Podcast / Mom Can't Cook!

I'm a fish boy

Who skates for Team XBladz

With a leprechaun who plays basketball.

Come to my smart house,

Meet my alien sister;

Don't come hungry

Because I bet my mom can't cook.

The theme tune

Mom Can't Cook! A DCOM Podcast is a podcast started in 2022 by Luke Westaway and Andy Farrant of Outside Xbox. The premise is that, every fortnight, the two watch a Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM, for short)^note or, occasionally, other, similar-feeling movies produced by Disney, and proceed to riff on it for an hour or two. Much of the humour is derived from the pair spotting bizarre plot elements, bizarre soundtrack choices, and Special Effects Failures, and generally commenting on how bad (or, rarely, good) the movie of the week is. The title of the podcast comes from the fact that many DCOMs make a Running Gag of how bad the protagonist's mother's cooking is (hence this British podcast saying "Mom" rather than "Mum").
All episodes can be found here.

Films covered by the podcast so far, in order:

• Smart House
• You Lucky Dog
• Horse Sense
• The Thirteenth Year
• Johnny Tsunami
• Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century
• Halloweentown
• Under Wraps (1997)
• Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire
• Now You See It...
• Motocrossed
• 'Twas the Night
• Brink!
• Genius
• Up, Up and Away!
• The Other Me
• The Luck of the Irish
• Quints
• A Ring of Endless Light
• You Wish!
• Hounded
• Cow Belles
• First Kid^note Not technically a DCOM, but "DCOM-adjacent" enough for their purposes
• Stepsister from Planet Weird
• Jumping Ship
• Stuck in the Suburbs
• Alley Cats Strike
• Cadet Kelly
• Zenon: The Zequel
• Get a Clue
• Ready To Run
• Phantom of the Megaplex
• Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge
• Don't Look Under the Bed
• Tower of Terror^note First aired on ABC, but considered close enough as it was a TV movie made by Disney to promote one of their rides
• Right on Track
• The Ultimate Christmas Present
• A Very Nutty Christmas^note Not at all associated with Disney, being available on Prime instead. Recapped anyway as a Christmas special (as in, the episode literally went up on Christmas), and because it has massive DCOM energy
• Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior
• Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off
• Can of Worms
• Going to the Mat
• The Jennie Project
• Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board
• Miracle in Lane 2

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Mom Can't Cook contains examples of:

• invokedAccidental Innuendo:
  • An irregular running gag is how certain phrases sound much more risqué than they were probably meant to. Examples include Val's comment about it being "open season on your butts" in Brink, or the dog remembering the words "Come on Susan, come on honey bring it home!" in You Lucky Dog, or how sexual the fake slang term "cranking little Bigby" sounds in The Other Me.
  • Andy describes the heroes of Stepsister from Planet Weird as "blowing [the evil emperor] until he dies". He means they use hairdryers to disintegrate him, but both hosts immediately catch onto what Andy's just implied.
  • When Alex from Alley Cats Strike mentions that there's a "weird vibe" whenever his dad and the mayor meet, just after the mayor's called his dad "Mr. 'Oops I Dropped The Ball'", Luke assumes Unresolved Sexual Tension is at play here.
  • From Tower of Terror, as said by a character to his ex, "I've got something huge; I'm coming to you first".^contextHe's talking about a news scoop.
  • In The Ultimate Christmas Present, Allie's dad runs a website called "Bones for Bowser dot com". It's a site for buying dog bones online, but both hosts think it sounds like a site for Super Mario pornography.
• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Stuck in the Suburbs was directed by a guy called "Savage Steve Holland", which both hosts think sounds like a wrestler's name. When later trying to remember his name, one of the hosts suggests ""Stone Cold" Steve Austin", which creates a Running Gag of using various wrestlers' names in place of Holland's. Luke even briefly forgets the director wasn't a pro wrestler.
  • The hosts keep thinking Ready to Run's real title is "The Confidence of Horses", as the name of that plot point keeps coming up in the film far more than its actual title.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • They often tend to vilify random characters, usually to extremes. Good examples are in Cow Belles, in which all the dairy workers get twisted into scammers, and Ready to Run, where Mr. Machado is assumed to have deliberately got Corrie's father killed.
  • Santa, of all people, gets this treatment in the episode on The Ultimate Christmas Present, as the version presented in that movie created a machine that can summon blizzards, thunderstorms, and earthquakes. Luke and Andy imagine him using it to hold the world hostage.
• Aesop Amnesia: Discussed in the Jumping Ship episode, where Michael (and, to a lesser extent, Tommy) seemingly lose all of their Character Development from Horse Sense. Given that the plot bears almost no relation to its supposed prequel, Andy and Luke wonder why they even bothered to make it a sequel in the first place: they even watched the two out of order the first time they watched all the DCOMs, and barely missed anything. Andy says the plot makes much more sense as a sequel if everyone got kicked in the head by a rampaging horse seconds after the film ended, leaving them with no memories of the events of the erstwhile prequel beyond land trusts, a sentiment with which Luke agrees.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Everything wrong with Jace's new life in Utah, according to the description of the Going to the Mat episode:
  The school won't get a beeping backboard to allow him [a blind kid] to play basketball, his music teacher hates him, and his classmates don't seem to appreciate him walking around loudly talking about how great New York is, and how everyone in Utah is a toothless hillbilly who wouldn't know culture if it spit in their egg cream.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • One thing Luke and Andy learn from emails is that the panic over a dolphin breech birth in A Ring of Endless Light makes no sense because breech is how dolphins normally give birth.
  • In The Jennie Project, Jennie is initially stated to have been given 3 cm³ of diazepam. Luke notes that he looked up the maximum dose of diazepam that a human would ever be prescribed on the NHS website: it's 20 mg, whereas 3 cm³ would be 3000 mg.
