Chris Sanders the Creator of Lilo and Stitch and Voice of Stitch on The Origin of the Voice and Original Artwork from the 80’s + Movie Review: Thor Love & Thunder

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Movie Mike's movie podcast. I am your host Movie Mike a very special episode for you. This week, I have on Chris Sanders, who is the creator of Leland Stitch. He is also the voice of Stitch, which if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that lel and Stitch is my favorite Disney movie. So it was like getting to talk to a hero on this week's episode. I'll also give you my spoiler free movie review of thor Love and Thunder, my most anticipated movie of the summer. We have so much to get to on this episode. Always no more of your time. If you guys in the movie crew are ready, let's just get started. Let's talk movies. In a world where everyone and their mother has a podcast, one man stands to infiltrate the ears of listeners like never before in a movie podcast. A man with so much movie knowledge. He's basically like a walking AUDIMTV Who's glasses from the Nashville Podcast Network Movie You may not know his name, but you definitely know his work. My guest this week is Chris Sanders, who is the creator of Disney's Leelo and Stitch, he's also the voice of Stitch, and long before he wrote and directed this movie in two thousand and two, he also worked as a story artist on Disney movies like The Rescuers, down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and really got his start when he was the head of the story on Mulan. Working on that movie led to him pitching his idea that he's had since the eighties of Lelo and Stitch. Lelo and Stitch was his first hit as a writer and director, and even after Leelo and Stitch, he went on to write and direct animated movies like How to Train Your Dragon and The Crudes. So he's a super talented guy. If you're a fan of Lelo and Stitch or just a fan of Disney, I think you're gonna love his story. So let's talk movies with Chris Sanders. I am on now with somebody I'm so excited to talk to. I'm on with Chris Sanders. How are you today? Good? How are you? I'm doing really good now. A couple of things led me here to having you on the podcast. Lilo and Stitch has been my favorite Disney movie since I was a kid. And earlier this year, I was scrolling through TikTok and I see you there and I recognized you, and I didn't realize the backstory of Lilo and Stitch and how it came to be, so I knew once it hit that twentieth anniversary, I had to reach out to you to get you on the podcast. Cool. Yeah, it's been really nice to do those TikTok's and um, that was just a response to I don't remember what it was exactly, but I ran across somebody who really didn't know anything about where the movie came from, and that was that wake up call to me realizing how much time had gone by and quite a few people didn't know the backstory to it. So it's been really fun to begin that series dressing up someone the material, which a lot of this stuff, just with animators and animation, a lot of stuff ends up in people's garages. You know, there's a lot of stuff in the archives. But I still have the original drawings and the original manuscripts that I used to pitch the project. So um, that's amongst the stuff that I was digging up and beginning to put up on on TikTok. So that people could take a look at it, and that's so cool to see. And I want to get to the movie, but I kind of want to start back at the beginning. When you were growing up in Colorado, what made you fall in love with animation? I loved straw. My dad, I thought, was a great artist. He did paintings and he would draw like these buck Grudgers style spaceships. And I remember one day he said, there's a limit to what you can build, but you can draw anything. And that really stuck with me, and um, and so I really I always had a love to a love of drawing. It didn't occur to me that I could turn that into a career. And tell you know, many years later, I was nearing the end of high school, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and my grandmother was reading an article in the Denver Post, which was our local newspaper, and she was reading this article all about how Disney Studios was running low on animators. They were retiring, and they were looking for a way to replenish their ranks. They created an animation program at this school in California called the cal Arts And I thought, oh, my gosh, that's where I want to go. So I'd always liked animation, I'd enjoyed it, but I've never thought of it as a possible career path until she told me about that school. And that's the only place I applied. How did you know you were? It went from just you just drawing to like, oh, I'm actually pretty good at this, Like this is something I could actually pursue and go to that school. You don't know, Um, I was really crossing my fingers that my drawings were good enough. I think a lot of kids at cal Arts were like some of the local best artists from where they came from, so I was not unusual in that. Like I did cartoons for my school newspaper, so when they needed cartoons, people would come to me at at our Vata High School and um, you know, when they needed a mascot drawn or a T shirt drawn or something like that. Likewise, a lot of the kids I ended up within my classic cal Arts same kind of thing. And that was really sobering because like, I went from being I thought a person who could draw pretty well to being so bird. When I'm sitting next to somebody named Kelly Asbury, Kelly Asbury keep a good friend of mine, and he just drew so much better than I did. I thought he just drew amazingly well. And he drew with a pen because he had this confidence, and I always drew a pencil because I was never really sure. I was like, I want to erase this and move things around. And he took out this ink pen and he would just draw what he wanted and I'm like, oh my gosh, he's so much better than I am, right um, And you know it's still that way. I think one of the things that's really cool about the animation industry is that