At long last, we are delivering on our promise to rip into Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and the two film adaptations molded by it (1971, dir Mel Stuart & 2005, dir Tim Burton). But there's just too much confectionary conversation not to share it with friends, so we invited Megan Steen and returning guest Dug Steen* to join us! This episode represents our first repeated author, as well as our first two time Snuffy Walden winner! Listen in as we confer about cgi chocolate, weigh in on Wonka wackiness, and parley about which parts would be present in the perfect motion picture version. *Dug didn't realize he was invited and didn't read the book. Thankfully, he was a good sport and joined us anyway.

Hate Expectations

HE038 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Sweet swimmin' unicorns, what did Lizzy do? It was her birthday a few months ago, and for it she selected Elizabeth Goudge's book, The Little White Horse, for us to cover. Seemed like a good idea, doing a cute story of a plucky little girl who discovers she's a moon princess in the valley of her OH MY GOD! What is wrong with the movie?! Where is the eyebleach! Ahh! Ahhh! Ahhhhhhhhh...

HE037 The Little White Horse / The Secret of Moonacre

It's April as I type this (rabbit, rabbit), and that can mean only one thing -- it's time for our Easter episode of Hate Expectations! Now we know there have been a few adaptations of the Bible over the years, so we had a lot of options. For this special episode we decided to concentrate on the stellar 1999 direct-to-video filmed staging of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I assume we go into great depths about our feelings for both the book and the movie/musical, so I'll let it stand it without any further commentary. Enjoy!

HE036 Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

While the pandemic has left a lot of us feeling a bit unstuck in time, the effects of that don't seem to be as strong for us as they are for Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (1969). Join us as we meander through our discussion, popping back and forth between the book and the movie adaptation (1972, dir George Roy Hill), relishing in the good moments and pointing out the those that never really came to life. So it goes.

HE025 Slaughterhouse-Five

Finally! Hate Expectations, along with multiple time returning guest/friend Jane Hutchins, takes a journey deep into the human mind. Join us as we dig into all the minutiae of the 1966 movie, Fantastic Voyage (dir. Richard Fleischer) and the novelization of it by noted sci-fi author, Isaac Asimov. No plot hole is too large and no performance is too small to escape our microscope. This is an episode that is guaranteed to get under your skin!

HE034 Fantastic Voyage

Halloween is our favorite time of year, here at Spielenwald, Hate Expectations's headquarters. There's no better time to dim the lights and curl into the fetal position with a scary book or the movie it spawned. In this episode we breathe life into Rosemary's Baby, the 1967 novel by Ira Levin and the 1968 film directed by Roman Polanski. It's a classic, but does it still live up to its reputation? It's atmospheric, but is it horror? Will it scare the bejesus out of you? There's only one good way to find out, and that's to join us...if you dare!

HE033 Rosemary's Baby

We're back! It's a special birthday / rebirth episode, as Lizzy* and Nate track down Richard Stark's 1962 novel, The Hunter. Join us as we not only beat this crime classic to a pulp, but we talk the two(!) movie adaptations to death: Point Blank (1967, dir John Boorman) and Payback (1999, dir Brian Helgeland). There's a whole lot of seething putrid evil to rip into, but somehow we get beyond just the pandemic to discuss the thrice told tale of a thief, a betrayal, and bloody vengeance. *Lizzy wants to correct the record and say that Keenan is Ed's son, not grandson.

HE032 The Hunter / Point Blank / Payback

We're back with a special quarantine episode! From the time we published The Princess Bride until today (11/19/19 to 04/01/20 -- over a third of a year!) we at Hate Expecations have had a good long Christmas vacation, planned and delivered the culmination of a four year Leap Day party, read some non-adapted books, and mostly enjoyed taking some time off. However, now that home isolating is a reality, we have had time to re-read something we expect a lot of people are also re-experiencing, the first book of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954). We also watched the seminal film adaptation (dir. Ralph Bakshi, 1978) and some other lesser conversions of the work. We don't have any special guests this time, in part because of the quarantine, but mostly because this episode wasn't planned. Like Gandalf the Grey, sometimes a podcast arrives precisely when it means to.

HE031 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

At a break in the Sasquatch board gaming festival, Hate Expectations took advantage of their inconceivable friend, Dug Steen, being in town to record an episode on William Goldman's novel The Princess Bride (1973) and the highly quotable classic movie Rob Reiner made from it (1987). The three grab a vine and dive head first into the beloved story and its familiar characters, breathing new life into it like some inconceivable bellows shoved in its pie-hole. They even discuss Goldman's missing bonus chapter and the inconceivable sequel, Buttercup's Baby. Finally, they do as you didn't know you wished and round out the whole episode with a brand new feature. Come, and love it as we have loved it.

HE030 The Princess Bride

In a very special episode of Hate Expectations, Lizzy learns the hard way that rock music is Satan's gateway to your heart, while Nate find's the school bully's unwanted attention is just a cry for help. No, wait. It isn't that kind of a special episode. It's a birthday episode! We finally get to the mic with our long awaited episode about Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief (1998) and its movie adaptation, the movie Adaptation. (2002, dir Spike Jonze). While the book is a delightful meandering read, the movie is more about the kind of hell that adapting a delightful meandering book for motion pictures can be. Nate then struggled to find a way to end the summary of the podcast about one of his favorite movies. In a self-aware and self-indulgent manner, he finally wrote the sentence "Nate then struggled to find a way to end the summary of the podcast about one of his favorite movies." Then he thought how weird it was to do that.

HE029 The Orchid Thief / Adaptation.

Rich and Z return to the podcast, bringing a curious Homer pick with them. Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) technically does give a "based on" credit to the ancient greek poem, The Odyssey, which qualifies it for discussion on the show. Not to spoil the journey, but it turns out you have to squint mighty hard most times to see the connections between the two stories. And squint we do! (Mostly from laughing.) We also discover that reading ancient literature actually is more fun than a burning stick in a Cyclops's eye. Who knew?

HE028 The Odyssey / O Brother, Where Art Thou

As avowed rat lovers, it was inevitable that Lizzy and Nate would eventually discuss the beloved Newbery Medal winner, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Robert C. O'Brien, 1971), and its Don Bluth animated adaptation, The Secret of NIMH (1982). But in a surprise twist of fate, it turned out that frequent guest host, Siobhan Beeman, was the one to bring this classic out and turn the Hate Expectations eye on it. To keep things lively and difficult to edit, we also had two large and noisesome guest dogs bumping around the set and occasionally growling at passing squirrels. But even they couldn't prevent us from gnawing on every tasty morsel in this legend from our collective childhoods. In fact, the only thing that could put a damper on our enjoyment of the story turned out to be...well, you'll have to listen to find out.  

HE027 Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Three people, intentionally sequestered in the woods of the Pacific Northwest: Lizzy, Nate, and special returning guest Jane Hutchins. At first they thought they were imagining things; haunting visions of insanity, terror, and death. A distant voice sighed out a premonition: "REDRUM". The television flicked to life, showing the huddled trio even more spectral sights and grisly imagery. Except the new images were kind of different from the original ones in their heads. The three gave in to a driving compulsion to come together to hammer out those differences. Luckily, their discussion of Stephen King's novel, The Shining, and the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name, was captured by sensitive audio vibration detection units. We can now present the entire ghoulish session here for your morbid delight. With that...heeeeeere's Hate Expectations!

HE026 The Shining

Lizzy invokes one of her birthday wishes this year to whisk the Hate Expectations team off to a hidden corner of the south pacific, where a magical island of humans and dinosaurs live and work together in near perfect harmony. Yes, we dust off James Gurney's coffee table classic, Dinotopia (1992), and then unearth a dvd copy of the Hallmark mini-series from a decade later. Despite the book containing only the barest bones of a story, the HE team finds plenty in it to examine. Then things really get dirty as they dig deep into the adaptation, a relic from the Crapassic era of cgi. Ping pong, Talking Heads, and a blooper reel; this episode has it all!

HE025 Dinotopia

Representing a slight departure from reality, this episode of Hate Expectations finds Nate and Lizzy taking a long hard listen to The Who's rock opera, Tommy, looking deeply into the Ken Russell movie of the same name (1975), and speaking freely about the sensations it inspires in them. They are joined by their friend, Matt Anderson, on a quest to divine meaning where there is mostly only a series of loosely connected themes about a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard. Lizzy wants to amend the record and point out that the Tommy dvd came out in 2004, not the much too early 1994 she said. Nate wants to append the record to point out that the "and leap up on the rostrum" line from Sally Simpson is one of the most clumsy lyrics ever sung, only made worse by the rough attempted rhyme with "and Tommy gave a lesson".

HE024 Tommy

Good books are read For adaptations that blew. Come hear a discussion By the H.E. crew. Lizzy and Nate and the occasional guest dissect novels, novellas, short stories, plays, leaflets, cereal boxes -- anything that was later turned into a movie. They pillory plot differences, castigate casting choices, and revel in all that is right.

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Hate Expectations

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