    Luke: This ape is either going to die soon or live forever.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • The general plot of Jumping Ship seems to have been written for the Caribbean (Ruthless Modern Pirates, mention of a wrecked Spanish treasure galleon, Paradise Island^note in Real Life, an island in the Bahamas being a significant named location, etc.), but the film is actually set, and was filmed, in Australia. Luke assumes this was for tax reasons.
  • The Ultimate Christmas Present is set in (famously very built-up) metropolitan LA, but somehow the characters can take a shortcut through a redwood forest. Luke jokingly asks if they somehow took a shortcut through Yosemite National Park (despite that being hundreds of kilometres to the north).
• Artistic License – History:
  • In Cadet Kelly, the Korean War's Battle of Chosin Reservoir is described as a very successful "advance to the rear". Both hosts had independently looked up the number of casualties for the UN troops (the greatest estimate is over 17,000), and note that this is a rather optimistic view of that battle.
  • The main character of The Ultimate Christmas Present claims to be writing a story where William Shakespeare is transported to modern times, and writes a play called A Tale of Two Pickles. The hosts are quick to point out that A Tale of Two Cities was, in fact, written by Charles Dickens.
  • While they do note that the concept of Big Bad Yan Lo commanding an army of terracotta warriors in Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior makes for some very cool fight scenes, they also note that the warriors were only unearthed in 1974, meaning that when Wendy's great-grandmother fought Yan Lo 90 years ago, either he wouldn't have had an army of terracotta warriors to command, or all the fighting took place in the underground chamber where they were buried, with barely any room to swing their weapons.
  • Example by the hosts: they make a joke about the alien puppets from Can of Worms being snatched from a bin of Muppet rejects that Jim Henson forgot to have incinerated. Henson died in 1990; the film under discussion was made in 1999.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • They consider the resolution to Horse Sense to be an example, and portray it as being Michael saying "I know about estate law", and that resolving everything.
  • In the episode on The Other Me, both of them point out the absurdity of the antagonists saying that "clone-napping" (as opposed to kidnapping) is perfectly legal. This extends to the assumption that all the adults in this film are overlooking any crimes which are committed against clones.
  • Jay declaring he'll take all the blame for the dog-napping in Hounded is lampooned, with the hosts asking what would happen if one of the defendants in a case actually tried to do so:
    Judge: But he shot 2 people!
    Defendant: Yes, but I'm taking all the blame.
  • The driving test in Right on Track is portrayed as being entirely speed-based, with Erica pulling off all sorts of insane tricks to do it quickly. Luke and Andy note that in real life, the instructor would be scolding her, and possibly giving her a lifetime ban.
  • After considering the possibility that the above-mentioned "Bones for Bowser" is, in fact, a site for selling bones online, they decide it must be for disposing of murder victims. They then joke that this would lead to the police deciding the dog was the murderer, which would let you get off scot-free:
    Andy: A dog and their owner can't both be tried for the same crime. That's double jeopardy, isn't it?
  • Luke and Andy are completely baffled by The Jennie Project's insistence that Jennie, a chimpanzee, can be tried under US law, the same as a human. Aside from "the one reasonable line the judge will say" about what an animal is doing in a human court, no-one in the film ever treats the situation as unusual. Andy compares it to a Ace Attorney case (presumably thinking of either the parrot from the first game, or the orca from Dual Destinies).
• Artistic License – Politics: The hosts keep commenting on how First Kid treats the US President's son as his heir, despite the presidency not being an inherited position.
• Artistic License – Sports:
  • Luke notes that Right on Track rather misrepresents drag racing as being just going fast, and occasionally choosing to go extra fast instead. He tries to point out that there is more to it than that, as there's strategy around when and how to accelerate, as well as how your car is built in the first place, although he then acknowledges that he doesn't find it very interesting either.
  • In Miracle on Lane 2, the villain is noted to have spent $20,000 on wind-tunnel testing alone. The prize for winning the soapbox derby national championship is $3000, in scholarships. Both hosts crack up at the fact.
• Bait-and-Switch: When discussing the production values of Stuck in the Suburbs before looking at it properly in the next episode, Luke has this to say:
  And if you're wondering how they manage to show the life of an early-2000s pop star on a DCOM budget... they can't.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Andy finds the reactions of all the characters in Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off to be so over-the-top, he suggests that maybe until the last second his habit was "dog-f***ing", and they didn't go back and change how everyone else behaved regarding it in the script.
• Black Comedy: Quite common, as most of the protagonists are kids and the hosts like to imagine awful things happening to them as a result of adults' incompetence or the weird supernatural stuff that happens in a lot of these movies.
• Blatant Lies:
  • After the "Kid Internet" is mentioned in First Kid, Luke and Andy spin a whole story about how, in the 90s, there used to be a Kid Internet, an Adult Internet, and a Snake Internet (because lots of the websites shown in the film are snake-themed).
  • When discussing Michael faking Character Development in Jumping Ship by getting an employee to plant a small wheat field at his house, the hosts claim that when you wanted to fake being somewhere (such as a wheat farm) before Zoom backgrounds, you would do this sort of thing.
  • In Stuck in the Suburbs, Brittany mentions there being a "swanky hotel" near the freeway. Andy promptly quips that there's a Ritz in London that you need to drive along the (notoriously loud and congested) M25 to get to. Later, the characters supposedly send a file to literally every phone in the world, and the hosts declare that yes, you have to be careful not to hit the "universal send" button when doing a file transfer.
    Andy: It's weird that they include that feature.
  • After a discussion in which they claim that branches of the military have a hierarchy based on height above sea level ("if you flunk out of the Navy, they put you in the Mole People division"), Luke declares they've just been talking "expertly" about the military.
