The Vintage Movie Book Club
A podcast about movie novelisations. Hosted by Jimmy Brown and Jen King.
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Home Alone (1990)
12/22/2025
Home Alone (1990)
We're back, after a month's hiatus, blame Jimmy. This month, as it is December, Jimmy and Jen discuss the novelisation of the latter's favourite Christmas movie, Home Alone. They discuss the differences, obviously as that's the point of the podcast but they also finally answer the age old question... with all the kids in the movie, just who are the parents to who? Contains strong language.
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Halloween (1978)
12/22/2025
Halloween (1978)
Episode three of The Vintage Movie Book Club sees Jimmy and Jen discuss the 1978 book adaptation of John Carpenter and Debra Hill's script for Halloween. Most of the script, anyway, Curtis Richards adds a loooooot of stuff. Contains strong language and adult themes.
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The Goonies (1985)
12/22/2025
The Goonies (1985)
Wellcome to the official first episode of The Vintage Movie Book Club with Jimmy and Jen. This month they cover The Goonies written by James Kahn based on the screenplay by Chris Columbus. They disuss the many diferences but also miss out some, There are soooo many.
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Final Destination (2000/2006)
12/22/2025
Final Destination (2000/2006)
Welcome to a new podcast hosted by Jimmy Brown and Jen King. Once a month they will read a movie novelisation from the 80s or 90s and note any differences. The criteria is, the book must have been released around the same time... except this pilot episode, where the book was released years after the movie. We'll stick to the rules next month, honest.
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My Very First Convention.
12/17/2024
My Very First Convention.
I hate people. Actually, let me pull that back a little, I only hate some people. Okay, lets retract that, I hate crowds. Of people. In around 2014, I suffered a bit of a mental breakdown. I had severe depression and anxiety that stopped me from leaving the house. And when I did leave the house to, say, do some shopping, I did so later at night when I knew the supermarket would be dead. I just couldn't do crowds, you see, mostly due to the area I lived in, the junkies and the drunkies causing havoc on my street left me with the dire need to stay under my covers and never leave the house. How this actually happened and how it led to me not wanting to be in busy supermarkets, I'm not entirely sure. I was told a possible explanation by a nice young therapist but even then I didn't really understand it. Nor do I remember. Anyway, in 2015, my mum took it upon herself to drag me out of the flat I was living in and I moved in with her. Circumstances have changed and now due to ill health, hers, not mine this time, I am oficially her carer and we're stuck with each other. I will never forget that initial saving, though, and that is exactly what she did. She saved me. What does this have to do with the title of the blog, I hear you ask? Well, I'll tell you. And get out of my room. As a fan of a lot of pop culture, especially from the 1980s, I have always wanted to go to a convention to meet people who made the things I like. As a low income person from a small town in Scottyland, I haven't always had the opporunity. I got to go to New York in 2003 to visit friends of my mum and I did see a film getting shot (Secret Window starring Johhny Depp) albeit briefly from across the road and visited the toy store from Big but that's about it. As the mental illness took control, I gave up hope of, well, anything, really but as I got better and more confident, hope arose again. In October 2022, for my blah-blah-blah'th birthday, my amazing sister and mother, paid for me to go to Scotland Comic-Con in Edinburgh to meet two people I admire greatly. One was James Marsters, he of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and Frank Welker, a voice actor I have worshipped since I was a child. Look up Welker's IMDB entry but it would take you two days to read it all, It's massive. Welker, now in his late 70s, started out with Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s, voicing Fred in Scooby Doo, a role he still does today but his resume extends way beyond that. Chances are, if there was a monster or even an ordinary animal in a movie in the 80s and 90s, Welker provided its voice or just its noise. Here are some examples- The monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Stripe in Gremlins, the troll in Cat's Eye, the gopher in Caddyshack 2, the giant bat in Graveyard Shift, Bunny the dog in Husdon Hawk, the Easter Bunny and Station in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the Reindeer in The Santa Claus and the Anaconda in...Anaconda. The man is a genius, he has speaking roles too, mostly in TV like Jabberjaw from the show of the same name, Megatron from Transformers and he is the current voice of Scooby Doo, having taken over the role in 2002's What's New, Scooby Doo. Anyway, can you tell I'm a fan? I got a photo taken each with him and James Marsters, it was a good day. Another highlight was walking past James Tolkan and Claudia Wells from my favourite movie, Back to the Future and seeing Tim Capello perform I Still Belive from The Lost Boys live. Sadly, he had a shirt on. It was an amazing day and while I was pretty anxious at first at the sheer amount of people there, I had proven to myself, once and for all, that I could do it. I could face my fear. My fear of people, evil, horrible, nasty buggers that they are. Myself and Frank Welker, look how happy he was to meet me.
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How I Got Into Horror
11/26/2024
How I Got Into Horror
When I was a child, I was a scardey cat, a meek little twerp afraid of his own shadow. On a day trip to Ayr in Scotland with family, my older cousins wanted to go into a haunted house at the funfair. I wanted to go in, to act the big man (I was 9) so I decided to tag along. I never made it in the damn place. I froze, I got so scared I yelled "shut up" to the ghost standing at the door making "woooooh" noises. To this day, I have no idea if that ghost was a real person or a sheet draped over a speaker. My money is on the latter but at the time, I didn't really give it much thought, I was too busy running. Now, I had one or two daliances with horror before this, my mum would tell me about horror movies she watched at her friends' house, she told me tales of The Terminator and A Nightmare on Elm Street in such detail, I couldn't sleep that night. Around this time, I have a memory of watching The Burning, a classic slasher movie with a very memorable massacre scene on a small boat. This is what I remember seeing and telling my fellow school kids about in class. However, I don't know just exactly how I saw it, one of the many casualties of my aging human memory. I think I was off school having just gotten teeth extracted, lying on the couch feeling extremely woozy after being knocked out by a gas happy dentist. I remember my aunt, who was keeping an eye on me that day was watching The Burning but thinking back, it doesn't really make sense. However, I have only ever seen that movie once since and I knew pretty much everything that was going to happen, so who knows. I do know I talked to freinds at school about it. Maybe I'll talk about The Burning on the podcast one day. Anyway, to the point, three paragraphs in. The Christmas after my haunted house fiasco, I got a black and white TV for my bedroom. I was 10 years old, living with a young single parent and she clearly got fed up watching cartoons every day after school. Friday the 2nd of January, 1987 would be a day that changed my life forever, albeit slowly, it sowed the seeds at least. It was that day, at 10.30pm, BBC 1 showed Poltergeist for the very first time and as it was still the Christmas break (and a Friday anyway), I stayed up to watch it, crappy 80s barely over the ears headphones plugged in at the front and too close to the screen in an oddly fitting way, given the movie. It blew my mind, even in tiny, tinny monochrome, I loved that movie and still do. That TV served me well. Over the next few years. I would stay up watching other movies such as The Omen 1-3, Halloween, Halloween 3, Carrie, Cat's Eye and The Dead Zone. All in glorious black and white and edited for violence and language. As I hit my teens, I became more of an action movie guy but would still occasionally watch horror, I would spend entire Summer days in my room watching videos, often films recorded off TV but some bought and while it would usually be the latest Arnold or Sly action blockbuster, the occasional horror movie would be watched too. I was no longer afraid. The explosion of teen horror movies in the mid-late 90s with Scream got me back into the genre fully again and I have loved it since. I will never forget that little black and white TV and the utter joy it gave me for a few years before I was allowed to get a colour one for my 13th birthday. And yes, I consider The Terminator to be a horror movie, it's a slasher with guns. What of it?
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