LAM2: Miracle on 34th Street with Eli Bosnick!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:01:17 Andrew: And I am recording as well.

0:01:20 Sam: We harmonize? Hello!

0:01:21 Thomas: Yeah. Hello. Hello and

0:01:25 Eli: You're both so white, yeah.

0:01:30 Thomas: Welcome to Law'd Awful Movies number two. Wow. Second one. I'm really excited. Andrew, how are you doing?

0:01:36 Andrew: I'm great, Thomas. How are you?

0:01:37 Thomas: How's your microphone?

0:01:39 Andrew: It is terrible. How's yours?

0:01:40 Thomas: Yeah. No, mine's great. Mine's great and we've got two very special guests. The first one, I'll start with the return guest Sam from Comedy Shoeshine. How's it going, Sam?

0:01:50 Sam: Good, my microphone is perfect.

0:01:52 Thomas: Here, I have something for you. We're Just the whole Time Sam's talking, I'm doing this. No, this This Movie Didn't have that, uh. Hey, and then our fourth and final uh participant here, Eli Bosnick from, uh, he has some pot. Yeah, let's see, he's got Scathing Atheist and some other podcast, uh, I don't know, God Awful Movies, something like that.

0:02:00 Sam: Yeah, oh my god. Just shoot me!

0:02:17 Eli: That's it, that's the one. Listener question from Eli Bosnick: what do you do if your lawyer steals your title, do I I

0:02:26 Thomas: Let's ask our lawyer. Here, Andrew. Uh,

0:02:29 Andrew: You know, recently we've been doing these segments where Thomas answers the legal questions and I get to just ask the questions. Questions.

0:02:36 Eli: Would

0:02:34 Thomas: Oh, okay. I'll answer it. My, my solution is to throw my, my podcast partner under the bus and just say, I thought he totally cleared that with you, you know, paperwork. I thought he had to like an agreement. I thought there was going to be some royalties happening. So none of that you're telling me he didn't do any of that.

0:02:38 Andrew: Uh,

0:02:53 Eli: Like, not only did you do that, but he sent us an email at midnight in red ink, and it said, and it just had Law'd Awful Movies.com registered already, with a picture of my face cropped out and Thomas's face cropped over it.

0:03:08 Andrew: It.

0:03:08 Eli: That's the only information that I was given. Yeah, it's pretty, I would like to take, first of all, I would like several pieces of credit. I wrote on your Facebook wall that you should do "Legally Speaking," you didn't name it "Legally Speaking," but I said that then I said you should Law'd Awful Movies crushed it and I posted on your Facebook wall on the, because I knew you guys wouldn't give me credit, I said Thomas should take the bar, with comedy, many annotations, and all of those suggestions have been taken so far, only patrons get to know

0:03:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. And we did did do that, yeah.

0:03:37 Thomas: No, that's true, if your point hold on, Eli, Eli, let me stop you there. If your point is that you're, we're 100% responsible for all of our success in every way, shape, and form, I'm gonna go ahead and say, yeah, like, you, we're all in agreement, yeah.

0:03:51 Andrew: Speak, wait, wait, speaking as the lawyer present, I do not agree, yeah.

0:03:54 Thomas: No,

0:03:56 Eli: Let's make silly fun jokes about the title lot off the movies, but let's not say on the air that he liked it, there's a thing, all

0:03:56 Thomas: Yeah,

0:04:03 Sam: Oh.

0:04:03 Thomas: So our, our movie for this month, if we're, we're if we're, I mean, if our attorney, let's put here, Eli, let's both talk to our attorneys and see if we're allowed to proceed with the show, so I, Andrew, can we, okay, okay, good, all right.

0:04:13 Eli: Okay.

0:04:15 Andrew: No, conflict at all, absolutely. Got waivers, waivers from all, uh, uh, from all interested parties. Well, I got from the lawyers for all the interested parties. So

0:04:22 Thomas: Oh, well, that'S all you need, so, yeah. All right, so the movie for this month is a Christmas theme, Miracle on 34th Street.

0:04:24 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, Yes. And it is, I believe, the one movie that Eli Bosnick promised he would never make fun of.

0:04:37 Thomas: Oh, yeah. That's That's true.

0:04:38 Eli: Well, that is because I hadn't seen it for 20 years. Upon watching it, I was overjoyed at the amount of bonkers contained in this 90 minute film. This is why kids got had sexed with all the time in the forties. This, This is like, this is like a pedophile's like weird dream that doesn't have the kid sex, it's just like, it's, it's pedophilia on easy, this whole movie can

0:05:04 Thomas: You know what? Since we have you here, Eli, maybe I'll ask you a typical gam question to just further infringe on your patents. Would you nominate this movie for being the best at being the worst at anything? Because that's a good segment you have over on Godawful Movies. I love it.

0:05:18 Eli: I go with best worst legal problems. I mean, again, I am not the lawyer here, and we will explore them, right,

0:05:24 Thomas: Even you could probably see through the legal plot of this one.

0:05:28 Eli: There were several times where I was like, I'm pretty sure that's illegal, like, just to do as a person, not alone, not in a courtroom, just, like, like, as a guy, I feel like they tackle you and someone puts their knee in your back.

0:05:40 Thomas: Oh, I can't wait that I can wait to get to the courtroom seat of this movie, but let's let's start at the beginning so we get a nice long long, uh, credit sequence. So the good thing about the date on this movie is what? 1947. I think it is. Yeah. 1947. So back then they had to do, they're required or something to do credits for most of the movie, like the first 30, 35 minutes, just to everyone ever involved in every friend of a friend who was ever involved with the movie in any way.

0:05:44 Sam: Yeah.

0:05:52 Andrew: Yes.

0:06:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:03 Sam: The first act is credits, uh,

0:06:07 Thomas: And, and we're just following a guy walking forever while credits go. And it turns out that's, that's our main character, or Santa Claus. Um, yeah, Chris Kringle. Spoilers.

0:06:15 Sam: Chris Kringle, like

0:06:16 Eli: Well, looking in the window, and the, the shopkeeper's like arranging the reindeer, and we see this like long shot of the shop creeper, and then we pan back over to Santa's face, and I wanted it so badly to, to pan down, and for Chris Kringle to just be jerking off into the window, it's like, "Oh, blitzing!"

0:06:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:33 Thomas: Yeah, you know, actually I wanted to, I wanted to ask you something, Eli, if you noticed this, I noticed this and I think you're the only other person who's going to give a shit about this. Makeup was done by Ben Nye. Did you see that? Yeah. He's the, the original fucking Ben NYE who liked it. His brand of makeup is every theater, makeup, everything ever now. It's kind of funny.

0:06:45 Eli: Yeah, that's yeah, that was, yeah, that was a weird yeah,

0:06:55 Sam: Bill Nye's dad, yeah,

0:06:55 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:06:56 Andrew: Yeah, I was going to say, was that a Bill Nye joke? But.

0:06:56 Eli: Yeah,

0:06:58 Thomas: Ben Nye, the makeup guy. He gave birth to the science guy.

0:07:00 Eli: Trust, three musical theater nerds that are listening to this are loving that.

0:07:02 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:06 Sam: Love, It by.

0:07:06 Eli: Yeah.

0:07:06 Thomas: Yeah it was weird though. I saw it and I was like whoa that's fucking weird. It is like if you saw a tennis movie and like Wilson did the, I don't know, like equipment or something. I don't know, something like that.

0:07:15 Eli: It's Like, lighting by Mr. Lights, right?

0:07:17 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say that it was like boom mike by Mr. Boom, yeah, just something like that, where it's like, "Wow, the Mr. Boom," but anyway, I noticed that on the second go around, so he tells the, uh, the guy's making a mistake with a reindeer, and the guy is like, "Dude, I don't fucking care, this is my, I just arranged" yeah,

0:07:18 Sam: John lumens Jake Jake Kodak did the film, I think, too, yeah.

0:07:28 Eli: So, yeah.

0:07:39 Sam: He's like, "I can totally fucking hear you, I just don't care, I'm just gonna try to tell you seven times that I can't hear you until you get the hint that I don't fucking care."

0:07:47 Thomas: This movie is a long sequence of people doing the "how do I get this old guy to stop talking to me" thing, like, "Oh, oh, okay," like, because he's through a window, Santa's telling him through the window, like, "Oh, you're making a mistake with the reindeer arrangement," and he's like, "Oh, okay, old man, sure, okay." It's, it's that tone of like, "How do I get this whole guy to," "Does anybody, uh, who do you belong to, is anybody, uh, helping you right now?"

0:08:08 Sam: Yeah,

0:08:11 Eli: This movie could be called "Humoring the Schizophrenic."

0:08:13 Thomas: Yeah, Let's

0:08:17 Sam: It's like "What About Bob" or whatever. What, I just thought it would have been amazing if you, if he mentioned, like, Donner's nutsack is way too small, the guy, he's got gigantic nuts, I don't know who's making these models

0:08:17 Thomas: Yeah. Uh, He's got the biggest dick of all the reindeer here, like you have this wrong.

0:08:29 Sam: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Blitzen's got a micro cock, I don't know what this is, who who made this, yeah,

0:08:34 Thomas: You got you got Donner's dick on Blitzen. Could you switch Donner and Blitze's dicks, please?

0:08:40 Andrew: I just want to point out we are 95 seconds into a beloved holiday classic right here.

0:08:43 Thomas: Yep. Yep.

0:08:46 Eli: Shouldn't have had me on this is my look, I love legally speaking, awful, God, Opening Arguments. I love Opening Arguments and I listen to it every time and I love to hear Andrew. And I actually thought when Thomas invited me on, I was like, oh, all those poor people who love Opening Arguments have to hear me now.

0:08:47 Sam: Yeah,

0:08:47 Andrew: Yeah.

0:08:47 Thomas: Well, we don't. Yeah.

0:09:05 Thomas: Yeah, and then you heard the firm and all the jokes and then like, oh, this is pretty much how it is. Yeah this isn't like the firmware, it's two hours and 400,000 hours. It's just an hour and a half, so we can fill it with all the things we want to. So then we're on to The Thanksgiving Day Parade, and it says the purpose of the parade is to welcome Santa, which is weird to me. That seems unrealistic. I thought thought it was just Thanksgiving.

0:09:05 Eli: Okay, I get it now, it's okay now and

0:09:22 Sam: There's I

0:09:24 Eli: And this is a shitty parade. Andrew, question, why did parades in the 40s suck so much?

0:09:34 Andrew: I I don't know that. This really is the worst parade I've ever seen. There's like a superhero balloon where the guy has an E on his chest, in like Comic Sans, um, and it I don't t know what Mr.

0:09:39 Thomas: Legal question.

0:09:50 Thomas: What does that mean? Energy

0:09:52 Andrew: E the E, but uh, yeah, this is 1947, so I don't think they invented energy yet, but um, but yeah, it's terrible,

0:09:52 Thomas: Man. Yeah, I don't, yeah. Yeah. Yeah it was, just electricity

0:10:02 Sam: Thought it was like ecstasy, man, or something. Wasn't ecstacy. Huge in the 40s, I forget, before my time, yeah.

0:10:02 Thomas: Man. Excellent. Yeah a different time. Yeah so a main character of Doris here, big main character. Doris is in charge of the parade right now. She's kind kind of telling people where to go. She's telling, doing, you know, coordinating.

0:10:17 Sam: The day of the parade, she's telling all the people where to go. Just doesn't seem like a very well organized parade.

0:10:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, it's not quite right. She is like, okay, this is a parade, everybody. Like, she is explaining way too much for it being the day of.

0:10:28 Sam: They're, yeah, they're already dressed up and she's like, you're going to this float, and he's like, yeah, no shit, I'm wearing the fucking whatever uniform. That goes with that float.

0:10:33 Thomas: Yeah! She is, like, yeah, I am a fucking pilgrim. I know I am going to the fucking pilgrims float. I did not think I was going with energy, man. Like I know I am fucking, yeah.

0:10:35 Sam: Yeah, I know, yeah. Yeah, I don't have lightning bolts coming all over my just

0:10:43 Thomas: Yeah it is really weird. And then we meet this, the parade Santa is just drunk off his ass, it's, it's incredible. Yeah, and and he's trying to use the whip that was, and this was, I, I love this part because the real Santa Claus, oh sorry, giving it away, uh, the the character that looks just like Santa Claus that we don't know is Santa Clause, yeah, he goes up and he's like, now you're doing this all wrong, like here's how you horribly abuse my reindeer, like here's how you fucking whip my reindeer to oblivion because the guy couldn't do the whipping right. We don't, I think nowadays we don't emphasize that part of Santa as much. It's not like, oh, there's jolly St. Nick and his horrible animal abuse whip that he uses on his reindeer, kids.

0:10:50 Sam: Hammering, I'm just gonna add that

0:11:24 Eli: See, I just wrote in my notes, Santa shows him out a whip and I am rock hard right now. I am erect.

0:11:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, he like fixes the ball gag and he's like, here's how you do it. This is how you deal.

0:11:34 Sam: Your c-ring is way too loose, it's

0:11:40 Thomas: Yeah he then asks, he asks a pilgrim or or something like an elf or whatever. He's like, who's running this thing? He's like, he's in charge of this fucking shitty parade. And we find out, this is kind of funny. I noticed this on the second go around, like Doris must suck at her job. Our main character must be terrible at parade organization. Cause the guy's like I don't know who's in charged of this shit. I have no idea. I don't even know what float I go on. It's

0:12:02 Sam: Like the biggest parade of in the world, by the way, it's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

0:12:03 Andrew: Yeah,

0:12:07 Eli: But you have to remember, this was the 40s, like, we had just discovered Auschwitz, so everyone was really down, and like, a car moving slowly down your street, that was the number one thing that would have happened to you before you died of the rickets in the 40's.

0:12:11 Thomas: Parades. Oh, yeah.

0:12:07 Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it must have been nice when you could just throw together a parade, the biggest raid in the country, the day it happens, and like not even give a shit, she doesn't even watch it, she's like, I'm leaving as soon as like, she's, yeah, sorry, she's just like, oh, this parade you planned the whole year, that's the biggest parade in the country, and then I'm not gonna watch it, I'm gonna go home, ignore it. What, a simple time, yeah.

0:12:31 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, yeah, but I believe we had a request for a drunken Santa, though, so I think here, let me see if I can get it.

0:12:47 Sam: Yeah.

0:12:48 Clip: KarmaFleet is Recruiting an NDA Specialist, KarmaFLET is Recruit

0:12:50 Thomas: The best drunk. That's an old-timey drunk.

0:12:51 Sam: I love that, I love that voice, it's so that old-timey voice, nobody talks like that now. Why is that

0:12:53 Thomas: Yeah? Yeah. God, I thought that for most of this movie. Yeah, everybody talked differently. Like even Santa Claus, you know, the main guy, like he's, is he British, or does he have that weird, what's that accent that like, what is it, mid-Atlantic or something? Is what is that

0:13:00 Sam: Yeah, did people talk like that and why don't they, more importantly, why don't we still talk like that? It's he's

0:13:15 Thomas: Andrew, this is your territory, legal stuff and accent questions, we know you know all this he's got an accent, it's like Madonna's accent, like I don't know what the fuck it is but it sounds really nice. Uh, so our drunk Santa, you just heard he just passes out, and then Doris, uh, you know, he just asked

0:13:22 Andrew: No,

0:13:33 Eli: Well, he dies, right? Because they can't wake him, and I wrote in my notes, I mean, I get it, this is how we treat the homeless in New York, I just didn't know we had always done it since the 40th. I mean I'm into it, don't get me wrong, I'm just,

0:13:35 Sam: He died and then you steal his alcohol. When someone dies you're allowed to just steal their alcohol, so that's what I, when I saw her with the alcohol, oh, he did die because she was able to take it. Yeah, dude,

0:13:53 Eli: Legally

0:13:49 Thomas: Yeah, the best time, the Only thing you do with two things with homeless people is you either make them be Santa or you just ignore their death. Like there's only two things you do. If you can, they kind of look like Santa, then they can do it.

0:14:02 Sam: My my note for drunk Santa was like, he's kind of out of options for a career at this point. Like if he's, if he can't even get up for the once a year Macy's parade Santa, like what can he do? What's below that, I don't really know what there is.

0:14:13 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:16 Andrew: My notes are that drunk Santa has apparently OD'd on, because his liquor bottle is like, like four ounces of scotch, right? And he's drank half of it, right.

0:14:16 Sam: Yeah, he's a lightweight, yeah.

0:14:26 Andrew: Yeah. So that's, that's two ounces of scotch. Which, you know, I, I had more than that while watching this movie and I watched it at seven in the morning.

0:14:26 Sam: Geez.

0:14:34 Eli: But you gotta remember when he was making that alcohol, it was made out of like moonshine and they made it in a, yeah, made it in a bathtub.

0:14:38 Thomas: Yeah. It would turn us blind nowadays. Like instantly.

0:14:43 Eli: They didn't believe in bacteria yet. There's just been a world war, there's a little mess, little mustard gas in there, yeah,

0:14:43 Sam: Yeah,

0:14:47 Thomas: That's some fucking old prospector alcohol right there. Like, that's what I thought about this. That'S what I love about these old old movies. Like how old was that guy? What in the sixties or seventies, maybe like he was in the 1800s, probably, you know, old prospectoring, making his own liquor. Like that's what he comes from. And he can't cope with this 20th century world. So he drinks that's, that's his character.