  • At the start of the Zenon: The Zequel episode, Andy off-handedly mentions people exploding in the vacuum of space, and then tries to segue into the film with the line "speaking of people exploding in space..." This prompts a discussion about how the first draft of The Zequel was just Zenon floating dead in space, and they were going for a Cosmic Horror thing before Eisner nixed it. Later, they bring up how common the topic of dissecting unique people/creatures is in DCOMs, and claim that the 1996 Chicago Bulls were all dissected to see why they were so good at basketball.
  • They describe Phantom of the Megaplex as the definitive and best-known adaptation of Gaston Leroux' Le Fantôm de l'Opéra, and then declare that Andrew Lloyd Webber wept when he saw it and declared it to be what he intended to make.
• A Boy and His X: Luke describes Hounded as the only "boy and his dog" movie where the dog is actually evil.
• invokedBroken Aesop:
  • The hosts note that Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior at one point makes a big thing of "immigrants should be able to embrace their heritage", and then transitions immediately to "this immigrant will only be accepted if he's wearing western clothes", which they feel sort of undermines that previous point.
  • A Running Gag in the Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board episode is how the film keeps pushing the message that Johnny Tsunami is clearly becoming a family man and is ready to be a father now... despite the fact he already has a son and grandson.
• Broken Record: Luke ends up constantly repeating the line "she's as strong as seven men, doctor" from The Jennie Project, as he's completely baffled as to how they expect the audience to believe this is the case, when Jennie is a relatively small chimpanzee.
• Buffy Speak: Luke at one point describes what is presumably an interior transom as a "hole in the wall which they deliberately put there". Andy asks if he means a door.
• invokedCalifornia Doubling: An inverted version is discussed in the episode on You Wish!: the film was shot in Auckland for some reason, and the hosts bring up that fact several times when discussing the film (for example, when the characters catch a tram, which Auckland is well-known for).
• Call-Back: While lots of Canon Welding goes on that naturally involves callbacks (see below), there are also other examples:
  • At the start of the episode on A Ring of Endless Light, Andy declares that he's Luke, and then scoffs at the audience for being "idiots" for actually believing him, referencing the previous episode's Running Gag of copying Jamie's habit of lying to the audience and then scoffing at them.
  • Andy states that Kelly's dad from Cadet Kelly has a "Cosmo Cola energy", then notes that Cosmo at least has the excuse of being an alien.
  • When a scene of Andrew Lawrence wrestling a dog appears in Going to the Mat, Luke suggests that the movie was originally centred around having sex with dogs, and this was the only scene they couldn't excise. They then desperately try to prevent this from turning into a Running Gag.
• Canon Welding: They often indulge in this between different films that, ostensibly, have nothing to do with each other. Most notably, they declare "reindeer flu" from 'Twas the Night and "the Spanish rice problem" from Hounded to be one and the same, and then when Spanish rice is brought up in Stuck in the Suburbs as being "too spicy" for Brittany's dad, they declare he's inadvertently saved her from this disease. References to Agent Simms from First Kid keep appearing in subsequent episodes as well.
• Characterisation Marches On: As much as the US Military is a character, anyway — in the Zenon: The Zequel episode, they note how differently it's portrayed compared to in Cadet Kelly, released only a year later (but which they had reviewed an episode before). In The Zequel, released in 2001, the Military is obstructive and even vaguely antagonistic, while in Cadet Kelly, released in 2002, it's unambiguously good. As they note, however, a lot happened in the intervening year.
• Clueless Aesop:
  • The Luck of the Irish attempts to cover themes of immigration and identity in modern America. Andy and Luke agree that it fails to do so, on account of it being a comedy film aimed at children, which draws heavily on Irish stereotypes.
  • Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior is noted to have similar issues with its attempts to talk about the same topics, compounded by the fact that Disney in the period the film was made was likely contributing to feelings of needing to suppress one's heritage, as shown by invokedthe film contradicting this point moments after making it. They also note the issue that several of the supposedly Chinese and Chinese-American characters are played by actors from other East Asian countries.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: How Andy portrays the bowlers' side of their first confrontation with the basketballers in Alley Cats Strike.
• Cold Open: The episode on The Jennie Project begins with Luke saying "Ughhhhh... apes" over the theme music, before declaring that he thinks they've got their cold open now.
• Comically Missing the Point: They interpret the father's question in Right on Track about if his wife would object to violin lessons as an example, given that what she's actually objecting to is junior drag racing.
• Contrived Coincidence: They note how everything in Tower of Terror happens in the hotel lobby, because the entrance to the theme park ride was the only part of it that could actually be used as a film set.
• Damned With Faint Praise:
  • Actors are frequently described as "doing the best with what they were given". Although Luke does at one point declare that that's probably the best you could ask for. Similarly, films they like will be commended for just having a sensible and understandable plot, and good pacing (such as with Ready to Run below).
  • They note that in Alley Cats Strike, Todd's line that people will see Ken because he's "real and [he's] there" falls under this trope.
    Andy: "What I can say about you, Ken, is that you're extant."
  • When noting how Cadet Kelly has a lot of scenes that amount to nothing, we get this gem:
    Luke: I'll say this for Cadet Kelly: it is just jam-packed with events.
    Andy: Yeah, scenes and occurrences...
  • Get a Clue was the third film Lindsay Lohan had to make as part of a contract with Disney. Luke imagines that after having seen it, families would have turned to each other and just gone "well, everyone filled their contractual obligation there."
  • They agree that Ready to Run was quite good simply for having a coherent plot with actual acts and good directing. As they note, this is coming right after the complete nonsense that was in Get a Clue the previous fortnight.
• Decoy Protagonist: They decide that Alex is this in Alley Cats Strike, as Todd is actually the sympathetic character who goes through an arc supported by the film.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Due to it being their favourite DCOM, the description for the Brink! episode begins like this:
    Hey everyone, it's Brink! It's Brink week! This week we're talking about Brink!
