"I mean, Mon-El lied to me for nine months! How do I forgive that?"

Well, they were both shot down in the street.

He's a traditional heroic archetype, but not strong/overbearing in the manner of e.g., a Clark Gable or John Wayne character, who might be more Gastonish. (Rhett Butler, for example, could certainly be parodied into a Gaston.)

It's not about entitlement— making Quasimodo's appearance and how it relates to his worthiness of love and friendship central to the story is something Disney chose to do.

Sure, but Disney had already largely thrown out the novel's plot, so the "love is for pretty people" element is theirs. Phoebus and Esmeralda don't wind up together (to put it mildly) in the novel.

hell, in past Disney films, his macho adventurer type would be the hero.

Hunchback has the best villain song ("Hellfire"), but its resolution completely undercuts its central theme.

there should be a protocol in place to make sure the families are comfortable with the idea and compensated for the performance

Crowe has his mom present for the commentary track to react to the Elaine Miller portrayal of the character based on her.

The Fast Times book is great, but it took me years to find one that wasn't priced as if it were printed on gold leaf. It definitely needs a reissue (and an ebook version).

I've long maintained that the overall arc of the show is a tragedy. Primarily the tragedy of Philip and Elizabeth, but with plenty of room for others to be their Ophelia or Laertes. And classic tragedy is all about people with substantial virtues being destroyed.

That would be a plausible reaction. But they know better than anyone that limits are just things competent and motivated people route around if they're not on board, as Paige has done several times.

Unless it's actually just a greenhouse (albeit a research greenhouse for an Ag school or Monsanto or the Department of Agriculture or something), rather than a secret CIA black site bent on starving Soviet children. In which case the major concern would be more local teens breaking in to drink beer than crack KGB…

This was in the early post-Iron Curtain era, and there weren't a lot of inexpensive hotels, so in e.g., Budapest I rented a room in someone's home for a few days. (People would hang out at the train station offering— sort of an early in-person Airbnb.) I was petrified that I was messing up their bathroom by not…

At that time and place, as a member of a hippieish left-leaning Protestant church, I doubt that it would be a huge deal. They'd counsel strongly against premarital sex of any kind, of course, but I wouldn't expect contraception to be a major focus in and of itself.

According to the podcast, it was filmed in winter, but was supposed to be set later in the year. (They had to pay a farmer to plant wheat which would be killed by the frost before coming to fruition, and supplement it with fake wheat and grass.)

My recollection was that this wasn't like that, but a shower/bathtub in the same room as the toilet, just no curtain. But it's been close to a quarter century, so I won't swear to my memory.

Traveling in eastern Europe in the early 90s, I repeatedly encountered bathrooms without shower curtains. I never figured out how showering was supposed to work without drenching the bathroom.

That may have been my first issue of X-Men, which made for a very odd jumping-on point. (I was a DC fan growing up; my exposure to Marvel was when someone dumped a huge bunch of comics, mostly X-books, in our dorm lounge.)

Very interesting. It seems to have resulted in legislation the following year (the Grain Quality Improvement Act of 1986) that prohibited some of the dodgiest practices. (Though as one source I found observed, while it prohibits mixing in foreign material to match the standards of a particular grade level, it…