0:15:09 Andrew: But man's got to do something.

0:15:10 Eli: I like that, yeah, I like the, we've given the drunk Santa extra, like, a tragic PTSD backstory, they tell you, it's okay to kill a man who steals your gold, but they don't tell you that he'll follow you forever. Lord, awful movies, a giggle a minute, yeah.

0:15:18 Sam: What, is his story,

0:15:17 Thomas: Yeah. So, so anyway, The real Santa has to stand in and he has a great horribly written scene, which is like Doris asks him, Hey, can you stand in for Santa? And he's like, nah. And then he looks and he's, he's just like, Oh, the kids. Okay. Like just instantly, like right away. It's kind of funny. And so he stands in. And the funny thing about him standing in as Santa is now the, the world is abuzz with how good of a Santa he is. Like he's somehow, this is something like adults care about. They're calling each other. Like, did you see the Santa? He's amazing. Which I think is a little unrealistic, he's just a fucking old guy with a

0:15:42 Eli: We

0:15:59 Sam: He's the best at sitting in a chair and waving of any Santa of all time, it just blows people away.

0:16:02 Thomas: Yeah, having a white beard, like that's yeah,

0:16:07 Eli: Gotta remember, again, this is the 1940s, if you didn't have a hoop and a stick, the parade was what you talked about for the year, you know, they didn't have Twitter.

0:16:13 Sam: Yeah,

0:16:07 Thomas: Yeah, my mom never got me the fucking hoop and a stick, all the other kids had it. Like Sam alluded to earlier, I love it though because the guy tells her like, oh, that Santa's the greatest thing in the world, she's like, I'm going home, I'm not even watching it, I, I don't care. And I love it. She's in charge of the entire Macy's Day Parade. But as soon as she sends off like one car, like one Santa, she's like, I'm out of here. I'm washing my hands of the entire thing. The parade's still going, but she's just like, no, I mean, I don't know, I'm leaving. And so then she goes home and Doris goes home. She's looking for someone named Susan, uh, she asked her slave, like, hey, slave, do you see, uh, do you know who's, yeah,

0:16:16 Eli: Yeah, okay,

0:16:18 Sam: Yeah,

0:16:49 Eli: Thank, thank you. She has a pet black, right? We can just acknowledge that in this movie that none of the characters will talk about the fact that she just walks in and she's like, huh? Out loud. She goes, huh? Nobody's home. And then runs into her black maid and is like, like I said, nobody's home, where's my kid?

0:16:49 Sam: Yeah,

0:17:00 Thomas: Oh,

0:17:06 Sam: No, yeah,

0:17:08 Andrew: I just want to point out this is not an exaggeration. This is literally what happens in this movie in 1947, which is, you know, 80 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Keep going.

0:17:13 Sam: Yeah,

0:17:15 Thomas: That's awesome, yeah, so

0:17:20 Sam: She's like, no, humans who should have full rights are home, yeah,

0:17:25 Thomas: So yeah,

0:17:23 Eli: And she she goes, like, oh, where's my daughter? And he goes, oh, your daughter's hanging out across the hallway with the neighbor you don't know, and she's like, but

0:17:30 Thomas: I love it, yeah, it was different time, yeah,

0:17:36 Andrew: Is he supposed to be a neighbor? I could never figure out the connection. I watched this twice.

0:17:39 Thomas: He's a neighbor who has just, just abducted her kid. Like, he's literally just, oh, yeah, your kid's been kidnapped. I don't know if you know this, Doris. Your kid's over there with a strange man across the way. They've been hanging out a lot, actually. Just all the time, this strange man and your kid. Yeah, that's how it goes.

0:17:53 Andrew: This is not normal lawyer behavior. I just want to be on the record for that.

0:17:57 Thomas: Oh, that'S right. He's a lawyer. And so, the kid is talking to Gailey. His name is Mr. Mr. Gailey, which is, it's a bit of a precursor to the later on, but anyway, Mr. Gailey does, Susie, the little girl doesn't believe in anything. This This is Natalie Wood's kind of weird, but Anyway, she doesn't, uh. Believe in anything at all because their life is terrible and her parents divorced and didn't love her and all that. So that's the basic of what's going on with her.

0:18:20 Eli: Here's the weird Thing, Mr. Gailey is deeply offended that this child doesn't believe in things that, like, nobody thinks children should believe in. Like, the very first conversation she has, is he's, is he's like, "Oh, look, maybe those are giants," and she's like, "Giants aren't real," and instead of, like, an adult with dignity going, "Yeah, I know, but they're a fun story," he's like, "What the fuck do you mean giants aren't real?"

0:18:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:18:45 Eli: They Used To be real, yes.

0:18:45 Sam: Well, Yeah,

0:18:46 Andrew: And I just Want to point out. Yeah, this is the protagonist of the movie.

0:18:48 Thomas: Before your parents ruined you. Yeah.

0:18:54 Andrew: Right. Is the one who needs to get taken down a peg, right? Because she's, you know, an uppity professional woman, and she's misparenting Natalie Wood, who doesn't believe in, you know, giants or whatever. No, no, that's the protagonist. Anyway.

0:18:51 Sam: Who

0:18:56 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:19:06 Thomas: It's unclear whether our main character lawyer guy believes in fairy tales or not. Like it's actually unclear. Like I think he might actually believe in them. He's cause he's like, what about Jack and the beanstalk? That's real. She's like no, it's not really. It was like, yes it is. My parents told me it was like he really is fighting for it.

0:19:24 Eli: I'll call your kid to the stand. Fuck. You like

0:19:25 Thomas: I can't wait. Yeah. Wait till later. Anyway, Doris comes in and to get her kid that's been kidnapped by the strange man and Gailey and Susie, it turns out they've been friends for a while. You know, they've Been drinking buddies. They've just been hanging out like an adult man has just been Hanging out with a kid.

0:19:39 Eli: This is how you get your kid. Look, I know the scientist lady who Thomas had on the show said that it's okay and that they don't fuck your kid, but this is how your kid fucked who knows she'd probably tell you the statistics or something, something she's a bad mom I get it, he

0:19:53 Thomas: No, this is definitely how you get your kid. Fuck. I think even she would agree, this now, don't do this she would tell me statistics are a hundred percent that Mr. Gailey will rape your kid, like a hundred, so some rapist in her apartment has been parenting her child, but it's okay because he even says, like, oh, I was doing it to get close to the mother, you know, like it's like okay yeah

0:20:15 Eli: Took her to the zoo, best way to pick up chicks is to take their kid to the zoo.

0:20:19 Sam: Takes a kid to the zoo yeah

0:20:17 Thomas: Just took her to the zoo, just took your kid, yeah Unbeknownst to them. Oh, I told your slave. Well, she doesn't count. She's not a person. I can't. So Susie then asks if if Doris can invite, you know, oh, can Mr. Gailey come to Thanksgiving dinner? You know, which I guess this is something they've planned. So this is cute little interaction where she's asking and she gives it away.

0:20:26 Eli: Well

0:20:40 Andrew: But before we get there, I just have one note where Susie is looking out the window, and she says, oh, they're the acrobats. The parade's over. And wanders off, and you can very clearly see the parade still going on in the window, and, like, going on for miles in the windows and the music is still playing, yeah.

0:20:41 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not just a couple of guys. Yeah. It's like there's a whole just shitload of people still to go. They must have been pretty offended by that. Oh, what, what, we don't get to go, we don't get to parade? Come on, we're here. So he has no Thanksgiving plans, but because clearly he's a weirdo rapist who doesn't have any friends or family or anything, like, he has, nope, this guy couldn't be more sketchy. He has no plans for Thanksgiving at all. He's parenting someone else's child just for, no, just for fun, because, because he felt like it. But, but that's okay, she's gonna invite him to Thanksgiving, because, you know, he's got a real pouty face, so he's definitely, it,

0:21:32 Sam: Well, he's already admitted to the mom at this point that he only became friends with the girl to meet her. Like, he actually, they sit, sit in the kitchen, and he just tells her that she's, like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, if you were the woman, you'd be like, oh, so you are the weird creep that I want to hate and I'll never talk to again. Okay, thanks, bye.

0:21:32 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Which must have been a relief, actually, like, oh, thank God, I thought, I though you were a child molester for a second, you're just trying to thank God, whoo, yeah.

0:21:50 Sam: Yeah, yeah,

0:21:50 Eli: It well, it's this weird it's this weird moment where he turns to her, and he's like, and the little girl's like, did I do it right, Mr. Gailey, and it's, it's supposed to be this, like, oh, turns out he asked her to ask him, and the, the 1940s lady isn't like, this is horrifying, you took my child to the zoo and then trained her to make me date you and instead, she's like, "Dinner's at three," which is more upsetting than child molestation, Andrew.

0:22:04 Thomas: Yeah, to invite you into my house

0:22:21 Eli: Why was dinner at three in 1947? Was it because you had to work by candlelight? Like, if you ate at six, you'd probably burn yourself.

0:22:20 Andrew: Yeah,

0:22:24 Thomas: Yeah, you were around Andrew, right?

0:22:29 Andrew: I was going to say, I think Eli has a slightly misinformed view of my age here, but yeah.

0:22:35 Eli: 1947. When Andrew started to work for Cover Girl makeup, and then they asked him to law one law too far again.

0:22:39 Andrew: Yeah, yeah,

0:22:45 Thomas: So, so we get more clips of this meaningless Santa Claus, which would be nothing, like, the this guy, the main character being Santa Claus would be absolutely zero, people would just be like, yeah, that he's being Santa Clause, yeah.

0:22:50 Andrew: He he does have his own beard, though. Oh,

0:22:58 Thomas: Oh, oh, well, that's, yeah, that's a huge deal, and he's made a huge impression on the entire city, in the world. I think, like, people are, like, in show scenes of other countries, and, like, did you see this one guy in a float playing Santa, and, uh, they'll sell a bunch more toys, like, the, the shopkeep is really excited about this. And at the end, Santa is just a shill for Macy's. You're like, there's this, um, badly dubbed thing where Santa's waving to the crowds and he's like, "Shopping Macy," it's pretty funny. Did Macy sponsor this movie? Did they make this movie, Dean? Does anyone know? No, yeah,

0:22:59 Sam: Yeah, before this movie, Macy's was nothing, no, they totally launched him into what they are now. We'll,

0:23:32 Thomas: Oh,

0:23:31 Andrew: I actually know the answer to this, which was, they, they wrote and they filmed the movie with both Macy's and Gimbals in it, uh, which Gimbels is the other department store that actually, like, used to exist for a while, and, uh, and then, when the movie was over

0:23:36 Thomas: Good, yeah, we know you were there at the time, You're old, we get it. We all get it, yeah.

0:23:48 Andrew: Right? Yeah, yeah, No, no, and I had a bitter rivalry as as to whether we were going to go to Macy's or Gimble's. And then when they were done, they went to R.H. Macy and to, I guess, I don't know, Mr. Gimple, whatever the hell his name was, and asked their permission after the fact. And both guys liked how their stores were portrayed in the movie, so they gave their permission.

0:24:11 Thomas: Huh.

0:24:11 Andrew: But if they hadn't, you would have had to have reshot major chunks of this movie. So there you go.

0:24:13 Thomas: Be no movie. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah.

0:24:17 Andrew: Real trivia. You, right.

0:24:17 Thomas: So yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And, um, so then Santa's in the Santa Claus locker room where everybody, like, you know, changes after. The, yeah.

0:24:26 Andrew: Which you, which you have, that's a thing I,

0:24:27 Thomas: Exactly. He's like, "Tough game," uh, "out there." Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:30 Sam: Get him next time. Yeah.

0:24:31 Thomas: Like somebody snaps their towel at his, like, naked Santa Claus ass, and, uh, and there's this weird kid janitor, which is there was still child labor back then, I guess, uh, and he likes Santa, he likes being Santa, he's talking to Santa, he was like, "Oh, you're so cool, man, I like dressing up as you because it makes me feel important," uh, because I'm a weird kid janiter, so, I don't know, I get his character, that makes sense, actually, sure.

0:24:34 Andrew: Yeah,

0:24:36 Sam: Yeah,

0:24:55 Andrew: No, I, I have to, I'm sorry, I have prevent here, because, as the, as the fattest person on this podcast, like, this kid, this kid is cast as, like, fat and since it's 1947, right? Also stupid, right? So he's fat and stupid, and, like, the kid's probably, like, I don't know, a 34, 36, right? Like, he's a little, all chubby, but, like, they play, like, it's Dom DeLuise on Thanksgiving, right? Like, I mean, it's ridiculous.

0:24:57 Thomas: Oh, God, I was, yeah, Yeah. The fat kid. Yeah.

0:25:20 Eli: This is when, like, only the president got milk, though, you gotta remember, in 1947, if you managed a 34 waist, it was because you absorbed a twin, I have to admit, I mean, it's gonna be pretty clear to anybody who listens to me that I'm already a pretty racist person, but I didn't get that the kid was a janitor because he, he was white. Like, I was just like, oh, no, janitors in movies are Latino, so when he was sweeping, I was like, "Why the fuck is that guy sweeping?" And Anna turns to me and goes, "He's the janitor," and I, and I start to, and she looks at me, because she is not, and I start to say, "But he's," woo, and she, and I was just like, "Way good at that role," all right, in my notes, right.

0:25:32 Thomas: Yeah, No, it's true. That would, that doesn't exist anymore. There's no such thing as a janitor who you could just, you know, speaks English and you could, could just talk to. Doesn't exist. This was 1947, different time. Shellhammer is the guy who's kind of in charge of the, what, like the toy department, I think, and he's trying to tell Santa Claus in the locker room, he's like, "Hey, you got yourself a future here, kid, and you can be Santa Clause full-time in Macy's, but you got to push, like, the shitty toys on the kids that, you know, they don't want, because we have to keep the, like, inventory, whatever we have, more inventory, have you got to push on there."

0:26:37 Eli: And Santa hates that. Santa's like, "Oh, the way they commercialize Christmas," says the man based on a Coke commercial and a rich guy who hits someone at a papal conference. He

0:26:38 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and

0:26:42 Sam: And he's like making a child take something he doesn't want. It's like a kid in those days would take anything, I, don't give, a kids nowadays will take anything, they're not, like, "Oh, you got me this toy, I really wish I had this other toy from the other store." It's like, no one cares, just get a fucking toy, whatever it is, it's great, I want a toy.

0:26:48 Thomas: My yeah, yeah,

0:26:48 Andrew: Yeah,

0:27:02 Thomas: But My note here is, like, so what is Santa Claus doing at this point, like, he has a day job now, like, he can just, shit, I mean, if we're going with the movie that this guy is Santa Clause, doesn't have shit to do, like, he can just walk around all right, well, we'll see we'll get to it, yeah.

0:27:05 Sam: Yeah, is he Santa Claus, I don' t even know he's

0:27:19 Eli: Is not Santa Claus he is you mentioned that earlier, he's not, s Santa Claus, he is very clearly an old man with some kind of dementia who has been living in a home. The movie acknowledges this, they're like, oh, yeah, no, this guy lives here, he has terrible, terrible dementia which causes him to think he's Santa Clause, and then throughout the movie, the home is just like, well, it's the 1940s, asylum's a pretty loose term

0:27:21 Sam: Is he and

0:27:31 Thomas: True. How, can You explain the fact that He has a beard because yeah like

0:27:45 Eli: And

0:27:46 Sam: It's not one of the string ones you understand

0:27:48 Thomas: Multiple times During the movie they're like, "But look at his beard, is real." It's like, yeah, it's a beard, everybody has that. So yeah, I don't know. So yeah, that evidence of him not being Santa Claus is that he's just hanging out like he has nothing to to do. So they give him a job and he's going to do it. Then they cut to Santa Claus in Macy's and some kid who's long dead now. That's my favorite thing about all these actors. These kids are just totally dead. Couldn't be more dead. Every one of them probably.

And some long dead kid wants a weird toy that I can't even tell what it is because it's not an Xbox or whatever. And they're all sold out. But but here's what Santa does. Our fake Santa, real Santa, whatever, whatever. He says, "Ah, here's this other store." You know, he says, "Oh, you're going to get that." And the mom is even trying to tell him like, "Don't tell her, I can't find the toy." And he's like, "No, you can't get this toy.

You can't." And so she confronts him and he says, "Here's where you can find it." And of course, this this is sends Shellhammer into shock. He's in Shellhammer shock. And because

0:27:49 Sam: Yeah shell shock and

0:28:46 Thomas: He hears what he's doing, like, you know, sending people to other stores for the toys. And she's really shocked about it. But then that mom comes over and tells him, "Oh, we love this new gimmick you have," where this weird old uh schizophrenic fellow tells people where to get toys that's not here, not Macy's, so it's okay because it's still commercially successful and all that yeah

0:29:04 Sam: She's like, "I'm willing to overlook the fact that he pinched my ass just because it was so great that he told me where I could find this toy."

0:29:09 Thomas: Also I think he shat himself but uh you need

0:29:12 Sam: Yeah he's due for a change

0:29:16 Thomas: To change your Santa

0:29:17 Eli: Then We we cut to, we cut to his office and he goes, and like the guy walks in and he goes, "Six more women out there want to thank you." So Mr. shell Shellhammer's, like, super affronted that he recommended, like, Dewey-Jewingtons. It's called Schoenfelds. And I just wrote in my notes, Andrew used to work at Schoenfelds, but one day they asked him to toy a toy too far. But, yeah, Shellhammer is really upset until six more women show up and they want to thank him for the 1940s Google that is Santa.

