A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode seventeen — ICE STATION ZEBRA

What If Jimmy Page played a session with Stillwater? Our podcastin' inspiration Matt Gourley joins us for a Cinerama epic of an episode that we didn't plan to release on Father's Day week, but the cookie just happened to crumble serendipitously. Because our subject is a genuine, certified, no-foolin’ Dad Movie, Ice Station Zebra, based on The Guns of Navarone author Alistair MacLean's novel Ice Station Zebra.

The moderately thrilling Cold War thriller that Patty McG cheated on The Prisoner with is an all-star affair featuring Rock “The Dwayne” Hudson, Ernest “Resistance is Futile” Borgnine, Jim “One Night in Miami” Brown and the dirty half-dozen himself, Patrick McGoohan! And this episode is, like Roger Ebert’s 1969 review of Ice Station Zebra, a one-star affair... the star being Mr. Gourley, who nails it like Harrison Ford in Witness when he hails Ice Station Zebra as “a Saturday lawnmow.”

Ice Station Zebra

Directed by John Sturges

Screenplay by Douglas Heyes

Screen Story by Harry Julian Fink

From the novel by Alistair MacLean

Released October 23, 1968

If it ain't woke, don't fix it: The Magnificent Seven, reviewed.

Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington take over for Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner, respectively, in Antoine Fuqua's update of The Magnificent Seven.

Wait, Michael Biehn starred in a short-lived Magnificent Seven series on CBS in the late 90s? I've always been bad at keeping up with what's on TV, but this I should've known, given my long-term interest in the guy.

Anyway, here's my NPR review of the new Magnificent Seven from Antoine Fuqua and Denzel with Chris Pratt mugging his way around, too. Random note: It's funny that both The Magnificent Seven and Westworld, two long-dormant properties that starred Yul Brynner — most famous for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, "etcetera, etcetera" — as a black-clad cowboy, are both getting reimagined in 2016, isn't it? I think it is.