if you ever are looking for inspiration, just walk down the hall. There's somebody down that hall that's gonna be way better at stuff than you are, and so inspiration to bounced. I mean, in turn, that makes you become better. You see other people just crushing it and you're like, I want to get to that level. I want to be that good too. I want to creak out my best idea so I can get the better jobs and get the things I want to achieve. Right, absolutely absolutely, because nobody, I mean there's no nobody draws the back. Everybody draws you know their own things in their own ways and stuff like that, and it's that great. It's that great coming together of all those different artistic styles where you can get these wonderful films and you get these wonderful projects and stuff like that. If I went back in time and and changed out one single artist on one of these films, the film would be a little bit different. So they are. They're literally a conglomeration of the talents that were gathered for that particular project. So you go out to this school and how long is it until you get your first page job to where Okay, this is turning into my career. A lot of people would leave school at that time early. A lot of people graduated on their third year. Um I didn't. I stuck with it for four years. I was very aware that this is my last chance to go to school before I would go and start working for the rest of my life. So I hung in there for the four years. At the time that I graduated, Oddly enough, Disney Studios was no longer hiring, so the place I was really hoping to go was not an option at that point. So I did find a job at Marvel Productions. Now that wasn't the comic book part of Marvel. It was the animation side of it, and they did Saturday Morning cartoons. I got a job on The Muppet Babies. Now, the funny thing about that is that one of the things that he would always tell us in cal Arts is draw, draw, draw, draw every day, draw things that you see around you. It'll make you a better artist. Well, I didn't want to draw the things I saw around me. I didn't want to draw shares, I didn't want to draw tables. I didn't want to draw people's shoes, you know. I wanted to draw the stuff that I wanted to draw. The funny thing is, at Marvel Productions on The Muppet Baby's Show, I was in the model department, which meant anything that was going to be in the cartoon had to be drawn first as a turn so that they could color it and model it and send it overseas so that everything would be on model. So the funny thing is my first job was really drawing things that I had avoided drawing in the past. I drew chairs and tables and shoes and dresses and everyday objects, a lot of them, right, And it was amazing training. So you're working at Marvel, and I saw that you said that you had the first drawing a stitch in n What about that story? What about that sketch made you come back to it years later when you finally get this opportunity to create this story for Disney. I had worked a little bit on it in private. I wanted us to do a children's book. And what I realized after working on it for a while in private, you know, on my own time, was that the story was too big to fit into a normally formatted children's book. I didn't think I could boil this thing down to stay seventeen pages or thirty two pages. It just seemed too big. Um So, the idea was bigger than my book. Um So, years later, I was in the waning days of the production of Mulan. We made that film at the Florida Studio. So I was out in Florida, and the president of Feature Animation at that time, Tom Schumacher, was out visiting, and um, he and I and everybody had gone through a lot making this film. It had been quite the adventure. I think that my performance on that film had earned me, had earned me a certain amount of I guess latitude to maybe do my own movie. And Tom was out visiting Florida and he said, is there anything that you would want to do next? And pretty much right there at dinner, I said, no, no, not well wait a minute, okay, you know there is this one thing. There was this story, right, and so I was able to think about it for a little bit. And the next time he visited, he said, well, and I was trying to work up a pitch for it, you know, and and uh, and he said, well, go ahead, just tell me about it. And I said, well, I'm not really ready, and he goes, no, just come on, just do it, you know, And I thought, here he goes my idea. I mean, I'm like, it's it's gonna be all over the next like in the next three minutes. And I pitched it, just verbally threw it out there, and I really got my very first and biggest note of all, which was the story that I had concocted was all about this strange little creature who was living in a forest and he didn't he had come from. He was a mystery to everything around him, but he was also a bit of a mystery to himself. And the story was all about how he was figuring out who he was, and he was frightening looking a bit of a monster, right, And Tom said, I like this story, but I would have a suggestion. The animal world is in a sense already alien to us, so placing this alien being in the animal world doesn't get you the kind of contrast that you might want. I would suggest you placed this monster in the human world. Boom, there it was. I thought that was a great idea. So that was the first biggest note that Lelo and Stitch ever got. Now this is before it was Lelo and Stitch, before they were in Hawaii. That was when I left and started working on the idea. Once I returned to California, and that's where I got. I got this uh motel room out in Palm Springs at this resort, and I locked on myself in this room for three days and all I did was draw and write because I wanted to create a bit of a document because it was going to be about an alien. And I thought, you know what, those are the days where people were making a lot of monstery kind of alien movies. And I thought, if you say the word alien in a development meeting or a pitch, A lot of people are going to get this instant idea of what an alien is. And I thought, Okay, if