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BONUS Mini-Sode: So I Married An Axe Murderer

·30 min·1 clip

Nancy Travis’s character has three dead ex-husbands, a sister who kills them, and breakup notes left behind.

The episode grows out of a Mike Myers conversation that left extra material behind, so it becomes a bonus mini-sode. The central question comes from Austin Powers: what year were you frozen in? In other words, what year did your taste in pop culture really settle? For the host, the answer is 1997. He ties that year to a dense run of things he loved, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Romy and Michelle, Titanic, Contact, The Last World, My Best Friend's Wedding, Dante's Peak, Anaconda, and Ally McBeal. The answer turns into a way of talking about how taste gets stamped onto a moment, whether you mean to or not. Then the episode pivots to So I Married an Axe Murderer. It is a nice change from the better known Mike Myers titles, and both hosts have real affection for it from growing up. One of them says he quoted it a lot with his sister. That gives the discussion some warmth, but the movie does not quite hold up on revisit. They settle on the idea that the memories were better than the film. There are still a few laughs, and the title itself remains a favorite. Even so, they keep circling back to the shaky romance and the fact that it does not feel especially believable. One of them says he was bored watching it again, and the episode does not try to smooth that over. It also wanders into the soundtrack and the era, including Spin Doctors, plus a long complaint about a coffee house scene that feels like a nightmare. The crowded 1993 San Francisco coffeehouse becomes its own joke in the conversation. There is also a gross meat-shop sequence that gets a hard reaction. Alan Arkin gets a quick and genuine compliment as the police captain. By the end, the hosts connect the movie back to Wayne's World and spot a recurring fear of commitment, aging, and growing up. That gives the mini-sode a shape that is about more than nostalgia.

As heard by us

A nostalgic Mike Myers bonus that asks when pop taste really locks in.

This mini-sode uses So I Married an Axe Murderer to ask a sharper question: when did a taste in pop culture actually lock in? The hosts land on 1997 as the moment a lot of favorites hit at once, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Romy and…

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A Mike Myers mini-sode that asks what year your pop-culture taste crystallized.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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