The Death Rattle Generation and the Meaning of Mr. Falcon
Older millennials have seen the slow death and crumbling of so many institutions once thought to be forever as a brave new world marches over us. We're also the first generation that was able to fall in love with movies by watching them over and over in our own homes, our own rooms — the home video generation. We formed a special attachment with them like nobody before or since. We memorized the cover art on cardboard video tape sleeves and then later DVD and Blu Ray cases and watched movies over and over the way Baby Boomers listened to singles on 45s.
As we get older and everything, including people’s tastes and Hollywood itself, moves on as all things must with the inevitable decay of time, it’s easy to feel lost. Folks born in the early 1980s barely got a chance to get used to all the things that defined their generation before it all changed more drastically than anyone could have expected.
The YKY Mr. Falcon podcast aims to focus on movies through that lens. We don’t do celebrity gossip or participate in cancelling people. We talk about the movies, our experiences with them, and all the trivia that goes along with it that’s cluttering up our skulls until the dementia sets in one day. It’s a cool place to hang out that will hopefully inspire you to dig out some old classics that you haven’t watched since dropping boxes with that blue and yellow movie stub on them in the return slot was part of your regular routine. Let’s go!
--Dave
Inside The Name
If you’re old enough to remember when TV networks would air feature films that had been edited to fit a 4:3 screen, and also for content. Extreme violence, nudity, and curse words were excised. In some cases, when objectionable phrases couldn’t simply be deleted, they were dubbed over with silence or, in some cases, alternate dialog. Every once in a while, an actor would record alternate lines for the TV version of a movie, but most of the time, it was a sound-alike who did the dub.
And every once in a while, that sound-alike sounded nothing like the actor. The most glaring example is the television version of Die Hard 2 (1990). At the end, when John McClane drops what became his famous tagline from the original Die Hard, viewers were treated to a voice that couldn’t sound less like Bruce Willis replacing “Yipee-ki-yay, motherfucker” with “Yipee-ki-yay, Mister Falcon.”
It's a quirk of a system that doesn’t exist anymore and that was unique growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when your folks would tape movies off TV instead of buying them at Suncoast video in the mall. And it’s also some really funny shit. Now you know.