Cooler Than Homework #012 – Horse Sense & MONTANA!

Nicole Sweeney 0:18
Hello and welcome to Cooler Than Homework, a Disney Channel Original Movie podcast. I’m Nicole Sweeney, and I was not really that into any animals as a kid. I had two cats though. Cats, cats are great.

Matthew Gaydos 0:32
I am Matthew Gaydos and when I was little I was super into white tigers for some reason.

Marines Alvarez 0:39
My name is Marines, and I wasn’t into animals either. We weren’t an animal family, but there was a period of time that I was super into Tweety Bird. And I had a Tweety Bird ring and Tweety Bird merchandise and shirts and a bunch of Tweety Bird stuff.

Nicole Sweeney 0:54
Okay, I went through that phase too, like I had like multiple like giant Tweety birds like, like when I was in fifth, sixth grade maybe. I had Tweety Bird comforter had all the– okay. Yes, yes, I changed my answer. It’s Tweety Bird.

Matthew Gaydos 1:08
It was Tazmanian devil, for me. That was the Looney Toon of choice was Taz.

Ceri Riley 1:12
I think mine was Taz, too. I think I had Taz like bed sheets at some point. And I’m Ceri Riley and I was really into dogs and also chinchillas growing up.

Nicole Sweeney 1:23
This week we are talking about the last DCOM of the ’90s on what is also our last episode of 2019, Horse Sense and now Mari is going to tell us what actually happened in this movie and whether it in any way resembles what Ceri guessed last time.

Marines Alvarez 1:40
I feel like Ceri’s big takeaway was that horse people can be of any gender and that is correct. That is probably the most correct that you have been on anyone guess. Horse people can be of any gender. This story though, in particular, is actually the story of how healthcare in the US is really broken and medical debt will ruin your life, so… that’s actually what we’re watching. Joey Lawrence plays Michael Woods and he is a spoiled 20 year old who lives with his rich parents in Beverly Hills. Michael is depicted as lazy and self-involved and not doing well in his college courses and mostly interested in his new also self involved girlfriend named Gina. Michael’s little cousin Tommy is coming for a visit from Montana. Tommy recently lost his father and looks up to Michael, especially since the two of them bonded years earlier at a family reunion. Michael isn’t very attentive when Tommy is in town though. He’s late to pick me up from the airport. He leaves him home with the housekeeper for long stretches of time, and he backs out of a promise to take Tommy to Disneyland in favor of meeting Gina’s dad at a horse race. Michael drops Tommy off at an indoor kiddie playground. After the races Michael runs to big Tommy back up again and ends up getting into a minor car accident. He hastily jots his information down for the other driver and leaves, only to find that Tommy called the housekeeper to save him from the Kiddie Zone. Tommy doesn’t rat Michael out to his parents, but once he’s back home, obviously Tommy’s mom finds out that Tommy did nothing while in LA. So Tommy’s mom then tattles to Michael’s parents and on top of all of that the police show up to Michael’s house because Michael wrote down bad information when he hit the other car. He lied his parents and said that it was a hit and run when actually the car accident with his fault, so his parents are pissed all around. As punishment, Michael’s parents sentence him to a month in Montana on the ranch. If Tommy or his mom complain about Michael at all, then he is not going to be allowed to go on a European vacation with Gina. On the ranch, Michael has a hard time acclimating and it’s all made worse by the fact that Tommy is exacting country revenge. It involves a lot of, like, early mornings, and shoveling manure and fence posts. It’s great. You know, a lot of nothing happens, but it’s all, I didn’t know, slightly creative on the nose country revenge. It’s great. It all comes to a head when Michael snaps and says very mean things to Tommy, about how the family reunion was like doesn’t mean they’re best friends. They yell at each other and feelings are hurt. But one of the ranch hands has a come to Jesus with Michael and reveals that Tommy and his mom are actually losing the ranch because of that medical debt. Michael feels really bad, and he realizes that he’s not self-centered anymore, and he is also better at ranch things and riding horses. So his, you know, turn around really comes into focus. He wants to help the ranch so he calls his dad, but his dad tells him that he’s already offered to help Tommy’s mom who won’t accept the money from his parents. So Michael heads back to LA after the month and goes to another race with Gina and her dad. But now he has horse feelings because he spent a month in Montana and right after the race– so Gina’s dad bought a racehorse and the horse kind of goes a little wild. And Michael is the one who calms the horse down, learning something– using something that he learned at the ranch, because now he’s a horse person. Michael realizes that, you know, he doesn’t really want to be back in LA, and he doesn’t want to go on this trip with Gina, so he cancels it. He has something more important to do. He ends up selling his Porsche. He cashes in his trust fund. I don’t know if you cash in a trust fund. I don’t know how trust funds work. I don’t have one. But… he gets money from his trudt fund. And he goes back to Montana. But Tommy’s mom won’t accept his money either. So they go through with this auction on the ranch. They’re going to sell out off all of their their possessions. Everyone is very sad. As Sammy and Michael are carrying out a trunk for the sale, they talk about what’s in the trunk, which is a bunch of Tommy’s old school work. And this makes Michael remember the last paper that he did for college, he ended up getting a D, but it was for his real estate development class. So he runs in to call his father to pull that paper and read him back the portion about land trusts. And inspired by this, he hops on his horse and gallops into town in order to talk to the bank. And he convinces the bank to put the land into trust because there is a herd of wild horses that live on the ranch. So Michael races back to the ranch and cancels the auction and reveals to everybody that the bank has agreed to let them stay on the land. They don’t own it anymore, but their debt is covered by the land trust, and everybody hugs and is happy. And then Michael and Tommy go on to work on a treehouse, which I never mentioned but holds a lot of emotional significance in this movie. The End.

Matthew Gaydos 7:05
During that, you came up with two better titles for this movie. One, horse feelings and two, country revenge.

Nicole Sweeney 7:12
Yes, truly Country Revenge is the actual title of this movie and I shall be referring to it as that henceforth. Okay, well, before we discuss all the things that happened in Country Revenge, Matt what is the cast of Country Revenge up to now?

Matthew Gaydos 7:34
Well, this is one of maybe the more dense “where are they now” segments just because we’ve got the Lawrence Brothers in this and they have done a lot of things throughout the years. So I’m going to start with some of the smaller players in this film and we’ll work up to those guys. First off, we have Susan Walters who plays Jules Biggs, who is Tommy’s mom and this I want to start with her just because she is still acting. She is not familiar to me, but she’s recently been on Teen Wolf and The Flash, so I’m guessing some of our audience will recognize her from one of those things. More recognizable to me was the actress playing Michael’s mom, who was Leann Hunley played Jacy Woods. She is still acting and I recognize her because she played Logan’s mom on Gilmore Girls and she also played the teacher that Pacey slept with on Dawson’s Creek.