0:29:43 Thomas: Uh,

0:29:52 Andrew: Yeah.

0:29:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's just given basic information.

0:29:54 Andrew: Yeah. And it is very clearly six more women want to thank you. And in fact, when the camera pans away, literally the entire story is nothing but but women. Gailey is the only man in the entire shot. And clearly the thought process is right. Only women shop. Right. Like it's not like men do that shit, except except for Gailey. And he's kind of weird.

0:30:05 Thomas: Yeah. Those were the days. Yeah. Well, yeah, Gailey is certainly weird, but he's not even shopping. He's just, you know, being a rapist neighbor, taking his neighbor's kid to see Santa, but she doesn't even want to see him because she doesn't believe in Santa, um, and and then he and Maureen O'Hara, you know, Doris, have the most, like, Doris has the most reasonable stance on parenting here. They have an argument and she's like, hey dude, like, I don't teach my kid these weird myths. Like I'm trying to get you to not do that because you're going to tell her these weird ass things and I've told her something different. She's going to question me. She has the most reasonable stance on this. Couldn't be more reasonable.

0:30:51 Eli: For context, she walks out of the building she works in and sees her her neighbor, A, hanging out with her daughter, and B, forcing her daughter to go meet Santa. And she's like, what are you doing? And she goes, your black girl broke her ankle, I swear. I wasn't trying to hook up a threesome with Santa. That's not what was going on.

0:30:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:11 Thomas: That's what he says. Yeah, oh, you're, you know, you're... I know we don't acknowledge your existence, but you're lady broke her ankle or twisted her ankle or something. And therefore, I had to take your kid to see Santa Claus naturally. That is the only thing you can do. And so, while they're having this discussion, I love this too, because they, they, you know, Doris starts to have the very reasonable parenting discussion about like, Hey, stop, you Know, going against all my parenting and teaching her weird stuff. And they just tell her like, hey, Susie, stand over there. And she just wanders off. I love it. She just wandERS off to be kidnapped or murdered or whatever. It's, it's great.

0:31:43 Eli: It's okay. The lady on Atheistically Speaking said it's fine. Don't worry about it.

0:31:48 Andrew: I do want to emphasize again that like Doris, as far as we can tell, right, like she is we never get her job title. Right, but she's high up in the Macy's Corporation. She's in charge of running the parade. She may be the most accomplished professional woman in America in 1947, right? Like, no, I don't, that's not a joke, like, I mean, I, I seriously think like she is, you know, uh, a a female captain of industry here, and the whole movie is like, and you know, come on, don't we need to bring her down a couple of pegs?

0:31:58 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:20 Eli: Yeah, the movie is definitely about what a bad mom she is.

0:32:20 Andrew: Right, Right.

0:32:21 Sam: Yeah,

0:32:24 Thomas: So Susie who we know, like the kid doesn't believe in Santa cause of all this, but she witnesses. There's this Dutch girl who doesn't speak English, and the woman that she's with is just like, can you just, I hope you could maybe talk to her. Santa just starts speaking Dutch because he's really Santa Claus, guys. That just...

0:32:39 Eli: Right. Right. And she speaks Dutch to him, and I wrote in my notes, she's explaining the Jewish menace to him.

0:32:47 Eli: And then, as if that scene wasn't creepy enough, they sing a Dutch song together, which no question summons a demon or haunts a doll or some shit. Okay, it's the creepiest thing. We're about to watch two men sleep next to each other in twin beds, and there is no question that this creepy song Santa and this little girl sings brings a dragon back to life. Like, we don't see it in the movie, but it's what happens.

0:32:57 Thomas: Yeah, so he's either Santa Claus or he's just a bilingual weirdo, so then the mom has had enough of this, and she wants wants Chris Kringle, which is his actual name, I guess, to tell Susie that he's not Santa. He's like, can you tell her the truth that you're not Santa? But he won't. He was like, no, I am Santa. So she cans his ass. She's like, you're fired. She was like take your fucking papers.

0:33:32 Eli: Well, she realizes he's insane.

0:33:34 Thomas: And yeah.

0:33:35 Eli: And she's like, oh, Santa, we're going to fire you because it rhymes with Macy. You are something that rhymes with Macys.

0:33:46 Thomas: She gets a butterfly net and they just take him off. So the higher ups now have found out about Macy's, you know, this gimmick that he's sending people to Santa's sending people to other stores and they're receiving tons of letters pledging like, hey, every future dollar I ever make I'm going to spend at Macy's now because it's such a great policy, you

0:34:06 Eli: I love this boardroom. Andrew, what was it like when boardrooms were just all white men in 94-piece suits?

0:34:12 Thomas: Were

0:34:13 Andrew: So, you know, in all seriousness, I when I start first started working at Covington and Burling, right, this was 1997. 1997. This was not, you know, the 40s.

0:34:23 Thomas: In your 80s then, yeah.

0:34:24 Andrew: Yeah, there was a hallway outside of our main conference room that we used to call the Hall of Dead Partners, right? And it was all of the, you know, because the firm goes back 150 years. It was all partners that had passed away. And the joke was that when you walk down that hall, that the only conclusion you could draw was that women and and people of color must be immortal because literally, yeah. And that's, that was not that long ago.

0:34:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:54 Eli: Also, tiny thing about my past here. They've gotten like 500 letters according to the script. I worked at FAO for FAO Schwartz, the largest toy store in New York, for almost 10 years. I walked dying, candle lighter kids, like Make a Wish kids, across the big piano like a day before they died. We never got 10 thank you letters, let alone 500.

0:35:18 Eli: The idea is like, hey, your Santa Claus told me where I can get roller skates. I don't buy it. My point is they don't buy it

0:35:17 Thomas: Oh Man Could have been back then, people had more time though, they were just like, I'm bored of the stick and the wheel. You know, wheel thing.

0:35:28 Eli: Right,

0:35:30 Sam: Yeah, like Well, the parade's over, so I guess I'll just write some letters.

0:35:34 Eli: Gotta get home for dinner at 3 p.m.

0:35:35 Thomas: Uh, so they're excited about that. Uh all the, you know their new dollars they're making from this and Mr. Macy says like everything's great and this is all awesome as long as you didn't fire that guy. Like as long you definitely didn't fire that for being insane. So yeah.

0:35:52 Sam: He's like, I don't even know why I'm even saying that. I don't know.

0:35:57 Thomas: So Doris hires him back, but he's really worried. I love this. And my note says, he's really worried about how commercialized Christmas is becoming in 1947. Like, yeah.

0:36:08 Sam: Yeah, if only Santa knew, now he'd be rolling over in his grave. Santa died, right?

0:36:13 Eli: So they just yeah. Apparently There was a real one. They declared it legal, so that means when that guy dies, Dana died, but we'll get to that, but

0:36:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:14 Sam: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's something I tell my kids. Well, there was a Santa, but he died, so.

0:36:23 Thomas: Yeah,

0:36:25 Eli: He fucking died.

0:36:25 Thomas: Here's his biography.

0:36:25 Sam: Wait, there's not one. Yeah. You saw the movie, kids. He died.

0:36:26 Thomas: Here's you saw the documentary Miracle on 3rd.

0:36:32 Eli: So So they decide that they're gonna have the company psychologist examine him now, look, we have one of those at Scathing Atheist, but I don't think that's a normal thing, right?

0:36:37 Sam: Yeah.

0:36:37 Thomas: Yeah it's not a normal thing for non-Eli companies. So he's going through the mental examination from this guy who this guy's face is amazing. Eli, you've got to have something for the look of the psychiatrist guy. I'm hoping.

0:36:41 Eli: Oh,

0:36:42 Andrew: No, it, it, that it

0:36:55 Eli: He looks like he's gonna pay you for a hamburger on Tuesday, but he's going to molest your kids today. This is incredible and we should

0:37:02 Sam: Yep.

0:37:01 Thomas: Yeah, he does look like a real life version of the Hamburglar, actually, like he's that kind of shape.

0:37:05 Eli: Absolutely can we point out he proves Santa has this moment before he goes into the psych exam where he's like, oh, I'll prove to you I'm insane, insane, I'll talk to myself and slap myself in the face. You could make this movie ten times better by just constantly panning down to his dick being out. That's what I'm saying, is that this character acts insane and Mr. Gailey's like, well, it seems to me like you're going to totally crush this psychological examination.

0:37:09 Sam: That's wimpy, isn't it?

0:37:35 Thomas: Yeah. This character's name is Granville Sawyer. I love the Granville. That's a name we need to bring back for sure. So he's doing the mental examination and he's passing because either, you know, he's sane and he's Santa Claus or he's taken a billion of these and he's a high functioning, just insane person. One or the other, we can't tell. Now she's gotten the doctor from the home that he's from. And the doctor says, you know, He's nuts, but he's the good kind of nuts. So it's fine. So that's kind of the doctor doctor from the home that Chris Kringle's from. That's his official opinion. Like, yeah, sure. He's, he's insane, but he's the good guy.

0:38:07 Eli: I want to talk a little bit about this meeting with the psychologist, Right? Because he does really good on all the tests, but he's like asking questions back to the psychologist, and Mr. Sawyer is like the villain of the movie, right, and we're supposed to believe that this guy is like a nervous mob, this, this is a very, this movie has a very strange, like, anti-psychology bent to it, because Santa's like, "So, Mr. Sawyer, how are you?" And Mr. Sawyer's like, "I'm not gay, okay, Santa, I'm not fucking gay."

0:38:10 Thomas: Sure. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

0:38:36 Sam: Yeah.

0:38:39 Eli: The moment Santa leaves, we see Mr. Sawyear have like a screaming fight about how his wife can't have more allowance, and I mean, we all get that, right, Thomas, your wife has an allowance. Andrew, nobody tell my wife I made that joke, please, please don't tell me, but

0:38:35 Andrew: Actually,

0:38:48 Thomas: Yeah, so

0:38:53 Andrew: My wife gives me an allowance. I mean, it turns out that dick joke law doesn't pay nearly as well as I thought it would when I left the big firm. So...

0:39:03 Eli: At the very end of the scene, we're supposed to believe that the psychologist, like, didn't like him as a person, so he's gonna send him to an institution. Now,

0:39:11 Thomas: Yeah well, I believe it back then, you know, they didn't have it. If there, If there wasn't a parade, there wasn't a letter to write, you had a guy committed. That's the only activities.

0:39:20 Sam: Yeah, I was annoyed by that because it's like, I'm just trying to get to it committed every day. It's impossible these days. You know what you have to do to get people to just take care of you all day? Back then, it's, like, hey, I think I'm Santa. All right, we'll take care of you for the rest of your life.

0:39:33 Thomas: Here, sit in this comfortable chair and have people wait on you.

0:39:36 Sam: Yeah.

0:39:33 Eli: Andrew, Andrew, legal question, in the 40s, when you were a mere 35 year old man, could you just, at Covington Burlington Coat Factory, could they just send you to an insane asylum at your job, wait,

0:39:48 Andrew: Uh, yeah, they pretty much could. I mean, what to me, the most interesting thing about this, the scene where you get, where you get the interview with, uh, the psychologist from, uh, Chris Kringle's home, right, he's portrayed as the reasonable one, right, and he says, look, he's not a danger to himself or to others, and so there's no reason to institutionalize him, and, like, that, that would become the law, but that doesn't become the law until 1975. There's a Supreme Court decision, it's called O'Connor versus Donaldson, um, and that the holding is that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non, yeah, it.

0:40:03 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:20 Thomas: It wasn't called Granville Sawyer versus, yeah, oh, yeah?

0:40:24 Andrew: I, this movie was actually written in 1947, and they anticipated what the standard would be, where, you know, all of a sudden people got sick of, uh, you know, just, you could lock people up because you didn't like them on a personality test.

0:40:37 Eli: Wait, wait, Andrew, you, you can't, like, confine a crazy person as long as they're not dangerous, that's the law, but

0:40:38 Andrew: Yeah, no, the law is that a person has to be a danger to themselves or to others, right, but that's only been the law for the past 40 years.

0:40:54 Eli: That's the law now. Like, we don't, have, we haven't since fixed that, there's a guy who could just walk around being like, "I'm Napoleon." It's like, you gonna hurt anybody? No, all right. Napoleo table for two.

0:40:54 Andrew: Right, yes. Yeah, right, Yeah, that's

0:40:56 Thomas: Yeah. That's fine. What's wrong with that? Yeah, he's, it's fine, yeah!

0:41:09 Andrew: Why "I'm not hurting anybody" is such a common, uh, street urchin refrain.

0:41:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:15 Eli: Oh, I have just changed my public behavior massively. This is, this is the, my life just divided into two halves, before I knew about this law and after I knew about this. Well,

0:41:15 Andrew: Yeah, and

0:41:26 Thomas: So, uh, the weirdo psychiatrist, uh, Granville Sawyer, wants him fired, but he's like, well, you know, it's on your head if he molests a kid, which he's totally gonna do, and Doris is like, nah, we gotta keep him because Mr. Macy wants him. So they decide, like, let's get him a room in the city, because he's traveling, apparently, from wherever this home is. It's far away, I don't know what he does all day, but he, he's, that's where he's been traveling, as long as we give him a room in the city and we'll watch him, he'll be fine. So there's this weird subplot, that for no reason, where Shellhammer, the other guy, like, he's going to try to get Chris Kringle to stay at his house, but he has to, like, roofie his wife in order to do it. So he's talking about like, I'll get her hammered and she'll agree to it. Um, but, but that's going take some time. So Santa has to have dinner with Doris and Susie. It's kind of a weird plot that doesn't go anywhere, but, but anyway.

0:42:03 Sam: Yeah,

0:42:14 Andrew: This is not an exaggerated, like, these are not jokes, right, like, the, this subplot, which is totally meaningless and, needs it, absolutely plays no role in the film whatsoever, is shell hammer laughing with his boss, his female boss, about how he's going to get his wife too hammered to make decisions. It's amazing.

0:42:31 Thomas: Yeah. So, uh, so now, now we're at Doris's house and, and Santa is teaching Susie to be insane like him. It's cool. He's got a lesson. He is like, here's how you need to be insane. And he has this whole speech about, I love this. And it's funny that this was even true back in the day, back in 1947, but he's like, imagination is the greatest thing. It'll help you do anything. Like, what is the point of that lesson? I know it's in a lot of kids movies and shit, but like, what does that do for anybody? Like, oh yeah, if you have imagination, you can believe anything until you're what, like 13 and then you can't do that anymore. And you never do that again in your life.

0:43:09 Thomas: It's only for a fixed time in your tiny years that you can just pretend stuff and it's really cool.

0:43:09 Eli: It's it's even more disturbing because at the beginning of the scene he's like, "Like, why don't you paint the house blue?" Or whatever, he says something very general, and she clearly demonstrates that kind of autism that's like, they don't understand turns of phrases, right? Do you remember what I'm talking about? There's a moment in the movie where he's like, "Cat got your tongue?" And she's like, "No, there are no cats in this room." And you're like, oh, she needs to see Dr. Thomas as well.

0:43:43 Eli: But yeah, he's trying to talk up the imagination to her, and she keeps, like, she wants, like, a cost, cost benefit analysis of the imagination, and he does this weird joke where he goes, "Well, you know, there's the," she doesn't, she literally does not know what the imagination is, right, hasn't heard the word, and he goes, "Well, you've heard of the French nation."

0:43:41 Andrew: And

0:44:04 Eli: Now there's the imagination. I just

0:43:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:44:06 Andrew: Really, I've got to be the one to come in and and say urination, like none of the rest of you watch Beavis and Butthead come on.

0:44:12 Thomas: Yeah, it's just such a weird pitch, that he, like, he's so important to him that she pretend weird shit for like a couple years. But, but then the minute you're too old, you can't do that. But anyway, uh, yeah,

0:44:24 Sam: Think it's just that adults are like, life's just so terrible right now, I'm gonna over exaggerate the five times I imagined when I was a kid, and push it on little kids, pretend that there's still some hope left in this world. Now, I mean, now the parade's over, there's nothing really to look forward to.

0:44:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:36 Eli: Just want to point, I make a full time living pretending to have sex with the dead body of Phyllis Schlafly, so one point for imagination also.

0:44:44 Andrew: I,

0:44:48 Thomas: So the rapist neighbor is talking to Chris Kringle and he's like, hey, I heard you're looking for a place to stay. You know, I got I live all alone. I've clearly we've established I'm a rapist with no family or friends or anything. He's like I'm all alone in my apartment with twin beds for some reason. Like he just, was that normal back when you lived in that time, Andrew? Just twin beds in an apartment for nothing, for no reason?

0:45:11 Andrew: Just want to say, I have watched this, this movie, uh, it is my sister's favorite holiday movie, we watch it, uh, this time of year every year, so I've probably seen it 20 or 30 times, and only now did, did I ever come up with any kind of, um, real homoerotic subtext here, but, but it's definitely there, like, once you see it, right?

0:45:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:34 Andrew: Like Gailey leans way in and his voice gets kind of husky. And he's like, I have an

0:45:39 Thomas: Yeah, he's got like a handkerchief in his pocket and he's like, you're, you know, you're a, yeah, yeah.

0:45:42 Andrew: Extra bed in my house.

0:45:44 Eli: We learn his firm's name for the first time here. Oh.

0:45:48 Andrew: No, this made me so mad because the whole movie, right, like we talked about the Macy's thing, right. So Macy's is a real store. Gimble's is a real store, all that. But no, his law firm is Hayslip, Haysslip, Sherman, McKenzie and Haysflip, which not a real law firm. They were just like, oh yeah, you know, we got to get the department stores right, but when it came to, you know, when it comes to law firms, like, yeah, just call it anything.

0:46:08 Thomas: Lawyers have been getting shafted since 1947. So, yeah, but Mr. Gailey, again, really appropriately named here. He's just ganging it up with Santa, and Santa is into that. He's like, yeah, I'll go stay in your apartment, sure. And the weird roofied wife calls and there's this kind of funny scene where she can't work a phone, she's kind of pointless.

0:46:11 Andrew: Yep, yep.

0:46:28 Eli: Right. She, she's just like Thomas, every time I've seen him in person, twice.

0:46:32 Andrew: I can vouch for that.

0:46:33 Sam: Yeah.

0:46:35 Thomas: Yeah. I've only met Eli once when I was on vacation and I'll never hear the end of it that I was hammered on vacation.

0:46:40 Eli: Blackout. Drunk.

0:46:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:46:42 Eli: Drank.

0:46:43 Thomas: Uh, and uh,

0:46:44 Eli: An entire bottle of table wine in Little Italy, also.

0:46:48 Andrew: Oh.

0:46:45 Thomas: God. That was so bad, so yeah.

0:46:49 Eli: Was drunk in front of Andrew, the evidence builds.

0:46:52 Andrew: Yeah.

0:46:51 Thomas: No. That's true. But but Andrew was too.

0:46:52 Eli: Oh.

0:46:52 Andrew: Oh. Oh, very Very.

0:46:53 Thomas: Yeah, we both, you know, well, I've

0:46:55 Eli: He's quote unquote quitting his job, people, he's quitting his Job2Podcast.

0:47:00 Thomas: Been told I'm quitting my job, I've been told by my job I'm quitting, uh, so yeah

0:47:01 Eli: You're out of order. Do you even know that? I know that, I'm taking the bar exam right now, one question at a time, I got a guy explaining stuff to me. Fuck you, Susan, I know you didn't listen to that podcast I sent you, I got eight podcasts and you, you listen to any of them, none of you.

0:47:22 Thomas: That's Exactly. How my work is, it's literally, how it is

0:47:24 Eli: I play hockey. We work in a jail. Oh.

0:47:29 Thomas: So Santa tells Susie that she must have a wish for him, and Susie schools Santa, this is the greatest thing, because she's like, all right, fine, I'll get out my wish list, like, I'll tell you what I want, and he, she asks him for an entire house, she's like, yeah, give me this house, and he's like, I don't, you know, it's gonna be a little tough, and she's like, fine.

0:47:48 Eli: This is the putting my kid-to-bed scene, right? This is when this strange woman has allowed a man who she knows now has a mental illness to put her child to bed. Look, I'm a normal dude, I'm married, I have very close friends with kids, there is no shot anyone I know would be like, like, oh yeah, go ahead, put my kid to bed, no matter what, no way, no matter how many times they listen to that Atheistically Speaking episode, no one's letting a strange person with a mental illness put their kid to bet, this is how you get your kid molested.

0:47:50 Andrew: It is

0:47:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:48:21 Thomas: She is hands off, like she's any chance for someone to pitch in with her kid, she apparently takes him up on it, yeah, whatever.

0:48:22 Eli: Right,

0:48:28 Sam: What is she even doing the whole movie? I didn't know what she was even doing, like most of the movie she's always just gone, yeah.

0:48:32 Thomas: Yeah that's

0:48:35 Eli: But we learned that what the little girl wants is a house.

0:48:35 Thomas: A good point. Yeah.

0:48:38 Eli: She doesn't want to live in this giant beautiful New York apartment where I'm sure her mom's paying three dollars in a song. She with With a free slave, she, she wants a, a house on Long Island with a tree swing. Nothing enraged me more in this movie, this is about a mentally ill man who gets declared the mystical creature of Santa, and nothing was less realistic than giving up a New York apartment for a house in Long Island.

0:48:38 Thomas: House with us with a slave, by the way, yeah.

0:48:46 Sam: Yeah.

0:48:52 Thomas: Yeah oh that's Awesome, so, but but it's great because she's like, get me this entire house or else you're not really Santa, and he's like, oh god, I'll do my best, and she has a thing where she's chewing gum, I love this, she's chewing gum and she pops it, and the sound effect that they overdub is a cannon, like it's literally the fucking, the overture, 1812 Overture happening, like it's just, just like, like as loud as possible, it's really funny.

0:49:33 Sam: It's weird out, like all the other foley of like shuffling through a drawer to grab a gum box, you know, typical things that we do.

0:49:36 Thomas: Yeah typical stuff Yeah.

0:49:39 Sam: Yeah. That was all normal sounding, and then the gum popping was not, is nothing resembling gum at all. What is wonder what they used, oh,

0:49:40 Thomas: Well, I saw in the credits, Mr. Foley did the Foley, so that's it's the original guy.

0:49:49 Sam: Shit. Well, never mind, I take it back, he is the godfather of Foley.

0:49:50 Thomas: Yeah. Again

0:49:51 Eli: And Why does she save she pops a bubble and then she saves her gum, is that in the 1940s, was there like only one piece of gum?

0:49:53 Sam: Yeah.

0:49:58 Thomas: Andrew poor

0:50:01 Andrew: And I and I want to I

0:50:02 Thomas: Andrew being the oldest guy here really sucks, is he's the only one we can ask. She's

0:50:07 Andrew: I want to point out, right, not only just did she save this piece of gum because it's, you know, the only piece of gum that she can afford like her mom is the richest woman in the world, right? And, and that's it, and they can only afford one piece of gun that she's going to chew it over and over again, every that.

0:50:07 Sam: He could barely remember yeah yeah This

0:50:14 Thomas: Ever had. Well, I wonder if Back then, gum had no fucking flavor anyway, so it didn't matter, like you, you know. If gum has no flavor, yeah, you only need one piece. It doesn't even matter. It lasts forever.

0:50:32 Andrew: Would explain a lot of paint eating that went on in the 1940s.

0:50:36 Thomas: So she's got it in a lockbox, too. She's really worried about this gum running away.

0:50:37 Eli: Or Yeah, a little kid with a smudgy face will come in and steal your gum.

0:50:41 Sam: This Isn't really making fun of the movie, but I was watching this whole movie with my seven-year-old daughter, her, and it was interesting, and she was like, why is she chewing gum in bed, and I go, I don't know, she goes, oh, never mind, she has a box for it, like that was, that made it fine, yeah.

0:50:58 Thomas: Yeah, that explains it. So then we cut to Santa and Mr. Gay are an old gay married couple. And this is, I think it's post-coitus, this scene. I think they're sort of undressing and getting into their double beds. And I love it because the dialogue is great because they're undressing. Like they're literally getting ready for bed. And Santa says, oh, nice place you got here.

0:50:58 Eli: Spoken

0:51:00 Sam: Yes

0:51:21 Thomas: They're like, so they've already boned. They've already done everything. And he's like, oh I just noticed.

0:51:25 Sam: It's like I only saw the ceiling this whole time.

0:51:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:51:27 Eli: Like a man who has not had anonymous gay sex, yeah.

0:51:27 Thomas: I only saw the pillow. That

0:51:32 Eli: He gets, he gets in bed, and then Mr. Gailey, it Mr. Gaily leans over him and goes, so he

0:51:37 Thomas: Yeah this is him testing the waters, I think, is what it was. Sorry

0:51:43 Eli: Goes so, uh, goes, whiskers in or whiskers out, and I just wrote in my notes, whiskers out, for Harambe, say it, Andrew, say it, yeah.

0:51:50 Thomas: Man. I

0:51:50 Sam: Did anyone else just feel weird when he's smoking cigarettes sitting in bed, like right now no one even cares. It's amazing.

0:51:55 Thomas: Oh yeah that too well I mean, they just fucked so I mean, it's after, you, after you have sex with Santa, you gotta smoke a cigarette, yeah.

0:52:01 Sam: Yeah I guess that Guy's working a, a pipe and, like, smoking cigarettes the whole, he's like doing all every possible nicotine, I think he had a chaw and later in the movie, yeah.

0:52:09 Thomas: Yeah. After that sex scene, really racy sex scene we got there between Santa and Mr. Gailey, Macy's is now made a guide for how to not buy anything at their store. They have a whole guide of like, here's everything else but our store. And then we we determined that because of this, Macey's is the greatest and everyone ever should shop at Macy'S. And let's just go go to Macy's right now.

0:52:34 Sam: They actually invented the internet to allow people to just buy stuff online because of Santa, it's amazing, that's how the internet started. In

0:52:37 Thomas: Yeah. So then there's Gimbles is the other story as you've referenced and Mr. Gimble's along with, uh, you know, Ben Nye and Mr Foley, the originals, Mr. Gimbls is going to do the same thing. Mr. gimbal. He's like, we need to send people to Macey's. And so they're having this weird thing. It's kind of funny. It's

0:52:56 Eli: Mr. Gimble, like, has this weird moment where he goes, well, if we don't do it, people will say Gimble is a Jew, damn it, a Jew, because we immediately cut to them, like, um, they're both trying to bribe Santa, like simultaneously, they're like shoving checks into either side of his face, like videos that are on my hard drive, and and they go, like, so what are you gonna do with all that money, which again, all that money in the 40s was like six nickels, but he explains he's gonna buy the hospital where he used to live a new x-ray machine.

0:53:03 Thomas: Not

0:53:10 Sam: So many words, like

0:53:37 Thomas: A bad machine.

0:53:38 Eli: And and I should point out that, like, x-ray machines at this time used to just be like dipping people in uranium and waiting until they were see-through, right, right, oh,

0:53:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:53:47 Sam: You got bones, that was all it is, yes. You have bones that

0:53:47 Thomas: Yeah. And 80 percent of people died immediately after using the x-ray machine on them like they're just fried.

0:53:55 Sam: Femur is bigger Than the the other femur we scanned earlier, yeah.

0:53:56 Andrew: A we

0:53:59 Thomas: Santa is now putting Susie to bed again for some unknown reason. He's just he's parenting her. I don't know what she's doing. She's like Sam said I mean where is she? We don't know.

0:53:59 Eli: Right.

0:54:08 Sam: Mom has like a heroin habit or something. I think they just don't really go into that, yeah.

0:54:09 Thomas: Yeah opium back then. Yeah, she's in an opium den.

0:54:14 Eli: In this scene we learned that her mother has never sung her a lullaby because atheists or Santa skeptics don't sing to their children, yeah.

0:54:19 Sam: No You don't understand, she got divorced, you don't understand, like, you know how terrible that is, it ruins everything, it makes a woman into a just an awful person.

0:54:31 Thomas: No.

0:54:32 Andrew: We we don't even know, right, like husband could be dead, like, I did, they never established what happened with with

0:54:34 Sam: No They said

0:54:37 Thomas: It said divorce they said Divorce, yeah.

0:54:39 Andrew: Oh

0:54:38 Sam: They got divorced. Yeah. The girl says like My mother got divorced when I was born, see, or something like that, the very beginning. Yeah, that's what was funny about that time, is, like, being divorced is like you're just, like, you, you're lucky you're alive if you're divorced, so they have to, like, you guys said, they have to paint her out to be this like horrible person because, because of that one relationship that went bad, she just has to ruin her kid's life obviously, but then when there's a rapist molester guy, she just instantly is cool with him and starts going out with him, but anyway, yeah.

0:54:40 Andrew: Did it really? Oh, no,

0:54:40 Thomas: Yeah, it says in the beginning, yeah. Yeah,

0:54:41 Eli: He's

0:55:06 Thomas: Well, anything to not be divorced, so, then There's this pointless scene where Santa wants to blow a bubble, and so he blows a bubble and gets, and we hear another cannon shot to indicate that the bubble's popped, and and and it's in his whole beard. So that's comedy for you. And that's it. That's the whole scene. Pointless. That didn't need to be. I thought it was going to factor in. I thought they were going to like have to shave his beard, and that would be another whole plot of like, oh, he's not Santa anymore. Like, you know, he lost his powers or something.

0:55:09 Sam: Exactly, yeah.

0:55:17 Andrew: Oh

0:55:33 Sam: It's Just trying to show the audience that is he maybe he isn't crazy if he can blow a bubble over over his beard that's kind of normal, yeah,

0:55:38 Thomas: Or maybe he is Santa because he's now used to doing human things like chewing gum. So now back to the cafeteria again.

0:55:43 Sam: I still have no fucking idea if he's Santa or not, does anybody know? He's

0:55:48 Thomas: Yeah, we'll see. We'll figure it out by then. Man. So back at the cafeteria, the weird chumpy janitor is sad because the Macy's psychiatrist said he shouldn't pretend to be Santa anymore because, go ahead.

0:55:49 Eli: Not Santa, right,

0:55:50 Sam: Not Santa, yeah.

0:56:01 Andrew: And And we have more, we have more ridiculous fat shaming going on here, right, Like, we got, we got fat, so, over here, I'm like, that's, that's this guy's entire character, right, and

0:56:05 Thomas: Yeah, I love it. I wrote this, I wrote this quote down. He said, because he, so he said, oh, the psychiatrist told me I'm guilty, I'm feeling guilty of something, and that's why I pretend to be Santa. And Santa, the main character, literally says, it doesn't seem like you've had enough time, him, to be guilty of anything except overeating, and the chumpy guy doesn't even acknowledge it, he's like, yeah, you're right, I'm a fat ass, I'm fucking fat ass, yeah,

0:56:27 Andrew: And we look down, no, yeah, no, he's, he's beaten into that, and we, and remember, they're eating lunch in the cafeteria, so we look out and we see what his lunch is, and his lunch is two slices of white bread and what I think is like a, a knife thickness spread of peanut butter between it, right, like, it is the calorie, the sandwich is like 85 calories tops, there's no doubt, and one, and one, like, six ounce glass of milk, like that's fatso for you.

0:56:39 Thomas: Steamed vegetables and yeah, yep,

0:56:58 Andrew: Anyway,

0:56:57 Thomas: He's totally a fat, so he's the most reasonably proportioned person, like he's got no, almost no fat, it's amazing, back then, like, how, like the difference,

0:57:06 Eli: But this, There's this fantastic moment that takes place between them. So little janitor kid is explaining that the psychologist said that people who pretend to be Santa do it because they feel guilty because they killed so many men in World War One, and I want, that's literally, he's like, oh, some men have done, done terrible things in the war, and that's why they do it, that's what he says, and I wanted so badly for Chris Kringle to, like, be Cupcake Dog, and for, like, Flight of the Valkyries to start to play, and for him to just get the hundred yard scare, well, like, mustard gas, and like, oh God, I jumped over the barricade and I just killed my way out, killed my way out, anyways, what do you want for Christmas, but but as he goes on to explain it, the psychologist, tell me if I'm wrong here, the psychologist, as the kid's explaining it, definitely sounds like a Scientologist, right, is that right?

0:57:52 Thomas: Yeah, oh, you're right, totally, should have done that thing, Yeah,

0:58:05 Andrew: No, I had the exact same note, it was like this movie is telling you, right, psychology is evil.

0:58:09 Thomas: pre-Scientology though, yeah, but, but the weird thing is about this movie is, Santa, our main character, actually says, like, I believe firmly in psychology, and this man is bastardizing, and I didn't know there would be that respect for psychology, you know, portrayed back then, it's kind, kind of interesting, but so Santa is now off to tell the fake psychiatrist off for pretending to, you know, like, no, stuff, because I don't even think he's licensed or whatever, because he goes up there and confronts him, he tells this asshole Sawyer to, like, stop pretending to be a psychiatrist, and this is the greatest scene, because after, after he, uh, you know, confronts them, is like, would you stop practicing, met, you know, medicine, in that you shouldn't be, or, like, practicing psychiatry when you shouldnít be? Heís like, ìNo, I wonít stop doing that.î Heís like, well, Iím going to tell Mr. Macy, your boss, that youíre, you know, being a fraud and, like, causing harm and pretending to know stuff you donít know.

0:58:15 Eli: Because he's yeah,

0:59:02 Thomas: And he's like "no, I'm not going to do it." And so finally, Santa is just like, "Well, you've left me no choice." And he just beats him with his cane. Like he just canes him in the face. It's amazing. And I wrote because that's what Santa does to a bitch. Like he does, as soon as a guyís not listening, he just kanes him on the forehead.

0:59:16 Sam: Yeah,

0:59:14 Eli: What's incredible well, what's incredible is he goes, look, I, under, I have great respect for psychology, like you said, but you, sir, are an amateur, and I hope we all wrote in our notes, armature, fuck you, and then he says there's only one way to handle a man like you, and, like I said, he knocks him out on the top of the head with a cane, and I wrote in my notes, oh, see, that was mean of Santa, he should have brought him on Atheistically Speaking so people could tone police him.

