I’m Ken Plume, and soon you’ll be listening to “A Bit Of A Chat” with me, Ken Plume.
In this episode, I have a chat with actor Janet Varney, about soup, brick sick, placebo effects, sleep, jokes, bodily rejections, jar jar binks, Last Eels, sandwich moats, meat ravines, puppy power, hipster games, Domino Hustler, salons, ApprovOwls, SketchFest, Albert Brooks, and heroes.
Hope you enjoy…
Download “A Bit of a Chat with Ken Plume & Janet Varney“:
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If you’re lucky, life is full of pleasant surprises. The arrival of the incredible modern television classic 
It’s a bit pointless to try and offer up a review of 
Oh, how I love nifty multi-task devices, and the 
I continue to marvel at the notion that, after this set, there are 25 episodes left until the entire run is available on home video. Thanks to the miracle workers at Shout Factory, 
I had very little expectations one way or the other from it, but wound up enjoying Disney’s latest animated feature immensely, which made digging into 
The end of a cinematic series means fans can finally snap up a comprehensive collection containing all of the flicks and usually a load of extra bonus materials, and 
There’s much to love and much to hate about Quentin Tarantino’s 8th film, 
Written as a gift to his young son Tenzin on the boy’s 5th birthday, 
It’s not a film you’ll probably ever find yourself watching again, but 
No one would consider any of these titles classics, but the latest clutch of high-def catalogue debuts to make their way out into the world via Olive Films certainly contains flicks that many would consider guilty pleasures, including the A Christmas Story sequel 
The best I can say about the wholly unnecessary 
They make money, so there will continue to be quickie franchise sequels like 
He’s a genius and a swell guy, so of course I’m going to recommend Terry Gilliam’s “Pre-Posthumous Memoir” 
And speaking of Sideshow Collectibles, photographer Daniel Picard has taken several of the figures they’ve released over the years and used them to create some absolutely magical photographs by dropping them into exquisitely crafted tableaus that run the gamut from funny to poignant. Those photographs have been collected together into a hardcover coffee table book, 
Disney’s slow trickle home video release of their high-profile animated films has always been painful for those of us who want to own everything right now, compounded by the fact that I’ve gone through this dance with VHS, DVD, and now Blu-Ray. After what seems forever and a day, another long-awaited diamond has made it out of the rough with the high-def arrival of 
I had been hearing for months just how must-see wonderful the Brian Wilson biopic 
Its spin-off has faded into the sunset, so it’s the perfect time to circle back and re-experience where it all began with 
Yeah, so, you’ve got a bunch of old NES and SNES cartridges lying around from your childhood, and you’d love to be able to play them, right? Of course you would! And how about making the ability to play portable, as well? That’s exactly what you get with the 
Not only has Shout Factory brought the long out-of-print and ridiculously priced on the secondary market 
When most comic fans think of Donald Duck, they think of the comic book work of Carl Barks. The folks at IDW are looking to expand the appreciation of Donald’s comic adventures with the very first collection of 
And because Halloween is right around the corner, Fantagraphics has used that perfect timing to release volume 13 of their marvelous Carl Barks Library, 
If you’re looking for a pretty darn perfect way to introduce a young kid to the wonderful wonders of Carl Barks’s Disney duck tales, Fantagraphics has hit upon a handy little reformatting style for some of his classic stories, presenting them in a 5×11 style that’s perfect for carting about. Joining the already available 
While their cinematic universe is a drab, depressing antiheroic wasteland, the DC Comics television universe as been evolving into a lovely, interconnected, heroic bastion of enjoyable tales. While the third season of 
I desperately wanted to love Brad Bird’s 
The impending arrival of the new animated film on the big screen means we’re getting a deluge of books featuring and celebrating his creations, and one of the most beautiful is Chip Kidd’s 
A hearty thank you to the home video gurus at Warner Bros., who have used their mojo to shake loose and release a quartet of oft-requested catalogue titles from Paramount and get them in the hands of fans in glorious high-def. Those titles include the Harrison Ford building a barn vehicle 
Try and avoid the increasingly creaky Modern Family and instead focus your attention on the genuinely fresh and funny 
Yeah, I was certainly one of those fans who was deeply worried that the show wouldn’t be able to stick the landing at the end of its run, but the seven episodes of 
Biding time patiently for the next full season high-def release? Partake of 
Knowing that his artists, who had been toiling away on Mickey Mouse shorts and Silly Symphonies, were not quite ready to tackle something as artistically ambitious as their first feature, Snow White, Walt Disney arranged for what essentially was an in-house art school, organized by Chouinard instructor Don Graham. Featuring lecturers like Frank Lloyd Wright and Alexander Woollcott, the long-filed and rarely seen notes from those presentations have been collected together with context and copious illustrations in 
It’s the fall and a new season has begun, which means we also get the release of the previous season with the arrival of 
A zombie medical resident who works at the morgue, eats brains, and solves murders with the psychic information she gleans while eating those brains? From the guy who gave us Veronica Mars? Sure, I’ll watch that show. And you should watch the complete first season of 
The Peanuts gang ventures into international territory in 
From the work of Bill Theiss on the original series through the work of Robert Blackman and Michael Kaplan on the modern shows and films, 