Marines Alvarez 8:25
Oh, I knew she looked familiar. Yes.

Matthew Gaydos 8:31
Yeah, that was my big deal. I was like, she looks so familiar and I can’t place it and then like went to IMDb was like, oh, yep, that yep Dawson’s Creek. That’s what it was.

Nicole Sweeney 8:40
And that’s totally like right in that sweet spot of she was a significant enough character in both of those parts that like if you watch those shows, you know that face, but she’s just minor enough that she’s forgettable. You wouldn’t like hold on to that and recognize her immediately when you see her.

Matthew Gaydos 8:59
Those shows that have like hundreds of episodes, but she’s in like six of them on each show. Like a lot of other DCOM stars, she is currently on Days of our Lives. So, I’m sure, I don’t watch soap operas. I haven’t since, like, I was eight and my mom watched them and I kind of had to. So I don’t watch any currently, but I’m wondering if you just watch episodes of like Days of Our Lives and General Hospital now, is it just like DCOM reunion all the time?

Marines Alvarez 9:27
I hope so.

Matthew Gaydos 9:28
Next up, we have somebody a returning guest to the podcast, I will say we have Robin Thomas who plays Glen Woods, Michael’s dad, who you might remember as Kalabar from Halloweentown.

Nicole Sweeney 9:40
Oh! Hello, Kalabar.

Marines Alvarez 9:45
I don’t know. I have like Disney, like DICOM actor amnesia, because also I was like that man is so familiar. We just watched Halloweentown. It wasn’t that long ago

Nicole Sweeney 9:55
Right?

Marines Alvarez 9:55
And I completely just did not associate him with that but, yeah, yeah, that’s him.

Nicole Sweeney 10:01
But most importantly though, he’s Greg’s dad on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. That’s the really important thing that he is.

Matthew Gaydos 10:09
Yes and if you want to know other things he’s done besides that, I probably talked about them on the Halloweentown episode, so you can go back and listen to that one, but I will say, this is not the last time that we are going to be talking about Robin Thomas on this podcast. So there will be another segment where I say, go listen to those other two episodes where we talked about him before.

Marines Alvarez 10:30
Next time, it’s my promise to myself that I’m going to recognize that man. I’m gonna be, like, oh, there he is! Kalabar!

Matthew Gaydos 10:38
I think the odds are better that you’ll recognize him in the next thing we see him in. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Ceri Riley 10:44
I have such low hopes for myself because he did not look familiar to me at all in this movie. I was just like, ah, yes, more generic parents. I’m so sorry to that man.

Nicole Sweeney 10:56
Even though you have now seen both the DCOM with him and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Ceri Riley 11:02
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Yeah, I’ve never seen that man before in my life, etc, etc,

Matthew Gaydos 11:08
Next up in the cast, we have Jolie Jenkins, which is a great like superhero name. She is the actor who plays Gina, the rich girlfriend of Michael in this. She most recently is in a show on Netflix that I am not familiar with, but seems to be very popular called Alexa and Katie. Anyone familiar with this? No? No? Okay. I thought I was gonna be like the only one, but she seems to play the mom of either Alexa or Katie on that show, based purely on the fact that one of the young girls on that show looks very much like what I would imagined an actress they would cast to play the young version of her is if that made any sense, but yes, she also may be more recognizable to some of us played Nicki on One Day at a Time, a woman who is super into Schneider on that show and is like the mom of one of the other kids and there’s like this thing that they have a recurring romance where they make out from time to time.

Nicole Sweeney 12:10
I never watched One Day at a Time. I was like really embarrassed to admit that because I know that I should watch one day at a time everyone, all of my friends who watch it tell me to watch it and I have not done it. So

Matthew Gaydos 12:23
Yes, you would love it. I don’t know how this next man made it so far up my list of importance but I like him a lot because he’s in everything. But M.C. Gainey plays Twister, the ranch hand in this, the one who has the come to Jesus moment with Michael. He is in so many things, and he’s just one of those guys that you recognize. And you’re like, I know I’ve seen him somewhere. But he’s in things like Conair. He was a regular on Lost. He was on Riverdale. He was in the Mighty Ducks. He was on Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He’s a voice in Tangled. He’s the naked man who runs at the camera and the movie Sideways. He In a lot of things. He’s just one of those sort of like character actors who pops up in anything and everything and I don’t know if any of you have a like, specific M.C. Gainey role that jumps to mind where you recognize him from but for me it’s always either Conair or lost where I see his face.

Marines Alvarez 13:19
I did not recognize him, but I have 100% watch this man on any number of things that you just mentioned. But there– I did not have that sense of like, oh, wow, it’s that guy while I was watching but yeah, Lost. I probably watched him on Lost.

Nicole Sweeney 13:35
He was Papa Poutine on Riverdale, Ceri.

Ceri Riley 13:38
Okay, this is what I was trying to do. I was like, this is my only thing and it has to be in seasons one through three.

Nicole Sweeney 13:45
My my actual answer to that is Justified where he played Bo Crowder. Which I– yes, yes, it’s all, it’s all coming together for me now.

Matthew Gaydos 13:57
I feel like he’s just one of those guys who pops up in everything. His character ends up dying like sort of a sad death for a villain in a lot of things. That’s sort of like how I associate him is like he’s the villain that you kind of like in a lot of movies. Alright, so to the the two most important men and boy in this movie. We’ll start off with Joey Lawrence, who plays Michael Woods, who was definitely the most famous person in this movie at the time when it was coming out. I grew up knowing him mostly from the show Blossom and Brotherly Love, but he was also on a show called Gimme a Break when he was a wee little boy, which is kind of where he, lack of better word, got his break. And he went on to just kind of be famous. He’s just Joey Lawrence. He was the voice of Oliver in Oliver and Company when he was a kid. Since horse since he’s been on Dancing with the Stars. He played Billy Flynn in Chicago on Broadway. He starred in the series, Melissa and Joey with Melissa Joan Hart, and more recently has been on Hawaii Five-0 and Celebrity Big Brother like this, this guy, just he he just keeps himself very busy.

Ceri Riley 15:06
I’ve never seen him also. I think we talked about this last time. I did not recognize– I remember us talking about at the end of the last episode about like, ooh, the Lawrence Brothers. I don’t know. I missed them. I missed the cultural wave and instead lived under a rock.

Nicole Sweeney 15:23
I mostly know them from like, they did a number of Disney sort of things. And like that, to me is where they live most strongly in my brain. But also like, as Matt said, they were kind of all over the place like they were they were ubiquitous.

Matthew Gaydos 15:37
Yeah, and that’s why I feel like every sort of generation has their own Lawrence brother. Like, I feel like my sisters would have had a crush on Joey Lawrence. Whereas like, girls, my age had a crush on Matthew Lawrence. And then Andy Lawrence was like the young little scrappy little brother that we all had.

Nicole Sweeney 15:52
Matthew Lawrence is not in this movie, Ceri.

Matthew Gaydos 15:54
He is! Surprise!

Nicole Sweeney 15:55
Wait..

Marines Alvarez 15:56
Cameo!

Nicole Sweeney 15:57
Where is he in this movie?

Matthew Gaydos 15:58
He has a very small cameo, uh, when Joey Lawrence gets off the plane when he first lands in Montana, another cowboy man walks by him and looks down and judges him and that cowboy man was played by Matthew Lawrence.

Nicole Sweeney 16:12
Wow, I feel like a fool. Yes.

Matthew Gaydos 16:18
I mean, he has like five seconds of screen time.

Nicole Sweeney 16:20
You are correct. I am in the wave of girls, for whom it was Matthew Lawrence.

Marines Alvarez 16:26
I watched Joey Lawrence on Blossom. So it– it wasn’t only that he was like on Blossom. He was like a ’90s teen heartthrob. It was like the kind of thing that on that show whenever he walks into the scene like the sound– like the laugh track or the audience or whatever went “oooh!!” like that was the kind of character that he was.

Matthew Gaydos 16:45
He was like the reason Tiger Beat was invented.

Marines Alvarez 16:47
Correct. Like the hair and the like built body and all of that. It was like a very big thing. So yeah, I am just old enough, and older than all of you guys that I was on the like the very end of like Joey Lawrence.

Matthew Gaydos 17:04
We found the like the generational gap there. It’s like, oh, okay.

Ceri Riley 17:07
I’m like trying to look through pictures of all of them and I can’t tell which ones which as an adult. They’re all like blending together. I’m like trying to flip back and forth between this like child for photoshoot adult, I need to stop because my brain’s gonna break I’m not gonna think about this horse movie.

Nicole Sweeney 17:23
You’re gonna be driven to madness by images of the Lawrence Brothers.

Matthew Gaydos 17:28
Yeah, there’s also lots of examples where in different films or TV shows like, Andy Lawrence has played the young version of Joey Lawrence, because as children they look identical. And so there are things where you would see like Andy Lawrence and Joey Lawrence playing the same character in a thing and it’s like that’s not going to help Ceri’s confusion at all. But yes, they are– they seem like very like charming, sweet boys who all still really like each other which is nice for like celebrity families because based on most of their online presence is focused on promoting each other’s work, which is really nice.

Nicole Sweeney 18:04
Aw.

Matthew Gaydos 18:04
Yeah, and that seems very sweet and wholesome. And so yes, getting to our star of the film we have Andy or Andrew Lawrence. He’s been credited as both in different things, but he plays Tommy Biggs. He has continued acting and doing other appearances, not as much as Joey, but he has also been on episodes of Melissa and Joey and Hawaii Five-O because all the Lawrence Brothers have to appear on those things at some point. I think it’s in their family contract, but maybe more familiar to some of us, he was also the voice of TJ Detweiler on Recess.

Ceri Riley 18:42
I haven’t watched Recess either.

All 18:44
Oh no!

Marines Alvarez 18:45
Ceri that was your moment to be like “oh, that’s the one!”

Matthew Gaydos 18:47
I kind of thought that would be it. I thought Ceri would be like, “oh, I know Recess.”

Nicole Sweeney 18:52
That was like, I figured it out. I know how Ceri’s gonna recognize him.

Ceri Riley 18:56
I know. Well, I heard you all stop talking as though it was my turn to respond and have a revelatio. It was like, I’m so sorry. I do know of recess. I was three years old when it started coming out and I think I started watching cartoons like slightly afterwards. I remember Doug. I remember Hey, Arnold. And I guess I watched some things from the mid-90s. Like, my dad watched the monsters show that was scary and Ren and Stimpy.

Matthew Gaydos 19:27
Aahh!!! Real Monsters.

Marines Alvarez 19:27
Yeah.

Ceri Riley 19:28
Yeah, that one.

Nicole Sweeney 19:29
The monster show… Uh, recess was a Disney cartoon though. So that’s, so everything that Ceri just named is all Nickelodeon.

Matthew Gaydos 19:40
Yeah.

Nicole Sweeney 19:40
Recess was on Disney, on the Disney Channel, so…

Ceri Riley 19:43
This makes sense.

Nicole Sweeney 19:44
Yes.

Ceri Riley 19:44
I watched Nickelodeon, Cartoon Networ, Kids WB. No Disney.

Matthew Gaydos 19:48
But Recess, now on Disney+, so I guess if you’re out there watching these DCOMs with us…

Marines Alvarez 19:53
If you’re curious!

Nicole Sweeney 19:54
If you have a craving for a cartoon.

Matthew Gaydos 19:56
But he recently was on the show that I keep referencing that everyone, if you really want to know where some of these people are, you should go subscribe to Christie Carlson Romano’s YouTube channel because she does a show called Throwback Kitchen, where she has other DCOM stars and other child stars on to like make food loosely associated with something they were in at some point. And Andy Lawrence was on a recent episode and they talk a little bit about Horse Sense and just their Disney experiences. And I wanted to bring up sort of this last fact that didn’t really fit in with either brothers specifically, but there’s a sort of like musical trend amongst the Lawrence Brothers that is an interesting one to me because Joey Lawrence had some, I will say, experiments with music in the ’90s. He put out albums in like ’93 and ’97 and from listening to them, it sounds like he got stuck in the worst spot right between New Kids on the Block and like N’Sync/Backstreet Boys and he wasn’t sure which direction to go with his music and so just landed on not great pop music. That being said, Andy Lawrence makes amazing music. And that’s not– I’m not being sarcastic in any way. Like in looking this up, I found his SoundCloud where eight days ago he released a new song called Moon Dust. And he plays like really, really good sort of like coffee shop folk and he has a really good voice and it served as like the background to my research for this episode was like his SoundCloud page, so please go check that out if you enjoy that sort of music. I think it’s just like Andy Lawrence Music on SoundCloud, but he is really good. And like in that one of those surprising you expect a child actor to not make good music kind of things, but he’s actually really good.

Nicole Sweeney 21:49
You expect Joey Lawrence and are surprised by Andy Lawrence?

