They woke the worms with their dancing!

who would win in a fight graboids or sandworms from dune dune worms are like gigantic we're here today to talk about footloose and trimmers so what's the what's the connection between footloose and trimmers leif uh well that would have we'd have to go back to that classic game seven degrees of kevin bacon wait wait in this case it's one that's a good game how many degrees of kevin bacon are there between these two uh these two films i'm sure i could somehow get to seven and loop back to tremors but that's unnecessary because there's just one degree of kevin bacon one degree of bacon oh man well hello and welcome to the popcorn isn't real the podcast where we talk about films and fan theories. I'm Leif Eric. I'm here with my co-host Torvald. And today we are joined by an amazing screenwriter and filmmaker, the creator and co-writer of such films as Short Circuit, Batteries Not Included, and of course, the ever-beloved Tremors.

Welcome to our podcast, S.S. Wilson. Thank you. Happy to join. And I love the name, The Popcorn Isn't Real. Thanks. It's a pretty good name. Leif came up with it, actually. So my first question for you is probably going to be one that you get a lot, but we like to start with just like a baseline. How did you become involved with the project of Tremors? The story is that we sold Short Circuit a number of years earlier. That put us on the map and got us into mainstream Hollywood. The first discovery that we made in that world was that we no longer had any control over our movies. Before that, we made short films that used to be sold in schools and libraries. That was an actual business, and we did pretty well for about 10 years making those films. And so, anyway, we sold Short Circuit, and John Battam never was mean to us. He just did what Hollywood does. He said, thank you for your script, and you'll never hear from me again.

We complained to our agent, Nancy Roberts, gosh, you know, we'd love to have more control over our movies. And she said, we're going to have to write something on spec. You need to go back into your old file folders and find something that you want to write. And then we will try to control it from square one rather than get onto some other movie that's already being made. So we looked in the old file folder. The idea of an underground creature was in one of those old notes. But it said something about there's a thing under the ground and a guy is sitting on a rock and he can't get off the rock. This theory just encapsulates what I think most people thought when they first watched Footloose and Tremors. which is basically that the town the town most people yeah everyone the town of beaumont the small midwestern town of beaumont and footloose is the same town as the town of perfection from

tremors the plot-centric ban on dancing in footloose was not some religious fanatic puritanical attempt at controlling the young people and ridding the town of sin like the movie would have you believe it was actually uh that the the town council the town elders were acutely aware of a certain monster problem they were aware of the graboids uh sleeping beneath the town graboids of course being the name of the worms from tremors they're not called tremors they're called graboids in case you didn't know they were aware that there were graboids sleeping beneath the town so they banned all music and all dancing out of fear that the uh the rhythmic vibrations and the noise would wake these sleeping monsters below kevin bacon's character ren in footloose of course he he stayed in the midwest you know growing up as like a cowboy kid and becoming his character valentine mcgee and tremors at which point he has to try and contain the uh the horrific

monsters that he inadvertently released with his irresponsible actions in footloose well i i would say that what i was hoping in coming on this podcast is that i would hear things that i had not heard i had never heard that that is quite extraordinary uh fairly convoluted but can i say fairly creative as well well that's a good theory i think that that's fun i think it's a lot of fun because what kind of a town would make a law banning dancing how stupid is that yeah i know no i just watched footloose for the first time yeah me too i guess it's a classic the idea never really appealed to me the idea of banning dancing well you know it was a really fast watch because there are lots of just like singing and dancing sequences you can just skip yeah i know whoa dude no no i hope you didn't skip his anger dance that's like the best part of the movie no i i watched the anger that's like the gleaming the cube moment where he's in like

oh it is way more classic movie i was gonna say most people would probably frame that the other way it's like the footloose moment dude footloose is like the gleaming the cube of dance movies gosh he should have had to save the the preacher's daughter with dancing somehow after she gets kidnapped and his troop of dancers i wish that they had done something like that in uh in footloose if he had actually had to use dancing to save the day instead of just dancing i mean i guess i can see how it appealed to the masses on like a mass level because you can't i don't understand like how did this movie get like positive word of mouth who saw this movie and then went home and told everyone else you gotta go see footloose like that kid taught that town to believe in dancing again it's so silly weird so it was based on a true story there was a town in oklahoma that had banned dancing from like the 1800s but the kids wanted to have a prom or something and so

they like petitioned to bring dancing back i guess and i'll bet they just like changed the law and did right yeah i don't think it was like a huge thing this is an old antiquated law that no one cared about that's footloose tremors on the other hand is a really really fun campy horror movie amazing movie you should everyone should watch it especially if you like horror movies or camp it's so fun it is and it's fun for kids too pretty tame yeah it's like it teaches kids if you watch it when you're a kid to like play the floor is lava game you know but it's like a movie it is the floor is lava the movie that's my first note that i have i guess it is the floor is lava it is it's so fun like it just it appeals on all levels we we were aiming for that for a general audience we didn't we we realized as we got further along into it it was really sort of a somewhat goofy you know concept and it's a b movie from the 50s you know that's when we grew

