22. Trading Places

Phil and Jake add an ornament to the List of Every Damn Thing by ranking the holiday-adjacent comedy film Trading Places (starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd) in this special deep-dive episode.

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SHOW NOTES:

• There’s debate over the origins of the phrase “taking the piss”. Some say the metaphor refers to deflation of a “piss-proud” false erection (aka “morning wood”), while others contend that it harkens back to ye olde times of English riverboat urine trade. For the record, it looks like Phil was right when he said doctors agree that having to go pee doesn’t cause piss-proud morning woods.
• How do boners work? It’s a mystery. Phil and Jake will research it.
• Putting eggs in coffee is a thing, it turns out. In both Vietnam and Sweden, people crack an egg into their coffee. Phil was imagining something like iced coffee with hardboiled eggs in it like boba tea.
• Jamie Lee Curtis is an under-recognized national treasure. This scene from Perfect with her and John Travolta is bonkers.
• We refer to the bad luck that John Landis had while filming Twilight Zone: The Movie. A more honest assessment would be that negligence led to the death of three people (including two young children).
• There are contemporary R-rated comedies, but they’re much more rare than they used to be. 
• Aykroyd is at the top of this list of famous people who are on the autism spectrum. Some of these people died decades or even centuries ago, so we assume their diagnoses are speculative.
• While regular-talking about fast-talking, Phil obliquely references the Micro Machine Man.
• We talk a bit about C-3PO and (Phil’s childhood hero) R2-D2. We don’t discuss this, but in the original concept art, Artoo is less cute and Threepio is more sexy (more like America’s Sweetheart, Bride of Pin-Bot). 
• We talk about movies set in Philadelphia, including Brian De Palma’s masterpiece Blow Out. Phil claims that all of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies take place in Philly, but of course The Last Airbender doesn’t (we don’t recommend this movie, but the original cartoon series will be high on the List of Every Damn Thing once we get around to ranking it). Anyway, is Trading Places the best movie set in Philly?
• We mention a lot of stories that have plots and themes similar to Trading Places. These include Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro and Mark Twain’s book The Prince & the Pauper; as well as movies such as frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, Preston Sturgis’ Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, Brewster’s Millions starring Richard Pryor, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.
• We discuss the fact that Trading Places was originally conceived as a Gene Wilder / Richard Pryor vehicle. Jake notes that once Pryor backed out, Eddie Murphy tried to get Wilder off the project. The only evidence Jake could find about this is from the movie’s IMDB trivia page.
• Here’s the great Planet Money episode about Trading Places that Jake mentions. We fail to talk about it in our discussion, but a few years ago Business Insider put together an oral history of Trading Places that is a terrific read.
• Aykroyd does a version of blackface in Trading Places. We talk about this and other modern occurrences of blackface, including Gene Wilder in Silver Streak, Adrien Brody on SNL, Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder and Colin Hanks on social media.
• Here’s one of the TV ads with a guy in a gorilla suit beating up luggage that Phil mentioned.
• Jake incorrectly claims that Dan Aykroyd plays Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 2001 Pearl Harbor movie. The role was actually played by Jon Voigt. Jake must’ve been thinking about Bill Murray as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson. Aykroyd does play a fictional President in My Fellow Americans.

ALSO DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
gravy SEALs * John Landis * Frank Oz * The Blues Brothers * Dr. Detroit * 48 Hours * Al Franken * Giancarlo Esposito * ...