I don't draw this, they're gonna get maybe the wrong idea. So if I draw this whole thing out and they say no to it, at least they're saying no to the idea that was my idea, so it's a legitimate no. So um. So, after those three days, what occurred to me was that in a sense, I had finally created that children's book that I had tried to create so many years before and had abandoned. That's really interesting to me because I was rewatching it and I realized how hard it must have been to pitch an idea about this alien creature doesn't really say a whole lot of words. So to hear you say that you took that idea, placed it into Hawaii, and suddenly it made sense. You know, this is where you've really got to understand, like how important the producer and ahead of a studio are to your future. They can make or break an idea. And in this case, Tom Schumacher, he wanted to make this film and he that was the next big thing was that it's a's the thing I'm going to put on a TikTok really soon, and I'm working on that one right now. He told me after the development department looked at it, that they all like universally liked the idea, and he said I watched into his office, into his office, and he said, I will make this film on one condition that it looked like you drew it. And that was, you know, very exciting and flattering. But at that point I didn't even know what to do because I thought, well, what do I even draw like? I just draw like everybody else. A girl who was working at the studios to Nichols, who was an amazing artist. She also came from cal Arts. She did a two week analysis of my art style and she created two documents called Surfing the Sanders Style, and it explained how I drew well. Nobody was more interested to read these than I was, and I was absolutely fascinated. It turns out there were things that were governing my style that existed that I didn't really even realize that I was doing, but she saw them and she had like dissected the whole thing. So that began, and that's one of the reasons that Leelo and Stitch is a highly unusual film. It is more unusual than people really, I think may may realize, because it is not only a very Miyazaki style story that is extremely hard to mail down. You know, it's a smaller story, and it's really kind of strange, based very very much on quirky, unusual characters. Really, you know, these personalities are the are the whole movie. But also that it's in an individual artists style, and that's I don't think there's anything that has happened really before or since, at least with an artist inside the studio they've based films on, say like Isaac Isaac u Ivan Girl. Sleeping Beauty is based very much on Ivan Girl, for example. Um but he was an outside creator. So it's one of the reasons that that's such an unusual film. So when do you sit down to create what is going to be Lelo and Stitch, you have to create Lilo. When did it get that title? When did they get that final art? It was Lelo and Stitch by the time it was in that first pitch book. So when I went away to Palm Springs, by that point I had made the decision to place the film in Hawaii. I had named the characters Leelo and Stitch, and I had no connections to Hawaii at that point. So I pulled Leelo's name off of a roadmap that I had from Hawaii. There's a Lil Lane and I saw that. So this is one of the strange things. I didn't know what that word meant. It sounded like a name. It turns out it's not a name, but it's the It's the word for lost. So in a really strange way, I found the right word to make that her name. The same with Nanni, I just again I looked around for names on a roadmap. Later on in the making of the film, we did engage as many people as we could from Hawaii because we're toughing about it. We're trotting into a culture that we are not part of, and if you're going to do that, you really have to connect with people that know what the deal is, that know what they're doing for the music, for the culture, for the dialogue, for your voices, as much as you can. So um and so we did. We met a huge number of people who came our guides to making the film be respectful. Going into the start of making this movie. At what point did you become the voice of Stitch? Were you always going to be Stitch or was that a voice that just existed in your head? Where did that come from? It's sort of both. It was it was a voice. I had used this up to that point to call people on the telephone with and annoy them. UM. And it was actually Dean, my co director. So along the lines of your last question, one of the first things you do is you find a co director that you trust, and I had learned to trust Dean into partment, into partner with Dean during the making of Mulan and Dean was extremely smart and amazing, a natural and it came to storytelling, he was a natural storyteller, a great writer, a wonderful story artist. UM. And he has very good structural knowledge and structural instincts. So so I partnered with him immediately. Um. As soon as we decided to do the project, I saw out and we we agreed to co direct on the film. Dean's suggested that I be the voice of Stitch. One of the main reasons was that we wanted Originally we didn't want Stitch to even speak. We were like, oh, it's gonna be like dumb, but we'll do the whole film and he will just be a character that works in pandomime. Later on, it became obvious that he was going to have to speak, and in fact, he would have some key lines during the film. Well, at that point we thought, okay, we're gonna we're gonna have to get a voice, but you don't want to necessarily hire somebody like Robert Redford or Danny DeVito and then worry about like, well, how is the studio going to react when they realize this character only says like fifteen things, and will they then start to push for like, well, if you know, if we're gonna hire Robert Redford, we want to you know, we want Robert Redford. We want like a lot of lines. And we were afraid that that might begin to really be the tail that wagged the dog as far as the making of the film. So Dean suggested, He's like, you