1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky. A few months ago, we put out a call for our listeners to tell us about your favorite guilty pleasures. We heard from a lot of people, including a few of you who were against this premise on principle, because you said no one should feel guilty about liking a work of pop culture, so long as it’s not offensive. But what fascinates me about the concept of guiltily pleasures – especially with sci-fi and fantasy – is that these genres began with lowbrow origins in pulp fiction and Saturday matinee serials. Over the years, creators have tried to elevate sci-fi and fantasy to critical acclaim and levels of respectability. And I think many of these “guilty pleasures” are really about the pure pleasure of enjoying something that is just really weird or fantastical. And we got submissions about all types of media, but we were particularly in movies because movies work so well as spectacles, and they can give you that hit over and over again. So, let’s begin with Corey Esser. He calls himself a, quote, connoisseur of bad movies. In fact, he says they’re guilty pleasures only in that he feels guilt in how much he loves to inflict them on his friends. It all started when he was a kid. COREY: My uncle is eight years older than I am. And he, you know, watched me as a kid. So, he would get the movies like, oh, don't tell your mom, we watched this. So, we'd watch like the Italian sword and sorcery kind of things like the Death Stalker that was like Conan but taken into the next level. So those kinds of things, you'll Beastmaster and, and that's kind of my, my niche. Was he the one who was he, the person who introduced you to the whole idea of the bad movies? COREY: I think unintentionally he did. I just because those are the kinds of movies that, you know, we, we would go and get, because we weren't supposed to watch him or we couldn't watch him when, you know, there were other adults around because nobody else would want to watch those. Um, I found out later on, and as I got a little older that, uh, my grandmother also had a little bit of that twisted sense of humor to her. I popped in unexpectedly one night and walked in and she was watching Pumpkin Head. Ha! COREY: And I had never seen her watch a scary movie before. And she kind of was like, what are you doing here? And sit down and grab some popcorn. We're going to watch the rest of the movie. So maybe it's just the genetic thing. 2 Years later, Corey was browsing through a video store. And he saw a movie that looked like hideous off-brand versions of The Muppets. It was called Meet the Feebles, and it’s about these puppet characters that put on a show while there’s a lot of backstage drama. Corey didn’t know at the time, but this was Peter Jackson’s second film and it got Peter Jackson a lot of attention in 1989 because it was really shocking. Or as Corey describes it: COREY: If the guys from South Park and the guys from Jim Henson studios got together and used a whole lot of illegal substances and then recorded their ideas because it's all there. It's just layers on layers of weird and they just don't hold back on anything. HEIDI: How dare you speak to me like that, you horrible spiteful rat! TREVOR: I’ve heard better singing from a mongoose with throat cancer. HEIDI: I don’t stand for this! It's funny. So, I'd actually never watched it before. I'd always heard of it. So, I started watching it. And at first, I was like, oh my God, this is brilliant. This is subversive. And after about half an hour, I couldn't take how horrible all the characters were, except for the super naive character, like love interest, everybody else was just like so horrible. COREY: Yeah. There, there are very few redeeming characters. Have people ever had that reaction when you showed it to people? COREY: Yeah, a lot of, a lot of people are like, well, if they focused on that part and it was like the love story of the new guy with the, you know, the sweet little hedgehog and they're like show more of him, but then they keep going back to, you know, these awful, you know, the, the weasel making snuff films in the basement or the, the, uh, the fly paparazzi that lives in the toilet tank, you know, things like that. And they're like, go away from that and let's get back to the fun part. The first scene that made me like, be like, oh shit, this is getting dark. Weirdly enough was the drug deal that happened on the golf course, because I think because it was played so straight, except they’re all like, giant puppets. MR. BIG: It's good stuff, boss. BLETCH: When can we expect delivery? CEDRIC: Meet Louie in the alleyway at 6. COREY: And I think that's what, what kind of sucks people in, because they'll see things like that. And I'm like, is there going to be like a serious subplot of this? Or is this just 3 something ridiculous? And then, you know, that just kind of goes away and they get into the, the surreal stuff again. So, when you show people Meet the Feebles, is there one scene that's often the deal breaker? COREY: Usually it's when they get up to the, uh, the basement snuff movie with the, uh, the cow and the cow sits on a cockroach. That's, they're doing like a bondage scene and accidentally kills the, this cockroach. TREVOR: Didn’t you realize you were sitting on its face? COW: It was a bit uncomfortable, but I thought it was my hemorrhoids. COREY: It's a completely ridiculous scene. And I can't imagine being in the room where they're pitching that or, or, you know, the writing team gone, all right. Here's what we're going to do today. Um, but a lot of times that's the one where they're like, nope, got to go. So how come the, you know, the things that bother everybody else about, about the movie, you know, that make them, like, they often can't even get through it. How come those affect you? COREY: I think it's because I like to look at where they come from and what they're doing with it, because you know, for the time it was made, it really kind of hit home a lot of issues. And you have the sub-plots of like the promiscuous rabbit host that ends up with, you know, the big disease and, you know, they leave it go on named or, they kind of tackle interracial relationships by having, uh, an elephant that had a baby with a chicken and it pushes envelopes and things like that. So, I kind of ties into those and say, you know, this was doing things that people appreciate when they see it on like South Park or, you know, they see something more modern doing, doing something that pushes the envelope. This was just, you know, 15 years earlier. That’s the other reason he loves Meet the Feebles. It was made by a good filmmaker, early in his career, who had nothing to lose. COREY: It kind of was the catalyst for some of the things that came later. So, um, a lot of the people that worked on Meet the Feebles carried through with Peter Jackson’s whole career. And it worked even for just that little nugget of trivia that you can watch through the credits and see, you know, some of the people that built puppets for this built the, the puppets and the feet and the prosthetics for Lord of the Rings, or they did affects work on King Kong. So, if people who went on to make Oscar-winning film began with Meet the Feebles, I wanted to figure out, what defines a guilty pleasure? I checked in with 4 Lou Hare because he hosts a podcast called Guilty Pleasures, and this is a question they talk about a lot on his show. LOU: I define a guilty pleasure in like the simplest term is a first of all, I guess I should qualify. I don't think guilt is associated. I don't feel bad for liking some of the movies that I like. I don't think anybody should, but it's the common place holder for what I call qualify as like a bacon cheeseburger type of a movie, you know, it's not good for you. You shouldn't eat it all the time. You shouldn't base your diet around it, but man, you just, you bite into one and it's incredibly satisfying. What I say on my podcast is a guilty pleasure is a movie that you love, despite what critic’s public opinion or even your own God-given sense might tell you.