Does this deserve a free sandwich?!
Also, should I be getting residuals for using my own .gifs?
Why oh why am I bothering your inbox?
I have a friend named Pablo Torre, who has his own Substack and a wonderful podcast called Pablo Torre Finds Out.
Why is it a wonderful podcast? Because Pablo is intelligent, thoughtful and insightful but also foolish enough to keep inviting me on his show to discuss anything and everything from why so many professional athletes have images of acclaimed sociopath and notable Batman enemy, The Joker tattooed all over their bodies to conversations about magic and not so magic mushrooms.
Pablo also has .gifs for you…
Recently, Pablo sent me an article about Pharrell Williams' new project: a Lego movie about his life. Why did Pablo share this article with me?
Perhaps, so that I’d create a Substack account to tell three people about it? Possibly?
Or maybe because we look like a low budget version of The Neptunes...
The actual reason Pablo sent me the trailer for Pharrell's Lego biopic is because Pablo and I were just talking about Lego on his podcast!
Specifically, we were talking about how for a very long time, all Lego people were yellow…
And how that all changed thanks to Lando Calrissian…
I stumbled on this information, while developing a podcast called Everything is Racist with Wyatt Cenac.
The premise of the show is that each episode, I'd take something innocuous like the color yellow or chocolate and then go on a comedic exploration, discovering the interesting and unexpected ways that race plays a role in those things.
Take something like bicycles...
An episode might start by telling the story of Major Taylor, a Black cyclist who broke records and won international trophies in the late 1800s and early 1900s. From there we could examine how today bike riders of color are disproportionately ticketed by cops at astonishingly high rates. And then we might look to better understand and appreciate the cultural importance of Latinx lowrider bike clubs in California or the history of cycling culture in Japan.
I took the idea to some great folks at Pineapple Street Studios, who helped me develop the show a bit more and we decided to make a pilot. As we developed the pilot, we chose yellow as the first topic and had a bunch of stories that we wanted to tell, but the more we dug into the story of Lego it started to take center stage.
Lego became this interesting case study to look at the problems that arise when people try to create something that is "race neutral." While it’s a toy, it offers a window into the problems that arise when people “try not to see color.” We spoke to some amazing academics... some of whom actually study the intersection of race and Lego. We learned about international Lego conventions where people create huge custom Lego builds that will hopefully never appear on the reality competition show Lego Masters.
Making this pilot was really fun and I got to work with a lot of very talented and wonderful people. The hope was to shop the pilot around and sell it to the highest bidder for Joe Rogan money. Unfortunately, after they gave Joe Rogan all that Joe Rogan money, there's not that much money left for anybody else.
Like television, the podcast marketplace is a mess right now and the bubble may be bursting a bit. Hell, even the parent company of the folks who helped make this pilot went bankrupt.
All to say, we didn't sell the pilot. But I enjoyed making it, I'm proud of it and the hard work folks put into it, so I wanted to share it with you. It's not a sandwich, but it was really fun to make.
It's on YouTube because "all the kids listen to podcasts on YouTube"... but also it felt weird to upload one lone podcast episode to iTunes, Spotify and those other places... whereas my YouTube page is like a garage for my weird ideas.
Please to subscribe to that too, so the algorithm might finally respect me.
If you've got some time, please give a listen to Everything is Racist with Wyatt Cenac.
Hope you dig it.
NOTE: If the earlier talk of sandwiches has you upset that there are no sandwiches, please direct all complaints to: gofuckyourself@wyattcenac.com where your concerns will be read to a sandwich.
Thanks for everything you've given me! I really dig it all.