know what, why didn't you just do the voice? You used that voice when you pitch your boards, So why don't you just do it? And then we'll avoid any problem because you know, you're not a real actor. Nobody's no one's gonna ask for more of you, right. So we didn't do that at and there came up a moment. There was only one moment that I felt a little stressed about it, and that was when we realized that near the very end of the film, Stitch would have this one very important line where he talks about this family that he found. And it was little and it was broken, but it was still good and that verged on real acting, and so I thought, I don't know if I can do this. On that day, I came to Dean and I said, today, I'm an actor, and you're going to be the director, the only director, and I'm going to go in that booth, and you tell me what to do and I'll do it. And if I can't pull this off, then we'll find somebody else to do the voice. And so we did. Like Dean directed me, I did everything he asked, and before long he said, okay, I think we got it. And I said, are you sure? And he said, yeah, I think we got it. And it worked. Okay, you brought up my favorite scene in the entire movie. I think it's because of that. It's that moment in the movie where everything kind of hits me emotionally and I remember watching it as a kid and having that same kind of feeling of Stitch, of being that person who was filled with ray age in a place that he didn't understand, didn't understand himself, but all of a sudden he had this family. Now, I think that's the most perfect scene in any Disney movie I've seen. So it's cool how that came together. And now you had to go dig out your acting abilities in that. I did my best. I really tried hard to that day. I still remember that day. This is my family. I found it on my own, this little and broken but still good. Yeah, still good. So when people find out you're the voice of Stitch, do they immediately ask you to do it? I get asked to do it a lot. It was there. I had some surgery on my neck at one point period of time about a year I couldn't do it, But then I got back to doing it, and I still do it. I get called up about at least once a month to come in and do I do voices for toys and for like parades, things for cruise ships, all Disney stuff. It's fun. I told myself if I ever had you on the podcast, I would show you my voice, and it's actually that scene that I do. So I would like to let you hear this and then judge my abilities afterwards and let me know how I can make it better. All right, okay, all right, So it's that scene, this Lis my family. I found it all on my own. It's little I'm broken, but still good. Yeah, still good. How's that? That's really good? That's very nice. How do you get the laugh though, because I've been trying this impression for a while, but that laugh is and like it's hard to do. The big laugh is painful. That that is one if you're doing a recording special, you save that for the very end, like okay, we'll save all the screaming and the laughs for the end, and then well we'll do Then you can just take it to the wall and if you blow your voice to out, you're fine. The fact that it being the twentieth anniversary of the movie, when you go back, what moment sticks out to you as being the most fun part of the entire process When the part of the process that I've always loved is music. Dean and I and Leoo and Stitch was a big part of this have really I've always loved music, and and I listened to music. I have never written a scene in a movie without listening to music while I worked on that scene. I have also boarded pieces of movies to music, and there are still there are still pieces of music that if you play them while you watch a piece of a Disney movie, it lines up pretty much exactly. Um, Like, if you go to the soundtrack for a movie called The Mission, there's a there's a track from that. I believe it. I believe the track is The Mission. And um, if you listen to that while you watch the scene where Moue Foster's ghost speaks to Simba, it works really really well because that's the that's the music I I listened to when I boarded the scene, and I pitched that scene to the directors with that music. There are scenes in Beauty and the Beast. I can show you the music that those were done too. So anyway, so same with Leoland Stitch. I would listen to music because I write these scenes. And nothing was more exciting to us than we would when we would partner with somebody like Allen Silvestri, who is going to be writing a score. And one of the things that Leland. Stitch was made for a lower budget than movies were being made for at the time. We felt we could buy our story freedom by lowering the budget, which is exactly what happened. But one of the things that both you and I told the producer is going to ask the studio carve off enough money to buy the best score money can buy, and we will make the film for whatever is left over. And that's exactly what they did. So we got Allen Selvestry and it was this really important day um where we were looking at the boards and Allen selvester was looking at the whole film on boards and looking at the outline, and he said, I really like this movie, and he had a few suggestions, but he said, there's one thing I didn't see. I didn't see the moment where Stitch turns from bad to good, because the Stitch is a villain that becomes a hero, and that was what the baseis. That was really the basis of the whole story. He's the first and I think at this point still the only Disney villain who then becomes the hero of the story. And Allan was like, well, where does that happen? And both Dean and I at that point we're like, oh, well, yeah, we tried to write it, we couldn't really figure it out. And it sort of happens here, kind of between these two shots, and suddenly both died, and I think we're confronted with the reality that we hadn't really been able to put it up there on the boards. And I'll never forget what Allen said. We basically told Alan we didn't know how to do it, and he said, put her on screen and I'll do it. And