on to become the highest paid writer in Hollywood twice, the first time for the Last Boy Scout for $1.75 million and then again for the Long Kiss Goodnight for $4 million.

He's featured on this podcast many times for his work on the Last kiss Goodnight, episode 88, the Monster Squad, episode 96, the Nice Guys, episode 52, Last Action Hero episode 107 and Predator episode 267.

Predator was the only one of those he didn't have a screenwriter credit on.

He did do uncredited script doctoring on that one though.

Lethal Weapon was his first action film script, which he wrote in six weeks in 1985 when he was 23 and fresh from graduating from UCLA.

It was during rewrites for Lethal Weapon that he got the small acting role in Predator whilst also co writing the Monster Squad with his friend Fred Decker.

The Monster Squad also came out in 1987.

Shane Black was inspired by Dirty Harry, where a violent character is the only one who can solve a specific problem alongside everyday police officers doing the job by the book.

Black claims that his initial 1985 draft of the script was significantly darker and different from the finished movie, but he also quite famously hated it enough to throw it in the bin before fishing it back out again.

It was 140 pages long with a different plot, different characters and larger action sequences.

A chase scene with helicopters and a trailer truck full of cocaine exploding over the Hollywood Hills with cocaine snowing over the Hollywood sign was part of the script's ending.

This draft was sent to various studios, being rejected by all except for Warner Brothers executive Mark Canton and producer Joel Silver, who loved the idea, paid Black $250,000 and together with Black they rewrote his first draft into a second draft.

Script dated 6 January 1986, which was 106 pages included Sergeant Martin Riggs and Detective Roger Murtagh, but stated Murtagh's age as 40 and also includes a reference to a sequel called Body Count, which was a working title for the sequel.

Writer Jeffrey Bohm also did uncredited rewrites on the script to inject more humor and tone down the dark sequences.

Lethal Weapon takes place at Christmas time, as do several of Black's other films including the Long Kiss Goodnight, the Last Boy Scout and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Black would say in an interview with Den of Geek quote, christmas is fun, it's unifying, and all your characters are involved in this event that stays within the larger story.

It grounds everything at Christmas.

Lonely people are lonelier.

Seeing friends and families go by, people take stock of where their lives are at Christmas.

It just provides a backdrop against which different things can play out, but with one unifying global heading.

I've always liked it, especially in thrillers.

For some reason.

It's a touch of magic, unquote.

And while it seems like Richard Donner was born to direct a movie like this, as well as its multiple sequels, there was a time when Leonard Nimoy was considered for the directorial gig.

But he was working on Three Men and a Baby at the time, which wasn't a terrible choice for him considering it was the number one film of 1987 in the US but back to Richard Donner because he was a skilled, experienced set of hands for the movie.

He'd made us believe a man could fly.

And he loved the script for Lethal Weapon and knew who he wanted for Riggs.

This upstart Australian actor Mel Gibson, who'd been in three Mad Max films.

He'd played Max Rockatansky, a police officer turned vigilante, and both Donna and casting director Marion Doherty thought he would be perfect as the brilliant but darkly troubled Martin Riggs.

He considered other actors, most interestingly Bruce Willis, who was up for this role as Gibson was being considered for Die Hard.

Michael Biehn as well, Pierce Brosnan, Patrick Swayze, Michael Douglas, Jeff Goldblum and Kurt Russell were all considered, but none shone like Gibson did.

The original script never specified either character's race at all, and casting director Marion Doherty suggested Danny Glover for Roger Murtaugh.

After seeing the Color Purple and the Two Men, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, who'd never met, were flown from Sydney and Chicago respectively, to Los Angeles to read through the script.

Donner would describe that initial two hour meeting as magical and total dynamite.

Both men felt the chemistry and found Riggs and Murtaugh throughout that session.

By the early spring of 1986, both actors had signed onto the movie.

After taking planes home to pac, Gibson and Glover returned to Los Angeles and started a rigorous two month physical training and preparation program supervised by stunt coordinator Bobby bass, a former U.S.

army Special Forces instructor and judo champion, which included physical conditioning, weights, workouts, and weapons handling and safety.

Both actors spent time in the field working with LAPD officers and technical advisors from the lapd, as well as the LA County Sheriff's Office, who were on hand to ensure authenticity during filming.

In the meantime, Gary Busey asked to read for the part of Mr.

Joshua, having had to not interview her roles previously.

Busey was a well known star since his Academy Award nominated role in the Buddy Holly Story, but he was currently in a bit of a career slump and hadn't tried out for a movie in years.

He attributed his comeback to Lethal Weapon.

According to his biography on the True Hollywood Story.

The producers wanted a big intimidated character who could be a credible opponent for the intimidating Gibson, so they hired him to play Joshua.

Gibson and Busey trained in Capoeira with technical advisor Cedric Adams.

Jailhouse Rock, which isn't just an Elvis song and movie, it's a fighting style that's something that I've learned for this episode.

So they trained with Jailhouse Rock with Dennis Newson and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with Rory and Gracie, who six years later would co found the ufc.

They trained in between filming for four hours a day for six days a week.

It came in handy when filming the climactic hand to hand fight between Riggs and Joshua.

Filming took place over four nights from dusk till dawn and the final product lasted just a few minutes.

Both men were continually soaked in water from a burst fire hydrant over the four nights worth of filming lit by Ritter's lights emulating the helicopter on a crane.

The idea being to show martial arts never before seen on screen.

And Lethal Weapon was shot in and around Los Angeles.

Locations included Lake Mirage, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Inglewood and West Hollywood.

And lighting.

The picture covered every combination of day and night interiors and exteriors with the more difficult action sequences shot at night.

Director of photography on Lethal Weapon was Stephen Goldblatt and he wanted to film in his new hometown of Los Angeles.

Working closely with both Richard Donner and Stephen Goldblatt was production designer J.

Michael Riva, who won an Academy Award for Ordinary People and an Oscar nomination for the Color Purple.

In the very first scene of the movie, a young woman who has just gone on a bit of a drug binge walks out onto her balcony and jumps to her death from her 30th floor apartment.

And this was actually a pivotal scene for the movie and used a Matthews camera mode on a dolly to capture her dizzying perspective from 300ft above the ground.

Three Arri cameras were mounted on a rig that slid down the side of the building to show the woman's view of Long beach and the surrounding buildings as she jumps the 30 floors to her death.

And this fall was filmed on the studio backlot.

But how did they get a shot of someone falling from above over a street and a car below, because surely that's just an incredibly unsafe fall for any stunt person.

And how they did it was they had a canvas painting depicting the impact point stretched over an airbag below.

And the painting is a perfect match for the street below, including the car that's parked there.

And so when you see her falling towards this street view, it's actually a painting above an airbag.

And the shot cuts away just before the impact, and then you see the car's interior imploding.

Providing the amazing falling stunts and related rigs was Dar Robinson.

He was a pioneer in the stunt industry and he revolutionized how stunts were performed.

He invented the decelerator, a device that allowed stunt performers to fall from great heights without the use of airbags or other visible safety equipment.

He also pioneered the use of an early version of the wire flying technique, which allowed stunt performers to be suspended on thin wires.

This earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records on multiple occasions.

And some of his most notable achievements include the highest free fall from a helicopter without a parachute, which was 311ft in the film's stick in 1985.

The highest jump from a building, a 220 foot leap from the Toronto CN Tower in the film High Point in 1979.

The highest fall from a moving vehicle, a 120 foot drop from a motorcycle in the film Sharkey's machine in 1981.

Despite histones always being well planned and never breaking a bone in his 13 year Hollywood career, Robinson tragically died while filming Million Dollar Mystery, the movie he made right after lethal weapon on 21 November 1986.

He was performing a routine high speed motorcycle run when he rode his stunt motorcycle past the breaking point of a turn and straight off a cliff to his death.

He was just 39 years old and Lethal Weapon is dedicated to his memory.

Speaking of lethal weapons, it's time for the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode.

And if you don't know what that is, it's where I try and link the movie that I'm featuring with Keanu Reeves for no reason other than he is the best of men.

And you could say that Keanu Reeves as John Wick was a bit of a lethal weapon in that he could make anything a weapon, including the obvious, like a gun and a knife.

But he also used his car, a horse and even a pencil with deadly accuracy and resourcefulness.

And that is the easiest way I can link Keanu to Lethal Weapon and If you were wondering whether or not this was a Christmas movie, this thing literally opens with Jingle Bell Rock.

But I digress.

Editor Stuart Baird needed a temporary score for the movie, so he used the music from the 1985 BBC TV series Edge of Darkness.

Edge of Darkness had been composed by Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton, and the 2010 movie version of Edge of Darkness would coincidentally also go on to star Mel Gibson.