it's that with updated quirkier characters that was kind of that was the overall approach we hoped it would be a hit you know especially when we got kevin bacon and tried word to star we thought oh boy we're in good shape so did the studio and everybody was taken aback when it didn't do as well the box office as everybody hoped we were equally surprised when it took off in video and became the cult phenomenon that it is now now i'm basically gonna pull out some evidence from all these movies to try and tie them together i have evidence from footloose and tremors one mainly i also have a good amount of evidence from tremors three and four as well so first i'm gonna start out talking about footloose for footloose i just need to prove a few things mainly i'm gonna be trying to prove that graboids exist in the Footloose universe and that they've been terrorizing this town before. So it starts out with a message. A preacher is saying, God is testing us. He is testing us every

day. If our Lord wasn't testing us, how could you account for the proliferation these days of obscene rock and roll music? Now, I think that this sounds like a preacher who has experienced the plague of graboids in the past. He's justifying this to his congregation who also dealt with that and he's telling them don't worry guys it's a test we can get through this and the test is getting harder because of the rock and roll music is going to bring the graboids back but we can get through it we can ban the rock and roll music and we'll never have to worry about them again this movie starts out with like an insane stunt that girl is climbing from her car to a truck and standing in between them and dancing while a semi barrels down on them i feel like she might have been trying to get her boyfriend and possibly herself killed right this makes sense and i'm going to point out that she does this a lot

she wants to be killed by gigantic cylindrical things barreling towards her like giant worms like graboids and the reason she wants to be killed by these things is because we'll find out later that her brother was murdered by graboids and she has some amount of survivor guilt. She wants to die in the same way that he did. She does this a couple of times throughout the movie. So the next scene, Ren, Kevin Bacon's character, he runs into Willard at school who is wearing Val's cowboy hat from Tremors. Like it's the same exact hat. And Ren comments on it and he's like hey i like that hat which he does because he goes and buys it later and then he even asks where he can get it he says oh do they sell men's clothes uh where you bought that hat because he wants it he's like whoa do they sell men's clothes there so i could buy that hat too he actually wants to and he does he buys that hat is there a place that sells that hat i mean he

doesn't he doesn't know how to like interact and be nice and small towny he's from big city he's all abrasive and mean so all the girls at school comment on how kevin bacon is gorgeous yeah do you do you disagree i even when kevin bacon is young i just don't see it i think kevin bacon is incredibly unique looking um yeah and i dig it i think he's so kevin bacon look he looks like a freaking lizard he's so weird i don't want to be I love Kevin Bacon. I think he's awesome. And apparently he's a dancer. He's a fantastic dancer and gymnast. He can actually do it. And he does in Will and Grace, which is like 20 years later. He busts out the entire choreography from Footloose. He does it in Will and Grace. So he finds out from Willard that dancing has been illegal in this town for five to six years. And Willard explains that it started when a bunch of kids got killed in a car wreck. The whole town went bananas, blaming it on the music and liquor and dancing.

Yeah, something about that doesn't add up. They call it the infamous Crosby Bridge Accident. They say five years ago, kids were playing highway tag drunk. One car hits the other and both go over the edge of the bridge, dead. That's when they started passing these laws against music and dancing. Now, what about this story has anything to do with music and dancing? Nothing. Literally nothing. There was no music or dancing involved in that story. Yes. So why would that story cause them to ban music and dancing? The only reason it would is if there was no car accident, there was a gravoid attack. They were dancing and it woke up the gravoids. Yeah, that's possible. Like I noticed this town doesn't seem to have a problem with dancing, I guess, because they've got that under control. They do seem to have a problem with doing very dangerous things with cars. And I think maybe that's what they should focus on.