I guess we were saying we couldn't, we didn't know how to say it, and he said, put it on screen and I'll say it, and he said it with music. And so there's a moment where Nannie realizes that they can't retrieve Lil and she's crying and Stitches watching her, and if you listen, there's a subtle change in the music and Stitch walks up to her and he speaks to her, and that's the moment of change. And what we realized at that point was that music does the heaviest lifting of all when it comes to story, and music is unassailable. No one's going to laugh at music. You can you can throw an awkward line in or an awkward shot and it gets an in vertent laugh and you've kind of blown it. But nobody laughed in music and um, so Alan just like taught us such an incredibly important lesson that day and we really took that to heart. So later on one DNA and I were working on How to Train Your Dragon. One of the first things we do now is we carve out a house for music in different places in the film. So in How to Train Your Dragon, in that scene where Hiccup is going to um bond and and and and um, he's going to cross this divide and form a connection to this dragon, no dialogue, it's all music, and we just the characters shut up. All the characters shut up, and music takes over. And that's just something that Dina and I really believe in now. And we learned that on Lelan Stitch. So was the love for Elvis music always a part of the story or did that come along when you're trying to find the music. I was a big Elvis fan, so I simply gave that. I imprinted that on Lelo and it was really cool because we actually had to engage with the Elvis state. Um we had done three things that you were not allowed to do without permission. We had shown an image of Elvis, we had used his lyrics, and we had also used his music, and you can't do any of those things about permission. So um so there there, there came a day when we had we had to approach the Elvis estate and they sent what we call the Memphis Mafia down to look at the movie. And all these people from the Elvis Estate traveled to California and they came into the theater one day and I'll never forget most of them were wearing dark glasses. They were wearing sunglasses even in the movie theater. As they watched the movie. It was exactly as you think it would be. And they watched the movie and they came out and they said, we're stoked, we love this movie. We're going to approve all the stuff you want to do. And one of the cool things we actually got a party at the Elvis Estate after the movie was done, and Dane and I received a key to the city of the City of Memphis, and we got a private tour of the Elvis of the state, and we even got a trip to one of their archive buildings where they have all of Elvis's actual stuff. There are four archive buildings. They are in tornado proof structures. Um. One of them is on the property and that's the one that we were able to go into. And um we were there in all these amongst all these shelves that had all these archival boxes, and we were like, so, what's in all of these? And they're like, well, a lot of stuff, and and we said what do we look at? And they said, well, I don't know, just pick a box, and so Dean Dean picked a box and they opened it up and they said, oh, these are all the things that were on Elvis' countertop in his bathroom when he died. And we simply packed them all up. And they had a bottle of his high karate aftershave that that he had used, and they opened it up and let us smell it. And so we saw, we saw some of his jumpsuits, we saw a pair of boxing gloves that Muhammad Ali had given him. It was amazing. Anyway, they were amazing. They were so kind and so generous, and it was just such a great thing that we we partnered with them. Anyway, one of those great lucky things. One of my other favorite parts of the movie is how Lilo is like a five six year old girl but sometimes has like these really dark, almost much older thoughts than her. How is that writing in things of like leave me alone here to die? Like, how do you kind of approach that to make it kind of believable that it's a kid saying this? You know? Um? That was Dean's line in Dean's scene. Dean also did the he invented the whole my friends need to be punished and she's taking those spoons in the in the pit pull jar. That was just Dean and my sensibility. But one of the things we had we did was we um. Our voice actor was a girl named Debate Chase, and we and we Um we auditioned a lot of young actors to try to find the right voice. It was one of those you'll know what when you know it, And when Dvague came in, she had this really very interesting way of delivering her lines. She had a little bit of this sort of dead pan kind of delivery, and we were like, that's Lilo, that's her. And so it's one of those things that like you write it and then you meet the voice, and hearing the voice helps you write it, so it's this kind of a snowball effect. But I must credit Demon for that really great scene that was entirely his. He wrote it and he even storyboarded it. So we've seen sequel Lelo Institch, You've seen the TV series, but now with Disney Plus, will there ever be any other installment of Lee Loo and Stitch. I think there will be. I think that. I mean, he's a very very popular character. One of the things that has been very amazing is that um I always hoped to pitch and create a movie that had a character that really endured. And one of the things that I absolutely am delighted with is whenever I go to Disney um properties. I can go to Disney World, or I can go to Disneyland, and you walk into stores and there are not just Stitch products. Sometimes there are entire sections of the store that are literally devoted just to him. And that is just mind blowing and I am so so proud of that. And it's so weird too, because I'm like, I drew him one day in Palm Springs. I have the first drawing of him, and now he's been reproduced millions of times, and he'll a lot a lot of times they'll be like a product it'll have maheat Donald and Stitch and it's like, oh my god, like