Emerald City Video

Employee Picks: Television!

Hello, and welcome to the Emerald City Video Podcast.

Today, we’re bringing in a very special episode of the show, featuring Employee Recommendations.

This is something we have done before, usually when one person wants to spotlight a particular movie. This time around, we’re instead doing it on behalf of a…well, we’ll call her a video store customer.

On her Instagram story the other day, an acquaintance of mine posted that she was looking for new shows to watch after a long day at work. She gave the following guidelines:

The show should be intelligent, but not too heavy. It cannot be a superhero show OR a CW show — so Legends of Tomorrow is out, even though that means her life will not be as full and rich as it otherwise might be. Being funny is a bonus but not a necessity, although she did say she preferred a feel good show, and does not want to cry every episode. She also said nothing too artsy.

I don’t want to name this person, since the episode is being done without letting her know, but she also told me once that she is not SUPER film literate. Between that and the fact that I do not know her well, I figure I will just assume that she hasn’t seen anything we’re going to recommend, and that will give us the opportunity to talk a little bit about the things that make the shows special.

She did provide a little more guidance, in the form of a list of shows she likes: Shameless, The Haunting of Hill House, The IT Crowd, Sabrina — which I take to be the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, since it’s new, although obviously the ‘90s version is a lot more “feel good” — Friends, and Outlander.

That gives us a pretty good range of emotion to work with, so let’s see what we come up with.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

A Conversation With 'Stan Against Evil' Creator Dana Gould

Not content to publish just one horror-themed episode on Halloween (check that one out here), Russ edited down an interview he recently did with Stan Against Evil creator Dana Gould to present to fans as a gift on this spookiest of holidays.

The show is an underrated gem -- a bizarre and brilliant half-hour horror comedy that airs at 10 p.m. on Wednesdays on IFC. And so...the first two episodes are going out tonight and we are here for it.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

New Release Wall #39: President Evil

To celebrate Halloween on the New Release Wall, Russ and Zach look at the brand new streaming release President Evil. It is a Halloween parody in which the killer wears a Donald Trump mask and targets minorities.

It is...pretty much exactly what you think.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

New Release Wall #38: Monster Party

It's almost Halloween, so Russ and Zach are checking out the brand new horror/thriller movie, Monster Party. 

While we are careful not to spoil any more than you would see in the trailer here ,we still encourage people to bookmark this page and see the movie first. It's really excellent, and both of us went in completely cold and that helped the experience.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

Scare-A-Con

Hey, remember how we're all from Syracuse?

This episode will break from our review format and instead feature an interview with JV Johnson, who oversees Upstate New York’s Scare-A-Con, which takes place this weekend at the Turning Stone Casino in Verona.

You can find details about the show, pricing, tickets, entertainment, and guests at ScareACon.com. Guests coming to this year’s show include A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Amanda Wyss, Paranormal Activity’s Katie Featherston, and Hollywood legend Malcolm McDowell.

Zach and I are going to be heading down to Scare A Con this weekend, and depending on availability, we will be talking to celebrities at the show, so stay tuned at the start of next week for that.

This week's spooky music provided by MusicNoteWorld, http://en.music-note.jp/

Employee Picks #6 - American: The Bill Hicks Story

Longtime listeners to the podcast will remember when the full cast talked about Richard Linklater's Dazed & Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!!, way back in August of 2016.

You can listen to that episode here.

Earlier today, Collider reported that Linklater has been tapped to write and direct a feature film based on the life of stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, a favorite of ours, and so Russ decided that this was as good a time as any to hop in the wayback machine to ye olden times of 2011 and see what Keith Olbermann had to say about Hicks at the New York premiere of the documentary film American: The Bill Hicks Story, which Russ and Zach attended.

You can see the video here.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

ECV Spinner Rack #1: DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Premiere

Hello, and welcome to the Emerald City Video podcast. I’m your host, Russ Burlingame, and if you listen to the show at all, you know me.

If you don’t listen to the show — and it just so happens that the episode where I give an explainer is your first episode to the show — then I’ll break it down for you.

Emerald City Video was, until April of 2009, a video rental store in Syracuse, New York. I used to manage the store for a while, and since this show started, nearly every voice you have heard on this show is someone who used to work at Emerald City at one time or another, as well.

This episode, I am introducing the ECV Spinner Rack, named for the spinning magazine racks that people used to be able to get comic books off of back when comics were sold anywhere other than comic book specialty stores. And, as you might guess, this segment, or this type of episode, will be dedicated to looking at comics and comic book adaptations on TV.

I am leaving the movies alone, since they are huge blockbusters and almost always get covered on the New Release Wall anyway.