But after using Caiman's Edge of Darkness score, it made total sense to bring Caiman in to score Lethal Weapon and also bring in Eric Clapton for Rix's guitar theme.

The sax, which does kind of make it often sound like a certain type of movie just for grown ups, is part of Murtagh's theme, which is played by David Sanborn.

There were alternate opening and endings filmed for Lethal Weapon and they can be found on the dvd.

The alternate opening sees Martin Riggs drinking alone in a bar where he is accosted by a couple of thugs who attack him for money but are easily subdued by Riggs.

Director Richard Donner felt the film should open with a brighter look of Riggs and replace the bar scene with the scene in which Riggs awakens in his trailer.

The alternate ending features Riggs telling Murtagh not to retire.

An extended director's cut version was later released on dvd, which is the version I have by the way.

The director's cut is seven minutes longer and features additional scenes.

One scene depicts Riggs dispatching a sniper who's been firing at children in a playground, which is actually an extremely shocking and violent scene, and especially pertinent at the moment considering school shootings are so commonplace in the us.

In another scene, Reeks picks up a sex worker in his car, but instead of arranging to have sex with her, he pays her to watch TV with him.

And these scenes don't really add much to the movie except to highlight Riggs mental state.

So I understand why they were cut, but I'd be surprised if the school shooting scene was ever reinstated.

It's an incredibly dark scene, but it also highlights just how gung ho Riggs is.

He has no regards for his personal safety.

He just marches up through the playground and shoots this gunman.

Lethal Weapon was released on 6th March 1987 domestically in the US where it jumped straight to number one at the box office, beating A Nightmare on Elm street, three Dream warriors into third and Platoon into second.

Platoon had been out for 12 weeks at that point and was still riding high in the charts.

Lethal Weapon would stay at number one for three weeks before being knocked off by Blind Date and not the UK dating show hosted by Cilla Black.

That is a very UK reference that only UK millennials and older will get.

Lethal Weapon would stay in the US top 10 for 13 weeks and on its modest $15 million budget, it would gross $65.2 million domestically in the US and $55 million internationally, for a total worldwide gross of $120.2 million.

It would become the eighth highest grossing movie of 1987 in the US and it's safe to say the success of Lethal Weapon really came out of nowhere on Rotten Tomatoes.

It also has a score of 80%, with the website's consensus reading the most successful installment in a phenomenally successful franchise, Lethal Weapon helped redefine action movies for the 1980s and 1990s.

It was even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing, losing to the Last Emperor.

Now, of course, Lethal Weapon did have several sequels.

Lethal Weapon 2 in 1989, Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992 and Lethal Weapon 4 in 1998.

The long mooted Lethal Weapon 5 was originally conceived in 2007, but with the passing of Richard Donner, who directed all of the films in the series the Spa, Mel Gibson confirmed in November 2021 he was in talks to star and direct lethal weapon 5, wanting to use the movie to pay tribute to Richard Donner.

In September 2024, Gibson mentioned at a fan convention that the movie was written but was being held up by Hollywood red tape.

So who knows what will happen to Lethal Weapon 5 in the future.

The TV series Lethal Weapon aired from 2016 to 2019 with three seasons on Fox, with original star Clayne Crawford replaced for the third season by Seann William Scott.

Due to Crawford's alleged bad behavior and hostility on set, Roger Murtaugh was played by Damon Wayans, and in the series they do actually kill off Marty Riggs, which is something Lethal Weapon 2 never did.

I'll come back to an episode on Lethal Weapon 2 at some point in the future.

In 2011, Warner Bros.

Announced it would reboot the Lethal Weapon franchise without Gibson and Glover.

The new franchise was set to feature the same characters with a brand new cast.

Will Beale was hired to write a script, but that reboot was eventually canceled and the TV series debuted in 2016 instead.

It's safe to say that Lethal Weapon changed the formula for not only buddy cop movies but also action movies in the 80s and 90s.

And all of that is really down to three men and one woman, the three men being Richard Donner Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, and the one woman being Marion Doherty, the casting director who found the chemistry that was needed for the characters of Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh.

Casting directors are not often given the credit they deserve.

However, I feel like in this case all credit for those casting choices to Marion Doherty for creating one of the ultimate partnerships in action cinema.

And it's really tough to talk about this movie without having to mention Mel Gibson, because the Mel Gibson of today is extremely problematic and an often hateful individual who has openly expressed his antisemitic and misogynistic views.

But in Martin Riggs, Gibson helped to create one of the all time great loose canon fictional cops.

The Riggs we meet in Lethal Weapon is dark and unhinged, but as the series progresses, he becomes more of a comedian.

His scene of his trailer watching cartoons while sobbing and holding a gun in his mouth.

At the beginning of the movie, we know that his wife has passed away, but we never find out the backstory.

And perhaps because it's actually superfluous, the Riggs in this movie is happy to die and happy to take risks to get that job done.

He doesn't fear the possibility of death, and basically at the point where we find him, he feels like he has nothing to live for.

And that is a complete contrast to Roger Murtagh, the complete opposite of Riggs.

He is a 50 year old, charming, loving father and husband with plenty to live for.

And at the end of the day, all he wants to do is get home.

Like Riggs, he is a Vietnam vet, but the experience affected him differently.

And the antagonists in Lethal Weapon are also Vietnam vets, as well as former CIA officers, secret black ops veterans and mercenaries who continue to import heroin from Asia.

However, like Riggs, Murtagh turns into a cold blooded murderer when his family is endangered.

The fact he's black and Riggs is white is never mentioned, but there is a clear undercurrent of the racism experienced by black people in America, particularly in the scene where a group of black children ask Murtaugh if police officers shoot black people.

And that's another one in this movie that hits differently in the 2000s, especially when we know that yes, police officers do indeed shoot black people just for being black.

Now, while this movie does hold up remarkably well to a 2024 lens, there are a couple of slightly dodgy ethnic and gay slurs in the movie.

But the mixed race buddy scenario opened the door for the film and the sequels to display social conscience explored through Murtaugh's family dynamic, beginning with a Free South Africa sticker on the family fridge.

This is of course alluding to apartheid at the time in South Africa, and it leads to the villains of the sequel being South Africans.

And as I mentioned, Lethal Weapon 2 is definitely a movie for a future episode.

But also the sequels do go more comedic, which makes the original stand out for daring to highlight some really important issues, issues that other 80s hero or buddy cop movies just wouldn't touch.

There's a reason why Lethal Weapon endures, and there's a reason why Lethal Weapon 5 is still being talked about, and that is the chemistry between Gibson and Glover.

It just works.

And I think everyone is interested to see what these guys are up to in the 2020s, but with Glover playing a 50 year old, the character would be 90 now.

And the only thing that doesn't work in this original Lethal Weapon movie is the movie trying to tell me that Roger Murtagh is 50 because the man looks in his 30s.

Danny Glover was actually 40 during filming, Mel Gibson was 31.

But this movie trying to tell me that Roger Murtagh is 50.

I'm sorry, but Batman is not 50.

My only sense of the imagination is that man 50.

But I just wanted as well to give a little bit of a shout out to Richard Donner because he really was one of Hollywood's greatest veteran filmmakers, and at the time he had an odd filmography because he directed the Omen, Superman, the Movie, the Goonies and Lady Hawk before helming all four Lethal Weapon films.

And he would go on to make Scrooge right after Lethal Weapon.

But despite his lack of expertise in action movies, Lethal Weapon would prove to be incredibly successful because it masters every small detail and is a triumph in stunt work, editing, pacing, casting and also cinematography as well.

Los Angeles looks grimy when it needs to look grimy, but it also looks beautiful when it needs to look beautiful.

Lethal Weapon is a well written, thrilling action movie that's remembered more for its franchise as a comedy than anything else.

But what makes this movie even more intriguing is that it can be examined on a level typically reserved for serious dramas, not action movies.

Shane Black gives Martin Riggs character psychological conditions and trauma and lets us, the audience, go through those intimate encounters with him so that we can sympathize with him, even though we are unquestionably on Roger Murtagh's side as the genuinely good, honest family man cop.

It's hard to believe that anyone could have a crisis of confidence writing this movie and almost chucking it in the Bin, but Shane Black took the genre tropes and filled it with fresh humor, action, set pieces and overhauled the buddy cop movie for a new generation.

Christmas might not be complete until you see Hans Gruber fall from Nakatomi Plaza, but I think we can also say it's incomplete without Martin riggs smacking down Mr.

Joshua covered in water and mud, surrounded by cops, just letting it happen.

Now that's what I call the meaning of Christmas.

Someone call Mariah Carey to write a song about it.

Thank you for listening.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Lethal Weapon.