0:59:29 Thomas: Yeah, uh, So the guy pretends to be like passed out, like he does this thing where he fakes like being passed out, and he tells him, Sawyer tells Doris and Shellhammer that Santa hit him because he's delusional and he challenged his delusion, so he's kind of taking the opportunity to get him fired. And now they, so they're like, oh, what do we do, what do they do, and eventually they convince, convince everybody that they need to kind of, you know, take him off to be committed, because clearly he's a violent Santa who, you know, he caned a guy in the head, and so they're taking, there's this great scene where it's like a mob hit, they get him in a car, and they're like, they're take him off to just be assassinated, and it's just like, leave the cannoli, like there's a great scene where just he's in a, a mobster hit scene, like it couldn't be more, yeah.

1:00:22 Eli: Amazing I wanted someone to bring a candy cane wrapped in newspaper to Doris and be, be like, Chris Kingle sleeps with the fishes, that's a Godfather reference.

1:00:33 Thomas: Yeah, exactly Exactly. Then the doctor calls Mr. Gailey. I love this. This is my favorite. Another inadvertent, you know, homoerotic undertone. The doctor calls.

1:00:43 Eli: Okay,

1:00:53 Thomas: Mr. your partner. I don't know what to call you people. Uh, you know, I have your partner here, your roommate. Oh, sure. Roommate. Okay. I get it. Roommate, uh, your roommate here. We, you need to come here. And he says, I love it. He says, uh、 I recommend commitment. I just thought like, you needs to make an honest man out of Santa. Like that's what's really in his life right now. You can't continue this lie.

1:01:06 Sam: Yeah,

1:01:12 Eli: Now I have questions, because when we open up on this scene, Mr. Gailey is dictating into what appears to be a phone, Andrew, walk me through this, I literally wrote in my notes, yay, lost stuff, forgot this, this wasn't my show.

1:01:29 Andrew: Yeah. So two things here. First, we hear kind of random law stuff in the background to establish that he's really a lawyer. And what he's dictating out are pretty archaic forms for conveyance of real property, like selling a plot of land or whatever. So I just want you to keep keep that in mind that this guy is a transactional real estate lawyer, right? Because this is going to be really, really important down the line.

1:01:56 Thomas: Oh, that's awesome.

1:01:57 Andrew: But no, the dictating machine, as we've established, I started practicing.

1:02:01 Thomas: I bet you used one of those. I bet you use one of this.

1:02:03 Andrew: I started I started practice law in 1997, and I had a machine that was just like that. I'm not kidding. Corded microphone and everything. But he does this really weird thing where when he stops, he clicks off the button to stop recording.

1:02:16 Thomas: Yeah, he apologizes to it.

1:02:18 Andrew: And he apologizes into it like the people shooting this movie didn't realize that there wasn't like someone on the other end of the microphone or something.

1:02:24 Thomas: Well, well, I want. Oh, I thought you would say,

1:02:26 Andrew: I don't.

1:02:26 Thomas: Is it because the person who you that he probably has a secretary that listens to it and types it out, right? Is that what it is Anyway, you just pause it.

1:02:33 Andrew: Right. But you just turn off the dictating machine. Right. Like, you know, it's not like she's got to wait. Right. Yeah.

1:02:38 Thomas: Yeah.

1:02:39 Eli: Wait, Andrew, you just, you just blew my face open. Wait. You used to dictate into a giant weird phone thing. What would happen then?

1:02:49 Andrew: What?

1:02:50 Eli: Who wrote down what you said?

1:02:50 Andrew: It was.

1:02:52 Eli: We just like, oh yeah, you had a giant archaic phone thing that went to your slaves. Was it a house elf?

1:02:52 Sam: Let's

1:02:52 Andrew: So. Yeah. It went it went to a box and the box had an audio cassette in it. And then my secretary would take the cassette and type shit up from it. It was

1:03:07 Eli: Oh, did that person kill themself? How many secretaries killed themselves?

1:03:11 Andrew: Those statistics are highly confidential that those are considered trade secrets.

1:03:17 Thomas: Yeah. So, uh, Gailey is off to the uh institution to make an honest man out of Santa, like I said, and and Santa's just distraught. Like, he's like, uh, and the reason he's distraight is because he thinks that Doris was kind of in on this. And he's really right, actually. This is was like, I kind of like this part of the script because he tells Gailey, he's like, yeah, she, you know, she kind of let me get committed. And he's, like, oh, no, she was really sad. And, he's. Like, yeah. But, you know. She's sad because she thinks I'm a pathetic old man. Like. If they had committed you. He says that she'd be pissed. But. They committed me. And. She. Is. Like oh. And. I liked that. I just really liked that line. I was. Like yeah. Yeah. You're right. That's true. She. She definitely pities him. And so. For that reason. He failed the test on purpose. And she's. He's like, screw it. I'm going to be crazy. I guess that's important to the plot. He's been determined to be crazy because he failed the test.

1:03:32 Andrew: Yeah.

1:04:00 Eli: Right gaily gives him like this weird You're like, get up, you son of a bitch, because Gailey loves you, pep talk. And Santa instantly is cheered from this. He's like, oh, no, nobody. And she's like. No, no. We all like you. He's, like, okay, let's leave. And then he goes, like. Oh, no! I remember I pretended to be insane. And there's no backsies on the cyclone.

1:04:24 Thomas: Yeah, he like walks a few steps until a chain like tightens on his foot. He's Like, oh, yeah, forget about that. Yeah, you're right. It's just like the scene in the beginning where he's like oh, no, I'm not going to do it. Oh, wait, the kids. Like it's the same scene because he's Like yeah, no know, I'm just going to die here in this insane asylum. I'm like, I've just going to stay here. And then Gailey is like, what about the kids? He's like, ah, you're right. Okay. I've I'm out.

1:04:44 Eli: He's. And this. And This is where. So he's, like, oh no, you got to get me out, Mr. Gailey. You're the- and I googled this and I want to make sure I'm not wrong on this- he says, "You're the greatest lawyer since Darrow." Andrew. Am I wrong that Clarence Darrow is the child killer and the monkey scope sky, sorry.

1:04:59 Thomas: Yeah.

1:05:06 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, no, that- that's Clarence Darrow. He defended my old law school classmate Nathan Leopold. Um, but- but I, I want to point out from the movie perspective, right, Clarence Darrow dies in 1938, right? So this comment is literally, you're the best lawyer of the last seven or eight years, right? Like, it's it's not like of all time or whatever.

1:05:22 Thomas: Yeah, I

1:05:28 Eli: Andrew, I would love to let you skate over my old classmate Nathan Leopold. Can you go into a bit more detail Leopold

1:05:31 Thomas: Thought

1:05:35 Sam: Just talk about that for the next 25 30. minutes

1:05:37 Eli: And Lobe

1:05:36 Thomas: You were saying you weren't alive back then.

1:05:37 Eli: The famous child killers

1:05:38 Andrew: Yeah I mean, seriously, you want me to go to like Leopold and Lobe killings? Like, yeah. That was that was basically like the OJ trial of the 1930s. They like were these two uh overprivileged white kids who uh killed a guy, and then uh the parents hired Clarence Darrow to defend uh- and I mean, there was no, like, they, they admitted, they wrote out, you know, "Yes, we killed this guy because we thought it would be fun." And, um, and Clarence Darrow put on the very first, um, insanity defense of- did not, of lack of empathy, basically.

1:05:38 Eli: Yes so

1:05:38 Thomas: Yeah yes. Yeah so

1:05:46 Sam: Fascinating

1:06:12 Thomas: He is a great lawyer.

1:06:13 Andrew: Yeah, well, the kids- and they got, avoided the death penalty, which in 1935 or whenever you could get the death penalty for literally anything.

1:06:20 Thomas: Yeah you just if you you were accused of something, I think most of the time you got the death penalty. Like it didn't even, yeah.

1:06:24 Sam: The chair instant

1:06:21 Andrew: Um yeah um and so there was a ton yeah, there was a ton of backlash, and it really- I mean, it's kind of a neat story, like it hit, it hit all of the things that we still hear today, right? Like, so, um, Darrow had to cut his fees, uh, because there were all these, um, stories in the press about how, you know, million dollar Darrow was going to take this, you know, huge, uh, payout. And at the end, uh, I think he recommended that they pay him like two hundred thousand, I forget the exact details, but but he wound up cutting his fees down to like fifty or sixty thousand dollars, basically, because he would have otherwise been lynched. And

1:06:26 Sam: Chair

1:06:27 Thomas: And

1:06:27 Eli: Just to point out but

1:07:01 Andrew: And that you know and that was

1:07:02 Thomas: That's, that's true. That used to happen to lawyers who took too much money back, back when Andrew started practicing in the thirties.

1:07:03 Andrew: Yes yeah

1:07:04 Eli: So just for just For clarity, this movie has a moment where it's like, oh man, are you kidding, you're the greatest lawyer since Jose Baez, are you crazy? Jose Baez was Casey Anthony's lawyer and she killed her daughter was it also child killer, I sure did, no I know all the child killer lawyers it's just a very I

1:07:14 Andrew: Right yeah no that was good that was a great reference I, I liked it I laughed Yeah.

1:07:17 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. So you Googled that, huh? Okay. So, uh, yeah, they're all in your phone and your Rolodex.

1:07:31 Eli: Just start listing them off the top of my head, no ask me a court date, ask me in trial date and

1:07:33 Thomas: Yeah, he's like, like Eli's like, I've tried to call that guy. He won't represent me. I've tried to called it. Yeah. Uh, so Gailey is going to get him out. Like you said, I love that. Yeah, greatest lawyer since Darrow Mr. Macy. Yo, good.

1:07:45 Andrew: And again, right. He could be the greatest lawyer. He can be Mitch McDeer, but like he's a real estate lawyer. Like he's not getting anybody out of anything. Right. Like, he's going to convey property to you. That's all he can do.

1:07:58 Thomas: Well, Darrow conveyed a hell of a property. That's, uh, that's that much is clear. So Mr. Macie then meanwhile tells Sawyer, you know, the evil sniveling kind of Hamburglar guy, that he needs to get Santa out too, because this is unacceptable, that Santa has been committed because he's so good for business. So Mr. I love this too, because this is where Andrew, I think, is going to start to kind of take over a little bit, um, they're, I guess, having a hearing because it's just the judge is in a chamber and a guy just comes in and he's like, "Hey, let's just commit this guy," and he is about to do it. The judge sounds reasonable to me, I take your word for it. And then Mr. Gailey just happens to walk into the chambers at the right time, because otherwise he was going to be committed, it was a, a done deal. But Mr. Gailey, they're like, "Oh, who is that?" "Oh, he's representing Chris Kringle." "Oh, okay. Well, I guess I'll listen to him." Is that how it works, Andrew? Here's where we find out.

1:08:47 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, I, I don't think I should have to point out that, like, even in the 1940s, the law was not like whichever side's lawyer first gets to the judge's chambers like gets to go in and yeah, you no, and the judge is like, "I suppose I'm gonna have to read all this paperwork and"

1:08:56 Eli: Right.

1:08:55 Thomas: He is more, more punctual. Yeah. Yeah, He's like, yeah, he is like, ah, I guess, I just have to read something. Darn it. I was going to just sign it.

1:09:07 Sam: Do I have to do a job here.

1:09:10 Eli: And finally when Gailey walks in, Gailey literally goes, "Hey, he needs some habeas corpus."

1:09:16 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, that's not a thing anymore, thanks to Scalia.

1:09:19 Thomas: Gailey kind of wins, what he wins, the right to for the judge to do his job, sorry. I don't know if it's an official, yeah. It's a hearing there's a pre-hearing Andrew there's pre-herring to determine if the judge is gonna, like, give a shit, right? There's... there's a first hearing that's like, "Am I going to give a shit about this?" And he's like, "No."

1:09:24 Andrew: Right.

1:09:25 Eli: Wins a hearing he wins a hearing Monday morning right

1:09:38 Thomas: And then Gailey comes in and is like, judge, I demand you give a shit. Habeas corpus. And he is like fine, thank you. I'll do my job.

1:09:36 Sam: Yeah

1:09:45 Eli: And he, he goes, "Your hearing is Monday morning at 10 a.m." and then just like writes it in his fucking diary, it's like, "All right,"

1:09:52 Sam: There's nothing else going on

1:09:55 Andrew: Yeah, if that were today, like that appointment would be August five years from now.

1:09:59 Sam: Yeah yeah

1:09:59 Eli: Well,

1:09:59 Thomas: Yeah. Christmas is long gone. Like all the kids are disappointed. The reindeer are dead. No one fed them.

1:10:03 Andrew: Yeah.

1:10:06 Sam: Kringle's long dead by then.

1:10:09 Thomas: Dies in jail. So, then Gailey meets, like, Sawyer kind of meets Gailey walking outside because Sawyer wants to to have this end, but he can't, it's like once someone has accused him once, a state doctor or psychiatrist has declared him insane, it's kind of out of their hands. So Sawyer asked Gailey, like, "Hey, just don't know, publicity or whatever," and Gailey's like, "Oh, well, you're the worst person in the world, so I'm going to do the opposite of that." So he's going to try to publicize the whole thing. The judge, this is the best part. So then we get the judge's campaign manager, who is just on standby, I guess, right? He's just there all the time, just in case. And the campaign manager is telling the judge, like, "Dude, you got to get off this case. It's too controversial. It is bad for your reelection efforts." And

1:10:34 Eli: Right

1:10:50 Andrew: The campaign manager is Fred Mertz from I Love Lucy, which is fantastic, and, like, basically his role in the entire movie is just to, like, sort of raise his eyebrows every time the judge says anything from the bench, like, I don't think he has any dialogue after this scene, it's just like long lingering glances with his eyebrows going up, which is fantastic, yeah.

1:11:00 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah,

1:11:08 Sam: And then like cigar things like licking his lips and putting a cigar in his mouth. I could watch movies with guys doing lip cigar stuff the whole time, it's great, you never see that anymore.

1:11:11 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

1:11:11 Eli: And yeah.

1:11:13 Andrew: There's nothing Freudian there, I think I think Eli has some, some of those movies, visas.

1:11:18 Sam: Okay.

1:11:21 Eli: I was gonna say, I have some videos to send you, I do you have a terabyte hard drive, also incredible moment in this scene with the judge, he goes, he's like, "Ah, they offered to drop the insanity charges." And And he's like, "No, can't do it."

1:11:23 Andrew: Yeah.

1:11:24 Sam: Yes. He's

1:11:26 Thomas: So yeah. Yeah

1:11:36 Sam: Like, "Look, I got shit and else on my calendar, I gotta do something." Already penciled it in.

1:11:40 Thomas: Well, He's, like I already started to this one page thing someone's making me read. I'm not gonna, I already got like one paragraph in. Fuck that, I'm doing, I've already started. You

1:11:42 Sam: I mean

1:11:50 Andrew: And this is another bit of like fuck the law that the movie decides to do, because it's really clear, again, that same camera zoom close-up, that's, that shows you alleged mentally ill person, has, uh, uh, Sawyer down as the petitioner, right? And like, when you're a petitioner, that means you, you filed a petition, right?

1:12:10 Thomas: Can un-petition.

1:12:10 Andrew: And so that means you can drop your petition, right? Like, so this entire thing about like, well, I'm sorry, like a doctor once talked to him. So, you know, nothing I can do about that. Like can't, can't shut these cameras off. Like it just makes no sense whatsoever.

1:12:19 Thomas: Yeah. So then the judge's grandkids come in and they kick him in the nuts. They're like, we hate you now. It's funny. And for putting Santa on trial. So that's more motivation for the judge. So then we're in the courtroom and this is great. It's so fun. Andrew, I'm sure, is going to have a lot to say. Mr. Kringle takes the stand. I don't know, Andrew. You should probably just go, I guess. So just start covering. Yeah.

1:12:47 Andrew: This whole thing is bonkers, right. Like, no. So before Kris Kringle takes the stand, we see the, the the lawyer for the petitioner, the the I forget what the guy's name is, right, but the person who is taking the role of who would be The prosecutor.

1:13:00 Thomas: Like, The prosecutor. Yeah.

1:13:01 Andrew: Yeah, if this were a criminal case, which it isn't, it's a commitment hearing.

1:13:01 Thomas: I think he's District attorney Thomas Mara, I think. This is

1:13:04 Andrew: Right, yeah,

1:13:07 Sam: This 70 year old dude with like a 25 year old wife that's a smoking, hot 40s. Wife. Jeez, yeah,

1:13:10 Andrew: Yeah, yeah,

1:13:07 Thomas: Okay, yeah, She was smoking hot. Oh, I wrote a note of that, she came in. I was like, can we do this movie, can she be the movie, yeah. Probably

1:13:15 Sam: I know, Yeah, she was awesome, yeah.

1:13:18 Andrew: I Will, I will point out, she's been dead for 115 years now. But you know, um, but

1:13:22 Thomas: I But whatever, as soon as they get a time machine invented, oh, really crazy, yeah.

1:13:25 Sam: You know, Doris died like last year. I couldn't believe that. Anyway, yeah, She,

1:13:25 Andrew: So So district attorney, uh, leans over to Granville and says, oh, well, you know, this trial is going to take about a week, right, and he says specifically I'm going to call witnesses, he's going to called witnesses, that's the way this thing goes, right, but instead, right, puts Kringle on the stand, right, which you never, like, like, you start with your witnesses, right, like you would start by calling the, uh, you'd start by calling Granville to the stand and say you know, right, yeah,

1:13:55 Thomas: Some of the elves, some of the reindeers, some of that, it just, anybody.