he's really like he's there right. So um, yeah, I've been writing little things because I thought, you know, he's part of the Disney universe now. And just a really quick side note, the whole ad campaign that we introduced the movie with was an ad campaign that Dean and I thought up in other like movie posters. Yes, because as the movie was coming close to release and we were thinking about how we were going to market it, we were sitting around one day talking about this whole thing and I said, out loud, isn't it weird? This little character that we started all by ourselves is going is about to invade the Disney Universe. And from now on, when they do a lineup of Disney characters, Stitch will always have to be in there with them. And the idea like and at the idea of like, oh, him invading the Disney universe, we all wouldn't it be funny if we did the whole opening the Lion King and when they helped the little cup up, it wasn't the cup, but it stitch and everybody just ran away and the whole idea just made us laugh. So we boarded that out um, and we went to this meeting with Dick Cook, who who was on the main line and he was in charge of these things and he was an executive there, and we pitched it and it got a big laugh. Dick Cook said, I like this, and then they said, can we do more? And so we started kicking around ideas of having him show up in The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and um, which means we had to go back and re record those actors with new lines. And that was really funny because none of them were super stoked about it like they I think it was the idea of it wasn't like we didn't want to do it. They were very professional and they were very, very generous, and he did a great job. I think it was more the idea of, like, what's this thing doing in my movie? And the funniest one was when we recorded Bell. She was on speaker phone and she was in New York, so we were recording her remotely, and the funny thing was because she was just on speaker phone, it was impossible not to imagine that the actual Bell was it the other end of the line talking to you, because you couldn't see her. So in my mind, it's Bell, it's the cartoon character. And I remember we staid, okay, this is what's this is the idea which is gonna show up and he's going to ruin your special dance with beasts and then you're gonna say I'll be in my room and you're and you're upset. And then there was a there was a beat and she said, so I'm mad at him, and he said, well, you're disappointed, right, and she'd go okay, and so she would do the line and she said I'll be in my room and she had this really sort of upbeat delivery, and we said, well, I think you're more disappointed than that, right. So we eventually got to the place where she felt very, very upset, you know, but it was just so sweet and so cute because she was like, wait, a mad and it was just it was so it was great and they were and what again, it was so cool because I got to meet those actors. I never thought i'd meet them, but that was so cool. I mean, you created an iconic character, got to work with people who are also iconic characters. It's amazing to see that all come together. And I can't wait to see you what comes next, and hopefully I'll get to talk to you again once that comes around. I really appreciate the time absolutely. If you ever wanted to a follow up, I'm so sorry we were late on this because but yeah, let's do that. That would be fantastic. I really enjoyed chatting with you so much. Let's thanks Chris. Have a good day, you two. I'll talk to you soon. Let's get into it now. A spoiler free review of Thor, Love and Thunder, my most anticipated movie of the summer, didn't live up to my expectations because you have Chris Hemsworth back in store, Taco Y t t back directing this one who directed Thor Ragnarok, and most importantly, you have Natalie Portman reprising her role as Dr. Jane Foster. But not only that, she becomes the mighty Thor in this movie. Not a spoiler, that's all in the trailer. So before we get into what I thought about this movie, here just a little bit of that. Now. He was no ordinary man. He was a God. After stating planet Earth for the five hundredth time, Thaws it off on a new gene. Well, he got in shape. He went from dead bard god, and after all that, he reclaimed his touches as the one and only four Oh spook too soon, Jane, and I have to say, even though I knew it was coming, even though I saw it in the trailer, at the moment that Natalie Portman became Mighty Thor felt awesome to me. I'll get into why I loved that part of the movie and why I didn't like that part of the movie all at the same time. But where this movie takes place, it's Thore who is struggling to find inner peace. He's trying to find himself. He doesn't want to be Thor anymore. He's basically sad Thor, and he has transformed since the last time we saw him, as Dad bought Thor. And he's with his old friends, the Guardians of the Galaxy. So you have Thour here struggling to find himself. But above all, the evil that is approaching is a new villain called Gore, the god Butcher, played by Christian Bale. He is this galactic killer who is trying to kill every single god around. It is Thor's mission now to take down Gore, the god butcher, and he enlist the help of King Valkyrie, his friend Cork, who is also voiced by the director Taiko Watiti, and then of course his ex girlfriend Jane Foster. Now, some people ask me, do you have to watch all the other Thor movies to understand this one? I don't think so. I think this movie in particular does a really good job at explaining the details you need to know about the relationship between Jane and Thor. Obviously, with any Marvel movie, you feel more invested if you've seen every other Marvel movie, if you have all all the time to watch the other three Thor movies, which I do enjoy. And I say that because I believe that Thor actually has the best solo movies, second only to Spider Man collectively. Now, this being the fourth Thor movie, I think they have the comedy. I think they have the action and even