Ribbon of Memes

It's been over a century and a quarter since the first moving picture was committed to celluloid - the "ribbon of dreams", as Orson Welles mellifluously intoned.

And so, welcome, one and all, to Ribbon of Memes, a new podcast in which Roger Bell_West and Nick Marsh supply grateful listeners hot takes about films considered masterpieces by critics or filmgoers in general.

The rules: we choose one "masterpiece" from every year from the earliest days of cinema to our dreadful modern dystopia. Do we agree these films are classics? Are we entertained? Did we even understand what the film was trying to say? The questions are endless!*

We start in 1973 (for reasons explained in the first podcast) and progress vaguely chronologically (unless we think of another film that makes an interesting comparison to the one we have just seen, or are otherwise distracted by shiny new things).

Yes, that's right, we decided that what the world really needed was two more uninformed middle-aged white guys telling the world about media largely produced by similar people. Find out whether we were right or not herein!

*Actually, no, that's most of them.

We're also on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

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Condorman (1981) 03 January 2026

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a lovable bumbler? Roger and Nick visit one of the films that turned Disney back towards animation, 1981's Condorman.

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  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 04:47pm on 11 January 2026

    Michael Crawford did quite a few musical films. (HELLO DOLLY being probably the biggest.) He did a lot of musical theatre (especially originating the lead in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA) some of which allowed him a bit more depth than his film and television work.

    I don't know why I dislike Michael Crawford but I do. I really didn't like SOME MOTHERS DO HAVE THEM: the mockery of the weird outsider upset me then and I've only gotten more disapproving as time goes by.

  2. Posted by Robert at 04:03pm on 17 January 2026

    I very specifically conflated this with Starman because both were placed in the sci-fi/fantasy shelf at the early 80's locally owned video rental place near my house as a child. Even more specifically the single Betamax shelf as my parents went with Betamax in the first run of viewers so the available videos were even more limited. Notably this just meant I watched Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts about five times as often as I would have otherwise from that limitation.

    This film (along with many other live action Disney films of the era) I almost can't imagine as a theatrical release because they are so closely tied to that era of video rental in my memory.

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