Hello, Big Picture listeners. For the next few weeks, Sean and I are handing the feed over to a narrative podcast about Vietnam movies.

It's called, Do We Get to Win This Time? And it's hosted by longtime ranger contributor Brian Raftry, who you might remember from our other narrative podcast, Gene and Roger.

I think you'll like it. Sean and I will see you in a few weeks.

I'm Sean Fantasy. I'm Amanda Davins. And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about garbage fish among other things. That's right. On this episode, we will be talking about the long-awaited garbage fish movies, which is something that Chris Ryan and I have been promoting, suggesting for many, many weeks. But before we do that, we have a special guest here with us, Amanda. Back on the show, how long has it been? Two years ago,

when were you last year, Brian? I think you and I did an episode about weird robots at some point during the pandemic. I vaguely remember that. Yes, that was fun.

Brian Raftry, friend, podcaster, writer, extraordinaire, author, you've been working on a project that's going to be taking over this feed in the bulk of August.

And I thought you could help us understand what it is, why you did it, how you found it, and what listeners should expect from the show.

Yeah, so what is it? What are you doing? I have spent the last year watching a lot, a lot of Vietnam movies, and doing a lot of thinking about Vietnam. And so what we've thrown together is, hopefully, what I think is really fun is kind of like a look at how the Vietnam movies, which were a, for better or worse, a very crucial part of my history, education when I was younger, how they kind of were made some of the big films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, but also looking at sort of like the big impact of these movies on people such as myself when I was a kid.

And I did not know what the Vietnam War was, and I did not know the stakes, and I did not understand American politics, but I watched a lot of movies about Vietnam and kind of trying to trace like what these movies were saying about the war, what they were saying about how Americans felt about the war, but also how these movies were made because a lot of them are these kind of incredibly ambitious over the top wild war epics that.

No one really seems to want to make anymore once a month, once in a while, you get like all quiet in the Western Front or Dunkirk, but there was a long period of time where just like there was a Vietnam movie coming out every month.

And I was not allowed to see it because I was too young and I could not wait until I got an HBO free weekend and my parents who were wonderful people, but not always paying attention to what I was watching.

And so watching, you know, hamburger hill when I was 13 and being completely traumatized by it, but it was it was a really kind of fascinating period in Hollywood history.

And they had this incredibly long sort of up and down relationship with Vietnam, where at first they wanted to make they want to nothing to do with it.

And then all of a sudden, as the country changes and mood change, we got this huge influx of Vietnam films that were, as I said for me and all my friends, we watched these as if they were, I don't want to be glib, but like they're almost like a kind of like a franchise.

And we would just talk about Vietnam movies in every single way and we knew nothing about this war. I was not, I was born after it ended.

I mean, this was nothing but a historical kind of like, it was just sort of like, it was almost like a pop culture phenomenon, which again, I'm not trying to spread it, but it really felt like you had to go see the new Vietnam movie this week.

You had to see platoon, you had to see full middlejack, and you had to go see you had to watch, you know, tour of duty on CBS, which is a show about Vietnam that I watched like from the pilot episode.

So it was a very strange kind of period in my adolescence where me and a lot of other friends were learning about Vietnam through the movies.

And I don't know if we learned anything actually, we learned some things, but that we got a lot of stuff wrong. And it was a very incomplete picture.

Yeah, speaking of learning things, I mean, he worked on the show again. What, what questions did you have for Brian when you guys were working on the show?

A ton because as Brian said, I would say that this podcast is about 70% film history. Yeah, 20% sociological history and 10% gen X history.

Yes. And so I learned a lot about random comic books about what is that one again?

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