Matthew Gaydos 21:54
Yeah, like yes, don’t you can just skip all the Joey Lawrence music probably and just get right to Andy Lawrence. But they did collaborate recently trying to get some of that like Hanson Brother heat. In 2017 they formed a band called Still Three and released a song that is from a different era. It was released in 2017, but it sounds like like 1994 Boys II Men jams, and it’s not great. And so I’m– I’m not gonna blame Andy for that one because his music lives that he’s great at everything. So I’m gonna blame one of the other ones is for writing and producing that song. I’m not sure who. Maybe we can throw Matthew under the bus. He’s not doing anything else. So one of them is to blame, I think for the Still Three poppy song so don’t go listen to that. Only listen to Andy Lawrence’s music. I, uh… that is my time. Check out my SoundCloud slash Andy Lawrence’s SoundCloud, yeah.

Ceri Riley 22:58
Patreon bonus perk, Matthew Gaydos reviews every song on Andy Lawrence’s SoundCloud.

Nicole Sweeney 23:03
Oh my god. Wow.

Matthew Gaydos 23:06
Spoiler alert: all great.

Nicole Sweeney 23:08
I love that that sounds like… no well, it’s a monthly perk and like once a month Matthew Gaydos listens to it and reviews an Andy Lawrence song.

Ceri Riley 23:19
And does a cover of that Andy Lawrence song.

Matthew Gaydos 23:22
I’m okay with all of this.

Marines Alvarez 23:24
More than a review., I just want the emotional response to these songs like I just want you to be in your feelings as you listen to…

Matthew Gaydos Reacts, yeah, yeah. It’s not a review, it’s Matthew Gaydos reacts.

Matthew Gaydos 23:38
I mean that– I do want the audience and you my fellow podcast host to go listen to these songs because they are surprisingly enjoyable and I think like, I don’t know, that’s just not at all what I expected when I found out that he did music, so I think everyone should be able to have that pleasant surprise moment for themselves.

Nicole Sweeney 24:02
So now it’s time to talk about Horse Sense slash Country Revenge. First thing’s first, nostalgia check: do you remember watching this movie?

Matthew Gaydos 24:11
Nope.

Marines Alvarez 24:12
I thought that my memories would be more hazy but once the movie got started there were a couple things that stood out to me so I definitely did watch this.

Nicole Sweeney 24:20
While this is technically a yes or no question I feel like there’s this like sliding scale gray zone in between of like, I have this feeling that I saw it but I remember nothing about it. And this movie is in that gray zone for me but it is more towards the no side of like I really truly remember nothing about it except this like very vague sense of I think I saw this.

Ceri Riley 24:43
Absolutely not.

Nicole Sweeney 24:48
Did you enjoy this movie?

Matthew Gaydos 24:50
It sounded to me like Ceri did not based on that very emphatic “absolutely not.”

Nicole Sweeney 24:56
Right. There was a there was an intensity to her…

Ceri Riley 25:00
I didn’t hate it. It just like blends in with– I looked at this list of DCOMs that I supposedly watch… fake news. And I slotted it in as my current eighth place between Under Wraps and the Thirteenth Year. Better than You Lucky Dog. I just was kind of meh about it. I don’t particularly care about horses. Tommy was great. Like he was a plucky little kid who just wanted to be kind to horses, which is great. But yeah, otherwise I just, I felt generally meh towards it. I didn’t find a lot of it funny. I didn’t find a lot of it heartfelt. Yeah, shrug?

Matthew Gaydos 25:37
Yeah, I think for me, it feels like somewhat similar. Like it kind of washed over me. And at times, I forgot it was still happening to me. Like I was sitting there thinking that like, how is this still going? Like I know this plot, like I can predict everything that’s going to happen and yet I still have 40 minutes left of this movie.

Nicole Sweeney 25:55
It felt like there were a lot of turns like but most of them didn’t matter.

Ceri Riley 26:00
Yeah, I didn’t expect him to hate the treehouse and then he started tearing that apart. I was like, I didn’t expect that.

Matthew Gaydos 26:06
Yeah, because they set it up pretty well, like early on, you’re like, oh, obviously Michael is going to rebuild that treehouse for him as like, sweet gift, like, that’ll be his turning moment, which we do get. But I did enjoy that there was the twist of him hating it.

Marines Alvarez 26:19
I think there’s something in my brain that doesn’t know how to connect a DCOM with like an adult. I know that like Tommy’s kind of the main character, but kind of because the arc really belongs to Michael. And it’s like his redemption or whatever, and so you’re watching this 20 year old in a DCOM and hasn’t happened to us, I don’t think since You Lucky Dog, which was also kind of a mess. So it’s always a little like weird to be watching the arc of an older character within the framework of a DCOM because it definitely hit a lot of the notes that you would expect, at least in terms of like city boy in the country and he’s so into himself, but then he gets better. It didn’t do a few things like the treehouse where I was like, okay, that’s not exactly what I expected, but for the most part, it was just like, I don’t know, sort of generic. It was fine. I didn’t– I didn’t hate it as much as some of the ones that are on the bottom of my list. But yeah, it definitely will blend into the rest. The only thing that I think will stand out about this is the fact that it had the Lawrence Brothers in it.

Nicole Sweeney 27:25
Yes, yes, this will be the Lawrence brothers horse movie is– that will be all that I remember about it. That will like stick with me as a fact, but beyond that, I won’t remember much else. It’s also like a middling entry in my list. And I think that’s a really good point too about watching this, like 20 year old have the the DCOM arc. I think it’s clear that this movie is what it is because it’s a Lawrence brothers DCOM but like, that character really should have been 16. Like that, Michael should have if– if Michael had been a 16 year old I feel like– ’cause he has to be enough to drive in order for the rest of the movie to work. But if you made that character 16… It was really difficult for me to watch this 20 year old treat a child like shit. I was like, I don’t know, like, I just I can’t I like I’m not I’m not into this character. He is like, he kind of sucks. And I like don’t really care about his redemption journey. Like, I don’t know, you’re– a child whose dad just died really looks up to you, like suck it up for four fucking days, dude. I don’t know. Like the whole beginning of the movie was just so annoying to me. I did thoroughly enjoy Tommy’s like country revenge or whatever, because like fuck that guy. He sucked.

Ceri Riley 28:51
The one thing that I wish: I loved Arlene as a character and the fact that she became best friends with Tommy even though he was stuck in the house because Michael wasbeing a jerk. I could have watched a whole movie of them just going to adventures or if she had gone to Montana, and like, decided to stay– I don’t know. That’s all. More Arlene.. She was interesting. Michael is annoying.

Matthew Gaydos 29:12
I think also, you brought up the fact that he should have been a teenager. If If you know if only they had a teenaged Lawrence that they could have cast instead of Joey Lawrence. Oh, wait, they did. His name is Matthew.

