The Day's Dumpster Fire
A small little podcast where your hosts, Kara and Ed, look at historical and not so historical cases where we don't celebrate humanity's success but its most fantastic failures. There are always lessons to be learned in failure and humanity has run amuck with fool proof plans that immediately go sideways and fall apart shortly after executing those plans. Join us as we scour the "human-verse" in search for the most poignant, and often hilarious, failures and try to pull out what can be learned from these failures.
The Day's Dumpster Fire
New Theme! Movie Busts: Waterworld Fire - Episode 55
In this episode, Ed is going back to his childhood from the 90's to talk about one of his favorite movies: Kevin Reynolds' and Kevin Costner's epic fill Waterworld.
Waterworld came out in 1995 and was touted as the most expensive movie ever made in human history. With an eye watering price tag of $175 million, the many creators of the movie as well as the executives who fronted the bill tried to make a cookie cutter no-fail format that can only result in huge success. Can you see where this train of thought can lead? Sounds a lot like "there is no way that this plan can fail!"
Well, here we are. A movie written by a Harvard graduate, directed by one of the most popular directors of the day, Kevin Reynolds who directed Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starred Kevin Costner as the lead and Dennis Hopper as the villain. The movie was filmed in the middle of the ocean with nothing but practical special effects and very little CGI. When it was all said and done the budget and filming times ballooned, but there was no way it could fail right? For the 90s this movie was going to be a huge hit.
And then it released and absolutely BOMBED and it bombed hard!
Take a listen and Ed will go over the cautionary tale yet again, that just because you think you have a fool proof plan, doesn't mean it's going to work out. Just because you follow a "formula of success" doesn't mean you'll have success. Throwing money at something doesn't guarantee that nature will obey your wishes.
For more details and notes about the episode, check out the website. You'll find the back catalog of over 50 episodes.
You might also want to check out Episode 46 - The Byford Dolphin Incident for when you get to the part about one of the stuntmen who nearly died from the bends in one scene. You'll thank Ed later for it.
Hey before you go! Email us your "Trashcan Fires" to
thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com (be sure to put "Trashcan Fire" in the subject line
We would love to see your stories where you tried to plan out every little detail, but when you executed that plan, it all went horribly wrong shortly after and turned into your own Dumpster Fire.
Be sure to put "Trashcan Fire" in the subject line followed by the title of the story and whether or not we can use your name.
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