1:13:57 Andrew: Well, well, but you would, you would have fact witnesses established that Kringle, like, went on a mad spree and beat people over the head with a cane, right, like you put your witnesses on for, nope, doesn't do any of that, calls Kringel to the stand, ask him, are you Santa Claus, he says yes, and then, and then, I'm not, I'm not kidding, he says the state rests.

1:14:19 Thomas: Yeah.

1:14:19 Andrew: Right after, after two sentences, right, just like we do on opening arguments as a bit, right, like, and well,

1:14:22 Thomas: Yeah, well, in his defense though, in the, this, whatever, the prosecutor guy's defense, like, once he admits he's Santa Claus, that's pretty much like case closed, right?

1:14:35 Andrew: No, because, like, we, we still have to establish, like, all of the, the all of the collateral facts, right, like you, you need to know, like, what has this guy done, and the answer is, right, like, there's a real case to commit this guy, because, right, not only is he, uh, delusional, but, like, he beat up a psychiatrist as far as anyone knows. Right, like he, he, you know, he took his cane and

1:14:44 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you would maybe want to introduce that evidence is what you're saying, like, maybe maybe cover that part.

1:14:59 Andrew: Yeah, you think you might No, this guy's just like, so are you Santa Claus, yes, and then he, you know, dust his hand, case closed.

1:15:03 Thomas: Yeah. My Yeah, my biggest note here, I have it like 70 times is, yeah, this is all how this works. And Mr. the state rest. Yeah, that's I'm guessing that's how that works. So he testifies.

1:15:08 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, and Oh, and I would, I would point out, right, like, that again we have it backwards, right, like the judge looks over at Kringle and says, says well,

1:15:20 Thomas: Mm hmm. I was going to say the judge tries to get him out of it. He's like, yeah. So, Mr. Kringle, they're saying, you know, you're you said you're Santa Claus, but I'm sure you meant that he He tries to, the judge is like leading the witness, which is awesome. Again, I'm sure that's how that works. He's like, you meant you work as a Santa, right?

1:15:40 Andrew: You know, that Not that blatantly, but, like, it, it does happen sometimes that, like, trial court judges will try and help witnesses out, but, but, but before he starts answering the questions, the judge says, totally incorrectly, you don't have to answer any questions that you don't want to, right? And like, that's, yeah, yes, yeah.

1:16:00 Thomas: Yeah. Oh yeah. He says, this is not a trial, right. Doesn't he say that? He's not a Santa. He's saying, this isn't a trial. But that doesn't mean that.

1:16:07 Andrew: No, right. So what you can do is, right, you can assert your Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, right, so the judge pans over to Gailey, who says, no, I don't have any objections to him answering as many questions as you want, and you're like, this is why you don't allow real estate lawyers to defend you in commitment hearings. Yeah.

1:16:23 Eli: Well,

1:16:25 Thomas: Yeah. But he's the best real estate lawyer since Darrow. So, uh, Mr. Gailey is going to, his whole, like, courtroom strategy is that he's going to prove Chris Kringle is actually Santa Claus, and the courtroom is a buzz. I don't know who all these people are, but there's a ton, it's open, anybody can go. I guess

1:16:32 Andrew: Yeah, Can we talk About the timing on this too, because, like, I'm not exactly sure when all this, like, so the commitment papers are taken to the judge's office sometime during the week, right? It seems to me I got kind of a Friday vibe from that, but I know it could be Thursday, could be Wednesday, and the judge is like, yeah, I'll put you right on the calendar, Monday at 10 o'clock. So, like, where has all this press come from, right? Like, there's this, this is 1947, right? Like, it's not like they could go, you know, put it on Reddit or something and, like, you know, tweet out a firestorm about, you know, Santa Claus on trial.

1:16:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

1:17:07 Thomas: Maybe. They they didn't have time for the scene where a bunch of guys jump on the blower and, like, hey, I gotta have a scoop for you, and then they, like, there's the monkeys at the switchboard, like, telling everybody, but it's probably, that's what happened. And so everybody found out.

1:17:23 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

1:17:25 Eli: Wait, Andrew, I have a question. Because he goes, the state rests. All right. And then Gailey just starts talking. Is that how it works?

1:17:33 Thomas: Yeah.

1:17:36 Andrew: No.

1:17:36 Eli: Is it just like the moment the other guy says the word rests, you get to start talking?

1:17:41 Andrew: Yeah, no, what you would actually do in this situation is you might move for a directed verdict because you'd say the state hasn't met its burden of proof because it asked one question, but but no, like this is a really common thing in trial movies, is that they seem to love the notion that like the lawyer's job is to explain stuff and like tell stories in the middle of the courtroom, and like that's why, I mean, like I, I know I'm a lawyer, I know people aren't gonna intuitively understand all that, but like, why do you think lawyers spend all the time calling witnesses?

And the reason is because the stuff we say isn't evidence and can't be used by the jury to render a verdict. In order for something to be admitted into evidence, it has to be a witness that says it or authenticates a document. So every time you see a lawyer grandstanding going like, "and this document proves conclusively that blah, blah," like that needs to be in the the hand of a witness right like that needs to be something yeah it's it, it is, it's worse than wasting time because you you want to have your witnesses say that

1:17:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, right.

1:18:43 Thomas: So that's just a waste of time pretty much. It's just like, all right. Yeah.

1:18:51 Andrew: So anyway

1:18:53 Eli: What

1:18:52 Thomas: So, this is day the one of the not trial, uh, because that concludes on him. He says, you know, I'm, we're going to prove that he's Santa Claus. Then we get, I

1:19:01 Eli: Happens when that happens? Do you get a mistrial? I feel like you get a mistrial if you're a lawyer at

1:19:02 Andrew: Yeah.

1:19:03 Thomas: Think everybody's just arrested immediately. Like there's just, this is nonsense.

1:19:08 Eli: Your sanity

1:19:08 Andrew: No. Yeah. Yeah, no, what, what happens is that the judge will, uh, stay the case and hold it in abeyance until he can find a new lawyer, right, who's not fucking crazy to represent Santa

1:19:09 Thomas: Yeah.

1:19:09 Eli: Hearing. Oh,

1:19:16 Thomas: An actual lawyer. Yeah, he would probably, I mean, I don't know, I think the official judge, the method uh, there, like what you actually do do is you go, okay, Mr. Gailey, great job. Great job. Could you go outside just a moment for some official business?

1:19:22 Andrew: Claus.

1:19:34 Andrew: Yeah.

1:19:35 Thomas: And as soon as he leaves, like, what the fuck is this guy? Can we have a real trial here? What's going on? Fight a real lawyer. But then we got a scene where Gailey is home with Doris and they're kind of an item now, I guess. And Gailey just says like, yeah, this is the the greatest thing ever. They've got news coverage of how my ridiculous cases and we find out.

1:19:38 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. No, but Again, again, no, I'm sorry, like, he goes home, right? Like, this, so, so this is now, I, I just, I just want to continue to emphasize the, like, time scene in this, the time sequence of this movie is insane, right? Like, he concludes the trial, it's the afternoon, he goes back to, like, an hour later and meets with Doris, and she's got newspapers that that have like coverage of what happened.

1:20:14 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

1:20:17 Andrew: And again, like, this is 1947, right? Like, there's no internet, like, nobody knows what happened in this courtroom an hour later. This bothered me a lot.

1:20:24 Thomas: Yeah, no, there's newspaper after newspaper covering it.

1:20:26 Sam: Well, Somehow the judge's kids know about it, like, everybody knows about it's the hugest thing they hate, they hit him in the nuts, like he said, yeah.

1:20:28 Andrew: Right. Yeah.

1:20:31 Thomas: So we find up. Yeah We find now that Gailey, like, his law firm was pretty pissed about this. Like, dude, what are you doing? Rightfully so. And so he quit. Like, he quit the way we find that he has quit his law firm career, like his legal career, in order to pursue the dumbest fucking court case in the history of court cases, and Doris thinks he's being a moron for this.

1:20:41 Sam: We

1:20:54 Andrew: And then and this this part of the movie This part of the movie really spoke to me. Keep going. Sorry.

1:20:57 Thomas: Yeah, Doris is like a monster because she thinks he is a complete idiot for this, and she's depicted as like, you horrible, horrible bitch. The idea that you wouldn't pursue this, clearly this idiot who is trying to prove Santa exists in a court and quit his career in order to do so, but no, she's a mom.

1:20:58 Eli: Yeah.

1:21:17 Sam: Should run down the timeline of what he, he is done as a character through the whole movie, and she's still with him, like, She, he got her daughter to try to get close to her, then he switched over to the Santa to try and have sex with Santa, and then he quit his job to prove that Santa is Santa. She's the worst.

1:21:22 Thomas: Yeah.

1:21:35 Thomas: Yeah, it's not like this is a money-making case for him either. He's quit his job in order for him to do nothing.

1:21:38 Sam: But the publicity, the publicity

1:21:44 Thomas: Is my favorite old-timey movie thing, is the dramatic turn away from the guy and have him talk at the back of your head. I love it. So the line is, you give up your job and throw away your security and expect me to be happy about it. And then she does the turn. And I just, I just wanted to point that out because it never would happen in real life in a billion years. If your wife did that to you, you'd be like, what, what are you okay? What's yeah.

1:21:44 Sam: Yeah. I know. It was awesome. I noticed that, too, yeah.

1:22:07 Sam: Why did they decide that was a cool, like, an acceptable way of showing that in that time? It's weird.

1:22:11 Thomas: Yeah. It's so funny.

1:22:13 Eli: There's this amazing moment where he goes, what, don't you have any faith in me? And I wrote in my notes, she doesn't have any fate in you because you think a guy is Santa. Yeah.

1:22:21 Thomas: Yeah, you've literally never done anything like, you know, that would inspire faith. So no, no. Now we're at the opposing lawyer, his house and his kids are kicking him in the nuts too. Like there's two sequences of kids just, just nailing guys in the nets because they're yeah. But like you said, they all know about it. Everybody knows about it, the town, the world knows about it and he now, not only are the kids mad at him, his wife is leaving him his hot wife is like, I'm yeah,

1:22:39 Sam: Shots. Everybody knows about it, yeah, the mail guy in the mail room knows about it, she's never gonna put out again, yeah.

1:22:40 Andrew: Yeah.

1:22:55 Eli: She says she wishes she'd married a butcher or a plumber.

1:22:59 Andrew: Which is, which is, by the way, the Andrew Torrez story.

1:23:02 Eli: So,

1:23:00 Thomas: And, uh, so this is the part of the trial now I would, to go back to what I think Eli was getting at before, too. This is part of trial we cut into where both lawyers are just allowed to say as much at the same time to the witness at any time because, like, one witness, or, uh, they're questioning Mr. Macy, and, and one of the lawyer, I guess the, what, the prosecutor guy is asking him stuff, and then Mr. Gailey's just like, hold on, let me cut in, just goes, starts asking him stuff just because that's how it works.

1:23:35 Andrew: So, so A couple things here, the, the first is they, they, they accidentally get something. Like, in that it's clear that the state really did rest its case, right? Because we begin with Gailey putting on his case, and the first person he calls is Mr. Macy, right. So that's at least what would happen. But then, like, we immediately sort of go right off the rails because the first thing that happens when, yeah, no, there's a lot of interruption, but it does start with at least Gailey calls him to the stand. But then Gailey, it's the classic bit in courtroom scenes in movies where you have your own witness on the stand, but you're still asking leading questions, which is just, you know, it is one of the only things that a law student would know you can't do, right? Right. So he's asking him questions like you're the owner of one of the biggest department stores in New York. Right.

And, you know, and Macy says the biggest. But like when you ask a question like that's a leading question. Right. Like and the you know Chris Kringle, he's your employee. Is he not? Like, no, no, you have to ask open-ended questions. You have to say like, so what do you do? Is Chris Kringle your

1:23:35 Thomas: Right.

1:23:56 Thomas: They're both asking him questions at the same time, that can't be right. Right.

1:24:44 Thomas: Okay.

1:24:44 Andrew: Employee? Right. Like that's what you have TO do when you put your own witness on, which, by the way, like this doesn't occur in this movie. But just kind of reminded me, like when you see that lawyer scene where the lawyer turns to the judge and says, permission to treat is hostile. Have you seen that before? Are

1:24:47 Thomas: Yeah.

1:25:00 Eli: Yeah, absolutely. Marissa Tomei. Yeah. She's mad at you. That means that the witness is mad at you and won't have sex. Wait,

1:25:02 Andrew: Yeah. Right.

1:25:07 Sam: Yeah.

1:25:07 Andrew: No.

1:25:07 Sam: Who.

1:25:07 Andrew: So Permission to trade is hostile just means that you can ask leading questions of your own witness, right. And so, you ask that, not when, so, so it's permission to treat as if it were the other side's witness, right. So, you know, you get to ask leading questions, that's all that that means but

1:25:08 Thomas: Oh, weird.

1:25:23 Thomas: What about when they ask the judge like, permission to come aboard, sir, what is that? That. Yeah. He gets up there and sits sits with him, Yeah, because

1:25:27 Sam: Should

1:25:27 Andrew: It does not mean you know, yeah. Yeah.

1:25:31 Eli: I have a question though. If you can just say permission to ask a witness to be treat my witness as hostile, why don't they just do do that as a matter of course, and then be like, so you were there and you saw this guy shoot this other guy, right?

1:25:43 Thomas: It's your own witness. It's, you have to do it when it's your own witness. So it wouldn't be somebody I

1:25:46 Eli: Right. But you can just say permission to treat as hostile. And then you get to ask leading questions. Why don't look,

1:25:50 Thomas: Think the point Is

1:25:51 Andrew: Well, but the judge has to grant it too, yeah.

1:25:52 Thomas: You shouldn't ever need to ask your own witness leading questions, right. Isn't that the point.

1:25:56 Andrew: That's exactly right.

1:25:57 Thomas: Okay. Thanks, I'm a fucking lawyer.

1:25:57 Andrew: See, he's gonna pass. He's going to pass this bar exam, I'm telling you.

1:25:59 Thomas: Yeah. Eli, I'm gonna kick your ass on that bar exam, you have no chance. I

1:26:05 Eli: You got the second question wrong. Okay.

1:26:06 Thomas: Know.

1:26:07 Eli: That was a fucking easy one. Cause I Googled it.

1:26:10 Thomas: I don't think you could get that one right. Even if you Googled it, I challenge you. I defy you to.

1:26:10 Andrew: Oh,

1:26:13 Eli: I actually, I GoogLED it and I got it wrong, which is why I deleted the tweet when I retweeted it with my answer.

1:26:21 Andrew: One more thing, though, which is, uh, the law craziness, which is you can't ask a fact witness to render an expert opinion, and so, and Gailey says, do you believe Chris Kringle to be of sound mind, and I'm just sort of picturing him going, like, well, in my capacity as a department store owner, like, yes. I like you know, how the hell does

1:26:31 Thomas: Oh, right. Right. Yeah. It's like he's asking him.

1:26:41 Andrew: No, right.

1:26:41 Thomas: It's not like he doesn't know. He doesn't. He's like, I don't know. I don't know. He's asking the witness like, hey, so how do you think this trial should turn out? You got any opinions on the verdict of this trial? Oh, sure. Sure. I do. Yeah Yeah.

1:26:46 Andrew: Yeah.

1:26:49 Sam: Win.

1:26:52 Thomas: Point to the man who should win this trial. So let the

1:26:55 Sam: Is the man who should when this trial is standing in front of you.

1:27:01 Thomas: Record show he pointed at. So,

1:27:03 Sam: Yeah, he pointed not to the man who had a hot 25-year-old wife.

1:27:06 Andrew: Yeah,

1:27:08 Eli: Then the prosecutor gets up, right, and he just, like, starts to ask him questions too, again, like, I don't know,

1:27:12 Thomas: I'm Yeah, that's what I was saying. He just starts, he just cuts in, like, here, let me cut in, are.

1:27:17 Eli: Andrew, question, if you're a lawyer and you're, the other guy's asking questions, but you want it to be your turn, does it magically become your turn? Well,

1:27:17 Sam: Yeah.

1:27:26 Andrew: Yeah, no, whoever can scream the loudest actually gets to go. It's a little known proviso. But it's actually in the list.

1:27:32 Thomas: Uh,

1:27:32 Eli: David Smalley is a much better lawyer than you, then right.

1:27:33 Andrew: Oh, no,

1:27:38 Thomas: So still in this scene, all right, so Mr. Macy has this weird, like, fantasy sequence where he envisions what's gonna happen if he answers the wrong thing. It's really funny, he's the worst actor in the world, uh, no, is it actually the guy, Andrew, or is it an actor portraying, because him, he's really bad, but

1:27:53 Andrew: It's an actor portraying him. It is not the extra This is just how people acted in the 1940s. Like, they were terrible.

1:27:56 Sam: It's not really him lying,

1:27:54 Thomas: Oh okay. Okay. So that's just bad. Old-timey. Uh, yeah. This is the weird thing though is I think they maybe they're trying to squeeze a lot in even though the movie's not particularly long, because Macy, as he leaves the witness stand, he fires Sawyer, which you would think is normally that's like the end of the movie is when the the villain guy and finally gets what's coming, you know, but he just walks down. He's like, you call yourself a psychiatrist, you're fired, which is a total non sequitur from anything that just happened.

1:28:25 Eli: And we should point out that this is the conclusion of him saying, Mr., the prosecutor, all of a sudden, is asking questions, and says, so do you think he's Santa Claus, and Mr. Macy, like you mentioned, has, like, a, oh, everyone will be mad at me if I don't say he's Santa Claus, and so the head of Macy's goes, yes, I think he's Santa Claus. What is the legal procedure when everyone involved in a trial is crazy?

1:28:33 Thomas: Yeah.

1:28:48 Andrew: Yeah.

1:28:55 Sam: Yeah. I was like, I laughed every time the guy said he's crazy too. I said it like a hundred times, everybody's understanding he's too, I laughed every time, yeah.

1:28:56 Thomas: Yeah.

1:29:01 Andrew: Yeah.

1:29:05 Thomas: There's one sane person and he's like, going crazy and here surrounded by insane people, yeah.

1:29:08 Sam: They're all nuts. Everybody's insane in the whole fucking courthouse, yeah.

1:29:12 Thomas: But I love the firing Sawyer on his way off the stand, like, it had no correlation with anything that just happened. Usually, yeah, you're fired because you're the bad guy. Sorry, I mean, I was gonna do this now or later, I decided I'm gonna do it now.

1:29:23 Sam: Yeah. It should have been like, as they were carrying Santa off on their shoulders when they win the case, and he's like, also, you're fired, so then it's like, we're all happy because it's like it's really Santa and the asshole gets fired, yeah.

1:29:23 Thomas: Uh, yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying like it made no sense Yeah. Yeah.

1:29:34 Sam: It was a weird spot to do that.

1:29:30 Eli: Crazy. Right, but in but Instead, what happens is, uh, Mr. Gailey then turns to the judge and the defense and the prosecutor and it's like, can you prove there is no Santa Claus? What, Andrew, question, and again, I have tried only a few cases in my life, uh, how often are you allowed to ask the judge to prove the opposite of your side as a lawyer.

1:29:56 Sam: Lost them all Galley's

1:30:03 Andrew: I, among the things that I do not recommend to any young lawyers who are listening to this, uh, and they're starting their practice, like wagging your finger at the judge on the bench and demanding that he resolves some stupid question right now, like that, that will not go over well for you in court, because the judge is going to be like, uh, that's not how any of this works, like you don't get to tell me, I have to decide questions, huh?

1:30:18 Eli: According

1:30:24 Thomas: He's like, you're not the boss of me. Yeah.

1:30:27 Eli: To Andrew, you don't even get to not call them judge in social situations, which is a weird S&M.

1:30:28 Andrew: No, it's true. Yeah.

1:30:28 Thomas: So, so here's

1:30:33 Andrew: Yeah.

1:30:36 Sam: Like, he's not, not Santa Claus, okay.

1:30:39 Thomas: The, here's the funniest part of all this is because, so the other lawyer requests a ruling, like on whether or not there exists a Santa Claus and the judge is like, uh, uh. And he looks to his man, you know, the, the cigar chewing guy, guy in, you know, his campaign manager for an answer. And this is definitely how the state Supreme Court works. Like there's a judge, every case there's judge, what should I just, and then a guy who's his campaign manger, like gives a weird wink. Like it's unclear what his facial expressions even are. Like you can't even tell.

1:30:55 Andrew: Fred Mertz okay.

1:31:11 Eli: What do you think, Fred Mertz?

1:31:12 Andrew: And

1:31:14 Thomas: And then he's like, I need a break. I need to talk to somebody. And they, he calls a recess.

1:31:14 Andrew: Can I and Let me jump in and clarify something, in one of the only things that this movie does get right, uh, trial courts in New York City are called Supreme Court, right? So, it, they keep saying, right, like it is the Supreme Court of New York, but that actually just means it's the trial court, right? The that

1:31:38 Thomas: Oh, it's more like a burrito Supreme is just as it's kind of, it just, that's not an actual, it's just a more delicious court. It's not like an official, I

1:31:42 Andrew: Is exactly what it's like yeah but it's not yeah, there's no, it's not on appeal, there's not any of that. Right?

1:31:49 Sam: Burrito supreme intermission Yeah.

1:31:51 Thomas: Could go for that right now. Uh, so the, uh, the campaign managers, you know, he's in there and he says like, Hey, look, you're judging careers over the minute you make a decision that some people won't like, which is again, note number 87. This is definitely how this works. Judges, every judge is Like, I, my career's over. If I decide something in a way that some people won't like and that dogs

1:32:09 Eli: Well, wait, this, well, this is the pathway that Fred Murtz proposes to him. He goes, look, if you say that there's no Santa Claus, children will read in the paper that Santa isn't real, then no one will do Christmas, and then all the toy companies will shut down, everyone will get fired, there will be riots in the street, and you will be strung up as the whore you are right

1:32:34 Thomas: And cats living together yeah

1:32:38 Andrew: Right, and I, and I love that, that the campaign manager, like, this entire, uh, doomsday scenario is based on the highly likely outcome that kids who believe in Santa Claus are avid readers of New York Times, right?

1:32:39 Thomas: They

1:32:52 Eli: Look,

1:32:52 Thomas: Follow the court like docket, they really did

1:32:53 Andrew: Like that yeah yeah because this is not on page one either, right?

1:32:54 Thomas: Yeah, yeah

1:32:55 Eli: There is one yeah There is 1 kid who reads the New York Times, and it is Andrew's kid, and someday he will be supreme ruler of the universe, and when that happens, I welcome our robot overlords. That's all I'm saying. I want this on record now, but in the meantime, we're safe because everyone else is playing Minecraft. That's my point.

1:33:05 Sam: Also

1:33:11 Thomas: So This is the best. My favorite thing now is Mr. Gailey. Is His next move here is to call the defense's child to the stand, and again, this is definitely how that it works. You just, this, you just call whoever, like, just anybody.

1:33:32 Sam: He would have no idea that it was going to be a witness, or you know, he was totally surprising rising, like, oh shit wow, yeah

1:33:33 Thomas: Yeah yeah

1:33:35 Eli: Andrew uh I really, really want it to be true, now I have a feeling it's not, I really want to be sure that you're allowed to call the defense's the state's as

1:33:47 Andrew: You're the prosecutor's son to the stand sadly

1:33:50 Sam: Without him knowing, yeah, a

1:33:50 Eli: A surprise, please because here's

1:33:50 Andrew: Yeah no

1:33:54 Thomas: And he's right there and they force him in, yeah

1:33:55 Eli: The thing

1:33:55 Sam: Minor a minor yeah, well

1:33:56 Eli: I'm eventually going to place a full page at in the New York Times with information that I have about the Cristiano brothers, and it means that we're going to be in court, and it would make me feel much better to know that I can call their children to the stand. Is that the case?

1:34:13 Thomas: So his kid, like but the whole, the whole gotcha point of Mr. Gailey's amazing case here is the kid, he asked him, like, well, who's Santa Claus? And the kid's like, yeah, that's Santa Clause. Did your dad tell you that? Yep. So that works. So because the, the opposing lawyer told his kid that that's Santa Claus, that this is evidence now, this is totally admissible, makes perfect sense.

1:34:15 Andrew: Yeah

1:34:16 Sam: Shit yeah

1:34:36 Andrew: I just want to point out the district attorney's, uh, response here is "I protest," which is then declared overruled by the judge, and I was just trying to figure out what a what a protest was right, like that's kind of like an objection that you don't want granted. I don't know, that the law in 1947 was weird.

1:34:48 Eli: Right

1:34:57 Thomas: So I Pro, I protest to, uh, other people manhandling my young son into an adult situation and questioning him. I protest. Overruled. Sorry, sorry, overruling, and

1:35:01 Andrew: Right

1:35:08 Eli: And and the answer to this, like, what the prosecutor does, because he doesn't want to, like, look at his kid and be like, hey, there is no Santa, because the kid's like, you wouldn't lie to me, would you, Pop? You wouldn't lie to me. And he's, and so the defense in this movie is like, the state concedes that Santa is real, again, everyone is insane

1:35:31 Thomas: Then the best part of all of this, then Gaily lifts the kid out of the witness box, just like, plops him down. I love that too. You could do that to a witness. Just lift him out of, yeah, man.

1:35:33 Eli: Yep all done with your son, case dismissed, case closed, I

1:35:47 Thomas: So yeah, so that's, that's important. The state has now conceded that Santa Claus exists, but now the, but Now he gets to make demand this part where the lawyers make these demands of, of the judge or whatever, or something. Cause he's like, we demand the state. Well, okay. I'll concede that. But only if the Mr. Gailey has to prove that Chris Kringle is is actually that Santa. And then that's a big wow moment. Cause he's cause Mr. Gailey is like, ah, shit. I didn't think of that. So he's, so he's like, ah, yeah, I didn't get this far in my fantasies. Like this is, I don't think this is either. They're going to arrest me when I put my hands on that kid. I didn't think I was getting this far. So He's, he's Like, ah the, uh, the, the defense needs a recess. Yeah.

1:36:13 Sam: I thought I had one he's is

1:36:28 Andrew: Oh so he requests an adjournment, and I just want to point out, right, we, we will find out that at the time he's doing this is December 23rd, right? So he has now asked for an adjournment to December 24th at 3 p.m. Now, we have already established that I have friends who are judges. There is not a judge on earth who's like, yeah, why don't we pick this up on Christmas Eve at three in the afternoon? You guys aren't busy, right?"

1:36:33 Thomas: Yeah. And

1:36:59 Eli: Assume they just sit in their chambers on Christmas drinking scotch and looking at a picture of themselves that they paid someone else to paint, is that not what judges do?

1:37:04 Thomas: Then

1:37:06 Andrew: Yeah,

1:37:09 Sam: A judge actually in charge of when stuff happens, like when things are, how does that work?

1:37:12 Eli: Well

1:37:15 Andrew: Judges, I mean, their clerks usually keep the calendar. But yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff that occurs in a trial is driven by the fact that, you know, we're now in this age, particularly in the federal courts where, you know, we're post-sequestration. So courts are really drastically underfunded and there's tons more cases than there are judges to handle them. And so it's really, really tough to get a spot lot on the calendar. And judges are like super ruthless about clearing it up, yeah yeah

1:37:40 Thomas: Well, maybe back then the key was every single person who came into court, they just threw him the chair. There's like chair, chair, share, share. So there weren't a lot of cases back then. That was like wide open. So. Okay. So he can't immediately do this on the spot. He can't immediately prove that this is, you know, so he asked, he's like, I need some time to, I didn't get this far, like I said, in my case. And so they're on kind of a break or whatever for a day. And Susie starts thinking like, oh, this guy must be Santa because he's so nice. That's great logic. He's so Nice that he must be said.

So she's going to write him a letter to make him feel better. And Doris writes that she believes in him too, on the letter. And she feels, uh, you know, just because she feels sorry for this insane bastard who's on trial here and they send him the letter and that's, that's like the greatest thing ever. Uh, but they, but at the post office, here we go. This crucial plot stuff at the post office. Some guy sees the letter and is amazed that there's a letter to Santa that actually has an address rather than the North pole.

1:37:49 Andrew: That's true uh

1:38:42 Thomas: Like, so he's, he's like, wow, look at this letter that's important to this plot. It has an address. And so then he's talking to this other, I love these two guys. They're so New York-y. It's really awesome. And they're talking, they're like, well, why don't we, maybe we should deliver these letters, all the letters to Santa to this address. Cause now we apparently have an address for Santa. So let's do it rather than just immediately burn them, which is what they likely would do. Like every single letter to Santa.

1:39:08 Eli: Wait this is insane what are they, this post office is, is a weird, dystopian Harry Potter nightmare, right? They have just shoots of paper going into bins in front of them, and then they just throw them behind them into vents? What is ha- Andrew, you were around when this was how mail was delivered. Are there post mice waiting in the vents,

1:39:16 Thomas: Me yeah no

1:39:29 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

1:39:33 Sam: Did anyone successfully get a letter that was addressed to them?

1:39:37 Andrew: So, and and I I have a bigger problem with that, right, which is we, we established that the, uh, hearing was postponed until Monday, right? So all of that stuff that just, that just culminated in the state concedes the existence of Santa Claus was Monday, December 23rd right. Right. So then Monday night.

1:39:39 Thomas: Yeah yeah this is that night shift of postal workers that already have the the letter, yeah

1:39:58 Andrew: Yeah. No, no, wait, wait. So. Yeah, so Monday night is when Natalie Wood writes her letter to Santa Claus, which, by the way, that really, like, the close-up bothered me because it was the, like, fakey adults trying to write in kids handwriting that just bothers me. Anyway, so so Monday, Monday day is day one of the hearing. It's postponed until Tuesday afternoon. Monday night, Natalie Wood writes the letter to Santa Claus and puts it in the mail in the mailbox. Tuesday morning. I like when does this mail sorting take place?

1:40:12 Thomas: Yeah like a kid yeah it was terrible I'm

1:40:13 Sam: Yeah yeah

1:40:31 Thomas: Saying it's the night shift, it's the, you know, those postal employees, they're real go-getters, they do, they want a letter, you, they can't let a letter not be delivered for any period of time, like, the immediately, whatever, whatever happened, I guess Natalie would drop the letter directly into a shoot that went down to this underground dungeon where these slave postal workers just work all night, like in some weird Mad Max kind of thing where they're just.

1:40:33 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:40:47 Sam: Yeah yeah

1:40:54 Eli: Throwing letters in random directions? Again, we never- I have no idea what system could have possibly been in place where you look at letters and throw them in random directions depending on where they're going.

1:40:56 Andrew: Right.

1:40:56 Thomas: Yeah. Oh,

1:41:08 Sam: Just I remember watching that scene thinking, like, what if that was your job, like, you just throw letters around, like, that was someone's job apparently back then

1:41:12 Thomas: Yeah. You would go postal. Yeah, yeah,

1:41:18 Eli: That's what Thomas is doing. That's where Thomas is quitting. He's done throwing letters in all different directions.

1:41:22 Andrew: Yeah.

1:41:22 Sam: Yeah.

1:41:20 Thomas: Yeah it that is, but I love this idea that they've had, again, this is not year one of Earth, like, even, even according to this movie, this has not year 1 of Earth. They, they, they have all these letters to Santa that they don't know what to do with. Like, is the first, is this the first year Santa has existed? Is that where we're supposed to, like, oh, we gotta, wow, thousands and thousands of these letters, we don't what to deal with them. So, and then this is a great plan, like, now that that they have an address, they're going to deliver it.

So back at the, uh, we're now back at the courthouse again, weird timeline, as Andrew has pointed out, but the prosecutor asks, uh, the judge, it's great, we cut into the to the courtroom and Gailey is still walking in the door and the prosecutor is like asking the judge, hey, uh, I I order you to sign the commitment papers on the grounds that like we're all really sick of being here, like, who wants to be here, like, it was literally really that's the the motion that he's doing is like, it's, you know, we're tired, it's Christmasy, like, let's just commit the guy, okay, like

1:41:24 Andrew: Yeah.

1:41:31 Sam: What year was it

1:42:21 Thomas: Just for time's sake, and that's his case, and Gailey kind of walks in during that, is that accurate, Andrew, is that what normally happens

1:42:27 Andrew: Yeah, we've established in 1947, like, whoever gets there first gets to go. So, yeah.

1:42:31 Thomas: Yeah a lot of law was decided on like dibs, like shotgun, that's where shotgun comes from, it's like they, They kill the guy with a shotgun if you call shotguns soon enough.

1:42:38 Andrew: Right.

1:42:42 Eli: So, so this is what's supposed to happen in the course of the movie. Right. Mr. Gailey comes in. We assume with no idea how to prove his case. And then someone from the post office. Again, this was not Mr. Gailey's idea. Mr. Gailey's idea was not, I'm gonna bring all the letters. Some guy was just like, hey, we's gots to send all these letters to Santa's to this to this office courthouse. Is, is it's the 40s and so someone comes in and whispers in his ear, hey, man, there's like a million fucking letters to Santa here, do you want them, and we assume Mr. Gailey's like, yeah, bring him in, that will be the linchpin of my case Now.

1:43:09 Thomas: Yeah,

1:43:21 Sam: Yeah

1:43:21 Thomas: He had nothing. He literally had nothing, no plan whatsoever. He's the greatest lawyer since Dara. No. No, no, no. So the, the whole, the, his whole case is that he needs to establish this, this branch of the government, the post office. He starts reading post office facts. And as Andrew said earlier, you don't you need a witness to do that? Like he's just like here, judge, let me just read this to you for a minute. And he reads like, yeah, go ahead.

1:43:22 Sam: Yeah

1:43:29 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and there's. This is kind of. So, you can do a little bit of what he's doing. So, for example, you can ask the court to take judicial notice of something that is a commonly accepted fact. Right. Like you don't have to put on a witness to prove that, the post office is a branch of the government. Right? Right. But you would like when they start talking about he gets into the details about like, you know, specifically how it operates and everything. And for all that, like, yeah, you want to wait.

1:44:16 Thomas: Right.

1:44:16 Andrew: And you have that like supposedly clever setup where the district attorney is like, why do we care at all about the post office? Like, I agree. The post office is fantastic. Will you shut the hell up about it now?

1:44:22 Thomas: He's confused. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He is like, I don't know where this is going, but I will definitely agree that they are an organization which if they decide this guy is Santa, then you win. In, but I'll just agree. Cause I know, I don't know where this is going, but yeah, I agree.

1:44:36 Sam: There's No chance that's happening, yeah.

1:44:41 Thomas: So the state agrees, like we said, the state just like, yeah, we get it. The post office is great. We agree. Let's get out of here. And then Gailey produces all the billions of letters onto the judge's desk. Uh, and then, you know, they come in and they just dump letters, dump letters. And the whole case is because the post, because two minimum wage workers who were just like on a goof, decided to deliver some letters to a specific place that were addressed to Santa. That's like means the government officially recognizes he's Santa and then he said a case dismissed. Standard stuff.

1:45:12 Thomas: Again, once again, this is all how this works.

1:45:14 Eli: Andrew, question. How often are you allowed to just dump mounds of evidence onto the judge, like, I I feel like that would get messy in rape trials. Yeah.

1:45:23 Thomas: Killing him in the process

1:45:26 Sam: Has There ever been one with just fish, like live fish? You just get to like a net and it just goes, like they're flopping all over the judge and stuff. That'd be awesome.

1:45:33 Thomas: There's one where it's like the Nickelodeon slime, like they just do the judge gets slimed. The climax of this is the judge is just covered in letters and he and he gets out and he's like, like, he's, like, drowning in letters. He's judged somehow.

1:45:35 Sam: Yeah. He out a couple letters, yeah.

1:45:49 Thomas: They have to do, you know, like CPR on him, and he coughs up letters, like to get, he does the, you Know, a bunch of letters come out.

1:45:39 Andrew: Yeah I

1:45:49 Sam: A Heimlich yeah We've

1:45:56 Eli: He's banging the gavel, but how, who is the judge? Is covered in letters, who is banging the gravel?

1:46:03 Thomas: On what?

1:46:04 Eli: He's

1:46:04 Thomas: Too? On letters? He's banging the gavel on letters. Wouldn't make that sound.

1:46:08 Eli: Fighting his way out, out with his gavel.

1:46:10 Sam: Been waiting to ask this the whole time, but what exactly is the miracle that happened? I don't understand. I don't understand why the movie is called a miracle on 34th Street. Oh, okay.

1:46:15 Thomas: That's a good point.

1:46:19 Eli: We're getting to it, Sam. We are getting

1:46:22 Sam: So I want to know what it is.

1:46:22 Eli: To it.

1:46:22 Thomas: Okay. So, he wins. Case dismissed outside the courthouse. We get this weirdly lit scene that I guess is in a soundstage. And they did. It's kind of funny when you look at it. It's totally dark and weird. And Doris asks him like, hey, so congratulations and all that. Santa Claus is like, do you want to come to dinner? And he's like, oh, no, it's Christmas Eve. Like, I'm, you know, I're busy. And she's like. Oh, we're still doing this. You're still dealing.

1:46:46 Thomas: OK, now that you won the case. Like it's it's case is over. Do you want to just come eat, or what? But no, he's still committed to it, and now we're at the Macy's Christmas party. Santa finally bought that doctor the lawnmower that he's uh wanted so badly. It's a lawnmower that is supposed to be an X-ray machine, I guess, but there's a lot of weird hoses and like, yeah.

1:46:46 Sam: With a Santa yeah yeah I thought it was like that Chuck Norris workout thing. What is that called?

1:47:09 Thomas: It's yeah Yeah.

1:47:12 Eli: The bow flex.

1:47:14 Sam: Yeah, a

1:47:14 Andrew: I definitely thought it was a still, right? Like, for moonshine.

1:47:14 Thomas: He bought him of a Bowflex. Yeah. It's, he bought him the apparatus that the wizard is using and The Wizard of Oz, like just all the weird things he's pulling to like get the, and so, Santa didn't get Natalie Wood an entire fucking house. Therefore he's evil. And she's not speaking to him like, oh, where's my house, Santa. 'Cause the real Santa would buy every kid a house every year that they wanted. Also I had a note about costume note here. Uh, I think Fred costume did the costume, but Santa's belt is across his breasts. Like it's literally, is that where he Santa typically it's a man's ear. Like that's

1:47:22 Sam: Guy's gotta stay warm somehow. The

1:47:59 Thomas: My note. It's a Manzier.

1:47:59 Eli: That's a binder. Yeah.

1:48:00 Thomas: Yeah.

1:48:00 Sam: Bro, yeah.

1:48:01 Thomas: Yeah, it's, it's a bro.

1:48:01 Sam: The bro.

1:48:01 Eli: Exactly. There's also this incredible moment where he's like, he's like, "Oh, I'm sorry, you must be very mad at me," and then her mom is like, "Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to," and I just wrote in my notes, "I agree." Right?

1:48:04 Thomas: He's yeah.

1:48:18 Sam: I said that too, I said exactly, right?

1:48:21 Thomas: Doris has been right on. I'm pretty much everything except for staying with this, you know, rapist. This is the funniest, like weakest justification for anything ever. Gailey and Doris are going to leave and probably, and you know they're obviously going to end up driving to a new house that Santa bought them. But, uh, you Know, Santa, his, his excuse is that he's written them some direct, I had to watch this like three times to catch this because I was like, why are they following these directions? He's written him some directions to to avoid traffic to their own house that Santa wouldn't even know. Why would he know the traffic? Like, why would he's not from there?

1:48:23 Sam: Yeah. I love Doris, yeah, Yeah,

1:48:58 Eli: 1947.

1:48:59 Thomas: They know where they're going.

1:49:00 Eli: Map quest.

1:49:01 Thomas: Yeah. Like it's, but why would, why would they know any of that? And where did they think they were going? Like, they're just going to their little, what, Manhattan apartment or whatever? They're driving like in the, they're in the country all of a sudden, like there's way out of the way. And they've, they're in another goddamn state for, it seems like. And Suzy, then, of course, as they're driving, Suzy sees the exact house that she wanted and she just runs in because obviously Santa just bought her a house somehow and now they're just in someone's house. They're like, okay, we're in this house just doing whatever, and Gailey decides to make his move. Yeah, that's when he's, you know, because he he hears Suzy say like, oh, you just, if you don't get something you want, you just gotta try again, and then he just starts making out with, you know, with with Doris.

1:49:01 Eli: I'm telling you Santa's just a time traveler and

1:49:05 Andrew: Oh.

1:49:47 Eli: And so wait, let's talk about this sequence here. This little girl runs into a house, which happens to be for sale, but it could have not been for sale, right? So she she runs into the house, which happened to be a little bit of a mess, and she's like, "Oh my gosh, I love this house," and he turns to Doris and goes, "So do you want to buy this house to keep your daughter believing in Santa?" And she's like, "Sure," and then they are kissing, which makes no sense, honestly.

1:49:47 Thomas: Mm-hmm, could have not been, yeah,

1:50:13 Sam: It makes no sense.

1:50:13 Eli: Thomas and I could kiss at this point in the podcast and it would make more sense than these two characters kissing in the movie.

1:50:10 Thomas: Yep, yeah like we should probably just, just do that to, yeah we should, Eli, no it's a good goof, we should just dothat just to, yeah just for fun, because it would be funny, yeah

1:50:20 Andrew: Patron, patron, goal, patron, goal.

1:50:24 Sam: It's gonna be a hefty one. Oh,

1:50:22 Eli: Are you ready and now, now's the miracle. Sam are you ready for the miracle? So They decide to buy this random house that they got instructions to, and then they look in the corner, and what's in the corner? A cane.

1:50:28 Thomas: Yeah, yeah

1:50:30 Sam: Yeah, what is the miracle? Unbelievable.

1:50:39 Thomas: A cane, the most nondescript object there could be, there's no features on it, it is, it's just a cane and I want to know, yeah,

1:50:41 Sam: Yeah,

1:50:47 Andrew: Well, it might still have what's-his-face's blood on the end of it, right?

1:50:50 Sam: I thought what it was is that the crazy Chris Kringle beat, just obviously beat, whoever was living that house, to death and

1:50:56 Thomas: That's that's, that's my note. Santa's

1:50:58 Eli: Murdered

1:50:58 Sam: Burned their bodies

1:50:59 Eli: Them and stuck them under the floorboard he

1:50:59 Sam: Yeah

1:51:00 Thomas: Cane is by the fireplace. And therefore he murdered and buried the family in the backyard like, and he put it all for sale, and my note says, and he did it all in one night.

1:51:02 Sam: Yeah yeah What?

1:51:09 Thomas: Like Santa could do anything, he could murder a whole family and bury them and put their contact like an agent and put there house for sale all in one night and

1:51:10 Andrew: Yeah

1:51:10 Sam: A miracle, and

1:51:16 Eli: Can

1:51:19 Sam: You flash back to Doris asking what he's doing on Christmas Eve, he's like, "I gotta find a family to murder, burn their bodies," and give you directions to that house in the next, like, what, six hours? You know, you know how busy I am.

1:51:25 Thomas: Then leave my cane there. Yeah

1:51:32 Sam: Yeah, it's impossible

1:51:33 Thomas: How is he walking without his cane anyway? But so the weirdest thing is that we're at the end, because the old movies did this, I love this, old movies just fucking ended like they would just be like "What, we're done," like it would just beat over, and the last part though that is so freaking hilarious is the the lawyer guy is about to say, he, he says, he literally, this is a line, he's about to say, like, "Man, I am such a badass lawyer because I essentially convinced a bunch of saps that some old, you know, crazy bum is Santa." And he like starts to sit and then he sees the cane. So we were about to find out that this whole time Gailey didn't believe any of this. Like he just pulled one over on all these people.

1:51:35 Sam: Yeah yeah yeah

1:52:16 Thomas: Right. And then he sees the cane and his line is, his last line is before the movie ends, he says, "Maybe I didn't do such a good thing after all." And I like, I don't know what he means. Like, what does he mean? Does he mean like, yeah, Santa did just murder an entire family for our benefit, yeah

1:52:30 Andrew: Oh,

1:52:31 Eli: See the bodies, it's a pan shot that he can see the kids

1:52:32 Thomas: Yeah what if they just did that like they did this horrible like reaction shot of like him seeing blood and just like bodies dragged, you know, from this house, for his benefit and he's like, "What, what have I done

1:52:43 Eli: Chris is just in the backyard digging and waving at them I

1:52:45 Thomas: Yeah yeah

1:52:46 Andrew: No,

1:52:48 Sam: I'm not joking when I say I don't even understand the movie, I don't understand if he is or isn't Santa Claus, I don't know if he bought the house or they bought the house or he killed the people in the house I don't understand, so what is the whole point of any of it? What's the miracle I

1:52:52 Thomas: Yeah

1:52:58 Andrew: That house is clearly still for sale, right, like yeah

1:53:03 Thomas: They still have to buy the house, he didn't get him the house

1:53:05 Sam: Don't

1:53:05 Andrew: Right yeah that's the miracle is Natalie Wood's mom is the richest man, richest woman in the world, and she's gonna buy a house because her daughter ran into it. Like, that's the miracle.

1:53:06 Thomas: Yeah,

1:53:08 Sam: Get it, so weird I don't understand it I kept thinking, the first time I watched that, I kept thinking like, any minute now Kris Kringle's gonna do a Santa thing, so that we all go, oh, he is Santa, he never does it

1:53:16 Eli: Think

1:53:18 Thomas: Right

1:53:25 Andrew: I

1:53:27 Thomas: Well in the end yeah he should just ride, ride off and go, "Oh," Oh. And he like rides off in a sled.

1:53:30 Sam: Yeah Anything. He never does anything. And so if I was a kid watching that movie, I guess a kid watched it because I watched with my daughter, her I think she thought

1:53:39 Thomas: They're so dumb. They just think they're Santa the whole time, right?

1:53:40 Sam: Yeah they're like oh he's Santa, but if you watch it as an adult you're like, he's not Santa and they didn't get a house and I have no idea what the whole point of the whole movie was, is it just that just

1:53:49 Thomas: Where's the family that used to live in the house, Santa? Where is the family? Yeah.

1:53:51 Sam: I know it's died.

1:53:52 Andrew: I

1:53:54 Eli: The important thing that we can take away from this movie is because this courtroom scene ends with him legally being declared Santa, and since the reality of this movie is that old man is not Santa, when that old man dies the New York Times will report that Santa is dead.

1:54:12 Sam: Yeah

1:54:12 Thomas: Christmas died with him. Yeah.

1:54:12 Sam: Yeah

1:54:15 Andrew: Have Eli, I have this idea for a movie called Santa's Not Dead, are you in with me

1:54:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

1:54:22 Eli: Santa's not dead, he's surely lame, that's it, yep.

1:54:23 Andrew: Oh

1:54:26 Thomas: Well, yeah, and that's it. And that's, like I said, the best thing about these old movies is they're Just done. There's just, maybe I didn't do a good thing after all, yeah.

1:54:31 Andrew: This movie was so short oh my

1:54:31 Eli: Natalie Wood did yep yep

1:54:34 Andrew: Gosh, it was half, it was half the length of The Firm.

1:54:36 Thomas: But we still did almost the same amount of time.

1:54:37 Sam: I watched the firm after just to because I had extra time, yeah

1:54:38 Thomas: Yeah yeah

1:54:39 Eli: Natalie Wood did too much coke on a boat and someone hit her in the back of the head with a board, and that's, that's all you need to know about this movie.

1:54:45 Thomas: That's pretty much the end of the movie, uh, it actually had that scene, it was weird, I don't know, yeah.

1:54:45 Sam: Another child star gone, gone.

1:54:51 Thomas: Yeah, I guess we're done. Did you guys have any closing thoughts on the movie, and, and so, is this 34th Street or is the, was is

1:54:59 Sam: Not joking, by the way, I still have have no idea what's, what the point of the movie is, yeah.

1:55:02 Thomas: Macy's

1:55:00 Eli: Macy's is 34th Street. Oh, that I can actually explain. Macy'S is at the corner of 34th and Broadway and has been for a very long time. So the miracle is that Santa was at MacyS. Macy''s at 34th street.

1:55:12 Thomas: On that is a miracle, that's you would never find a yeah, Santa and Macy's, yeah.

1:55:14 Sam: Wow, amazing, miracle, I

1:55:16 Andrew: I definitely, I thank you, Eli. Like, I definitely thought the house was on 34th Street.

1:55:22 Thomas: Well, what, it makes sense, there's no miracles anywhere in this film, like, no, okay.

1:55:26 Eli: Well, everyone from New York knows that Macy´s is on 34th St. That's what's on 34st Street. It's Macy' s.

1:55:30 Thomas: Well, yeah, you know that some people don't live in New York though, like there's some of us

1:55:35 Eli: Nah, everyone else is just pretending.

1:55:36 Thomas: Yeah, um,

1:55:38 Sam: Thought it was the, the courthouse, like, that they were proving that there was Santa, I thought that was the miracle, the whole time, I still have no idea, it's the weirdest movie, yeah

1:55:42 Thomas: It's a miracle that a guy who's like a real estate lawyer could get a job, that's the miracle, wow,

1:55:49 Andrew: Yeah, that is a miracle.

1:55:51 Sam: I thought there was a miracle. That 76 year old lawyer has a 25 year old wife that was a miracle, God.

1:55:52 Thomas: Oh. Yeah. That's Yeah, their house is on 34th Street, that's actually all it was. The district attorney lives on 34th Street with that hot woman, yeah, that's for sure. Uh, so yeah, that's it, I guess, thanks for another, all right, that was awesome, uh, thanks Sam for coming on, uh, people can find you of course over on the little known podcast, Comedy Shoeshine, and much, yeah, it's, it's a podcaster's podcast.

1:55:59 Sam: Yeah. It's like an indie podcasts, we don't want to be big.

1:56:21 Thomas: Yeah. And Eli, thanks for so much for coming on and showing us how it's done. Uh, and I, you know, you should do this but, but for other movies, Eli, I feel like you.

1:56:31 Eli: And I actually have a new show coming out. I don't know if I can announce it Here I have a new show called Schmopening Schmarguments Me and Ted Cruz I ask him questions And he walks me through It's really great

1:56:38 Sam: Ted Cruz.

1:56:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

1:56:46 Andrew: That sounds like a really good idea.

1:56:48 Sam: He's a genius. Yeah.

1:56:48 Thomas: I know I would do that. I would listen to anything with Eli and Ted Cruz. That would be fucking amazing.

1:56:49 Andrew: Yeah.

1:56:49 Sam: Does that real please tell me that's real, Lawrence.

1:56:53 Eli: Oh please get off me Get him off He's so strong Stop

1:56:59 Thomas: And Finally, of course, thanks, Andrew, participating for and showing us, uh, that you can't actually just pull a kid and yank him into a witness box and ask him intimidating questions. I I wouldn't have known without you.

1:57:11 Andrew: This we have destroyed a beloved holiday classic. We are horrible, horrible people. We have done this before Christmas, and I there there was no hope for any of us.

1:57:23 Thomas: Awesome, well, that's all from me. Any, uh, any last words? Are we good? Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next month, our fine, fine patrons, for another other Law'd Awful Movies, and it's yet to be determined, but it'll be a good one.

1:57:28 Eli: Breaking the law asshole

1:57:46 Clip: This has been Opening Arguments with Andrew and Thomas. If you love the show and want to support future episodes, please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/law. If you can't support us financially, it'd be a big help if you could leave us a five star review on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever podcast delivery vehicle you use. And be sure to tell all your friends about us. For questions, suggestions, and complaints, email us at openarguments@gmail.com. The show notes and links are on our website at www.openargs.com. Be sure to like our page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at OpenArgs. Until next time. This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC. All rights reserved.