All Movie Talk, Episode 1: Unspecial Edition

Here's a special bonus, in lieu of the usual weekend bloopers, in honor of our 50th episode. Before we started recording in earnest, we planned a slate of trial segments for a pilot episode, to see how the recording and editing processes would go. We didn't know if we'd air them or not. Stephen was thinking we wouldn't, but I didn't want to waste all that effort. The problem was that the recording quality was pretty bad, and, worse, the way we recorded it was with both of us on a single audio track, which meant our voices couldn't be edited independently of each other. We decided we'd air the episode but find a better means of recording ourselves for further shows -- and the intro and closing for the pilot, in which we apologized for the audio quality.

But as we continued to record material, the poor audio quality of the pilot kept bothering us, and eventually we decided to rerecord all of the segments. So we did. We reused the intro and closing (except for the parts where we apologized for the sound), but the Episode 1 you know and love has rerecorded segments. We lost some of the spontaneity of the initial recording but gained sound quality.

Well here, for the first time, is the original pilot episode, our very first attempt at recording material for the podcast, and it's interesting to see what's changed over 50 episodes. I've gotten better at improvising content, I think, and better at sounding like I'm improvising when I'm actually reading.

Show contents, with start times:

• Director Spotlight: Christopher Nolan (1:40)
• Trivia Question: Franchise With Future Stars (15:56)
• Industry Trend: Cliffhangers (17:17)
• Top 6: Romantic Movies That Aren't Sappy (29:25)
• DVD Preview: October 2006 (43:54)
• Closing: Trivia Answer, Preview of Next Week (54:53)