1999: The Podcast

The fact that American Pie was the twentieth-highest-grossing movie of 1999 wouldn't suggest that film was a mammoth hit, but it was.

American Pie made back its tiny 11 million dollar budget and then some in its opening weekend. And it went on to gross more than 100 million domestically and 235 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable movies of the year (an honor obviously belonging to the freakishly budget-to-gross ratio obliteration machine that was The Blair Witch Project).

But like 10 Things, it had almost no star power whatsoever. While much of the cast would go on to various levels of fame, the most famous cast member at the time was Alyson Hannigan, who had spent three seasons playing Willow Rosenberg on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, followed by Thomas Ian Nicholas, who had starred in a couple of popular family movies in the 1990s.

American Pie was also buoyed by some surprisingly warm critical praise. But do the movie's gross-out humor and depictions of sexual angst still hold up? Find out in this episode, where John and Joey invited Tessa and Nicole from the Doom Generation podcast to talk about what happened that one time in band camp.

Everything you need to know about Doom Generation you can find out here!

We continue our celebration of the 25th anniversary of 1999 with our sixth installment, March 16-31 1999!

In the second half of March, we got:

• The Oscars! Roberto Benigni jumping on chairs! Harvey Weinstein buying the Best Picture Oscar for Shakespeare in Love!
• The premiere of Futurama!
• Jack Kevorkian!
• Ricky Martin unleashes La Vida Loca upon an unsuspecting world!
• Fabio gets hit by a goose!
• The Melissa Virus
• 10 Thing I Hate About You! The Matrix!

and more!

John and Jenn also accidentally create a true crime podcast and wonder if they've pinpointed the moment Gwyneth Paltrow came up with GOOP.

"Dusk! With a creepy, tingling sensation, you hear the fluttering of leathery wing! BATS!"

Bats.

So, not every 1999 movie was a paradigm-shifting landmark. Some of them were unabashedly absurd b-movie creature features about bats. Like Bats.

1999’s 127th-highest grossing movie, Bats opened at #9 just in time for Halloween, on the weekend of October 29th.

But it nearly earned back its budget in its opening week, taking in 4.7 million dollars, and going on to earn more than 10 million dollars on a US-only release.

Bats is also the worst-reviewed film we’ve covered. But is the Lou Diamond Philips-led horror romp a hidden gem?

Maybe!

So we asked the world's #1 fan of the movie Bratz, Austin Wolf-Sothern, to go to bat for Bats, a movie Joey ended up loving and John ended up rooting for in spite of all its frustrating shortcomings.

You can check out Austin's Patreon site here: The Truth About Cats and Bratz

A critical and commercial failure upon its release, Drop Dead Gorgeous was the 125th-highest grossing movie of 1999.

Filmed in the then still novel mockumentary style, the movie about a beauty pageant in Mount Rose, Minnesota was written by a former beauty pageant contestant from Rosemount, Minnesota, Lona Williams (also known as 1985’s Minnesota Junior Miss) and directed by former member of The State and accomplished TV director Michael Patrick Jann.

And it boasts a jam-packed cast, including Kirsten Dunst, Allison Janney, Ellen Barkin, Denise Richards, and the film debut of Amy Adams.

But in the years since its release, it has become an enormously popular cult favorite, with appreciative audiences finding themselves baffled over its initial critical panning.

Drop Dead Gorgeous was requested by return guest Chelsey Weber-Smith, who appeared on our Blair Witch Project episode, this time joined by American Hysteria producer Miranda Zickler and This Ends at Prom co-host BJ Colangelo.

Starring Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard as themselves – or people who happen to have their exact names – and written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999's 10th-highest grossing film, The Blair Witch Project was produced on a budget of less than a half million dollars and grossed $248.6 million at the box office.

One of the founding films in the "found footage" genre, the film was perhaps most famous for the unprecedented marketing campaign that led up to its release.

The movie made innovative use of a relatively novel outlet called "the World Wide Web" and deliberately blurred the lines between fact and fiction, giving the film an air of reality that actually fooled some its audience into believing they were watching real documentary footage.

Heralded by critics for its ingenuity as well as its genuine scares, Blair Witch may well have been the buzziest of buzzy movies ever. But its legacy is slightly more complicated. While it was a huge hit with the public at the time, it is less liked by audiences now, who often complain that the movie doesn't hold up on its own, having relied too much on the multimedia "project" of which the film is merely the final ingredient.

This week, we talk to Blair Witch superfan and host of American Hysteria Chelsey Weber-Smith about what made it a great movie then and why we should still love it today.

Chelsey on Twitter: @AmerHysteria