Welcome to Tales From the Rec Room – a podcast that uses nostalgia as a jumping-off point for a discussion on pop culture, context, rabbit holes, pop psychology and more! Movies, TV, music, video games – did you first consume it via physical media in a rec room? Then we’ll cover it.
The Butterfly Effect (2004) with Stephen Sajdak
Welcome to Season 3, where you can’t sleep at night, because everyone is screaming! We Hate Movies cohost, improviser and former Smash Mouth frontman impersonator Stephen Sajdak joins us to, for some reason, revisit the 2004 attempted Ashton Kutcher reinvention, The Butterfly Effect. We’d say Kutcher’s laughable attempt at a dramatic turn is the most offensive thing about this movie, but man, the mentally ill really get it, don’t they? In true TFTRR tradition, we go back to the best and the worst (no, seriously, the worst) of 2004, a time when you could still pretend mental health facilities were nightmare factories and make tasteless prison jokes while still claiming to be a serious movie. Plus, we discuss the Edgy Media Economy, this movie’s weird insistence on attachment to your childhood friends and high school sweethearts and, of course, the Bash Brothers.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Former high school wallflower Helen joins Bree, who really should have been more of a wallflower in high school, to discuss the 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. We discuss the pace of change in pop culture from the early to late 90s, how we see ourselves in Charlie, how to communicate deeply internalized feelings in a book versus a movie, how music shapes (or doesn’t shape) your adolescence and much more!
This episode deals with issues of childhood sexual abuse and substance abuse.
Yellowcard’s Ocean Avenue
Well-rounded multimedia producer and former music journalist Ryan Stephenson Price stops by to continue our journey through the early aughts and to go to where the podcast has never gone before: pop punk! Yellowcard’s violin gimmick didn’t win them a lot of fans with critics, but they were much loved by sort-of-angry teenagers everywhere – and then they sort of went away, and then came back, and then went away, but not really, and now they’re back again! We discuss the commercial rise of pop punk (and where it went), cynicism versus idealism versus the evil pragmatism of wanting to make money as a musician, the technical and theoretical challenge of being a drummer and the millennial obsession with nostalgia.
Harriet the Spy
Friend of the show Kelsey Goldman whip out their notebooks full of observations for their triumphant return to the mid-90s. In this fun and introspective episode, we revisit Nickelodeon’s first feature-length movie, Harriet the Spy. We discuss the evolution of the Kid Power genre, the movie’s meditations on the loneliness of childhood – which both of us experienced – Harriet’s iconic style and, of course, the career trajectory of the gone-too-soon Michelle Trachtenberg. There’s also a lot of ponderance on this movie’s portrayal of class, friend groups and parents that are neither amazing nor terrible at it!
