Top Plug of the Week

Tomorrow’s FlopTV is all about SKI SCHOOL 2, filling our apparently-mandatory “ski-themed sex comedy” slot for the season. If you wanna watch live, that’s Saturday, 1/4, at 6pm PT/9pm ET — tickets are still available! — $7/episode, $35 for the whole season [+ticket fees]. Following the live stream, all episodes will remain available ON DEMAND for ticket holders through the end of February 2025!

Top Five Flop House Episodes to Celebrate the New Year

The past couple of decades seem to have followed a trend of, let’s call it “scarification.” Each new year seems to come preloaded with a new form of existential dread. Luckily, science has invented something called “earbuds,” which serve both as earplugs to block out the unfeeling universe, AND a way to transport your brain somewhere more fun. Thus, for the new year, here are the top five Flop House episodes to honor/escape from the passage of time!

• (5) 10,000 B.C. — Celebrate the new year by returning to a land before recorded time, when problems were simpler, like “Hey, I don’t want to get eaten by that sabertooth tiger!”

• (4) Uninvited, with Gillian Flynn — Speaking of dangerous cats, maybe you can just be happy that you’re not on a boat with a housecat with a smaller, killer-mutant cat living inside its mouth! Count your blessings, right?

• (3) Happy Halloween, Scooby Doo, with Justin McElroy — Let’s be honest. New Year’s is a bittersweet holiday even at its best. So how about a shot of pure joy? Let’s go back to the BEST holiday, with our friends Scooby and Justin.

• (2) Valentine’s Day — Or maybe, in these cold, post-holiday weeks, you want to look forward to the next celebration on the calendar. We somehow avoided reviewing New Year’s Eve, which would have been the MOST appropriate thing for this list, but you can listen to us discuss a different film from Garry Marshall’s holiday-romcom-industrial complex!

• (1) CATS, with Natalie Walker and Jenny Jaffe — Was seeing Cats in the weeks before covid hit our shores the last time we felt uncomplicated joy? Probably not, but god help us, sometimes it feels that way. Revisit the magic! Cats now and forever!

Okay, the framing of that list was pretty bleak, so I’ll give you another, bonus one! I’m finally getting back into reading more. As a kid I read like a madman, and in college I was an English Lit/Theater Arts double major and devoured genuine classics, but time and world stress stripped my reading habit away until just recently.

I’ve found that the sustained quiet attention of reading is a genuine balm for stress… unfortunately my ADHD means that I have a bad tendency to read like six things at once, as something shiny and new attracts my attention, but I’m trying to get that reading list down by chipping away. Here’s what’s on my “currently reading” bookshelf right now:

• Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage - a exhaustively-researched history of the Marxes’ history in vaudeville, Broadway, and other live stages. No movies here! Given to me by Mr. Elliott Kalan.

• Bleeding Skull! A 1980s Trash Horror Odyssey and Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash Horror Odyssey - two volumes from the experts on bizarro fringe cinema, Bleeding Skull, with capsule essays on all sorts of weirdo horror films.

• Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist - An art instruction book, specifically about fantasy painting, from the creator of Dinotopia.

• A Little History of Philosophy - I’m woefully uninformed about philosophy, partly because my brain shuts down when anyone talks about it, so these short, funny explainers on the key thinkers and theories are just right for me.

• Slow Horses - I love the show, so I got the first volume to read on a recent vacation, but I spent most of my non-sightseeing time reading Linda Holmes’s book instead, so I’m only a chapter in. Looking forward to more, though!

• The Path to Power - Elliott and Roman Mars’s Power Broker podcast inspired me to finally dig into Robert Caro’s multivolume LBJ biography (since I’ve already read TPB). It’s just as excellent as The Power Broker, but since this is only the first volume, and the first volume is nearly 900 pages, I expect to be chipping away at this for some time!

What have Stuart and Elliott been reading?

STU: “Rouge” a novel about loss and skincare by Mona Awad, and “Triangle Agency” a TTRPG by Caleb Zane Huett & Sean Ireland

ELLIOTT: I’m reading Sam Wasson’s book about Coppola “The Path To Paradise,” which I’m enjoying though it’s slightly (I assume deliberately) overwritten.

Next on the Podcast:

Hear ye on main!

1/4 - We kick off the new year with the release of our other live show from Oxford, where we discuss Spice World, a movie I’m not even gonna pretend we didn’t love. People of the world, spice up your life!

1/11 - Dan leads this mini, looking forward to the films scheduled to be released in 2025!

Extra Credit

Stuart crossed the streams on bad movie podcasting recently by appearing on the esteemed We Hate Movies to discuss the seasonally-appropriate New Year’s Evil!

Meanwhile, Dan was over at our friend’s horror franchise show This May Hurt a Bit, discussing Gremlins 2: The New Batch. And, like a bat gremlin flying through NYC, gremlins must be in the air, because our friends over at The Greatest Generation discussed The New Batch as well, in their bonus feed. If you’re a Max Fun member, hop on that boco, post haste!

You Made it to the End!

Happy New Years from 2/3 of The Flop House! (I mean — I’m sure Elliott wishes you a happy new year too! I just don’t have a NYE photo of him! Okay bye!)