Nicole Sweeney 29:28
True.

Matthew Gaydos 29:28
Like he was still a little bit old because like, I think him and Joey are like really close in age and then Andy is the much younger one, but like he could have more convincingly played like a 16/17 year old at the time.

Nicole Sweeney 29:39
Right. He could’ve been a movie movie 16 year old.

Marines Alvarez 29:41
Right.

Nicole Sweeney 29:41
Also I just looked it up and Matthew Lawrence would have been 19 at the time, which is totally acceptable for like, movie 16 year

Matthew Gaydos 29:41
Yeah. And I think that definitely could have worked because like, yeah, he just got this car maybe that he wrecks and he does, like, if he’s closer in age to his little cousin, it makes sense that they used to be really close, and now have like grown a little bit apart because I think we all have like family members like that. When, when you’re younger, three years doesn’t seem like a lot, but all of a sudden you’re in high school or college and three years seems like a huge gap between you.

Right because Joey Lawrence was, like, 23 at the time.

Nicole Sweeney 30:16
That’s my first fix for this movie is cast Matthew Lawrence, and make him 16.

Matthew Gaydos 30:22
Yeah, rather than Joey Lawrence, who was the producer of this film, or at least one of the producers felt a little bit like, okay, I’m gonna play this guy and also, I’m gonna be wearing a tank top a lot. Like I’m gonna be sweaty. I’m gonna wear a tank top and some cool sunglasses. That’s my part in this film.

Marines Alvarez 30:42
The one thing you’re not gonna catch me complaining about is that tank top Matt, so, I’m sorry.

Ceri Riley 30:47
Yeah, all the low angle shots…

Marines Alvarez 30:51
I’m with you on everything else.

Ceri Riley 30:54
Him building the fence in the sun..

Marines Alvarez 30:58
I think the thing about the country revenge that I really enjoyed the most is that it wasn’t like very overt revenge, like he would give him instructions, and even try to help sometimes, like, want me to show you and then Michael would always be like, no, and then he would do the wrong thing. So it was like clever revenge. He like, left the wheelbarrow in the manure, but then the tractor was just off on the other side? That’s so good!

Matthew Gaydos 31:28
There’s lots of vehicles out of sight jokes that he pulls. The other truck is over there. You just didn’t see it. You didn’t ask. Why would I tell you that the other truck is over there?

Nicole Sweeney 31:41
But also, it’s like it all would have stopped being revenge if Michael would have stopped being so proud. Like that’s the thing is at any point in time, Michael could have saved himself by asking more questions, but and like not insisting that he knew best and so like it was subtle, partially because it had a clear, I don’t know like intent behind it. Like if you stop sucking, this will all get better for you.

Marines Alvarez 32:08
He never stopped sucking. I mean.

Nicole Sweeney 32:11
Spoiler Alert: He never stopped sucking.

Matthew Gaydos 32:14
Yeah, I think that’s what like part of that for me is one again, we’re watching a 20 year old man struggle with these things, so it was a little bit harder to buy that he was so dense. And it also just kind of made the movie more boring that this was such a drawn out arc. Like I think it was like an episode of some TV show, it would have felt more okay that this happened like more quickly, but because it was drawn out over like an hour and a half or whatever, it just took forever for him to understand why he was a douche.

Nicole Sweeney 32:47
Yeah, I mean could even have been a two part– you know, you could have had one episode where Michael goes to LA and then the next episode is or sorry, where Tommy goes to LA and then the next episode is Michael coming to Montana. You know two parter spread out over..

Matthew Gaydos 33:00
Yeah, that’s how I felt like as soon as the moment like when he’s getting back in the car to go to the airport, Tommy is after visiting LA, I’m like, this feels like the end of a movie. Like this feels like something that we’ve already experienced the whole story in like 10 minutes, like, what else is there? Like, what’s a– what’s gonna happen now because that felt like a pretty good narrative arc, but you gave it to us in the first 10 minutes of this movie.

Nicole Sweeney 33:25
I took a couple of notes. I took three notes while watching this because they were things that I had such a strong, I was so amused I laughed out loud and I had to stop and write them down. First of all, the the mouth alarm at the beginning was so funny to me. There’s– so in this movie, the– when we first see Michael, before we even see him, we see him, he’s being woken up by a video alarm clock that is just a close up of a woman’s mouth saying, “wake up. It’s 12:15 wake up. It’s 12:15.” And I– this was so hilarious to me for all the things that it is meant to signify in the context of a Disney Channel Original Movie. Like it is, it’s clearly the intro to this man is rich, because he has a video alarm clock. Hilarious. And second of all, it’s a DCOM like, it’s not gonna do anything sexy, but this is clearly meant to be like a sexy woman. Like that’s like the idea is, it’s like he has a sexy lady waking him up in the morning, but it’s her mouth like it’s just a video of her mouth? Just I don’t know, everything about this was hilarious to me.

Matthew Gaydos 34:41
Yeah. Now I think especially that line, like the way that alarm clock is used and the transition to it is that it makes it seem– like I flashbacked to Xenon of like the differences between the space station and earth of like the contrast they’re trying to draw between Montana and Beverly Hills in that moment is like they’re working on the farm and they say something like well life’s not that different in Beverly Hills is it and it cuts to: video mouth!

Nicole Sweeney 35:08
Tommy has the line about you know what about the money and like they do all of that right away, that like we’re working hard and money is tough and life’s not that different in Beverly Hills. Cut to: mouth.

Marines Alvarez 35:23
The best thing about the mouth is that he wakes up with this like shit eating grin and turns over like all happy. I don’t know, it was so weird. “Just me and my mouth alarm clock.” Okay, calm down.

Matthew Gaydos 35:38
In that moment, I was like, wait, are they trying to like say that Montana is in the past and like Beverly Hills is like 10 years in the future of like, they have video screens everywhere and like home assistants and all this thing. It’s like Smart House in Beverly Hills, but it’s still the Wild West in Montana.

Nicole Sweeney 35:54
No, I choose to interpret that moment as when you have lots of money you wake up happy and not sad. You wake up at noon, and you’re happy. So… I don’t know, sounds legit to me. The other thing that I wrote down because it made me laugh so much was the zoom-y realization about land trusts because it was just so out of nowhere. For context, the way that we get to the big, you know, we save the farm with, by converting it to a land trust is that they are auctioning off all of the family’s belongings and Michael and Tommy are carrying out this giant chest that you know, seems very nice and like it will fetch a good price at this auction, but it’s still inexplicably full of all of Tommy’s school stuf. Like nobody thought to empty that out before putting this chest up to auction? Like I, I do not buy that this woman who cares so much about her family wouldn’t have done that. Regardless, it’s full of papers and they carry it out and Michael is like, “oh you got an A on a test the last test I took, I got a D on,” and then like the camera like zooms in on him. And he’s like, oh man, the last test that I took was on LAND TRUST. And I just… what?

Matthew Gaydos 37:15
I didn’t think it was a little weird when they show him at college like in his class. They focused a lot on what the class was about. And I’m like, that’s gotta come up later, because he talks like way too much for something that seems completely insignificant.

Marines Alvarez 37:30
And that was kind of, how I felt about– I mean, I know it’s like a ranch and it’s the whole deal, but they, they really focused a lot on the horses– the wild horses and we named every horse and we had like neat scenes of just the horses running. And at first, I just was like, okay, I guess– we’re on a ranch. But then the horses are the reason that the land trust works or whatnot. But by far the scene that probably should not have made me laugh, but made me laugh a lot was when he’s back in LA watching the, the race and so he’s had like having all of these feelings, you can almost see the camera work, like zooming in on him zooming in on the horse, zooming in on the crop, going back to the wild horses like and it goes on and on and on and you’re just like okay, I get it.

Matthew Gaydos 38:18
I do think it was interesting that like, for a DCOM in the late ’90s to focus on the topics of like medical debt and animal abuse so prevalently. I was like, oh, okay. I don’t necessarily like this movie more because of it, but those things I thought were interesting choices and maybe a little bit deeper than the average DCOM.

Marines Alvarez 38:36
I don’t know at what age this would have changed for me if I had seen this, and like really, like, I don’t know, clicked that it was like medical debt in there, that was like ruining their life. They mentioned it, but it’s never like a thing. It’s just, I don’t know, the sense of like, wow, this is a plot that probably could only happen in a handful of places, including the U.S. That was– that was kind of wild watching it this time around.

Nicole Sweeney 39:02
The last thing that I wrote down is that because we live in Montana, I really want to go to a bank in Montana and I’m going to need to bring like a zoom-y camera man to get you know to have a camera man to like, you know, key in on my feelings, but and say, how about making a difference in someone’s life, huh? A positive one and see what that does for me and my student loan debt.

Matthew Gaydos 39:27
What if my house was made a land trust and you just forgave all of my student loan debt? That’d be great.

Nicole Sweeney 39:34
Ma’am, you don’t own your house. You’re a renter.

Matthew Gaydos 39:36
“There’s a horse in my backyard right now! I brought this horse over because I thought this would work. And it’s not. And now I have a horse? So you’re saying I still have debt.And now I have a horse. Thanks a lot, Mr. Bank Man.” Why didn’t we see Disneyland in this movie?

Nicole Sweeney 39:52
I don’t know, man.

Matthew Gaydos 39:53
I really thought we were gonna see Disneyland like even a little bit in the middle or like at the end they celebrate by going to Disneyland because. like, come on Disney you own that place. You could have easily made that happen.

Ceri Riley 40:04
I know. They really sold it as like a great place to go though.

Matthew Gaydos 40:07
And it didn’t show us an inch of it.

Ceri Riley 40:09
Yep.

Nicole Sweeney 40:11
And never got to see him ride the Indiana Jones ride.

Ceri Riley 40:13
Or Space Mountain.

Matthew Gaydos 40:14
Yeah! They mentioned specific rides and never go. And this was like in the prime era. Like there’s an episode of Blossom that takes place at Disneyland. Like Joey Lawrence is like Disney shill 101. Like, I feel like they should have celebrated at the very end by like going to Disneyland. I don’t know. Maybe, Maybe we’ll apparently the Lawrence boys in recent years have talked about wanting to do a sequel. So maybe one day.

Nicole Sweeney 40:44
I’m sorry. They’ve talked about wanting to do a sequel to Horse Sense?!

Matthew Gaydos 40:47
Well, so small spoiler alert, you won’t know which one it is Ceri, But there’s a movie in the future of the DCOM lineage that is a sequel to Horse Sense so they…

Ceri Riley 40:59
Oh.

Matthew Gaydos 40:59
Yeah, you won’t know it by the title alone. It’s not like Horse Sense 2 but…

Ceri Riley 41:04
Dang it!

Matthew Gaydos 41:05
But it will come up eventually. They want to make a third one and they’ve talked about doing that in recent years. Like all three of them apparently are super into it and I think nobody else is but they want to.

Nicole Sweeney 41:17
I love that Ceri’s now going to be on edge looking for the secret Horse Sense 2.

Marines Alvarez 41:25
All of her future guess are gonna be like the Lawrence brothers star in this…

Ceri Riley 41:36
Yeah, and they’re inexplicably horses?

Nicole Sweeney 41:40
I love the way in which this has maybe just broken the Ceri plot-predicting algorithm.

Ceri Riley 41:45
Yeah, that’s the problem. You gave me too much information about the future and now like it’s somewhere.

Matthew Gaydos 41:52
It’s either a 13 year old girl story or a Lawrence Brother story.

Nicole Sweeney 41:59
This week’s group discussion topic: Montana?! In my notes here I have in front of me living, living in and visiting Montana is actually what we’re talking about, because this movie takes place in Montana and three out of the four of us live in Montana, and I am very confident that we are not burning a topic that we’re going to want to use later. So I feel feel really safe and secure in this and yeah, so none of us are from Montana, by the way, but Mari came to visit me. All of us came here from much bigger cities, bigger places and so we’re just going to talk about our like, first impressions of Montana.

Matthew Gaydos 42:42
I’m curious what your friends and family said to you before you came to Montana for the first time, like, not only your expectations, but what people around you said because when I was getting ready to move to Montana, I worked at Starbucks, and all of my coworkers were like you’re going to get eaten by a bear. Like that’s what they know about Montana. It was also a very weird, like convenient time where Montana was doing this huge tourism push at the time in 2013, and so, our Starbucks looked out onto a busy Chicago Street, and a ton of the Chicago buses had giant murals on the side that just said, Montana, and then had a picture of a bear, or a ram or a mountain lion. And so all like my co workers, and I would see every day was Montana: wild animal that can kill you. And so that was a little bit of coming out here, I was like, how prevalent are bears? Are they just walking around town all the time? Is this a thing? But I didn’t know because I moved here without ever setting foot in Montana.

Ceri Riley 43:53
I also love the idea that your co-workers thought that you looked at the bus and had like some sort of revelation like a movie character of your own, like, why am I working in Starbucks when I could be in… Montana? My– I feel like no one I knew knew anything about Montana, because I got this job while I was still in college in Boston. When people graduate from MIT, they usually stay in the cities, like a lot of people go to either other very illustrious universities, or stay in Boston or go to like San Francisco, expensive cities. And so when I was like, I’m gonna be a YouTube person, and live in Montana, all my friends really had no idea what I was talking about. I’d gone to see Hank in concert at some point, and so my friend Eric, I remember very distinctly telling or asking me, he’s like, “oh, you’re gonna go work for that musician you saw that one time?” Which is how little all of my friends knew about Montana and the thing that I do now.

Matthew Gaydos 44:57
Yeah, I think that’s still the case of like, people don’t know a lot about Montana and also the world of YouTube videos is a weird world, so people really– like if you said I’m moving to New York City to work on YouTube videos, there’s at least one touch like stone there that they can go, “okay, I get it,” but you gave them to like outside the box things.

Ceri Riley 45:17
Yeah, the biggest question I got was like, “what’s out there?” And my answer was, “I don’t know mountains?” Because, I also didn’t do research into Missoula. I just said I moved there, because that’s how I lived my life. No planning just I guess I’ll go.

Nicole Sweeney 45:32
That was entirely my experience as well. Like knew, knew nothing, had never been here. I thought that I had driven through it. And I think I said in my interview that like I like drove through it once during a blizzard, and then afterwards realized that that was actually Wyoming. So… I had never been here, confuse it with Wyoming, knew literally nothing about it and also had a lot of conversations with people about how I was moving to Montana to work on YouTube videos and like everyone was very confused, didn’t really have, didn’t have any context and there were there was no like, oh, you’re going to get eaten by bears. It was just like a lot of, I’m sorry, what? When I got here, I drove from Missouri. And it was like, I’ve been driving for like 20 hours before I crossed the state line, but then once you cross the state line, there’s still like nine hours of Montana before you get to Missoula. I had stopped to sleep, but after many hours of driving, I crossed the state line and all of a sudden it was like full on whiteout conditions. And I’m in the middle of nowhere and like eastern Montana is truly nothing, like there’s, there’s nothing, there’s just nothing there. And it was really, really bad snow. I couldn’t see anything. I also couldn’t like stop, though, because if I stopped then I would get snowed in in the middle of nowhere. So I was like, okay, I guess I just have to like keep going. I had my mom on speakerphone a couple times just like trying to calm me down because I was having a mild panic attack trying to drive through the snow. And I got most of the way here. I was about 15 miles outside of Missoula, and I changed lanes. I– this is, this was where I went wrong, but it was like the problem was the roads in addition to being incredibly slippery, it was also that thing where if you’ve ever driven in snow, you’re not familiar with this, but when you’re driving through, like a lot of snow, sometimes the car in front of you will like kick up stuff. So like you want to not be directly behind someone like you need distance between you and another person. But at this point in time, the lanes were like there was really only one lane that was like good to be driving in, but I was like, so fucking close, I could taste it. So I was like, okay, I’m going to get into this other lane and as soon as I did, I spun out and like completely– I lik spun out, hit the median, bounced out of the median, landed in oncoming traffic. Fortunately, there wasn’t that much traffic, so it was fine, but like, totally wrecked my car. Fortunately, I was close enough that I got towed directly to the hotel that I was headed to that night. But uh, yeah, so that was my first experience of Montana.

Matthew Gaydos 48:20
That’s way worse than mine.

Marines Alvarez 48:23
Hearing this story from like, the friend end of it, especially because when she was like, okay, I’m going to Montana and I was like, why? Okay… And then hearing like, yeah, she crashed like driving in, in the snow. I mean, the ongoing joke anyway, was that she was moving north of the wall into the land of perpetual winter. And then she was like, yeah, I was driving in the snow and I crashed. I was like, wow, this is all like bad, bad, bad, but it’s turned out better than that!

Nicole Sweeney 48:55
Yes, ultimately, things improved.

Marines Alvarez 48:58
So I went to visit Nicole, I’ve been there once. Nicole and I usually meet up at places that are not our homes. So we’ll travel together, but I went to visit her one time. And it was over the summer which was purposefully done. So, I don’t even know that I have like a true impression of Montana, but it was indeed very, very beautiful. I landed in your in Missoula is like itty-bitty airport, and it was so hokey and weird.

Nicole Sweeney 49:29
Yeah, stuffed bears.

Marines Alvarez 49:30
There’s stuffed bears all over the place. So that was great. I think the like first thing that one of the first things that we did when I got there as we stopped at like a grocery store, and so I had that moment in the grocery store was when I first like walking out, I turned to Nicole and I was like, Nicole, I was the only brown person in that entire grocery story. And that experience of being the only brown person like lasted for quite quite a bit while I was there. So that’s something I was super aware of. But it was also like Fourth of July weekend and we went out on like the river we did like the raft the floating thing, which obviously barely have like vocabulary for it, so something I had never done before. It was absolutely gorgeous. It’s Fourth of July, we’re out there floating, and an eagle soars overhead in between the mountains. And I just remember whooping along with everybody else.

Nicole Sweeney 50:30
We were pretty drunk, too.

Matthew Gaydos 50:31
We were quite drunk! So like day drunk into night drunk that we didn’t even see the fireworks we were like inside of a bar during the fireworks that year.

Marines Alvarez 50:44
Well, as we’re gloating, I just remember just somebody screaming, “fuck yeah, America!” Which my personal peak Montana experience.

Nicole Sweeney 50:57
Yeah. Sitting on the river drunk, floating through mountains as an eagle soars overhead.

Matthew Gaydos 51:04
Maybe also somebody shot fireworks towards us, I think at one point, like not at us, but like over us, like someone was like lightning bottle rockets up next to the river. So did that match your expectations of Montan?

Marines Alvarez 51:20
I mean that that particular thing did, but I think that from what I experienced of Missoula, I didn’t know the categories of my brain. It was it’s more filed under college town than like city in Montana, or like, this is what I thought Montana would be like, I think I was more overall like, oh, this is I, I travel a lot to college towns. I do a lot of campus recruiting for my current job. So like college town has like a very strong feel and it’s something I’m super familiar with. And so being there, I was like, oh, okay, Missoula has that vibe above all else.

Ceri Riley 51:54
I think that’s what stood out to me, because after learning that this movie was set in Montana, I was trying to pay attention to Montana things and it was like, they’re too many cowboy hats here because that’s not my experience in Montana because Missoula is very college town. Like there are a few people walking around with cowboy hats, but it’s not like literally every person you see in town, geared up like that.