  • Andy, on Kal from Halloweentown II:
    He explains his stupid plan. It's stupid.
• invokedDefictionalisation: They end up making "bonesforbowser.com" from The Ultimate Christmas Present an actual website you can go to (or rather, a redirect to their merch store).
• Description Cut: How the hosts describe a typical Resident Evil diary in a joke about the primate institute from The Jennie Project:
  Andy: Day one: Injected ape with Super Serum. Expect no problems. Day two: Help, I'm being killed by an ape.
  Luke: Oh, no, there were problems with the ape!
• Disproportionate Retribution: While Andy and Luke agree that Michael's behaviour towards Tommy in Horse Sense was bad, they think some of the "pranks" he gets pulled on him in return go way too far, as they're all potentially harmful.
• Dissonant Serenity: Luke reads all the emails about people who were "scarred for life" about Don't Look Under the Bed in a light, breezy voice.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Under Wraps was the first DCOM, and both hosts comment on how unusual it is to see a DCOM with a proper budget.
• Expository Theme Tune: The theme tune (at the top of the page) sounds like an example, but actually mashes up the plots of 5 different DCOMs^note in order, The Thirteenth Year, Brink!, The Luck of the Irish, Smart House, and Stepsister from Planet Weird. It also doesn't explain the premise of the podcast itself.
• Foreshadowing: In the Phantom of the Megaplex episode, Andy notes there is a massive Plot Hole which almost every watcher will spot, then later takes time to emphasise that because Shawn got tied up by the Phantom, they couldn't possibly be the same person. No prizes for guessing where the plot hole is.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: Lampshaded at the beginning of the episode about Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off. This is later proven by them conflating the "catcher" (the person behind the batter who guards home base and catches strikes), the "backstop" (the fence behind home base to protect the crowd, or, rarely, the catcher), and the "shortstop" (a fielding position between second and third base, covering their blind spots).
  Andy: He pops a fly-ball, I expect. Um, expect some bad baseball terminology, folks.
• Gone Horribly Right: Both hosts agree that Don't Look Under the Bed is way too effectively creepy for a kids' film, in everything from cinematography to composition (courtesy, they note, of Daniel Licht, who would go on to compose for Silent Hill, Dishonored, and Dexter). Andy declares you wouldn't have to change the opening if you wanted to make it about a girl suffering a psychotic break.
• invokedHarsher in Hindsight:
  • After spending all of the Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century episode joking about how they have no idea what the connotations of the film's expression "blow an O-ring" are, they note in the next episode that they got many emails telling them that the Challenger disaster was caused by a part called an O-ring failing. Both of them are baffled as to why Disney would add this very dark piece of slang into a kids' film (Zenon was adapted from a book, but "blow an O-ring" was a Disney original, so to speak), and seem to consider it an example of this trope. This is brought up in the decription for the episode on Zenon: The Zequel as well:
    Why do they keep saying "blow an O-ring", even though we all know what it means now?
  • When discussing First Kid, they bring up how the titular kid is just talking to and agreeing to meet up with strangers online, and his bodyguard's only concern is if he's told anyone his real identity.
  • The fact that Cadet Kelly was made and set in 2002, a year before the disastrous Second Gulf War, draws quite a bit of attention from the hosts, who assume all the characters were shipped off to Iraq the next year and suffered horribly.
  • Luke suggests the reason the sequel to Johnny Tsunami is called Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board rather than Johnny Tsunami 2, and the reason they usually call the character of Johnny Tsunami "Johnny T" rather than using his full name, is because between the first film (1999) and the sequel (2007), the Indian Ocean Tsunami happened, dampening people's appetites for that particular nickname.
• Hero of Another Story: A Running Gag is that side characters often seem to have far more interesting (or, at least, worrying) home lives than the main characters.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: The Running Gag of DCOM fathers being awful often leads to depictions of this. They are often portrayed as beating their children, pushing them to ludicrous extremes, denying them any joy, and being very keen on gender conformity, among other such behaviour. Most of the time, this isn't too far from the actual character.
• invokedIdiot Plot: Andy fingers the climax of The Other Me as an example. Both the protagonists and antagonists are running around for several minutes trying to evade and capture each other, despite both parties having the same goal: to give Twoie the medicine.
• invokedInferred Holocaust: A couple of times:
  • Both 'Twas the Night and Hounded contain background mentions of some sort of disease ("reindeer flu" and "the Spanish rice problem"), which Andy and Luke spin out into a whole pandemic^note which they note as probably being influenced by the podcast being recorded during the COVID-19 Pandemic. In the latter episode, they decide that the two most be different names for the same thing, like in many Zombie Apocalypse stories.
  • When the characters somehow send a file to the entire world in Stuck in the Suburbs, the hosts note that everyone must have been charged for that simultaneously, leading to an economic collapse.
• Inherently Funny Words:
  • From Jumping Ship, "sextant".
  • From Going to the Mat, "scrimmage".
• Informed Attribute:
  • The dad from Right on Track claims that junior drag racing is "safer than the playground". Both hosts note that playgrounds don't require 5-point harnesses, roll cages, or their users to wear fire suits.
  • Going to the Mat is clearly meant to be about Jace overcoming people's prejudice against the blind ... except, as the hosts note, the film seems too scared to actually portray anyone showing such prejudice, meaning it feels like there's no stakes or drama.
  • The dad in The Jennie Project declares he's Not That Kind of Doctor (PhD, not MD), then immediately feels comfortable assisting a dying chimp giving birth, a fact Luke and Andy are quick to point out. They suggest he's just winging it based on what he saw on TV.
• Insane Troll Logic: Andy and Luke decide the reason First Kid uses a CGI White House for one shot is because "America's enemies might see it." There doesn't seem to be a more logical explanation they can come up with.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Both hosts consistently refer to Jamie from Quints as "Marnie", after her actress Kimberly J. Brown's better-known (and previously-covered) role in Halloweentown. It helps that they dislike the character, thus making it also an example of Malicious Misnaming.
