hbo Max – Fancy Boys Club

Music/Movies, Pop Culture, Uncategorized

My Sincere Pitch for a New Muppets Movie

January 5, 2025January 6, 2025by rikimjadamsLeave a Comment

When the pandemic started in 2020, part of my escapism from the dread of the moment was going back and rewatching the entirety of the old Muppet Show. And it felt good, letting the nostalgia wash over me, but also it made me sad. As I continued watching more Muppet content, the movies, then the later TV shows, I felt like something got lost along the way, and it was the earnestness with which the Muppets and even the humans around them behaved. Even in moments of commentary or weirdo subversion, there was a genuineness that I felt fell away a bit. Recent years felt like there was more snark, more bite, more irony, even in how we as viewers engage with the Muppets. I was pleasantly surprised by the Electric Mayhem focused show with Lilly Singh and Tahj Mowry from a few years back, that felt like a love letter to music through the heartfelt lens of the Muppets. And it gave me hope that perhaps more Muppets could be coming. Then news came that a certain Warner Bros owned streaming service might be looking to off-load Sesame Street, and I didn’t just have hope, I had an idea, a movie pitch for how to reunite the Muppets and the folks of Sesame Street for the first time since the early 2000s.

I guess in order for this to happen Disney would have to buy the rights to Sesame Street to have them under the same umbrella as the Muppets. I’m not here to discuss the pros and cons of monopolistic IP hoarding and such. I’m here to talk about Muppets. So…

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Comedy, Pop Culture, television

So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way: Unearthing The Lost Episodes Of Friends

August 24, 2020by Matt DrufkeLeave a Comment

With HBO Max, your pop culture viewing options are a plentiful harvest. You can catch up on movies you’ve never seen before. You can watch all of The Sopranosand try and figure out what gabagool is. You can start to binge all of the Studio Ghibli movies and then get angry when your wife watches Spirited Away with you and doesn’t “understand what the big deal is.”

Or you can just watch a buttload of Friends.

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Advice, Comedy, television

Whoever Arranges Movies For HBO Max Needs To Be Fired (and possibly beaten up)…

July 14, 2020by Matt Drufke1 Comment

HBO has always lived by the slogan that they are “not tv”. They’re something more, something better, and for the most part, they’ve lived up to that by going above and beyond. They don’t just give us a little show about dragons, they gave us Game Of Thrones. They just didn’t give us a crime show, they gave us two of the best ever with The Wire and The Sopranos. They didn’t just give us a new Perry Mason, they gave us a Perry Mason that fuuuuuuucks. (Author’s note: my wife says I talk about this too much.)

Veep. Curb Your Enthusiasm. True Blood. Last year, HBO received 137 Emmys nominations, which was 20 higher than the next highest network (to show you dominance, NBC finished in third with 57). Anything anyone can do, they can do better… and then they do it.

When HBO launched HBO Max on May 27^th, everyone expected something special. For the most part, it’s pretty great. They’ve teamed up with Warner Brothers, New Line, DC Entertainment, Turner Movie Classics, Adult Swim, and others to give an amazing amount of content for it’s viewers. Considering we’re in a global pandemic, more content is a very, very good thing to most of us.

But they need to fire the person who arranged their movies. And they need to fire them today.

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