The Losers' Club

Clay, Clay, beep, beep, McCloud Chapman, and Geno, eater of world's DS.

collectively known as the Losers Club.

Here we are to talk about the 1990 made for ABC TV miniseries Stephen King's It.

What a pleasure it is to have you all back.

And that's really part of why... that part one works better for me.

I'll compare it to one of my favorite horror films of the past 15 years, Let the Right One In.

I mean, that movie is an amazing movie in part because it is a perfect film about know what it's like to be a kid who's bullied and how desperate you are to find a solution any solution even your best friend being a vampire you know yeah is going to be some form of redemption and uh you know you're right all it takes from your kid to bond is you live next door we both read the same you know i i like flying saucers i mean that's all it takes But the power of the bond of this group, the Losers Club, is they are all trying to battle a bully.

They're trying to survive the bully.

For the rest of my life, but I couldn't save my brother.

And so I have this weird hybrid appreciation for the book now where I still love Ben and I still relate to Ben, but the bill of it all started to creep in as I got older, which I think is one of the great things about The Losers Club as an ensemble.

I think that...

Depending on the day you pick this book up, you could relate to any one of them for any reason, which is part of the appeal.

That is turning all of those bad things into something, you know, we all have those fleeting dark thoughts that we have to push away.

That is turning them into something more concrete that you have to fight against.

But the way that the Losers Club overcomes that is they understand that eventually, that all of the positive things that they glean from each other and all of the associations they make with positive stuff in their world can also be turned into concrete things and can be weapons against this.

And I think that the most obvious version of that is Bill's bike is silver.

It Chapter Two, released in 2019, continues the story of the Losers Club 27 years after their first confrontation with Pennywise.

Now adults, the group returns to Derry after the creature resurfaces, forcing them to confront their fears, trauma, and memories they thought they had left behind.

While the film expands the mythology of Pennywise with a larger scale and darker emotional themes, its core remains centered on friendship, unresolved childhood trauma, and the idea that some fears can only be defeated by facing them directly.

And in, in terms of just time, it takes place 27 years later, obviously, because that's the cycle of It or the entity or the creature or whatever you wanna...

Pennywise, whatever it is.

But, um, what, what we'll end up with is the members of the Losers Club, they're adults now.

And just about everyone from that group has left Derry.

Well, everyone did leave except for Mike, so I guess when I say just about everyone, it, it really is everyone bounced and then Mike stuck around.

It passes down from parent to child like a genetic disease.

In 1962, the narrative introduces us to a group of young people who act as a proto-Losers Club.

They are fundamentally linked by bloodline to the characters we know from the later 1980s eras.

Right.

We've gone from a macroversal space turtle vomiting up the universe to the tragic psychological theft of a grieving circus clown's identity in 1908.

We've walked through the extreme Cold War paranoia of 1962, analyzing the horrific systemic violence of the Black Spot Algory.

And the desperate attempts of a proto-Losers Club carrying a radioactive space dagger across a frozen lake.

We tracked the blood oaths of the '80s all the way to a final brutal confrontation fueled by mockery in 2016.