  • The dog attacks in Hounded are always referred to as "ownings".
  • Luke always calls the snow in The Ultimate Christmas Present by a name that reminds you it's obviously fake snow, usually along the lines of "soap-and-potato powder".
• Interface Spoiler: Discussed. The end of The Jennie Project is described as being very tense: Will they find Jennie's family group? Will they accept her? And then Andy notes:
  Then I checked the runtime and there were 4 minutes left of the film.
• Irony: Luke notes that he keeps calling Right on Track by the name "Ready to Run", despite the fact that he's talking about Ready to Run, he can never remember its name.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • They point out that Agent Morton from First Kid is entirely correct in that someone who likes to joke around during his job shouldn't be a Secret Service Agent, and yet he's portrayed as a stick-in-the-mud.
  • Ricky "Rules" from Phantom of the Megaplex is noted as receiving a similar treatment for wanting to stick to their Union's code.
• Jive Turkey:
  • Their attempts to mimic surfing slang for Johnny Tsunami come across this way. They describe the episode as "totally nectar" and claim it goes "richter at Backdoor, East Coast style".
  • Similarly (this time Lampshaded), for Alley Cats Strike:
    Description: Peel your ears and get hip to this, daddy-os, Mom Can't Cook! is making the scene with a flick that is as confusingly 1950s as this sentence.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: Happens at the start of the Can of Worms episode. After Andy introduces himself with a bit related to the film, Luke gives the instruction to cut the music, as he "wants to start this episode on a war footing" (due to Disney+ removing a bunch of content, including most DCOMs, from the EMEA region, which includes the UK). The theme music stops with a mix of this trope and a Record Scratch.
• invokedMary Sue: The term isn't explicitly used, but given how frequently comments about everyone bending around her come up, it's clear they consider Jamie from Quints to be an example.
• invokedMemetic Badass: Sophie from the Halloweentown films is portrayed as a ludicrously powerful witch who could do literally anything if she wanted, due to her being the only one of the kids in the first film to display any magical aptitude until the climax, and the only person to sense Kal's approach in the second. Luke and Andy are both very disappointed whenever she gets overlooked by the other characters, which happens often.
• Mood Whiplash: After both hosts rattle off a variety of 50s-ish Jive Turkey for Alley Cats Strike, Andy claims he's got polio, because that's another 50s thing.
• Non Sequitur: The hosts consider the final lines of The Jennie Project to be an example, as it suddenly pivots from an attempt at a comedy film about humans trying to raise a chimpanzee, into an attempt at a heartfelt ending about how Jennie taught the humans a lot, actually.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: In Phantom of the Megaplex, the protagonists' now-deceased father apparently once said that movies can teach you a lot if you pay attention. Luke and Andy note that this is blindingly obvious, and suggest this was something he said as he was starting to fade. Andy then suggests he might also have said "If you think about it, Brian, purple monkey dishwasher."
• Noodle Incident: Andy, seemingly entirely seriously, brings up Luke having formerly gone to a "rockabilly hairdresser" who cut hair with a switchblade, in connection with Alley Cats Strike's general 50s theming.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • They note that in several films, there are occasions when the connection between two scenes seems random or disjointed, and feel the need to state that they aren't glossing over anything for comedic effect. This is emphasised especially strongly for Under Wraps and The Other Me, which aren't as easily findable as the other films watched (and therefore the listeners are more reliant on their descriptions).
  • In the episode on The Jennie Project, they decide that the dad is so bad in one scene, they have to play a clip of it or else the audience won't believe them.
• Oddball in the Series:
  • They point out how unusual You Lucky Dog is as a DCOM for starring an adult, without even any supporting children.
  • In terms of the podcast itself, the final episode of 2023 recaps Prime movie A Very Nutty Christmas, rather than any sort of Disney-affiliated movie. This was done as a treat for the episode going up on Christmas Day.
• Oddly Small Organisation: When discussing A Very Nutty Christmas, Andy and Luke are baffled by the fact that a bakery seemingly consisting of just 3 staff is somehow receiving and expecting to fill orders for thousands of biscuits within a few days, while also manning and stocking a regular shop.
• invokedThe Other Darrin:
  • Luke quickly brings this up in the Jumping Ship episode:
    Luke: Michael's dad, who is now played by a different actor...
  • Similarly, when Sam shows up in Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, they describe him as "a complete stranger" because he's played by a different actor.
• Overly Long Gag: Luke's description of the plot of Cow Belles towards the end of the episode consists of him robotically repeating lines about how much money the dairy needs and how much people can supply. Given that he's trying to make the point that the film is boring to watch, it's quite effective.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Andy coins the word "engreyen" to describe what happens to people affected by "the Grey Spell" from Halloweentown II.
• Plot Hole:
  • Luke and Andy point out that in Ready to Run, despite supposedly being able to talk to horses, Corrie's father somehow died in a racing accident caused by the horse being injured. Although they do suggest that it might be explained by him not trusting what the horses had to say.
  • Really emphasised in the episode on Phantom of the Megaplex, where the timeline of the Phantom's actions is completely irreconcilable with that of his secret identity, some of his actions are basically a Gambit Roulette, and others are completely impossible for just one person to do. They end up devoting about 20 minutes at the end of the episode to just how little the plot makes sense.
  • The Ultimate Christmas Present has, as part of its plot, a basketball match and people showing up to someone's house early to help decorate for a Christmas party. Neither of these would be objectionable, except for the fact that, as Andy and Luke point out, both of these are happening on Christmas Day. Why would there be a basketball match happening, or someone hosting a Christmas party not have their house decorated for Christmas, on Christmas? For that matter, they find many of the deadlines in this movie way too late, such as a family not having their tree up by the 22nd, or students still going to school on the 23rd (which, for that matter, was a Saturday the year the movie is set).
• invokedPoor Man's Substitute: They describe Right on Track as being a poor man's Motocrossed.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • After Andy introduces Stepsister from Planet Weird normally, Luke just declares "we're f***ed". The background music also immediately cuts.
  • Luke declares he can barely muster the energy to think about the third Halloweentown film. Andy then points out to him that there's a 4th movie as well.
    Andy: Yeah, there's Halloweentown High and then Return to Halloweentown.
    Luke: F**k.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • Lampshaded in the episode on A Ring of Endless Light:
  Luke: Even if you grant that Vicky can telepathically talk to dolphins, which is a big one to give, that doesn't mean that you should listen to what the dolphin says about its own complicated birth... That was an odd sentence to say, but it was important.
  • A moment in Cow Belles prompts Luke to declare that "[Jackson is] huffily wrangling an enormous milk hose", which unsurprisingly causes Andy to invokedCorpse.
  Luke: Well, he is! ... I don't know what to tell you.
  • Andy also notes that that episode made him say "cow afterbirth" more times than he'd like.
  • When discussing Stepsister from Planet Weird, Luke states there must be "many sensual pleasures associated with being a gas bubble".
  • The East Appleton bowling team from Alley Cats Strike is stated to look like "an Eastern Bloc bowling team". This leads to a brief tangent about "test-tube bowlers", raised from birth to do nothing but bowl.
  • Discussed in the Get a Clue episode:
    Andy (quoting Jack): Didn't you ever hear of Lizzie Borden, the dainty murderess?
    Luke: And other normal things teens say.
  • From Miracle in Land 2:
    Luke: They probably couldn't find any NASCAR drivers sexy enough to play God. Which is not a sentence I ever expected to say! ... And yet here we are.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Luke thinks Jumping Ship doesn't look like it's set in Australia, but it was, in fact, filmed there. Luke and Andy claim you really need to film in New Zealand for it to look like Australia.
• Running Gag: Several across the podcast, plus many in each individual episode.
  • Guessing when the protagonist of the movie died and "dreamed a wonderful adventure", as they put it, involving the events of the movie.
  • DCOMs being made on invokedNo Budget and having a rushed production. The latter is often accompanied by a description of Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney at the time, telling the creators to hurry up (or, in the case of Hounded, Mickey telling Eisner to hurry up, as a way to explain how a shot of a possibly-dead dog got past the radar).
  • On a related note, the scriptwriters realising that the part of the movie they've written so far takes up all but 5 minutes of its allotted time, leading to a very rushed conclusion.
  • DCOM fathers are generally awful people.
  • invokedComing up with better plot ideas than what the writers could.
  • Any character looking out a top floor window is probably going to be compared to a "Victorian ghost".
  • Side characters having horrible (and/or more interesting) home lives which just get glossed over.
  • The Running Gag that named the podcast, that the protagonists' mothers can never cook^note or, occasionally, are smart houses. In the episode on The Luck of the Irish, Luke and Andy hypothesise that there was a healthy-eating fad in the late 90s and early 00s, leading to the scriptwriters putting exaggerated versions of the food they were getting served in their films.
  • The duo repeatedly jokes about the possibility of being hit by a cease-and-desist from Disney for covering the movies.
  • The props department just not being bothered to make anything that looks particularly convincing. Or, when they do, mixing it with props of the usual quality, referred to as props "of varying levels of attention to detail".
  • Describing the movie reviewed as "one of the movies that happened".
  • Trying to work out what the lower face of the neighbour from Home Improvement looks like.
  • Whenever a character is frozen, Andy and Luke describe the people freezing them as using "an evil [insert mechanism here] that freezes them", quoting Halloweentown.
  • In films that get overly patriotic, expect the phrase "America's enemies" to be brought up. They will likely be described as "becoming emboldened".
  • Voiceovers are always assumed to be the result of the crew realising that the film, as it stood without it, didn't make any sense.
  • In Horse Sense, Jumping Ship, and Ready to Run, a main character's father is dead and used to work with horses. In all 3 episodes, Luke and Andy joke they must have been "kicked to death by a thousand horses".
  • Bad CGI being referred to by the hypothetical name of its file, indicating that it's not ready to be shown yet. For instance, "fly_notfinal.png" from Halloweentown II.
  • If a main character does something shady that isn't condemned by the film, they'll describe them as the "lovable protagonist".
  • The idea that the writers were Writing by the Seats of Their Pants so much, that the films were written in real-time, with hastily-typewritten pages being passed to the actors after the previous scenes. This is invoked as an explanation for the barely-strung-together plots typical of these movies. In the episode for Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, they're shocked to discover that this is somewhat true: namely, there was generally so little time for filming that if someone couldn't make it to a shoot, the plot would just be rewritten around their absence, and inclement weather would just have to be dealt with.
  • Characters who suffer extremely nasty fates in the hosts' imaginations are described as being in "crunched-up bone heaps"
  • Both the episodes on Right on Track and Miracle in Lane 2 feature declarations from Luke that the drivers in their respective sports (drag racing and soapbox derby) are "essentially ballast".
• Same Surname Means Related: With a bit of creative interpretation - the main character in Miracle in Lane 2 is called Justin Yoder, whose surname in an English accent is pronounced like "Yoda". Andy and Luke start joking that his brother is Yoda, who's the Black Sheep of the family.
• Sarcasm Mode: From the description of the Tower of Terror episode:
  The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is a Disney ride in which you get in an elevator that flings you up and down for about a minute. As you can probably tell from that description, it's rich with narrative potential...
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Quite common. One good example is in the episode on Stepsister from Planet Weird, when the mother serves soup for breakfast, and Andy and Luke start debating whether warm soup is a breakfast food. This quickly turns into an argument about if cereal and porridge are soup, and Luke ends up conceding when Andy insists that yes, even a bowl of petrol with spiders floating in it counts as a soup.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • At the start of the episode on Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire, they note that it was recorded in front of a live audience, and claim the reason it went overtime was that having other people in the room laughing at their jokes made them "think they were actually funny."
  • Luke states that his fondness for A Ring of Endless Light shows how basic he is. This joke comes back for Ready to Run, which he states is operating in "the same zone".
  • When discussing the Opening Crawl of Zenon: The Zequel, Luke has this to say:
    Luke: It doesn't do a very good job of summarising the first film, but then again, neither did we.
  • After starting the Ready to Run episode by pretending to be a horse licking the mic, Luke states he can't imagine a worse way to begin a podcast.
  • They open the Tower of Terror live show by asking how many people in the audience had a hard time explaining what they were doing that evening, followed by how many people outright lied about it.
• Serious Business:
  • Several movies seem to exaggerate how popular certain pursuits, such as magic, rollerblading, and coin collecting, are, which is deemed to be because they were written by a bunch of middle-aged men.
  • When Disney+ removed access to most DCOMs from the UK version, Luke claims absolute outrage, comparing it to the USS "Constitution" sinking HMS "Guerriere". Unsurprisingly, one of the sponsors of the first episode after this happened was a VPN.
• Shout-Out: Andy brings up Defunctland in the Cadet Kelly episode.
• Small Reference Pools: When Andy is struggling to understand strikes and spares in bowling, Luke first compares them to natural 20s, then to dice explosions, both from games they have played on Oxventure^note the episode went up in the week before the first Deadlands episode, by which point they had clearly already recorded some or all of the episodes.
• invokedSoundtrack Dissonance:
  • The Thirteenth Year is noted for making some rather unusual choices in certain scenes, such as an overly emotional piece playing during a standard apology scene, or the rock piece, mostly unrelated to the film, playing during the credits.
  • In The Luck of the Irish, when Kyle's grandfather starts playing a dirge, Kyle starts uncontrollably jigging. Andy and Luke are both confused as to why that would happen in that context.
  • Jumping Ship is noted to have a lot of reggae music for a film set in Australia.
• invokedSpecial Effects Failure: Special Effects are often mocked as being very obvious, although they are occasionally more congratulatory to the creators.
  • In Halloweentown, they make quite a few mentions of the "monsters of varying levels of attention to detail", which range from people in decent costumes to "person in a Shrek mask" and "man in a hat".
  • After Get a Clue has a newspaper article as a plot point, Luke starts looking closely at newspapers shown in other DCOMs to see what the articles say. The one from Get A Clue turns out to feature the same text repeated 3 times, while one from Ready to Run, with a headline about a horse coming to an inspiring finish in a race, has text about the disappearance of a couple in Hawai'i from an area notorious for its drug dealers!
  • The snow in The Ultimate Christmas Present is stated to be gross, obviously fake snow. Given that it has to appear in every shot because of the plot (White Christmas in LA), it's stated to make the film rather unwatchable.
  • Any special effect below a certain quality threshold will reliably be referred to as "[object]_notfinal.png".
• Spit Take: From The Jennie Project:
  Andy: We cut to dinner; the ape is eating at the table with them, presumably at the dad's insistence.
  [Luke makes some concerning snorting/laughing noises]
  Luke: Sorry, I shouldn't have taken a mouthful of tea at that point!
• Strange Minds Think Alike: At the start of Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, Johnny's father says that he never thought the family would be returning to Hawai'i to see his father (Johnny Tsunami) "get... you know." The hosts discover that both of them had substituted "executed" for "you know" in their notes. (The actual substitution is "hitched, tied down, hooked up.")
• Stupid Evil: On at least a few occasions, the hosts lampoon villains for overly complicated plots, or fixing them by accident so the heroes don't have to.
• Suddenly Shouting:
  • Throughout the Quints episode, Luke and Andy get gradually more irritated by Jamie/Marnie's self-centered whingeing, but they manage to stay relatively composed. However, after Jamie/Marnie tries to steal her parents' attention away from their newborn child, who is in the midst of a fairly serious medical emergency, in order to focus the conversation on herself again, Luke's composure finally breaks:
    Luke: NOT F**KING NOW, MARNIE! Their infant son is in hospital!
  • Another instance from A Ring of Endless Light: because Andy and Luke are confused as to why the young protagonists call their guardian Grandfather, which the hosts consider to be a rather archaic form of address, they theorise that said Grandfather strictly corrected the children in their youth, leading to this imagined exchange:
    Luke: 'Oh, we're going to stay with our Granddad.'
    Andy: 'Grandfather.'
    Andy: 'Oh, Grandpa, can we-'.
    Luke/Andy: 'Grandfather.'
    Luke: 'Grandpa, can we have a yogurt from the fridge-'.
    Andy: ' GRANDFATHER! '
  • Luke breaks into a full-on rant when a character from the "US Intergalactic Patrol" shows up in Zenon: The Zequel, despite humans in this film canonically having neither gone further than the Moon and Zenon's space station, nor met any alien life.
    Luke: JUST HAVE HIM BE FROM THE ARMY! WHO ARE IN THE FILM!
  • When Andy reaches his breaking point with Halloweentown II:
    Andy: IF YOU HAVE A TIME TRAVEL SPELL, WHY IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING?
  • When Luke gets annoyed at just how long Miracle in Lane 2 takes to get to the topic of soapbox derby, the literal plot of the film (the film takes almost 40 minutes to get to it):
    He asks his brother, "What do you think is in that shed?" I THINK IT'S GOT A SOAPBOX DERBY RACER IN IT, JUSTIN! GO IN THE SHED AND LOOK AT IT AND START THE F***ING FILM!
• Take That!: Aside from the constant insulting of the films...