Matthew Gaydos 52:14
Yeah, I think for our experience in Missoula, this is not accurate. Like if you think like, “oh, they live in Montana Horse Sense seems like the place they must live.” That’s not quite true. Our airports a little bigger than the one he flies into in this, and I think there are towns very similar to this in Montana, like no one this will mean not much to anyone, but towns like Hamilton or Phillipsburg, and these kinds of places are smaller, non-college towns that aren’t that far from Missoula, but definitely feel a lot more of the quote unquote Montana way that you might imagine based on watching this movie or just your general impression of what Montana is, and so I think– it didn’t necessarily feel like I’m sure they shot this in somewhere in California, not actually in Montana, but it didn’t feel not true when they go to like a little like downtown area. I’m like, oh yeah, that could be any number of small towns in Montana. Like that doesn’t look wrong to me.

Ceri Riley 53:13
I think it is accurate when he was like we have two movie theaters was like ah, that’s Missoula! That, that one is correct. We do have two movie theaters. And then we got a third. Exciting.

Matthew Gaydos 53:29
Big news in the city

Nicole Sweeney 53:30
It’s a dine in!

Ceri Riley 53:31
When he was out at night, talking with his girlfriend– when Michael was out at night talking with his girlfriend and had the most green screen sky behind him… It was like purple with weird stars. Like the sky is actually pretty in Montana because like if you go out to Flathead Lake or any any place that’s more like farther away from city light pollution and things like that, the sky is really pretty. It does not look like that mess behind him.

Matthew Gaydos 53:55
Yeah, it is not like a glowing purple galaxy behind you.

Ceri Riley 53:59
Yeah.

Nicole Sweeney 54:01
Well now it is time for us to share the lessons that we learned from Horse Sense.

Matthew Gaydos 54:07
The lesson I learned from this movie, a direct quote from little Tommy Biggs: We have VCRs in Montana.

Marines Alvarez 54:17
The lesson I learned is that if you are in a lot of debt and a very wonderful, kind hearted family member wants to give you money to get out of that debt, I just feel like you should take it.

Nicole Sweeney 54:28
You should take it. Literally just take it.

Marines Alvarez 54:32
“Wow, thank you so much. You have a lot of money and I have none. So, I’m gonna take this money.”

Ceri Riley 54:38
The lesson I learned is that even when you ride a horse into town, remember to put a quarter in the parking meter.

Nicole Sweeney 54:46
And as I promised last time, the lesson that I learned is that horse people can be of any gender. All right now it is time for Ceri, the algorithm of Ceri to guess the plot of the next movie. Next time on Cooler Than Homework, we’re going to be watching Up, Up and Away.

Ceri Riley 55:07
Okay, so it stars the Lawrence Brothers, and instead of horses, there are PEGASUS. Just kidding, I’m not gonna waste it they wouldn’t do a sequel immediately afterward.

Matthew Gaydos 55:18
Or would they?

Ceri Riley 55:19
Or would they! No they need the time to break and continue working out to build up their muscles for Horse Sense 2. Okay, Up, Up and Away: because the word office in the title I’m just thinking of the movie Up, and so I’m thinking of balloons. And I think that this movie is about an eccentric family of hot air balloon tycoons and they– there’s a family business of hot air balloons, but this young boy has no interest in hot air balloons. In fact, he’s a he’s scared of heights, and his dad and his mom and maybe his like grandma who’s still around, they all dress up like, like circus folks– ring masters, that’s it, with the big hats and the big coats and they lead hot air balloon tours of… I don’t know where they would live. Colorado. And yeah, he wants to stay grounded. And then he, in science class gets really into airplanes, which becomes a very big point of tension in this family because they’re like, we love the old way, the romantic nature of hot air balloons, because you just fly up, up and away. And you forget about your problems here on Earth. And he’s like, but I feel much safer in a plane, and I can control it. And he’s like, I don’t know making paper airplanes and stuff. And I’ve dug myself a very deep hole. What’s the tagline?

Nicole Sweeney 56:49
Oh man. Oh Ceri. The tagline for this movie is “In a family of superheroes, the greatest power is just being yourself.”

Ceri Riley 56:58
Oh no! But aren’t hot air balloon operators really superheroes in their own way?

Matthew Gaydos 57:10
Yeah, I haven’t seen Aeronauts but I’m sure that’s what it’s about.

Ceri Riley 57:14
Well, fine. They all can fly and he can’t. No balloons needed, no airplanes needed. And they’re like weee! Look at us! I guess the Up, Up and Away makes sense because that’s like a superhero thing to say like, “up, up and away. I’m Superman,” or something like that. I don’t know. It’s probably just about this dumb kid figuring out that he couldn’t save the day with his ordinary life. I would rather watch my hot air balloon story, but I do like superpowers. So, okay, I got I got derailed by my own apathy. To end the story: So family of superheroes just like pretend when I said hot air balloons I said superheros. Good costumes still apply. And then instead of going to super hero school this regular kid goes to regular school, but maybe his whole family gets trapped by a super villain who uses some sort of like anti-hero technology to trap them in a bubble. Bubble seems pretty villainous. And then this boy has to use his human ingenuity and all the things that he’s learned in his regular kid classes like home-ec and woodshop and his friends to save his family by pulling wires out of control panels, and very average ways of solving super problems. So maybe the villain is like freeze beams or things like that, but he just like steals the technology, or throws a blanket over the villain’s head, and then pops the bubble and saves his family and they’re like, you’re pretty super too. I was about to say Johnny, but Johnny was already the protagonist. You’re pretty super too… Pete?

Matthew Gaydos 59:02
You’re getting like even more specific with your guesses than where you’re like asking of you. You’re trying to name characters in this film now.

Nicole Sweeney 59:09
Yeah, okay, it is a moto syllabic pretty generic boy name. You got close. Pete I yeah, I’m gonna say Pete is, Pete is pretty close.

Ceri Riley 59:20
It’s more fun if I take stabs in the dark because then you can make fun of how close I was or how horribly far away I was.

Nicole Sweeney 59:29
Gind out next time on Cooler Than Homework if anything about that guess was correct. If you are enjoying this podcast, tell your friends rate and review it. We would love to hear all of your thoughts on this episode and on this movie and on the Lawrence Brothers.Who was your favorite Lawrence Brother? There will be a post that could have been episode up at snarksquad.com/DCOM or you can find us all on twitter at DCOM squad. I am @SweeneySays.

Matthew Gaydos 59:57
I am @MatthewGaydos and you can find Andy Lawrence’s soundcloud at soundcloud.com/andylawrencemusic

Marines Alvarez 1:00:04
You can find me @mynameismarines.

Ceri Riley 1:00:06
And I’m @ceriley

Nicole Sweeney 1:00:08
This podcast is produced by Snark Squad, edited by me, transcribed by Mari, and our theme music is by Stephen Chin.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai