This week’s Saturday Night Live, which adopted a unique “At Home” format, and featured surprise host Tom Hanks and a fun swipe at Tiger King’s Carole Baskin, aired a new animated short, catching us up on the now-miserable lives of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello — as the Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles!
Watch April and Mikey try to keep their marriage alive. Cringe in fear as Donny gets some disturbing news from his doctor. And what happened to ol’ Shredder? Prepare yourself for some scintillating adulting…
Looking for shows to binge during these quaran-tainment times? Here are some IGN-recommented series to take in…
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
You probably don’t know songwriter Lenny Macaluso by name, but it’s likely you’d recognise his touch. Specifically, The Touch, the motivational masterpiece Macaluso co-wrote with singer Stan Bush in 1986. The rousing power ballad – or “power anthem” as Macaluso prefers to think of it – was inspired by a line of dialogue in the classic air force movie Iron Eagle, written with Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra in mind, and ultimately found initial success on the soundtrack for Transformers: The Movie. It’s a fist-pumping four minutes that refuses to die, resurfacing with some regularity over the years in film (Boogie Nights, Bumblebee), television (Family Guy, American Dad), and videogames (Saints Row IV, Shadow Warrior). The Touch is a song that’s lived on for more than 30 years, despite the fact it apparently took just 30 minutes to write.
“Songs like [The Touch] are written very quickly because the lyric is so inspirational; when you touch upon that vibe within your soul, the song writes itself,” explains Macaluso, now retired from the music industry. “Because you inspire yourself as it’s being written, and it’s a great feeling. I hope others can share that feeling themselves when they listen to it; that’s the whole purpose.”
Lenny Macaluso with Tina Turner. Macaluso served as guitarist and musical conducter in Turner’s touring band from 1977 to 1981.
In early 2019, the team at Australian-based game developer SMG Studio were in need of some inspiration of their own. Work was well underway on the studio’s cartoonish couch co-op game, Moving Out, and with the deadline for finalising the game’s announcement trailer rapidly approaching, SMG Studio was desperate to find the right piece of music to suit the game’s vibrant eighties style and setting. That search would ultimately lead them to make a direct connection with Macaluso.
“Originally our plan was to get someone to write a Moving Out theme or title track, and then use stock music [for the rest of the soundtrack],” explains John Szoke, SMG Studio’s senior games producer. “During the process of getting someone to write the theme it was obvious that we weren’t fans of music that tried to sound like the eighties. We wanted something more authentic.”
A number of classic eighties songs were used as reference points by the team, including Jump by Van Halen, Weird Science by Oingo Boingo, and The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. But when one of the designers dropped The Touch by Stan Bush into a work-in-progress version of the trailer, everyone at the studio knew they had found the right song for the game. Or so they thought.
“Ash [Ringrose, studio head] loved it and reached out to get the rights to use it, and that’s how we got in contact with Lenny,” says Szoke. “Unfortunately there were multiple rights owners, including the film company [for Transformers: The Movie], so using the track was not only going to be expensive but also problematic in terms of digital rights management on YouTube,”
“Lenny had dealt with other game companies before and started sending us some alternatives and we landed on the track you hear on that trailer. After that we just kept talking,” continues Szoke. “Lenny is a great guy and we had a lot in common and a lot of mutual respect for what one another was doing.”
Never Surrender
Macaluso had grown used to being approached for music licensing deals over the years, but his partnership with SMG Studio on the soundtrack for Moving Out presented him with a considerably more collaborative opportunity, one that would ultimately give life to a number of unused tracks that had laid dormant in his archives for decades.
“The Touch, Never Surrender, Thunder in Your Heart; they are always the go-to songs [for licensing],” says Macaluso. “Very rarely do I get the opportunity to pitch something from the vault. That’s why [working on] Moving Out has been so soul-stirring for me, because John [Szoke] really encouraged me to keep digging deep.”
The first song Macaluso supplied was One Track Mind, which was retitled to Moving Power and selected as Moving Out’s main theme. The song was written back in 1987, and a heavily restructured version of it was eventually recorded and released by Canadian electro-funk duo Chromeo in 2018.