  • In the You Wish! episode, they say that Alex tanking his reputation in the new universe reaches "Elon Musk buying Twitter levels" of reputation self-sabotage.
  • In the Hounded episode, both hosts agree that the reason the term BMX is almost never expanded is because calling it "Bicycle Motocross" would make it sound lame. Andy compares it to calling running races "foot F1".
  • Luke compares the set-up of Get a Clue to that of Lost:
    Luke: And it might never occur to you that [the producers] don't know what they are doing.
  • There is so much dunking on drag racing in the Right on Track episode, as it's a sport which just involves going fast in a straight line for nine seconds or so.
  • When discussing a kid wreaking havoc in a hot dog stand just by throwing a baseball in Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off, the hosts compare it to the Cold Open of an X-Men film with a bunch of kids misusing their Mutant powers, leading into this joke:
    Luke: My X-Men power is destroying small businesses!
    Andy: And my name shall be "Amazon"!
  • Luke declares in the Miracle in Lane 2 episode that he can't see any reason why someone would care about spoilers for The Karate Kid (2010).
• The Tetris Effect: They note that the basement from Phantom of the Megaplex gives them old-style FMV Point-and-Click Game vibes.
  Luke: So many things to click here.
  Andy: You'll need to come back multiple times and combine various items...
• invokedThey Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As mentioned above, one of the podcast's Running Gags is the hosts thinking of plots that would have been better than what the writers managed. Of particular note is Going to the Mat, where they note that the story has all the elements present for it to be a heartwarming tale about a blind teacher and student working together to form a jazz band in a rural town, but instead ends up being about wrestling. They decide this must be a case of a story taking on a mind of its own and going in a different direction than the writers were intending, except that in this case, the writers forced it back into a wrestling story by making the band teacher an awful person.
• Three-Month-Old Newborn: Luke believes this trope is exaggerated with baby Jennie in The Jennie Project, who he describes as looking like an adult chimp.
• invokedThrow It In!: The hosts propose that, due to the chimp actors in The Jennie Project just being from the Balboa Zoo, most of the scenes went in a totally different direction than planned, and they had to rewrite the plot of the movie on the fly.
• Tongue Twister: They quickly realise they've created one with their hashtag #BringbackBrink^note a campaign for Disney to restore DCOMs to Disney+ in the EMEA region, and end up turning it into "#Brinkbrankbronk".
• To the Tune of...:
  • Luke sings the opening lines of Hallelujah to an upbeat, poppy tune at one point, to illustrate that it doesn't really matter how depressing the lyrics Stuck in the Suburbs' Jordan Cahill writes are when he doesn't have control over the tune they're set to.
  • When discussing the idea of a baby Phantom of the Megaplex, he sings the titular song from The Phantom of the Opera, substituting baby cries for the words.
• The Triple: The episode descriptions often take the form of this, with two normal-sounding questions or facts about the film, followed by one that sounds completely insane out of context (often an observation they made about the film that its creators didn't intend). For instance, from Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior:
  Will Wendy embrace her culture and history to defeat Yan Lo? Can she balance her homecoming campaign with her kung fu training? And why are everyone's clothes so dusty?
• The Un Favourite: Sarah from The Jennie Project is portrayed this way by the hosts, as she is pretty much overlooked after the first few scenes of the film. They end up joking about people overlooking Sarah and treating Jennie as the only daughter/sister in the household, and even trying to pull a switcheroo with the two.
• invokedUnfortunate Implications: Discussed in the Miracle in Lane 2 episode, where the only Black person in an otherwise white neighbourhood is the one person who isn't "nice".
• invokedUnintentionally Sympathetic: Crops up sometimes due to DCOMs' often strange writing choices. The hosts will point it out and defend the characters in the episode when it happens. For example, in the episode on Cadet Kelly, Luke and Andy discuss how the titular Kelly's surprising emotional maturity in the wake of her mother's new marriage, sincere kindness, and optimistic spirit makes it hard to watch the school attempt to tamp down on her individuality despite the film portraying it as a good thing. They do note that this pro-military stance certainly comes from the film releasing in 2002, only a year after 9/11.
• The Un-Twist: Luke considers the fact that Phillippe from Cow Belles is not evil to be such, although he notes he was probably conditioned by Motocrossed to assume all French exchange students in DCOMs are automatically evil.
• invokedValues Dissonance: Discussed:
  • The movies often bring up the idea that divorce is the worst thing that could ever happen to a couple, which Andy and Luke Lampshade whenever it's brought up.
  • Luke snarks at one point about how DCOMs require everyone to be heteronormatively paired by their conclusions.
  • They seem to be a bit irritated at how OK a character is with the idea of spanking the titular First Kid.
  • When an internet-booked holiday is shown in Jumping Ship, Luke notes how this is meant to be all sketchy, rather than the perfectly normal thing it would be now. Later, they note that the existence of shrunken heads in, supposedly, Australia, is an "obnoxious stereotype".
  • They note that Cadet Kelly seems to think the military is "A-OK", which draws a bit of snark. Direct reference is made to the film being from 2002, and all the patriotic fervour that was happening during that time period.
• Verbal Tic:
  • Luke will often begin his sentences with "now, look..." when he's about to particularly vigorously criticise a part of a movie.
  • Both of them are likely to say "stop everything" when about to embark on a tangent about a very small detail.
  • Andy will say "so it's good, actually" after coming up with a (usually facetious) justification for a plot hole.
• Waxing Lyrical: Andy begins the Get a Clue episode by quoting the film's title theme.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Luke and Andy agree that you can't just date someone called "Cosmo Cola", because while you don't know where they got that name from, you know it can't be from a good place.
• Wiki Walk: The hosts end up going down a rabbit hole of Goodreads reviews for the book Can of Worms was based on, trying to find a succinct summary of the differences between book and film. They end up discovering two other weird-sounding books by the same author, but not what they're looking for.