Clay and Buck Talk Sci-Fi

BUCK: Clay, there are the areas where we, from a pop culture standpoint, have some of the same loves. I could sit here and quote Young Guns with Emilio Estevez —

CLAY: Such a great movie. Yeah.

BUCK: — Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, some great stuff in there. Dermot Mulroney, if you’ll recall. Dermot Mulroney’s in it.

CLAY: Oh, I didn’t even remember he was in there.

BUCK: Oh, I could go all day. So I love Young Guns. I loved a lot of those eighties, nineties action movies. I do like sci-fi. We know you’re not a Dungeons & Dragons guy. But I will tell you, I was home sick over the weekend. Thank you for doing a fantastic job, obviously, Friday at the helm solo. I was home sick on Friday, and I just needed something to do.

I had read the Dune Novel by Frank Herbert a long time ago, great sci-fi novel. The movie is one of the first sort of Hollywood studio pictures I’ve seen, I want to say in years, that was actually really good. So, two things. One, have you seen Dune, and two…? Well, actually I should probably do the reverse order. One is sci-fi an acceptable genre to you — or are you going to upset all of our Star Wars fans in the audience — and, two, is Dune something you’ve seen?

CLAY: I love the Star Wars movies, and one of the great jobs about being a parent was being able to introduce my boys to all those 1980s movies including the Star Wars canon. So yes, I’ve seen all those. I love The Matrix movies, for instance. Those aren’t necessarily sci-fi.

BUCK: It’s action sci-fi. It’s kind of both.

CLAY: Yeah, and I like a lot of the nineties and 2000 sci-fi movies. I have not seen Dune. I was not someone who read sci-fi. When I was a kid growing up I loved… Do you remember Robotech? Do you remember Robotech at all, or Star Blazers? Do you remember any of those stories?

BUCK: No. No.

CLAY: Okay. So, it’s like a niche, but it was kind of a popular niche. In fact, I’m curious how popular it is. If you are listening to us right now and you watch either Robotech or Star Blazers — these were Japanimation, but they were sci-fi cartoons that were set in space. So, I was obsessed with those when I was a kid, read all the books. There were book versions. I think they originally came out of Japan, but then they also became wildly popular in America. I’m curious… Not “wildly popular,” popular. I’m curious how many of our listeners are familiar at all with those. I loved those Japanimation early kind of Japanimation set sci-fi in space.

BUCK: I want to get to calls here in a second. I just wanted to say the reason I was thinking about sci-fi as well, other than Dune, which I can tell anybody who’s read the book: The movie version of it is fantastic. I mean, it’s an amazing and very close to the actual Frank Herbert masterpiece. It is a fictional masterpiece, a masterpiece of fiction. But for me sci-fi probably had a bigger impact on my early developing a love of reading than anyone else. It actually was Michael Crichton, the Jurassic Park author.

CLAY: Oh, yeah, those were great.

BUCK: I went through forth, fifth grade —

CLAY: Congo, Jurassic Park.

BUCK: Sphere, Rising Sun, Andromeda, all of them.

CLAY: I read those.

BUCK: All of them. That was the first time being a kid being like, “I would rather be 200 pages into Congo than watching GI Joe or whatever.”

CLAY: Jurassic Park was such a… I mean, maybe of all the book ideas out there, such a brilliantly idea for a book.

BUCK: Well, what’s fascinating is that West World is also a Michael Crichton project —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — was a show back in the day. You can see West World is the creation through sci-fi of an experience for female and then there’s this deus ex Machina and the machines take over and it’s like that, except with dinosaurs, so West World you can see the comparisons they’re both Crichton projects.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: And obviously once you introduce dinosaurs to things, everything is cooler. It’s just a rule, right? “Hey, we’re making a sports movie. Let’s throw some dinosaurs in there.” Now we’ve got velociraptors playing volleyball.