Tell me 20 years ago, and I never would have believed you if you’d told me that Bobcat Goldthwait would turn out to be a filmmaker crafting some deeply fascinating films, the most recent of which, 
As finales of NuWho go, the two-parter 
As a film 
There are enough dour and depressing aspects barnacled on to the Batman universe that sometimes it takes a bit of real world joy to brighten up the impact of the Dark Knight, and that’s what we get from the documentary 
As much guff as Keanu Reeves has gotten for his acting and film choices over the years, his performance in Gus Van Sant’s 
I know my nephews, huge fans, probably would have begged to see 
While they’ve been available as separate collections of episodes, all of those separate discs have now been brought together in 
If you’re a fan of arthouse cinema – also known as, ya know, really good films that contain almost no CG, aliens, or superheroes – then the curated collection of 10 films put together by the award-winning team at Indiepix, running the gamut from comedy to drama to documentary, is right up your alley. The specially assembled lot includes 
Remember in the 1990s, when every year seemed to bring a new batch of Jackie Chan movies? Well, Warners aims tom remind you, with the high definition debut of a pair of those 90s Chan flicks – 
What do you do when your main character left the male stripping world at the end of your first surprisingly successful film but you really, really want to make a sequel? You use the old “Getting the band back together for one last hurrah” trope, and that’s exactly what we get in 
Just like the documentaries on World Wars I & II before it, there’s something undeniably fascinating in seeing history come to life merely by introducing color to what has always been black & white, and when it comes to photography, 
We haven’t gotten a proper Christmas episode out of the current iteration of the characters, so we’ll have to go to the last series for a festive 
A film like 
When you’ve exhausted sequels, go back and make a prequel, which is just what 
Remember those deluxe, ultra-desirable, completely definitive Twilight Zone DVD releases from a few years back? Well, turns out they weren’t nearly as definitive as we thought, because Rod Serling’s classic series arrives in high definition with a ridiculously heightened amount of bonus features. In addition to all 36 episodes plus all of the original bonus content of the old sets, 
There are some things that are instant triggers for geeks to rip out their wallets and plunk down the cash necessary to own. It’s safe to say that the newly released 
Another landmark cinema classic makes its way into high definition with the arrival of Milos Forman’s iconic 
After running under the radar for its first two years, it was during the 3rd season of 
It’s not quite the old Criterion Blu-Ray release, but Lionsgate has done a fine job assembling their own high definition special edition of Carol Reed’s classic 
It’s a hoary metaphor to compare the analysis of comedy to the dissection of a frog, but I’d like you to ignore that metaphor (which I won’t even bother to complete) and recommend you read Stewart Lee’s brilliant 
It’s certainly not the Blu-Ray restoration I would have hoped for, but seeing as how it still retains its red-headed step child status within the Disney catalogue, I suppose I should be happy that the 25th anniversary re-release of 
Did you know that a feature film version of 
It’s decidedly diminishing returns as you go along until the most recent flick pulls things out of the cess pit they’d gotten into, but at least the high definition presentation of all 6 films in 
If you’re looking for a sprawling, one-stop primer on the history of the United States, look no further than The History Channel’s 
I always thought it was a beautifully designed and executed show, so to be able to peruse those designs via the handsome 
Explore the majestic 
School is back in session, so hunker down with the release of a trio of classic film adaptations of literary masterpieces – John Steinbeck’s 
Long derided as one of the most z-grade laughable of the many Star Wars rip-offs that littered cinemas in the late 70’s, Roger Corman’s Italian-produced mess 
I still, to this day – despite friends who have fallen fully under its sway – remain unmoved by 
Everyone’s favorite sponge drops a greatest hits disc featuring… Well, the title pretty much sums it up – 
I love Patrick Warburton and I generally like sitcom-based David Spade, and I really have tried to like 
It’s not the recent lackluster live action fare, so fans of the Mystery Inc. gang will probably like the new feature-length animated movie 
It’s not the Kevin McCarthy original, but the remake of 
I think 
The original cast is gone, but the 3rd season of 
They’ve come out in about a half-dozen different iterations over the years, but the latest batch of Saturday Night Live best-of releases adds over 20 minutes of additional sketches and outtakes, with the latest to get the treatment being 
I’m as surprised as anyone that 
Speaking of stillborn, that’s the best way to describe the still pointless 
James Cameron wanted me to let you know that, in addition to being “the king of the world”, he is now also the king of Pandora. That, of course, is the name given to the moon associated with the planet Polyphemus in Mr. King of the Galaxy’s new movie, Avatar. An Avatar is, as I’m sure you know, the binary and digital equivalent of an “AKA”, which itself is just an acronymic way of saying “I can’t stand on my own two feet, so I’ll adopt a more exciting alter-ego”.
Golden Globes night. I had just cracked open a cold bottle of Paulaner Hefe-Weizen, while recalling my grandfather’s now-legendary words of wisdom: “Just remember, you can’t drink it all – they’ll always make more.” 
Ari Gold, the man who created the very funny ADVENTURES OF POWER, passed along an e-mail message to let me know that 
I’ve got some DVDs to give away. Want some?
Director: