How Did This Get Made? · Earwolf and Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Jason Mantzoukas

The Forbidden Dance

March 27, 2026·1 hr 9 min·4 clips

The hosts land on 'Jason Baby needs a Swayze' as the definitive summary of the film's failure — a line that goes immediately on the T-shirt.

Let's save the rainforest by dancing. That seems to be the movie's whole plan, and the panel grabs onto it before the plot has much chance to explain itself. Then the title starts wobbling. The Forbidden Dance is not the 1990 movie Lombada, except everyone keeps noticing how much Lombada is in it. Paul may have set the table for chaos. The opening banter turns into a small identity crisis over whether they all watched the right film, with Nisa as the proof that reality has not fully broken. The lawsuit detail is exactly their kind of thing. Posters, injunctions, and a renamed dance movie give the hosts production trivia they can turn into a bit without much effort. Then Ashley takes over. The hosts treat her less like a side villain than the movie's unpunished disaster engine. The car scene is toxic in the funniest way. Her conversation with the man they call American Rutger Hauer moves the room from amused confusion to open hostility. She sells out Nisa. She sends him toward the Creation club, where Jason and Nisa are rehearsing for the Kid Creole show. The stakes make almost no sense, which helps. National TV is a dance audition and somehow a threat of anti-American propaganda. Nobody can cleanly explain Ashley's plan, and every attempt makes her motives sound worse. She never really pays for it. The nearest justice is that she is not talented enough to perform with Kid Creole and the Coconuts. The final stretch settles back into Last Looks housekeeping, fan reminders, and team thanks, pulling the room out of movie madness and back into the show's weekly rhythm.

As heard by us

A rainforest dance crusade turns into prime HDTGM fuel, with lambada confusion, corporate villains, and a richly hated Ashley.

How Did This Get Made? finds a very silly sweet spot in The Forbidden Dance, a 1990 movie trying to save the rainforest with lambada, courtroom-adjacent title confusion, and a second lambada movie apparently opening at the same time.

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Why you'd press play

There are two bad 1990 dance movies. You are about to care deeply about which is which.

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