Here is Moving Power as it appears in the game, which is an instrumental version of the track recorded in 1999:
“After we got [Moving Power] for the trailer we kept going back and forth,” explains Szoke. “I would send him info about the game, screenshots and so on. He would go through his archives of music he wrote in the eighties and send what he could find.”
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=The%20eighties%20decade%20was%20an%20incredibly%20prolific%20one%20for%20Macaluso.”]The eighties decade was an incredibly prolific one for Macaluso, and by his own account there was a period between 1981-83 where he wrote and produced over 100 songs (“And that’s a conservative number, to be honest with you,” says Macaluso). In addition to these songs and countless others released by artists around the world throughout the remainder of the decade, Macaluso also wrote and recorded numerous other tracks that for varying reasons never saw the light of day.
Some of these tracks were written with movie soundtracks in mind, such as Movin & Groovin’ (originally titled Skin Tight) which was intended for the 1989 Jim Carrey comedy, Earth Girls Are Easy, and Tight (originally titled Cheapshot), which was written for the 1988 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy, Twins.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins (1988). Schwarzenegger is on the left.
“Danny DeVito’s character was a scammer, always running scams, so that’s why the lyric is what it is,” remembers Macaluso. “Unfortunately [Cheapshot] did not make the final cut of Twins, and I don’t think anyone’s ever really heard the song because I’ve never truly pitched it for any other opportunities.”
Macaluso’s efforts to get a song on Schwarzenegger’s soundtrack may have come up shorter than Arnie’s onscreen brother, but for Moving Out the track has finally found its purpose. Here is the original recording of Cheapshot:
Here it is in instrumental form as it appears on the Moving Out soundtrack:
Other tracks Macaluso supplied SMG Studio with were originally intended for young pop stars of the late eighties and early nineties, including Way to Go (originally titled Operator) that was very nearly recorded by Whitney Houston in 1990 at a time when she was arguably one of the most popular performers in the world.
“Operator was specifically written for Whitney Houston,” says Macaluso. “[Houston’s record label] loved the song’s melody, but I think in the end the lyric wasn’t something they were comfortable with for her as an artist at that time,”
“There’s a million missed opportunities in [the music business] but for all the ones I’ve missed, a Whitney Houston cut would make up for a hundred of the less successful artists that I’ve [worked with] in my career.”
Here’s Way to Go as it appears on the Moving Out soundtrack, a song according to Macaluso is “as melodically and structurally as close as you can come to a Whitney Houston track”:
Aside from movie soundtracks and songs pitched to pop icons, Macaluso also spent a part of his career writing and recording soundalike songs for commercial use.
“Sometimes [advertising agencies] want something that sounds like Material Girl, but they don’t want to pay for a Madonna song,” explains Macaluso. “Fortunately I have a back catalogue for opportunities like that.”
One such composition is Rocking Moves, an instrumental that’s highly reminiscent of Tom Petty’s 1993 hit Runnin’ Down a Dream, because that’s exactly the song it was written to replace. Here it is as it appears in Moving Out:
Music to Move You
It certainly seems fitting that the development of a game about moving house (albeit in the most chaotic, hilarious way possible), would lead to the discovery of a soundtrack made up of mostly unheard, decades-old recordings, as though they were from a shoebox full of cassette tapes someone found shoved under the bed when they were boxing up the spare room. The end result is a game that sounds authentically rooted in the eighties without actually featuring any tracks you recognise, as though it arrived from a parallel dimension.
“The eighties was really my era, and I wish it would have never ended,” explains Macaluso. “But when I revisit these songs, I really do relive the moment.”
Macaluso in 2020, surrounded by his gold and platinum records.
Equally, it seems appropriate that the process of assembling the Moving Out soundtrack would be so collaborative, since working together is such a key component of the game.
“My greatest love is working with excellent [collaborators], because they bring your A game even further to an A+ game,” agrees Macaluso. “I just really wanted to go a cut above. I saw how much [SMG Studio] were putting into it, and you know they’re not an Activision, they’re a small company. I wouldn’t be encouraged by some of the bigger companies to participate like that, to the point that they even gave me a music supervisor credit on the game. So it was fulfilling for me, to be able to really step up and contribute to a significant degree.”
“I think they felt the love, and I felt the love too. So I gave it back.”
“It was a constant back and forth throwing ideas around and we had a lot of fun,” explains Szoke. “We enjoyed it so much that we designed a level around him and named it Lenny’s Mansion, and threw a heap of musical memorabilia in there including framed gold records,”
“We probably went a bit overboard, but that’s what Moving Out is all about!”
Moving Out is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch on April 28. You can stream the soundtrack in full here.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”] Tristan Ogilvie is the video producer at IGN’s Sydney office. He also wishes the eighties had never ended. You can find him here.
Netflix released the eighth episode of their blockbuster docu-series Tiger King, an aftershow titled The Tiger King and I, on Sunday, which included new some revelations from the motley crew of Joe Exotic’s big cat park featured on the show.
Due to the current self-isolating measures, host Joel McHale conducted remote interviews with Tiger King cast members John Reinke, Joshua Dial, John Finlay, Saff, Erik Cowie, Rick Kirkman, and Jeff and Lauren Lowe.
Each interviewee shared their thoughts on the success of the series and their newfound celebrity, with many stunned by the notoriety considering they just consider themselves regular working people who just so happened to be in a documentary. (Saff, for example, recounted being stopped by fans while on a late night run to Walmart, while Reinke said he’s had fans violate self-isolation rules to shake his hand while he’s on walks.)
Most of the revelations were about the series’ main subject, the now-incarcerated Joe Exotic (aka Joseph Maldonado-Passage), with the cast members reiterating their animosity toward him.
Here are the six biggest takeaways from The Tiger King and I (and SPOILERS ahead for the Netflix series):
Joe Exotic Killed a Horse and Fed it to Tigers
TV producer Rick Kirkham, who now lives in Norway, provided the aftershow’s most dramatic revelation. After accepting an elderly horse from its teary-eyed owner and assuring them the horse would live out its final days in good care, Joe waited until the owner left before shooting the horse dead in front of Kirkham.
“I don’t take care of nobody’s animals. Now they’re tiger meat,” Exotic told Kirkham before having the carcass chopped up and fed to his tigers.
Joe Exotic Is Actually Scared of Tigers
For a man dubbed “The Tiger King,” it turns out Joe Exotic is deathly afraid of big cats. Kirkham says that when Joe infamously posed for photos with tigers, the cats were harmless because one was blind and the other tranquilized.
Saff recalled that while Joe didn’t provide any financial assistance for the incident that cost Saff most of his left arm, footage of the mauling was used by Joe in a safety video shown to zoo employees.
Travis Maldonado’s Death
The most shocking and tragic moment on the show was when Joe’s husband Travis Maldonado accidentally shot and killed himself in front of Joe’s campaign manager, Joshua Dial, whose reaction was caught on a surveillance camera. Dial recalled the heart-wrenching seconds after Travis shot himself in the head and the fear and disbelief that he saw on Travis’ face before he died.
While Dial did not seek professional counseling — he hopes to soon — after witnessing the tragedy, neither did Joe. According to Dial, Joe instead sought out a shaman for help, but Dial claims Joe’s behavior only deteriorated after that.
Jeff and Lauren Lowe, who have an open marriage, were asked about their attractive nanny, which is a top search result when people google Jeff Lowe. (They said things are going well with Masha.)
But Jeff spent most of his time in the interview with McHale hoping to set the record straight about a few things presented on the show. Jeff bristled at being depicted as the show’s villain, claiming that those, like Joe, he helps out eventually turn on him.
Jeff, who revealed he owns roughly 60-70 Affliction t-shirts, said he knows the real reason why his former pal and business partner James Garretson became an FBI informant — and that it wasn’t because he illegally owned a lemur. Lowe, however, wouldn’t disclose what that other reason was.
Neither of the Lowes also knew why their pal and would-be hitman, Allen Glover, was interviewed in a bathtub at one point.
Should Joe Exotic Be in Prison?
“Good riddance,” said big cat handler Erik Cowie when asked about Exotic’s 22-year prison sentence. Cowie’s disdain for Joe Exotic was echoed by nearly every interviewee, all of whom recounted Joe’s ego, volatility, and overall nastiness. Only Saff showed any measure of sympathy, saying Joe did some good things for the less fortunate and that he hopes he doesn’t die in prison.
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What did you think of The Tiger King and I? Did it leave you with any lingering questions about the show or its characters? Let us know in the comments.
James Gunn, answering fan questions on Twitter, stated that nether of his upcoming films for DC and Marvel — The Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — are currently having their release dates affected by the coronavirus crisis.
Obviously, this could change somewhere down the line, but for right now Gunn explained “there’s no reason for The Suicide Squad release date to move. We are on or ahead of schedule. We were extremely fortunate to wrap shooting & set up editing from our homes (due to a post production team & studio with foresight) before quarantine.”
Right now there’s no reason for #TheSuicideSquad release date to move. We are on or ahead of schedule. We were extremely fortunate to wrap shooting & set up editing from our homes (due to a post production team & studio with foresight) before quarantine. https://t.co/URRFXX58r3
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
Saturday Night Live has been on hiatus for several weeks due to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, but the show returned on April 11 for a special remote episode hosted by Tom Hanks. Actors were confined to their homes, and Mikey Day made the most of it with a Twitch stream sketch featuring a very poor Call of Duty: Warzone player.
In the sketch, insufferable content creator “Cam Playz Dat” says he’s playing the new Warzone game, but actually begins a game of free-for-all in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. There is little time for those unfamiliar to discern this as he’s shot roughly one second into the match.
Cam Playz Dat criticizes anyone sniping by his respawn location, which is a tactic commonly used by Twitch viewers in order to kill streamers. Of course, this isn’t the reason he’s dying so quickly. He is just very, very bad at the game, and after snapping at a viewer who makes fun of him with a classic “your mom” comeback, he’s forced to apologize.
He eventually gives up on playing Call of Duty and switches to Super Mario Bros. You can probably guess how well that went.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available for free on Xbox One, PS4, and PC. The game recently passed 50 million players, hitting the impressive milestone less than one month after launching.
If you’ve been stuck at home the past couple of weeks, either working from home or trying to find something to entertain yourself with, then you might be happy to hear that Best Buy has just kicked off a big new sale on MacBook Pros, iMacs, and even a great 4K TV. Best Buy’s Easter Sale is only available for today, and supplies are limited, so be sure to snag any deal you might be interested in before time is up.
Both the Space Gray and Silver models of the 15-inch MacBook Pro are currently discounted $500. This particular MacBook Pro comes with a 2.3GHz, 8-core i9 processor; 16GB RAM; an AMD Radeon Pro 560X; and 512GB SSD. It’s an excellent laptop for production, video and photo editing, and more–if you need to work from home, this will handle the entire week with ease.
MacBook Pro, 15-inch with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD
$2,600 ($3,800)
If you’re looking for something with a bit more kick to it, then MacBook Pros with more powerful specs are also getting huge discounts. The $3,800 is discounted to $2,600 and boasts 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. If you’re looking for a laptop that can multitask with the best of them, then this MacBook Pro is a steal at only $300 more than its lower-spec counterpart.
MacBook Pro, 15-inch with AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20
$2,650 ($4,150)
If you need an even more powerful MacBook with a better GPU, then the MacBook Pro model with an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 is the way to go. It excels at video production and even gaming–at least the games that are available on MacOS. In addition to the great GPU, it boasts an i9 processor, 32GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD.
iMac, 21.5-inch with 4K display
$1,050 ($1,300)
This iMac features significantly lower specs than the MacBook Pros on sale, but it’s also considerably cheaper. You get a 3.6GHz i3 processor, 8GB RAM, and a 1TB hard drive for $1,050–$250 off its regular price. If you’re looking for a Mac to work on while at home, then this is a pretty good deal.
Samsung 65-inch 4K TV, Q60 Series
$800 ($1,100)
If you’re stuck and have been looking at your TV, thinking you need to upgrade, then this is a great opportunity to do so. Samsung’s excellent Q60 series, 65-inch 4K TV is currently $300 off. It features HDR support and Motion Rate 240, which provide vibrant colours and a clear picture during fast moments, respectively. It also comes with four free months of Apple Music for new subscribers.
Following this past week’s debut of The Big Show Show, Netflix and WWE Studios’ family-friendly joint ventures continue with The Main Event, a half-hearted go at, basically, molding a Spider-Man style origin story into something that pairs with WWE. Which, admittedly, can’t be easy to do. WWE, and wrestling in general, is such a strange beast that its on-screen depiction in movies and TV shows is all over the place, quality-wise.
In The Main Event, Seth Carr stars as Leo — an 11-year-old WWE fanatic being raised by his father (Happy Endings’ Adam Pally) and grandmother (Little Shop of Horrors/Martin’s Tichina Arnold) after his mother, we’re told, left her family behind to run off with another man in a manner so cold and abrupt that it almost suggests mental illness. Bullied both in school and after school, Leo discovers a dingy old luchador mask that grants him superhuman powers. Not just the type that allow him to compete in a wrestling ring, but to do crazy strong things like swat down giant trees. Leo, now with a new streak of confidence, and a secret identity, can do things that the most powerful humans in the world can’t do. Again, it’s very similar to Spider-Man. In fact, they even call Spidey out in the movie.
The heart of the story involves the dad, Pally’s character, working up the courage to have a real discussion with his son about how he’ll probably never see his mom again (I know, oddly bleak considering she’s not dead) and also Leo realizing that his newfound fame and swollen ego is creating a big rift between him and his friends. The packaging and casing here is super messy though. When a masked Leo heads to televised wrestling try-outs, as part of a tournament that culminates with a steel cage match (more on all of this in a bit), no one seems to care that he has unearthly abilities. Sure, they marvel at this tiny person’s prowess when it comes to hurling a keg so hard that it crashes through the ceiling and winds up in the parking lot, but no one does more than drop their jaw. He’s just viewed as “really strong.” Basically, it’s the type of move where no one even realizes Leo, going as “Kid Chaos,” is a child until his mask comes off.
So the more grounded elements of Leo and his struggling family clash with the cartoon-y antics in the ring. For example, WWE’s Otis, who plays a character named Stinkface here, apparently has fart powers to rival the X-Men’s Banshee sonic scream. He can break wind so explosively that it blasts his opponents out of the ring and blows back the hair of audience members. This is clearly a mutant ability that, again, gets shrugged off by all involved. Because wrestling in movies apparently can be anything.
Otis isn’t the only WWE Superstar in the film, of course. The Miz, Kofi Kingston, and Sheamus, along with NXT’s Keith Lee and Mia Yim, are on hand as well — with Lee actually taking on a sizable (no wordplay intended) role as a tournament hopeful, named Smooth Operator, who befriends Leo on his journey. The story is also boosted a bit by Pally, Arnold, and Ken Marino (who plays a sleazy manager).
But what will WWE fans who are Leo’s age think of The Main Event? Obviously, there are some dramatic themes that will resonate but ultimately it feels like the film’s aimed at kids a bit younger. Either that or the movie can’t make up its mind who it’s trying to wrangle. As mentioned at the top, WWE is a strange business, and not one that easily translates to screen. It always has to be reshaped and reworked into something totally different than how fans see it.
Sure, animated mash-ups, like WWE’s intermingling with The Flintstones, Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo, require a complete re-imagining of the WWE product, but even a movie set in the here and now, like The Main Event, has to change a lot about WWE for the story to work. Like, do young WWE fans get irked at all when they see The Miz hosting a televised open call competition for a spot on the NXT roster? One that takes place over several weeks from a local gymnasium in small suburban town? Basically, a premise/set-up that doesn’t, and never will, exist within the real-life parameters of WWE? Do they care that when Leo and his grandma watch RAW it’s clearly SmackDown on the screen? It matters and it doesn’t matter, I suppose. If the film weren’t about a devoted WWE fan, it’d be easier to let these things slip.
2019’s Fighting With My Family, which told the shined-up broad strokes of WWE Superstar Paige’s beginnings, also had elements of this. Basically, that movie and The Main Event play very fast and loose with regards to “what NXT actually is.” Overall though, when it came to Fighting with My Family, Paige’s story was transformed to appease and appeal to, bottom line, non-wrestling fans and how they think wrestling works. It was meant to reach non-WWE diehards. The Main Event can’t seem to agree, even within its own story, how wrestling works.
