Episode #22: Jack Ryan and the Hunt for Red October

This week’s episode is the first recorded on new hardware, the first recorded while part of the ACPN group (as opposed to recording an episode and then being invited while in production), and the first in a while to have the “classic” format of an old release and a new release.

For anybody who might be new to Emerald City Video and is currently reading these notes (likely at ACPN), here’s what our deal is:

Russ Burlingame (that’s me!) is a senior writer for ComicBook.com, but in another life, I managed Emerald City Video, a family-owned video store in Syracuse, NY. During that time, I worked with Visu.News's Zach Roberts briefly as well as a number of other people who have been featured on this show less regularly, including Logan Bretschneider, Dan Fecteau, Erica Ladd, Eva Furmanska, and Dave Nielsen.

The idea of this show is to have the kind of conversations people used to have at the video store: a little more casual, a little more in-depth, and a lot more organic than you get from the crappy algorithms of Netflix, Amazon, and the like.

For example: today, YouTube Movies suggested six movies I should buy, and — as acknowledged under each one with the caption “you purchased this,” each of their purchase suggestions was a movie I already owned. Additionally, they were all six Marvel movies. That seems like a huge missed opportunity to pitch me on…I don’t know, literally any other big blockbuster?

At any rate, Emerald City Video.

In the beginning, over two years ago, our format was that we would talk about one new or new-to-video movie that everyone was buzzing about, and another, older movie that was somehow thematically linked.

For instance, our first-ever episode was Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the underrated girl-power masterpiece Josie and the Pussycats.

Yes, masterpiece. Fight me.

The reason we chose this format goes back to our video store: at ECV, when it was in business, you could rent any movie at full-price and get an older/catalog movie for free. The most frequent combination, of course, was that somebody would get one of the hot new releases, come to the counter, and be reminded “you can grab an older movie for free if you want.” This was one of the most frequent ways that conversations would start, with the cutstomer saying “well, what might go with the thing I have in my hands?”

In today’s case, Zach and Russ are talking about Jack Ryan, the new Amazon series, and the very first live-action Jack Ryan adaptation from 1990, The Hunt for Red October, directed by Die Hard and Predator filmmaker John McTiernan.

There are four more Jack Ryan movies, and we will get to those (and a little more talk about the rest of Jack Ryan season one) over the next few episodes.

You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/emeraldcityvideo or Twitter at twitter.com/ecv_podcast. If you want to support our show, we have ways you can do that, either at PayPal.me/emeraldcityvideo or at https://patron.podbean.com/emeraldcityvideo.

And for more from Russ, Zach, and the rest of the ECV crew, make sure to be back here by noon on the fifth day, and always remember to rewind your cassettes.