Yeah, they probably should. The girl in the beginning is doing like a Fast and Furious stunt. they charge bulldozers at each other and like someone could have died there he drove it into a ditch it flipped over yep seems like they'd be more careful about that if there was a big car accident on a bridge that traumatized unless there is a much bigger problem in the form of giant murderous worms living under town that will come out and eat you if you dance right so they're like we gotta get rid of the dancing the entire story of what happened five to six years ago is a massive cover-up for a gravoid attack clearly no and everything about this to me screams cult this could be a horror movie kid comes to a town where they have like really strange rules and laws we do not dance and there's like this preacher of the cult of the worm and and he's immediately pulled over this is exactly what happens in all horror movies he's pulled over by the cops and

they hassle him because he was listening to a cassette and they're like where'd you get this cassette like it's some sort of contraband yeah absolutely it feels like you know he just wandered into a texas chainsaw massacre town or something the police demand the cassette tape and find him these cops are the most on-the-ball cops in the world they've been arresting kids coming back over the state line from concerts which makes no sense because they didn't even commit an infraction in this state they they went to a concert somewhere else and these police are like no you've been dancing haven't you i can tell yeah no i mean it's like even in the real life version of this story from oklahoma maybe there was no dancing in that town i don't know but there certainly wasn't a rule of like no radio in your car all i have to say is there must be some larger purpose for these rules it's not just about keeping these kids safe at least not from sin maybe from giant

evil worms i was gonna say just because you mentioned the crosby bridge accident the neighboring town nearby that they keep driving to in beaumont is crosby whereas the neighboring town they keep wanting to drive to in perfection is bixby sounds pretty similar but why would that town change its name well you know because uh uh it was just like cross uh like you cross the bridge where that terrible accident happened bix just sounds better because it means like i i can i can give a little like linguistic reason for this actually um it might be that there are two different towns one is named crosby and one's named bixby but there is kind of a sort of implication that these towns are nearby in like old english and in like scandinavian languages which all have kind of similar roots um due to all the you know vikings uh settling in england and messing up the language and stuff um the word b uh by the uh the suffix at the end of crosby

and bixby um it means city so it's like cross city and bix city basically is the name of those places. And you would get a lot of different towns with, you know, the name ending in B in an area that was settled by the same kinds of people, right? Yeah. So the town Beaumont, the word means beautiful mountain. And we know that perfection is surrounded by mountains that are seen as like almost salvation. Like they always, they like, we need to get to the mountains, you know, get out of the valley where these graboids are. Yeah. Perhaps beautiful mountain kind of became a symbol for perfection eventually they changed it because they were like well first of all everyone moved out and their economy crashed because of the graboids and they're like well we need to rename it to get people back there is precedent that that exact thing would happen in perfection that has happened before in the 1800s yeah everyone moved out and the economy crashed but we'll go

Yeah, and then everyone just forgets about the Graboids. Yeah, well, it's actually enacted, like, basically in law that everyone needs to forget about the Graboids. Under penalty of torture. Kind of. I'm just saying there's historical precedents in Tremors of towns making specific laws to, you know, permit people from only carrying out specific actions or only talking about certain things to protect them from Graboids. Just like what Beaumont is doing by prohibiting dancing and music and stuff. Some people have tried to argue that Beaumont is in Utah because that's where it was filmed. But I can definitively prove that it is not because it's a small town in Utah. It would be Mormon. Mormonism would be the main religion, which John Lithgow is most certainly not. That's not the religion they're practicing. But I would say that this movie was written about Mormons by a person who had never experienced Mormons.

Who knew nothing about them. Yeah, maybe. That sounds about right. Next thing I wanted to mention was just that I thought it was somewhat indicative of the time that this was filmed. How Ren, who is new in town and kind of universally hated, like people think of him as like the shifty newcomer. He's the bad boy. He just immediately goes and just lands a job, no sweat. like he's just talking to this guy and the guy's like yeah people don't seem to like you and you know nobody really knows anything about you and then ran is like yeah well do i have a job or not and the guy's like yeah just come back tomorrow you got a job like oh god that's how you did it in the 80s you just get a job jobs going around this guy who didn't even like him is just like yeah sure i'll give you a job easy next uh main like important thing that happens is the uh bulldozer chicken fight that you mentioned so important well it's important because it shows

that uh ren uh or val as he's known and tremors has a lot of experience in driving bulldozers right it pays off in the sequel it pays off in tremors it's so good right he doesn't know how to to drive a bulldozer at the beginning of footloose he learned a very valuable survival and then at the end of tremors they're like we need somebody who knows how to drive a bulldozer and earl's like i'm gonna do it i'll try doesn't know and then val is like no i have to do it i've been training my whole freaking life for this i know how to play chicken with a bulldozer anyone can play chicken with a grab boy using a bulldozer it's definitely this guy is so good like he dude there's no better person for the job well that is that is truly amazing as well of course he might not have mentioned it to us you know he would have been trained by the transport department on the bulldozer probably when we weren't around so it might it must have

come up then he must have told those guys you know yeah i've already done this that's great the bulldozer link is wonderful shortly after this he gets overwhelmed with uh teenage feelings and goes and performs his angry dance which is probably the most iconic scene of this movie leaving the cube scene i would say if there's one reason to watch this movie it is because it is the prequel to tremors if there's another reason to watch this movie it's because of kevin bacon's angry dance that was a really good part of the movie right after his angry dance um the preacher's daughter shows up and she wants kevin bacon she wants ren to join her in standing in front of a speeding train and screaming as you know they die why does she want to do this is because it reminds her of the graboids that ate her brother she's she's suffering another survivor guilt attack and she He wants to be crushed by a giant, speeding, worm-shaped object.

That's the only reason she could want this, right? It's not like she's traumatized because her brother died in a car crash and has something to do with that. It was a gravoid crash. Sandworm. Yeah. The whole town council gets together to address a rumor that some boy wants to have a dance, which I think is insane. That's absolute insanity. The preacher is going around, like, campaigning and making speeches all over town against this dance, which is nuts, unless there are evil worms under the town that will come and kill them if this boy has this dance. They're treating it as an existential threat to the existence of the town. If this boy has this dance, we are all doomed because of the worms. exactly well i mean and we learn in tremors that like few things stop them floors don't stop them they can just eat you inside of a house it takes them a little longer but like cars don't stop them

even though sometimes they do think cars stop them like the graboids think that cars stop them they don't stop cars occasionally work really well but sometimes just not after this kevin bacon goes on a crusade to teach everybody to dance because he's like no one knows how to dance we all have to learn how to dance and there's a big montage of him like teaching them to dance and they're all starting to dance and they're dancing so hard that the houses are shaking and and i'm like oh kevin bacon what have you done no they're waking up they're gonna get you after this kevin bacon has to go to the city council meeting and defend dancing using the bible when he tells the story of david dancing with all his might for the lord I thought he should have finished that story and included the part where he also just got naked in public, stripped off all his clothes while he was dancing. And then when he came home, his wife chewed him out.

And she's like, what the heck are you doing, you crazy, naked, dancing man? And then he's like, oh, yeah, no sex for you for the rest of your life. Go live in a tower and never leave. Sorry, back to Footloose. They decide to go have like a good old fashioned book burning, which I think in real life, the reverend would probably support. But in this movie, he doesn't support it. His thing is purely dancing. He's not a typical reverend. Yeah, he's like, books are great. I just don't like dancing. Everything is fine. I'm just trying to protect you from sandworms. Yes, exactly. He's like, I wouldn't even be a reverend if it wasn't for the Grabois. I just need to get you to stop dancing and singing and making music. Just be quiet and read your books. Books are great. You sing quietly.

Well, I mean, let's talk about Tremors. My theory was just that Ren McCormack feels guilty for this because he's the one who unleashed this plague upon humanity when he brought back dancing. And that's why he had to change his name. And he had a three-letter name and he wanted to keep that. So he went from Ren to Val. He liked being a McCormack, so he changed it to McKee. And so it's just very interesting how similar those two names are. And a person who perhaps unleashed a great evil upon the world certainly wouldn't want to keep his old name, but he would probably want to keep a familiar sounding name. So it wasn't such a huge change for him. In Tremors, the main character Val McKee is stupid, and I think he's overcompensating. I think he's very well educated because he's actually Ren, but because he's kind of trying to hide from his past and change his name. That's why he projects this air of seeming so stupid in Tremors, where in at the beginning of Footloose, we learn that he reads Kurt Vonnegut.

He's he's highly educated. He's well-spoken. Whereas in Tremors, he's just like, hey, howdy, y'all, let's kill some gravage. Not going that bad. I follow you. I follow you. And this is actually proven really early on in the movie where they meet Rhonda, the college student. She's putting up seismographs. She's been reading very unusual vibrations around. She wants to know if there's been any drilling or blasting. When Earl says that, oh, you do geography, he corrects him and says geology. And then she says, actually, seismology. But clearly, he's smarter than Earl. When she says that she's supposed to monitor seismographs, you know how they measure vibrations, Val starts to eye her warily. And he then displays knowledge of this subject immediately by explaining to Earl that they measure vibrations in the ground. So he knows what she's talking about. And then he books it out of there as soon as she finishes her sentence.

Seems to me like he had previous experience with vibrations in the ground and graboids, and he just wants to leave. He's like, I don't want anything to do with this. Yeah, he's like, this happened before. I'm not going to be here when it happens again. You are correct. It was our goal that both Val and Earl are seat-of-the-pants guys. They're not dumb. You know, they're not well-educated, and Val is one of those guys. You meet them, you know, throughout your life. For whatever reason, they didn't go to school. When you talk to them, you realize, oh, this guy is really, really smart. He really knows his field, whatever it is. But he will say, or she, well, I never went to college. I don't know nothing, you know. And Val is that kind of self-effacing character. But you're quite right. Those moments are in there for that reason. Yes, he does know the seismograph. Yes, he does know whether his truck is hung up or not.

It's a good analysis. I applaud that and I approve it. So there. And you'll notice all of his actions after this lead to like getting out of town. He just wants to leave. He even convinces Earl to say no to free beer, which is pretty crazy. And Earl comments on it. He's like, holy cow, can't believe that. We said no to free beer. We looked temptation in the eye, and we did not bend, which is pretty similar to what the other preacher was saying. I'm like a poor single mom who's just trying to raise a pogo-sticking girl from Jurassic Park who just wants them to help her do some work. She would have given them free beer, free meals, but no, they're leaving. They're going to Bixby. All it took was like a single sentence from some girl about vibrations in the ground, and he desperately wants to leave. Yeah, we're out of here. he even comments on it uh he like he already clearly has his suspicions about what's going on

and he even says like as they're going he says man we decided to leave this place just one damn day too late you know he's like we should have just left yesterday if only we'd left yesterday um he knows what's coming well they they he does know what's coming they find edgar edgar dean he He is a dehydrated, dead man with a rifle clinging to an electric tower. A very, very disciplined man. Yes. I will not die, Brick Graboid. No. No matter how thirsty I get. Who's willing to stay there? I will hold on to this fool even when I'm dead. I think Edgar's death was incredibly cool foreshadowing. I really like it. they have a guy who literally would rather dehydrate himself to death than face whatever horror is down there that's really good yeah it's a plural edgar uh yes thank you you know those are moments that we are proud of because again you should be the movie is the design of the movie is you know old 50s sci-fi i can't remember when we came up with it we were excited when we came

up with it what about the first guy just starts or just dies in dehydration that's cool and we thought it was cool too so and it's very nice to hear all these years later that people react to it that way oh i maybe you know he's really old maybe he's one of like the original natives who was taught to like never create vibrations by dancing or moving at all so he knows how to sit still i will not trigger graboids i learned from john lisko himself yes they meet a couple of road workers they try and warn them unfortunately right after they leave to go tell everyone else about this grisly murder um you know the road worker jack hammers into a graboid and gets dragged away basically their car got hung up and they couldn't get out of there after they found those dead road workers uh turns out they weren't hung up at all it was actually a graboid holding on to them and val seemed to know it because earl kept telling them we're all hung up we're hung up

you can't get out of here and val kept saying we're not hung up we're not hung up they weren't hung up he knew a graboid had gotten them he knew they had to get out of there he i mean seems like he's experienced this before maybe you know back back when he was a teenager and into dancing they come across the older couple who died i think they're like trying to build a house or something that's the car that gets eaten i mean it didn't get eaten though it got pulled into the ground and it's still in the ground and i thought having them like dig out the grill of that car and slowly realize what it was was like a very cool scene val is the one who thinks something's wrong earl is like the car is gone we must have missed him and then val is like no no no this is weird he wants to find the source of the radio music he can hear and where does he look for it in the ground he bends down and starts digging and finds a car there so he knows something's up

yeah no he knows where things go and graboids attack after he awakened the graboids he was probably driving around town with his playing his music in beaumont and his car got pulled into the ground exactly he's like music dancing graboids i bet his whole life is flashing before his eyes they run into ronda after they've killed a graboid earl says you ever heard of anything like this before val says oh sure earl everybody knows about him we just didn't tell you he's not lying everybody around does know about them not only does he know about them other people in town know about them they just don't tell anyone and it makes sense that earl and ronda don't because earl and ronda aren't from around here yeah that one certainly feeds into deeper in the conspiracy side of the theory but yeah but i'm sure he could make the case val is the one who explains how the grab boys know where they are he says it ain't got no eyes

right sure as hell can't smell us underground i say he's been listening so he knows i thought it was pretty cool that uh bert and reva reva mcintyre it's not her name but i thought it was cool they took on like a graboid like face to face like literally like you know a couple feet from it and just like slaughtered it um so i wasn't sure but after that i i agreed that bert deserves to be the main character of the entire series from this movie you might think the series main characters would be Earl and Velvet. No, it's Burt. He's the main character. And he totally deserves it. He is the total badass in this movie. He kills more Graboids than anyone else. Yes, he killed the first... Well, he didn't kill the first one. The first one died by hitting a wall. These are just kind of... They're just underground whales. They're not really very smart. They're only scary because you don't know what the heck

is going on. Yeah, he was the first person to go toe-to-toe with one and like actually kill it. and his wife reba mcintyre is pretty cool she sings the ending credits song well she does when they drive back and they have that piece of a graboid stuck to their truck it cuts to reba mcintyre and she goes it stinks that was the first line she recorded for this whole movie that was the first scene she did and apparently the instant they said cut she like jumped up and was saying i did it i did it i'm in a movie and was like jumping around like celebrating and then apparently her acting skills went way down by the time she got to little rascals and she was like uh and it'll end right and it'll end can't even say one line got that sucker it wasn't even a hard line they'll come right back where from the start oh boy my favorite part of the end of tremors is it's a callback to his chicken fight

But this time he has to jump out of the way. I thought it was so good, like brought an actual tear to my eye. I was like, oh, my gosh, his arc is complete. He needed to give up his values. He needed to stop pushing everyone to dance. He needed to jump out of the way. Right. No, it's a perfect setup. At the end of Tremors, the Graboid is charging toward him. And in order to defeat the Graboid, the perfect payoff from the prequel is that he has to leap over it. Just like when he was talking to the city council in Footloose, he said, there is a time to leap. And it turned out that time was coming. That time was when a Graboid is coming right at you. Later on, when a Graboid is coming right at him, and it goes off the cliff and it dies. Wow. Somebody needs to cut these two movies together. We really said.

And this is something that I only recently noticed when watching Tremors, but I think it's a very, very cool foreshadowing, I guess, is right at the very beginning of Tremors, when Val first wakes up Earl there in the truck, he wakes up Earl essentially by stomping around and dancing on the truck, which is how he woke up the Tremors back in Footloose when he was a kid. But then also Earl slides out of the truck in his brown sleeping bag onto his head on the ground and he looks just like a graboid wrapped up in that brown sleeping bag. And this is exactly what Val does to the graboid at the end of the movie. He dances around in front of it until it goes off a cliff and falls on its head. And if you put those two scenes together side by side, Earl falling out of that truck really looks exactly like the graboid falling off the cliff. And I just have to ask, was there any sort of intentional foreshadowing there or was it just a wonderful coincidence?

You know, I'm going to have to bring that up to Ron and Brent because they are much more into that kind of filmmaking than I am. And I think both of them would love to say yes. Earl is foreshadowing the grab void. I cannot say that we all thought that at the time, desperate as we were to try to just get the movie shot. But that's pretty good. He does look like a grub blade coming out of the truck. It could be foreshadowing. I got to actually write it down or I'm going to forget it. That's very cool that the movie starts with, you know, this kind of tremor-like figure falling out of a truck. And then it ends with a tremor falling off a cliff. But it's definitely a fun one. It's definitely, you know, sort of a classical, critical analysis of the movie. See what they did here. See the shape. Oh, we tried to dig far deeper than anyone ever should into movies. I'm impressed so far. S.S. Wilson was kind enough to reach out to his fellow writers,

Brent Maddock and Ron Underwood, and ask them if this scene was included intentionally as some sort of reference to the Tremor's death at the end. Here's what they had to say about it. Ron said, I've seen the idea of Earl being a symbol of the graboid in his sleeping bag as he falls off the back of the truck, disturbed by Val just as it happens at the end. And it is great foreshadowing since Val is standing atop the cliff moments before. However, I don't think that was intended. I never thought about it until I saw it online. I wish it was. Maybe it was subconsciously put into my script. Brent said the following. Earl in a sleeping bag falling off the back of a pickup truck is a clever foreshadowing of the film's climax? My idea, I tell you it was mine, all mine, mine, mine, mine. I'm joking here, or am I? These fans are so damn clever. Between them and OpenAI's ChatGPT, we pretty much got the new Tremors already written.

That was so kind of SS Wilson to get back to us, and of course Ron and Brent for chiming in on this theory. We really appreciate it, and it was really cool to hear their thoughts on that particular scene. Tremors 2, that's the end of Kevin Bacon. I mean, he's around, but we just never see him again. So Tremors 2 was the first one I saw. And, you know, maybe I'm biased because I saw it when I was like 10 years old. But I think it's even more perfect for kids than the original. Well, duh, it's got mousers. Well, like, I remember I just loved the beginning of that movie because they're just killing Tremor, like Graboids left and right. And they're using remote control cars with dynamite on them to do it. It's so cool. And it's still got the floor is lava thing where you have to like, you know, stay off the ground. For Tremors 2, 5, 6, and 7, the main point that I want to make is that Tremors are global.

They are present in all kinds of different countries, Mexico, South Africa, Canada, Pacific Islands. They're all over the world. Tremors 3 and 4, though, actually have a lot of evidence that supports the Footloose connection. So Tremors 3 is where you get the ass blasters. Yeah, Ass Blasters. They're so cool. Just their official name. I thought it was too bad because she also suggested Butt Launchers. And Butt Launchers is a way better name than Ass Blasters. Oh, Butt Launcher. Oh my gosh, there was a Butt Launcher toy that we had. We had a toy we called Butt Launcher. He can totally launch his own butt off of his body. What a cool toy. Tremors 4 is the prequel. It's the one where they show Tremors origins, basically. Tremors 3 and 4 are important because they show that graboids basically like make nests in specific spots and then terrorize those spots over generations, forcing the inhabitants to adapt and enact specific rules and cultural norms to basically like overcome life with the graboids, which is important because that's exactly what had happened in Footloose.

Tremors 3 also shows us that the U.S. government will sometimes intervene and enact actual laws dictating what people in certain places can do and can't do to deal with the Graboids. So I think Tremors 3 does a lot to kind of show how a society could end up like the town in Footloose. the little gimmick of Tremors 3 is that they come back to perfection. But now there's like a tourist industry there where they've got this guy who's like bringing in tourists and, you know, taking them on pretend Tremors safaris, pretend Graboid safaris. But I thought it was a fun little inside joke where they have some tourists come up and they're like taking pictures with like a cardboard cutout of a graboid and they're like hey get a picture of me in the tremor look at me in the tremor and then the tourist guy is like they're called graboids not tremors and then no one listens to them because everyone they should be called tremors that's a completely unexpected

gift from the audience especially younger audience and it was it took us completely by surprise i don't remember when we first began hearing it but by the time we did trimmers three is to say we we made a joke of it because we thought it was great to go back a separate step we were not happy with the title tremors we weren't particularly happy with the name grab literally up until the day of shooting we were still throwing out monster names to use in that scene where victor and bobby jacoby come up with the name and and you probably know the story that the movie was called beneath perfection the head of the studio when he got his crew jacket threw it across the office and said there's no blankety blank way in hell we're calling any movie beneath perfection that is so weird and you're calling it tremors so we were stuck with the title tremors the fact that the fans began calling graboids tremors was kind of a relief and fun for us

right as kids a lot of us didn't know what the word tremors meant you know so we assumed that it just refers to the monsters yes obviously it's a noun those are the tremors so bert is all ready and prepared and he's going to take out these three graboids that they discover in perfection just before he can the government shows up and imminent domains him it's what he always feared what he talked about since the first movie they show up and they say that graboids are a protected species and then they announce some laws to protect the species i just think it's pretty interesting that the government is actually like creating laws prohibiting how people can act because of this race of animals, which is exactly what happened in Footloose. Wow. Tremors 4, the one that's set back in the 1800s, is important because it proves that Graboids have been around and interacting with humans for centuries.

So it is totally plausible that Footloose could be a prequel to Tremors because Tremors 1 was not the first time Tremors had interacted with humans. And clearly there would be some sort of cult of the worm led by John Lithgow. i don't know how the fans took it but for me tremors 4 is like the best movie in the series i love tremors 4 it's so good there's a precedent here that they could change the name to you know something else like beaumont uh because the town of perfection used to be called the town of rejection oh no which is a horrible name for a town i don't know why they call it that i don't know. Hiram Goomer, who is Burt's ancestor, he, after going out on a few expeditions and just having people die, he's like, let's all leave. We don't need to live here. We can all just leave and restart our lives. And everyone else is like, no, we'll never leave. We love this town that has no one left in it. Isn't Hiram the only one with a reason to stay? Because he owns

the silver yes exactly he's the only one who actually has a reason to stay this does set a precedent that there are certain communities that just will not leave um they will just deal with the graboids and they will you know change their entire way of life to be able to live with graboids for some reason so there you go okay this also shows that there are communities that have been devastated by graboids and you know had entire populations leave or die as the economy dwindles So that's good for Beaumont changed its name because that town had some green grass, but that's just because people were watering, clearly. It was in a desert location. So if people just moved out, then it would become like a ghost town and it would look just like perfection. It sure would. And last time there was a massive graboid attack. Everyone left or died and the town changed its name. So I can see why that would happen again and again and again.

And sometimes they might change the name back. Who knows? They changed it from Rejection to Perfection to Beaumont to Perfection.

I mean, once you start changing a name to a town, you just can't stop. It's just like, I don't know. I think I liked Perfection. Let's go back to Perfection. The name of the third movie. Dude, it was explaining it. They changed the name Back to Perfection. The title of the movie told us. That's why it's not Beaumont anymore. So, eventually, Hiram Goomer, he has a change of heart. So he sells everything he has left and buys guns. Wow, dude, that's exactly what a Goomer would do. He becomes Bert. All the guns he buys are great, but there's a specific gun that he buys that's insane. it's called a punt gun and it's absolutely massive it's it's shaped like a rifle but i've never seen anything like it it's like something out of final fantasy like it's like 12 feet long and like it's as wide around as like a log but it's it's just got like a trigger like a massive trigger that's like huge like it's it just looks like a normal gun just upscaled and it's real

like it's an actual gun they would use apparently they would use punt guns to hunt an entire lake full of ducks in one shot in one shot so you just aim it at a lake and shoot and everything in that lake dies that one we had to build they're not all that common and you mount it like a cannon in a tiny little ridiculous robo and you lay under a tarp or under you know camo netting and you wait for a million ducks to land in front of you then you kill one shot oh boy it's it's a marketing thing no punt guns were insane and apparently it was so effective that they had the u.s government had to make laws about not transporting fowl over state lines because people would use punt guns and just kill every bird in a lake and then ship them somewhere else so they had to like stop that like don't transport birds and then people stop using guns anyway crazy gun i really like that they put it in this movie and it was going to be the ending

until we found out we could get a real steam traction engine and somebody said you know there's this guy down in san diego he can bring a real steam tractor you gotta be so that thing was real that was a functional steam tractor engine oh absolutely 100 and some year old machine wow yeah that thing is awesome yeah the guy was on set hours ahead of the rest of this firing it up with wood to get the steam up to speed up to pressure and uh yeah it was an absolutely real machine when i got that i said this has to be the climax somehow i cannot have this thing on the set and not be using it that way man that's amazing after they've dealt with all the grab graboids basically he makes a law he says okay everybody now i'm in charge i own the silver mine i own this town from now on we tell nobody we never mentioned graboids to anyone uh this is this is the rule from now on and this explains why nobody's ever heard of graboids so this town

has a history of instituting weird rules as laws that you just don't break like no dancing no talking about graboids talking about graboids yeah exactly and then uh the hotel owner who is like a redheaded southern belle turns out he's like really into her and then they get married so possibly burt gummer married like his cousin or just a person who looks a lot like his grandma yeah last thing i have to say this is my real life evidence there are and you know there's a bunch of crazy stuff like this from like cowboy times but there's actual legends like real life legends of pterodactyl like creatures being spotted all throughout the midwest um particularly around arizona yeah the thunderbird um and there's like you know old black and white photos that they've taken where like a bunch of cowboys are standing around like the body of a pterodactyl and no one's ever been able to like verify these photos i mean they're real photos but no no one's

ever been able to figure out what that thing was that they took a picture with most people just think it's like something that they faked so that they could like put it together for like a dime store or a dime museum or whatever but yeah there's a legitimate legends of like pterodactyls flying around in cowboy times which could have totally been uh graboids ass blasters um you know if real life was a movie which would support that uh you know there could have been a town good evidence anyway it's not good evidence because real life is not a movie but anyway other fan theories that you may or may not have heard lots of people like to try and pretend that graboids are the same species as the sandworms from the dune series some of the colonization ships from the dune series maybe visited earth and seeded it with sandworms to try and get them to produce spice but maybe the earth lacked some minerals that enabled them to actually you know

get gigantic and suck up all the water and produce spice so they abandoned earth and just left the worms there and those worms evolved into into graboids i've never heard that one either i have heard i've gotten the question many many times are graboids based on sandworms you know and i i've always felt like they aren't you know the original idea was was i i imagined it as something like a shark it was under the sand uh when i was out hiking around in the desert but no, I've never heard and that's actually kind of a fun theory miniature sandworms from some previous colonization that's kind of extraordinary When Dune Part 2 comes out I'm hoping that we see some giant ass blasters to confirm this Oh yeah That would be amazing That's what we want We want them to take from Tremors So before I go are you convinced that uh footloose was actually a town plagued by graboids and was actually a prequel to tremors

yeah i mean it makes footloose like worth watching it makes it so much better i don't know how hard we want to go on footloose people love that movie but no that's that's fascinating well you guys have lived up to your to your promise sure enough there i mean get granted that i'm still answering fan questions it's quite interesting to me that you have done earth a half a dozen things that have never crossed, you know, my plate, you know, because I am still paying attention. Well, I'm so happy that we didn't let you down, that we kept you entertained and kept you on your toes. Oh, true. Hard to argue with. Before we go, I just wanted to say it was amazing meeting you, Steve. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about Tremors. Seriously, I've been a big fan of the franchise for a while. So this, you know, meant a lot to me to hear some of the behind the scenes stories. So really appreciate it.

Music for this episode is provided by Christine. We're a completely independent podcast. So if you like what we're doing and you want to support us, we have a Patreon. Feel free to go over there and subscribe. Send us a little bit of support. It would really mean the world to us and it would help us to keep doing what we're doing. Other than that, you can reach us on X. Oh, gosh, no.

Oh, man. We have a Twitter, whatever you want to call it. maybe we'll move to something else it's starting to get ridiculous but i don't want to be on twitter anymore anyway all right well this is ss wilson signing off and remember the popcorn isn't real