coming full circle now on the love story. So I find them the most entertaining now and the ones that I feel I can continue on and on, especially after this movie, and I had a lot of high expectations going into this movie because of that, because he is one of my favorite Marvel characters, and because I really love Thor Ragnarok so much. I felt like Chris Hemsworth really got the character down. The story was so perfect in that movie, and visually that movie looks so amazing and kind of created this own new identity for Thor that I feel like that carried on through the rest of the Avengers movies and now coming back to his solo movies. That's why I was so excited for this one, and this one really meant those expectations. I don't think it exceeded them in any way, but it met them. And much like Thor Ragnarok, this one was just as visually appealing, and it kind of took a different approach on the style. Where Ragnarok had this kind of cosmic color palette, which was very defining to that, I felt like this one was a little bit more comic book style, especially when it came to the costume and a lot of the wardrobe. I felt like Thor kind of went back to that more classic Thor look that you get in the first movie, and also just more representative of what the comic books look like, and then you have paired with that. What Thor movies do that no other real Marvel movie can pull off is the comedy. This movie is effortlessly funny to wear. Thor is actually a funny character. That's unlike all the other Marvel Humor, which for the most part is characters who aren't funny, that say the occasional witty thing, the occasional like out of place line that makes it funny. That's kind of what Marvel humor has always been. When it comes to like Captain America and Iron Man, they just say things that you wouldn't expect them to say, and everybody lasts and it's funny. This movie was, at the root of it a romantic comedy, and I think that's why some people don't like it. If you go into it expecting just your average Marvel movie, the kind of formulaic thing that they've been doing with all their superhero movies for a while now, which has worked and which I've loved for a very long time, but I'm kind of itching for something a little bit different. This movie didn't stick to that same type of formula, and what it really showed me is that Marvel can kind of exist by making movies in different genres and in different styles. I saw that with Doctor Strange until the Multiverse of Madness, which I didn't really love. I felt like that was Marvel's attempt to make a Marvel horror movie. This one. At the root of it, it really is a romantic comedy, and then and you layer that with the superhero aspect, and then you layer that with action, it becomes a Marvel movie. So you just start checking off all the boxes. Here. You have the action, you have the acting, you have the characters, you have the costume, you have the humor. All those things are exactly what I was looking for, and then you wrap them up into the new thor aesthetic, which I'm totally in love with and met all my expectations. Now, the part of the movie that I didn't like is it felt a little bit rushed within the first twenty or thirty minutes, and this movie is under two hours, which I don't find myself saying this a lot, but I wish this movie was longer. I just felt the movie was trying to find its footing early on and kind of going between Gore the god Butcher's backstory into where Thor is now into where Jane is. It was kind of just like, Okay, what am I focusing on here? And then the moment she becomes Mighty Thor, it goes from just her being Dr Jane Foster. Now she's Mighty Thor and everybody's just kind of cool with it. I wanted to see a little bit more there of her figuring out her powers, being a little bit more questioning of what is going on. She just kind of turns into Mighty Sore and everybody accepts it. The rest of the movie kind of moves on, which does create a pretty fast pace throughout the entire thing. So I felt at the root of it it did help with everybody's attention span of once you get kind of comfortable and one thing, it's onto the next, onto the next. So it had that kind of feeling to it. So while some people are probably praising that a Marvel movie is under two hours, this one I wouldn't have minded if it would have gave like maybe twenty minutes more there in that first act. And then when it comes to the villain in this movie, Christian Bale. Great for him. I love that they gave him a backstory and while he is no Fano so by any means, he was a pretty good threat, which Marvel tends to have a lot of forgettable villains. I felt like this is one that ten years down the road, I'm going to remember Christian Bale as Gore, the god Butcher. And the only thing I didn't love was I felt like they should have given him more action sequences. I felt like his character really shine whenever he was the most menacing, whenever he felt like he was a very unstoppable force, like something to really be reckoned with. But I never had that moment in the movie that I felt like the villain was completely in control. So basically my biggest criticisms of the movie is that I wanted more. But I guess as a Marvel fan, you want to leave us wanting more, because I would go watch Thor five tomorrow if it came out. I think Marvel fans will be happy with this one, especially if you're a big thor fan, which it's unusual to see movies get better with each installment, especially when you're making a fourth one. Usually by the third one you're like, all right, I'm ready to cut the chord here, I'm all in for another Thor movie. I think they have come a really far away since the original Thor, which I did rewatch going into this movie, which I still enjoy that movie. The only thing I don't like looking back on it is how weird they make Chris Hemsworth look in that movie, like he has makeup and the hair and the wig just isn't completely there. Now Thor's look is completely perfect, and I think Chris Hemsworth should get a award for how ripped he got for this movie. He