Remember All Those Childhood Films You Used to Love? This Podcast Does
Anne and Eleanor Huntington made me go on a trip down (very scarring) movie memory lane.
Welcome to PodFodder, where I talk to the people behind podcasts about why they created their podcasts. Yeah. Cool. Let’s get into it.
Today’s interview features Anne and Eleanor Huntington, the sister duo behind the Good Film Hunting podcast. Anne and Eleanor discuss movies they watched during their childhoods as well as movies their friends watched when they were lil’ nuggets, so it’s a good time.
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Anyway, Anne, Eleanor and I talk Spy Kids (*shudder*), surprisingly terrifying kids’ movies, and long-suffering parents, so let’s dive in.
The Queue: You were told to think of this beforehand. Can you describe your podcast in haiku form?
Anne Huntington: Sisters, El and Anne/Talk with friends about kid movies/Do they still matter?
TQ: Can you talk a little bit about the origin story behind your podcast? When did you decide you wanted to watch films from your childhood and discuss them together, how did that come about?
Eleanor Huntington: I think I generated the idea initially, and one thing we did — part of it was we do live in different cities but we’re very close and we both care a lot about movies and we both care a lot about childhood and education and cultural literacy and competency, so this idea that we could talk about it in a space that supports the work that we do but is not part of our jobs. I think that was a big appeal to both of us, that we care about these issues but we also want it to be fun.
AH: Exactly. I also think that we should mention — Eleanor and I are very lucky to be able to travel all over the world together. A couple of years ago we found ourselves in Ecuador and I was sitting on on the Galapagos Islands, and I really didn’t want to talk to my students on Monday when I got back to work. And Eleanor had the great idea of making them movies, so I would go around to these different things in the Galapagos and be like — classroom this is a turtle. It’s lived for this many years. And then from there we kind of spiraled and we’d be like, “One day we’ll have a media company!” and this is our first kind of attempt to do something together and create something together in that vein.
TQ: That’s awesome. And why a podcast as the medium instead of let’s say a blog or a YouTube channel? What about the world of podcasting intrigued you both?
AH: So it’s funny that you ask that because my students — I teach 5th grade — they’re like 10 and 11 years old, and they know about the podcasts, they’ve listened to a couple episodes, and it’s always so fun for them to do that. I think their biggest criticism of our podcast is that we don’t do YouTube videos attached to them. I think it’s just a kind of generational shift for them. They go home and they watch YouTube and I would never think of doing that. I would much rather listen to a podcast as I walk to work. So for me, the podcast medium just makes more sense.
EH: And I would agree. I enjoy podcasts, so it made sense. Both of us really like writing, but we spend a lot of time writing anyway. And to collaborate on a blog was never going to be our speed. We enjoy talking to each other and we enjoy talking to our friends, so podcasting worked. I know for me the part of podcasting I enjoy the most is the “call your girlfriend” [aspect] and the idea that weirdly it can be very interesting and engaging to listen to other people’s conversations, which was kind of new to me. So that was a new idea.
I’m 28 but I feel like generationally that makes me super old. I would not enjoy the pressures that come with YouTube, even in terms of — I don’t often care what I look like, but I would hate the added pressure of stating every time at the beginning of a YouTube video like, “Oh I put no thought into what I was wearing today” because I wouldn’t.
TQ: So the other big question I have is, what does the process look like in terms of picking out the movie you’re going to talk about? Do you do any research beforehand? Is it more of a winging it situation? How does that work for you?
EH: So it definitely depends on the guest we have in question.We’ve spanned the guests from friends who’ve expressed interest, friends who we’ve gone out to because we think they’d have an interesting viewpoint. For example, when Queen of Katwe came out, we went to people specifically who had experience in East Africa and who could speak to that. When we talked about Hidden Figures, we wanted to talk to women who work in STEM. And we did research on that.
Some of the most interesting ones we had: We talked about The Unsinkable Molly Brown and this was early in our podcasting. And this one was cool because last summer, the two of us were both in Denver at the same time just randomly, because we both had two different weddings the same weekend in Colorado. And we visited the Molly Brown House, and our tour guide was this fascinating, gregarious woman. And we said, “We need her on the podcast.” So then we got kind of a little creepy in that I went to Los Angeles, I e-mailed the historic society of Denver and was like, “We had a great tour guide, her name was Pam, would you be able to reach out to her for us to see if she’d be okay with talking about The Unsinkable Molly Brown on our podcast?” And she was a lovely woman. So that one, because it was a movie we had seen but hadn’t seen in a while and that required a bit more research and we were engaging with a professional, that was a different take.