When I am not podcasting about movies with people who used to work at a video store, my real, paying job is writing about comics and related media for ComicBook.com. Up to now I have kept a wall up between the two gigs, but as we near our hundredth episode, I am looking to roll out some new features and some new ideas for ECV.

More on that in the weeks and months to come.

For a long while, I had a podcast called Panel Discussions, in which I talked about comics and related media with people who, believe it or not, NEVER EVEN WORKED AT A VIDEO STORE. Crazy, I know.

I recently shuttered that podcast; it was just another thing costing me $15 a month to host, and I did not have the time to consistently update it. But since I still like talking about that stuff, and sometimes I like to talk about It in ways that are not conducive to how we write stories or what I am assigned to cover at work.

So here I am. And in keeping with things like the New Release Wall and Five for Five, I wanted to give this a veneer or the video store, creating a title for the feature that would resemble something you might actually find in a video store. So — The ECV Spinner Rack.

In the near future, one of the big changes we are going to be rolling out is that we are going to have other co-hosts who haven’t all worked for ECV in the past. When I do so, I will introduce them by asking them where their home video store was, when the last time was they were in a video store, and what their favorite video store memory is. That will give us all a point of commonality and community, even when they aren’t people who worked or rented at ECV.

Today’s guest is Michele Curran, the co-host of the Krypton Podcast and the Hashtag TV Geek Podcast. I met Michele through another show I host, Archie Digest: A Riverdale Podcast, and we have become friends in the couple of years that show has been running. She has appeared on Panel Discussions in the past, discussing last year’s “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover event with me.

Tonight will be another chance for Michele and I to talk about The CW’s shared DC Comics universe of shows, as we will be looking at DC’S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW. Legends, which debuted its fourth season tonight, centers on a ragtag team of misfits and C-list superheroes who travel through time fixing things, breaking them again, and then fixing their own mistakes. After an underwhelming first season — which I actually didn’t mind, and so you can see quotes from my review of the pilot used as examples on the show’s Wikipedia page — the show found its groove by embracing the weird, fun energy that the characters and its cast brought to the table naturally. 

Each season of Legends has been something of a soft reboot, and this year things are getting a bit…magical. At the end of season three, the Legends defeated Mallus, a demon who had been trapped in a time prison. In order to have their final showdown with the demon, they needed to release him from his prison, but doing so opened the door for other beings and creatures who now have to be rounded up and sent back to where they came from.

The team will be joined in the quest by John Constantine, played by Matt Ryan. Constantine is a demonologist and master of the mystic arts — or a petty dabbler, if you want to be really specific about it. Ryan’s version first appeared on a self-titled NBC series that ran for a single season before moving to The CW, where he has made occasional appearances on Arrow and Legends, as well as headlining an animated movie that was serialized and shown as short episodes on the web-based CW Seed network. The movie, along with about a half an hour of previously-unseen footage, is available now on Blu-ray and DVD.

As I have always endeavored to do with Archie Digest, this segment is intended to be released immediately after Legends airs its premiere on the East Coast. So — spoilers ahead, and don’t listen to us talk about the show until you have had a chance to see the episode. If you missed it, press pause now and wait until tomorrow, when you can either buy it on your Video On Demand service of choice or stream it on The CW’s website.

Without further ado, the first episode of ECV’s Spinner Rack.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

Employee Picks #5: Grosse Pointe Blank

In the latest episode of the Emerald City Video Podcast, Russ Burlingame and Zach D. Roberts take a look back at the 1997 black comedy Grosse Pointe Blank.

Not only is this an employee recommendation — one of both Russ’s and Zach’s favorite movies — but it is thematically appropriate, since this weekend, the Jamesville-DeWitt Class of 1998 had their 20-year reunion…

…which Russ was not able to make, since he has been traveling for work and basically oozing money out of every pore for weeks.

But he can get his ‘90s nostalgia on, by watching John Cusack get his ‘80s nostalgia on, while talking about Grosse Pointe Blank.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

Episode #24: Clear & Present Danger/Jack Ryan

In part three of our five-part look at the Jack Ryan movies and TV shows, Russ Burlingame and Zach Roberts take a look at Clear and Present Danger (1994) and the third and fourth episodes of Amazon's Jack Ryan TV series.

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.

New Release Wall #37 - Venom

You would think, based on reviews and the harping of comic book fans, that Russ Burlingame and Zach Roberts would not have been big fans of Venom. 

Well, listen in and find out...!

You can find us (and a number of other awesome podcasts) on the ACPN family of shows.

If you like what we're doing here, you can become a patron of the Emerald City Video Podcast, which comes with fun perks. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We also have Instagram and Vero accounts where we share images, photos, memes, and nonsense.

Be back for more by noon on the fifth day, and please -- always remember to rewind your videocassettes.