said it's the most cut he's ever been for any role, and it really shows. And somebody like his counterpart in this movie, Christian Bale, who is been praised for losing a crazy amount of weight for roles, he's also put on a lot of weight for roles and I feel like it only matters what kind of movie you do to get praise for that, because he did those both in dramas. But then you have Chris Hemsworth getting like obliterated. So he actually looks like a god in this movie, but that kind of gets glossed over because it's a Marvel movie. Watched this movie and see just how shredded he looks. The entire time and try not to be impressed by it. I think when it comes to ranking this among other Marvel movies, it's getting really hard to compare. I'll be honest, we're almost at thirty of these movies now, so I don't think at this point it's fair to compare all of these almost thirty movies. I try to just compare them in phases, and in this last phase four easily top three. In phase four for me, it's just always hard to beat Spider Man, but this one comes pretty close and delivering. Do you need to go watch this movie in theaters. It's hard for me not to watch a Marvel movie in theaters. I think that's where they really shine. I still feel like they're sporting events. However, in my theater, and myself included, I don't think there were particularly hype moments, kind of what I was saying earlier about I wish there was a little bit more adversity from the villain and that struggle. I don't think there were a whole lot of cheer moments in this movie, and I think that makes it more of a reason to go watch this in theaters, which that's kind of what I was surprised by I wanted to have that big epic roar, people clapping. There wasn't a whole lot of that. Maybe it was just my theater's vibe. Maybe it was because the dude next to me took his shoes off and was barefoot next to me. Maybe that took a little bit away from that. But that's why you go to the movies. I still think it as an event. However, I don't think the crowd was as electric as it was for a movie like Spider Man No Way Home. So if you weren't as excited about this movie is maybe some of the other Marvel movies. You may wait till it goes to Disney Plus. But if you do go, do stay because there are two very important post credit scenes. And finally, if I had to rate thor Love and Thunder, I would give it four point five out of five storm Breakers. I honestly thought this movie had the potential to be my five out of five movie for the year. Didn't quite get there. If it would have had a bigger Harrah moment, probably could have made it to a five out of five. But without a doubt, it is crushing it at the box office right now made sixty nine point nine million dollars and it's opening day alone even more the night before that probably be the third highest grossing movie of the year with a very good reason. It's been a really great summer so far, or you know, really only kicking off July, so I've been seeing so many movies I can't even get them into all my movie reviews. So that is it for this week's. Next week, I'll finally get to my Elvis movie review, which I haven't done yet, so have all that to look forward to. What a summer blockbuster season, and that is going to do it for another episode here on the podcast. I feel like this episode has gone longer than expected with the interview and I couldn't shut up about four Love and Thunder. So I'm gonna punt the trailer park for this week because a trailer drop that I'll probably spend another ten minutes on. I'll just say that for next week. But I can't skip the listeners shout out of the week because I do it every single episode. So you can tweet me at Mike d stro I love including anytime somebody tweets a photo of you listening to the podcast or in this case something movie related and I gotta tweet. Recently after I did the Pixar Characters that Deserve Solo films from Kyle Skew, and Kyle tweeted a picture of him maybe a girlfriend or wife and they were dressed up as the characters from UP, and Kyle wrote, not want to jump on social media, but enjoy the podcast, and I thought I would share a feeding photo from the past weekend as we dressed up as the characters from UP for a Disney themed party. Keep up the great work hashtag movie Mix Movie podcast. First of all, Kyle, I am envious that you have friends that to begin with, I'm envious that you have friends, but also that you have friends that throw Disney themed parties like that sounds really fun to me. I would go to one of those in a heartbeat. And your costumes look dope. The only time I've ever dressed up as a Pixar character was my very first Halloween. I was able to somehow convince my parents to spend money on a woody costume, and that's the only time in my life they've ever spent money on a costume from Walmart, and sadly, I outgrew that costume pretty quickly, so maybe someday I'll get invited to one of these and reprise my role as Woody. And second of all, really appreciate you listening to the podcast and jumping on Twitter, which you say you normally don't do, just to send me that. It's like going an extra level there. So I appreciate that. Kyle. Hope you had fun at the party and hope you keep listening to the podcast. As to the rest of the movie crew, I appreciate all the love and support, especially when you comment on things that really helps me out. And what I like to do is I like to post videos for my interviews and create a secret emoji that you can go and comment, because sometimes I know it's just weird that you don't know what to say to somebody even though you like the video and you want to show your support, you can just drop a like. But the secret emoji for this interview would I'll be dropping a video of me talking to Chris Sanders, and since Stitch is an alien, if you want to go comment on the video on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok dropped the alien emoji that is the secret emoji for this episode, and I'll talk to you again next week here on the podcast, and until then, go out and watch good movies. Later