AH: Also, there are different times where I’ve definitely not seen the movie in question and I’ll always come right out and say that but some of our friends — we have a lot of different diverse friends, but they choose the movies that I’ve never seen before, so I do research on them beforehand. But we’ve heard of some absolutely crazy children’s movies.
TQ: There are some days where I look back on movies I watched as a kid or in general when I was younger like “What was that? What I was doing then?”
AH: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is terrifying. Truly terrifying.
TQ: I was also scared of all movies as a kid, so I feel like I was even scared of movies that — not all, but a lot of them. For example, The Land Before Time, I thought was terrifying.
EH: Because it is!
TQ: Whereas my friends loved them. This is a scary series, with a bunch of these talking creatures that are wannabe dinosaurs marching around and people were like, no this is great, we were about seven or eight, this is awesome! No, it is not. This is not what I would like to watch.
EH: What’s also hard when you know they all die, and if you ever saw the movie The Good Dinosaur, I hope you didn’t because it’s not great, but it’s a movie intended for children, and it’s also really dark and it goes where Land Before Time doesn’t go in that it very explicitly shows dinosaurs dying and the end of their world. And like why is this intended and marketed towards three- to five-year-olds?
AH: Lily — so I have a question for you if you don’t mind. What was your favorite movie growing up? If some movies scared you — what was a movie that you remember watching really fondly?
TQ: There were two that were like my favorites. When I was six or seven, when it came out, Spy Kids. I thought was the coolest movie. I saw it five times in theaters. Spy Kids was the best. I was obsessed with it.
And when I was nine— spoiler I have only one sibling, and he’s six years younger than me. I’m from a very small family in general, both my immediate family and my extended family’s pretty small. I loved the movie Cheaper by the Dozen, because the idea, the concept to me of a large family is just so foreign that I thought it was the coolest movie. You also think of the movies that affect you in terms of what’s going on in real life, so we had just made a huge move from New Jersey to Florida, I was near my school, I felt really weird and outcast-y, so for whatever reason, that movie stuck.
EH: Absolutely. Okay, but so, I’m assuming you’re talking about the 2003 Steve Martin version. So then I would encourage you to check out the 1950 original Cheaper by the Dozen, which is also hysterical. It’s a riot. And with Spy Kids, I think I was like a senior in high school when Spy Kids 3D: Game Over came out and I remember no one would go see this movie with me except my dad. At this point he’s, I don’t know, 60, and the last thing he wanted to do was take his bitching 17-year-old daughter to see Spy Kids, but he did.
TQ: My poor parents. I feel like if I ever have kids, I’d have to apologize to my parents in terms of the movies. I can’t imagine dragging me, a nine-year-old, to see Cheaper by the Dozen six times. The sacrifices parents made. Similarly, I also made my parents listen to Hilary Duff albums on end, the Metamorphosis album. My poor mother. Anyway, those were my movies. Spy Kids was also, strangely, not afraid to [be strange]— it’s a very weird movie. Like, Floop is weird and the whole thing is really bizarre but I loved it.
EH: Next time you come out to LA what we should do is go to Trejo Tacos and Trejo Donuts because Danny Trejo who played their uncle just has reinvented himself as a 72-year-old foodie so he’s buying up all these places across LA, painting them millennial pink, and selling food.
TQ: See, that’s so smart though. Gotta love capitalism. So those are my favorites, but is there any podcast episodes for either of you that sticks out in terms of “this is a podcast where we had the movie and the perfect conversation”? Not perfect necessarily in the sense of everything went so smoothly, but that was so memorable?
AH: Well, there have been so many good ones. Truthfully, this has been such a great adventure to do as sisters, I feel like it does keep us really close in a way, but also has kind of reconnected some friendships where we hadn’t talked in a while where we were like hey, be on our podcast. But one of my favorites had to be talking about Wonder Woman.
I’m obsessed with Wonder Woman and we talked about it with our oldest friend, she’s our childhood friend growing up, and she’s like our third sister, so it was great to talk about the female empowerment of that movie and just really get into it. I just loved that conversation, to just be so energized and ready to be my own Wonder Woman.
EH: I would say for me one of the ones I appreciated the most was — we did one with a college professor of mine who was one of my favorites, she was so instrumental, I took several classes with her but one that really worked for this particular podcast was that she teaches Disney film and culture at Notre Dame, and we spoke to her about Snow White, because Snow White was the first princess film, and she studies princess culture and she writes about princess culture, and she’s someone who is so in love with Disney but then very aware and critical as a viewer, but she blends those both beautifully.