And as always, thank you for your continued support of this podcast.

And if you want to get involved and help this podcast grow, you can.

You could leave a rating or review wherever you found this podcast.

You could tell your friends and family about this podcast or about this episode, or you can find like and share posts on social media.

You can find me and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram threads, Blue sky and letterboxd.

I am@VerbalDiorama and if you like this episode on Lethal Weapon, you might also like I'm just going to suggest episode 235 on Die Hard because this is a Christmas movie that's a Christmas movie.

If you want a good pair of Christmas movies to watch over the festive period, you can do no wrong with a double of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

So the next episode.

Sort of a double episode really, Because I need to know, have you been naughty or nice this year?

And I guess there's only one way to find out which of Santa's lists you're on and which verbal diorama episode you will be receiving this year.

Will it be the naughtiest episode, which is how the Grinch Stole Christmas, the live action comedy from 2000 starring Jim Carrey about a mean green other from outside Whoville?

Or will it be the nicelst episode, Elf, the charming movie about another buddy, this time not a cop, but Buddy the Elf raised by elves at the North Pole who just wants to find his father and reunite with him?

Or have you been a bit of both and so maybe you'll get a bit of both?

I guess you'll find out just before Christmas when both episodes come out.

So join me next episode whichever one you may receive on the history and legacy of how the Grinch Stole Christmas and the history and legacy of Elf.

And as I always say, this podcast is free and it always will be free.

However, if you have some spare pennies.

I know not many people have spare pennies at the moment, especially at Christmas time.

But if you do and you love what I do and you want to help support what I do, then you can financially support this podcast if you wish.

There are a couple of ways you can do that.

You can go to verbaldiorama.com tips and give a one off tip.

Or you can go to verbaldiorama.compatreon and you can join the amazing patrons of this podcast.

They are Sade, Claudia, Simon, Laurel, Derek, Kat, Andy, Mike, Luke, Michael, Scott, Brendan, Lisa, Sam, Jack, Dave, Stuart, Nicholas, so, Kev, Pete, Heather, Danny, Ali, Stuart, Brett, Philip M, Michelle, Xenos, Sean, Rhino, Philip K, Adam, Elaine, Kyle.

And a huge welcome to the Patreon for brand new patron Aaron.

I am so delighted to have a new patron just before Christmas.

It's always exciting when new patrons join, but I feel like just before Christmas is just even more so exciting.

And I'm so very grateful for all of the patrons support.

Making a podcast is not free.

They help me fund things like software, subscriptions, hosting equipment, anything that this podcast might need to improve be better.

That all comes from the patrons and from the tips.

So thank you so much to everyone.

If you want to get in touch with me, then you can.

You can email verbaldiorama gmail.com.

you can say general hellos, you can give me feedback, or you can give me suggestions.

Or you can go to verbaldiorama.com and fill out the little contact form there.

You can also find my work@filmstories.co.uk too.

You can find issues of the magazine, I have a column in the magazine.

And you can also find articles online as well.

And finally.

Hey.

What the.

You just do?

Well, I controlled the jump.

You wanted him down.

He's down.

Hey, come here.

Come where?

Here with me.

Party's over.

What's going on?

Excuse me, buddy.

Get in here.

Hey.

Okay.

Nope.

You want to kill yourself?

Oh, Christ.

Shut up.

Yes or no?

You want to die?

Yes or no?

I got the job done.

What the hell do you want?

What do you want to hear, man?

Do you want to hear that sometimes I think about eating a bullet?

Well, I do.

I do.

I even got a special one for the occasion with a hollow point.

Look.

Make sure it blows the back of my goddamn head out.

Do the job right.

Every single day I wake up and I think of a reason not to do it.

Every single day.

And you know why I don't do it?

This is going to make you laugh.

You know why I don't do it?

The job.

Doing the job.

Now that's the reason you want to die?

I don't.

I'm not afraid of it.

I ain't afraid of it.

Yeah.

Take my gun.

Don't nibble on the barrel, pull the trigger.

Go ahead, pal.

Be my guest.

Go ahead, if you're serious.

You shouldn't tempt me, man.

Put it in your mouth.

Bullet might go through your ear and not kill you.

Yeah, under the chin.

Yeah.

Yeah, under the chin.

Ow.

You're not trying to draw a psychopention.

You really are crazy.

Bye.

Movies should know.

Movies should know.

Crinkle, Single Green B Trivia.