Cursed Knowledge #1: The Fast Saga


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Cursed Knowledge is our latest podcast that explores how narratives, for better and worse, have shaped our world without us noticing. The world is full of people pushing their version of reality on us and it’s time to expose the truth. No matter how much you might wish we hadn’t.



The Fast and Furious movies are famous for intense action and ridiculous plots. But the truth about how these stories get made has more to do with the drama happening behind the camera than in front of it.


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Comments

  1. Avatar for robh robh says:

    Listened this afternoon. Great job Harper!

  2. this was great.
    Now that there is as many Fast Furious movies as Star Wars movies, is there a “machete order” that the FF movies should be watched in (I haven’t seen any of them… so that is an option for me).

  3. This is one of those things that if posted to Reddit could blow up to the top of /r/all. Then it will be copied and posted by other websites such as Buzzfeed etc and becomes what is called Common Knowledge.
    On the first level my response to this episode is TIHI (thanks, I hate it). Now every time I watch a movie instead of enjoying the movie itself I’ll be thinking about the characters in the movie, how they are a product of the character (or ET in parlance cartoon) of the actor/actress and how contract plays a part in creating the cartoon of a particular actor/actress.
    Which leads to: does kayfabe have anything to do with all this? (referring to this video discussed in ET forum). What’s “real” about actor/actress, or Hollywood of the entertainment industry in general? Is there any other industry where kayfabe plays a big role?(other than pro wrestling and politics).
    Is it just narratives all the way down.

  4. (Re: last line of podcast.) I learned about the starfish eating method while on sea kayak tour. Ick!
    Great analysis, btw! This podcast reminded me of a current Disney+ series “Inside Pixar” and its episode 4 (“Who Gets All The Lines?”).
    My first takeaway of IP:Ep4 was amazement that anything gets out of scripting and rewrite committees. But I was somewhat impressed with the software tool that was developed to measure lines per gender, and provide a measurable feature. I don’t think the pains the studio(s) took to ensure on-screen parity for multi-studio characters in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” was a bad thing, given the uniqueness of the result.

  5. There is! Not counting the shorts and additional content, it’s 1,2,4,5,6,3,the end credit scene of 6,7,8, and soon to be 9. I’ve personally never done a marathon, but now I’m thinking that might be in order.

  6. “Thanks, I hate it” is exactly the reaction we were going for. This stuff pops up everywhere. Another example is Tom Cruise making sure all of his movies have a prolonged shot of him running.
    Hollywood has a really long and dark history of stripping away the person in favor of the star. Or the cartoon. Might have to go into more detail on that in another episode…

  7. Glad you enjoyed it! And yeah, the starfish fact really takes away from their appeal. I think anything that created the masterpiece of Roger Rabbit was well worth it. But it is a good example of how these characters had personas that existed outside of the movie and the studio was more concerned with maintaining the persona than creating the movie.

  8. This reminds me of the scene in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood where Marvin Schwarz is explaining to Rick Dalton that he shouldn’t be doing other shows where he plays the heavy for one episode and then gets beat up. Audiences don’t see Rick’s one-episode character getting bested, they see Jake Cahill, his regular hero role, getting beaten, which weakens his overall career.

  9. I know Hobbs & Shaw is not technically canon, but it’s a perfect action movie and it feels like the whole thing is a secret joke that they let the audience in on.

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