A. Michael Baldwin

What is Phantasm about? Each of the movies in the series is very much a different film, as I've been setting up earlier.

So that's a difficult question to answer, but for a very basic overview, after the death of their friend Tommy, Jody and his brother Michael discover that their small town's mortician is a really otherworldly villain known as the Tall Man.

They attempt to stop his harvesting of bodies with the help of their best friend, Reggie.

Now, that makes sense.

And he had an interesting theory.

It's a movie about grief.

Jody and Michael have lost their parents, so the only way that teenage Michael can deal with this loss, and the idea that his brother is soon going to leave him behind and leave town, is by inventing the tall man whose unexplained nature is less frightening than the idea that death can really happen at any time.

By the end, however, the darkness grows even more dim as it turns out that Jody has been dead all along.

And it was funny because I read this in Dustin's book.

You know, Michael Baldwin and Don Cosgrove, they all went out there because it's the first time Michael Baldwin worked with Don.

And he was saying that the Japanese would laugh at the most... on a moments that weren't funny and he didn't understand why it was translating the way it was in Japan, but it was a huge hit there.

And so of course there's a proper Blu-ray of it.

Yeah.

I don't know if a Michael Baldwin could have done the same material.

I, I was gonna say, that just...

I mean, maybe my ideal Phantasm II is just kind of a different movie.

But they wanted a love story.

They didn't find Michael Baldwin to be more believable.

I can't believe they didn't think that these guys were iconic and that people wouldn't want to keep watching their story.

That's insane.

Why would you not keep these other two guys? The two

people that lived at the end?

They wanted, okay, I guess Michael Baldwin stopped acting, so they wanted someone who's more contemporary and was a working actor.

I haven't seen Michael Baldwin as a grown man.

That's the thing.

Yeah, it's- it's like normally a- I can deal with the recasting, but we said in the last episode that that kid's performance, A. Michael Baldwin, is really why that movie resonated so much with so many people because of his unique tenacity and just, like, who he was.

And on top of that, he looks very unique.

Yeah.