And she’s such a warm and engaging person, so that was so fun. This is early in our podcasting where we, Annie and I, couldn’t really figure out Google Hangout, so we were trying to [only] do [the podcast] when we were together. When we were driving to wedding in Iowa, we were doing this podcast while we were driving and suddenly in front of me there’s a dead zone in western Illinois, so we lost our reception [with my professor], and thought, “Oh no she thinks we hated her, we feel so bad because we’re missing this conversation.” So it was bad in the sense that we screwed up. But she still had a great time and was like, “I want to do it again.”
TQ: I mean, nothing’s ever going to all go according to plan, but at least you had a good excuse as to why it was not going according to plan. And other question I had that’s been interesting to ask people: What is the biggest one or two challenges you all have faced in terms of podcasting?
AH: I think one for the two of us is scheduling. It’s difficult because I’m in Chicago and Eleanor is in LA and usually we have to wait until the end of Eleanor’s work day which is around 6pm, and by that time it’s 8pm. I’m a teacher and I’m tired all the time, so when I’m getting ready to talk I’m like I could fall asleep right now. So that’s one thing that has been a challenge for us.
EH: I would agree 100%. And in part it bothers me because I went to — I like to do well at what we try to do, and so many of the things that you read about podcasting is that you need to do it regularly, you need to make sure you’re doing it the same day every week because that’s what encourages subscriptions and listens.
But for us, that’s not feasible. I felt the same way in terms of tech capabilities; we’re not super tech-y, and I remember at the beginning we were so optimistic. We were like, “We’re gonna learn audio editing and learn all these things, we have so much free time,” which is not consistent. And we had recorded several podcasts, and we kept realizing that we didn’t put them up because they weren’t perfect, and we kept not putting them up, and then finally we were like, we’re never gonna do this unless we do something with these raw files. We have a very unpolished show, but it’s kind of become who we are, and it’s really fun because we never know where it’s gonna go. So I think a challenge has been getting over that we’re kind of improving but we didn’t need to be perfect at the beginning.
TQ: Sometimes done is better than perfect, as they say. At the beginning of my career in my case, for example, it was only my mother reading my stuff, my parents or family reading my stuff, and some friends, but they all love you anyway and won’t judge you based on the quality of this new project.
AH: And then you also get feedback, which is something I really love, too. We have some friends [who] are pretty avid listeners and they’ll be like hey, “This sounds kind of weird, think about this segment, or can I make you music?” So that’s been fun to interact with the people we love in a different way too, when they listen to us.
TQ: I have two more questions. First, regardless of genre or vertical, what do you think makes a great podcast?
AH: Oh, that’s a great question.
EH: I would say to a certain extent, someone’s voice, because there are some people I think are fascinating and interesting and they’ve led cool lives or they have cool experiences, but they come across as really mean. I know for me, an example would be that I appreciate the Pod Save America guys, but they just seem so mean all the time. I deal with a lot every single day, I like learning about these issues, but it’s not that I want it presented in a positive way; I want you to be constructive, I want it to seem as if I’m learning. And when there’s too much joking around going on, it’s hard for me to concentrate, which is funny because it’s the opposite of what we do in our podcast. But there you go.
AH: My favorite podcast is Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and what I think makes that podcast great — it’s also sisters so it’s fun to hear that — but because they’re sisters, they love each other and they really do sound like they’re having fun in those conversations. There are times where they’ll laugh at each other and make these little jabs at each other so you feel like you’re getting to know both of them better, but you’re also into their friendship and sisterhood, which I think is really fun.
TQ: My last question for you two, going back on our last conversation about when you were starting out — what advice do you have for people who are just starting out with a podcast?
AH: Oh, gosh. Just do it. I feel like so much of what we struggled with in the beginning was holding back, and once we actually put it out there and were starting to see on Soundcloud, I was so excited.
EH: Yeah, and along with that I would say the importance of sharing it out. I’m not necessarily someone who would advocate for myself a lot, but the way the format of our show works, it’s the fact that we invite guests, we invite friends on, it allows us to bring up this project that we do spend a lot of time on, but in a way that encourages them to participate and not just have them listen for my own benefit, if that makes any sense.
Find ways to actively engage with people that you already care about to strengthen those friendships and those relationships. That’s been the biggest benefit for us. Reframe podcasting in your mind as relationship-building or relationship-enhancing; I would say that’d be great advice.
Transcription provided by Christina Tucker.
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