Podcast Tuesday: "Garry Marshall is for the Children"

Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement.

About a quarter of a century ago, author Meg Cabot had a revelation: girls like stories about princesses. Cabot herself liked stories about princesses as a child and still did as a grownup. And so she wrote The Princess Diaries (2000), a popular YA novel in which an American teenager named Mia finds out she is the rightful heir to the throne of a small European country called Genovia. Director Garry Marshall successfully adapted Cabot's book to the big screen in 2001 with Anne Hathaway (in her first major screen role) starring as the clumsy but endearing Mia. Cabot has since written many more books in the Princess Diaries franchise, while Marshall and Hathaway reunited for a sequel to the first movie called The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement in 2004.

I've yet to read any of Cabot's novels, but I have now seen both of Garry Marshall's Princess Diaries movies. To me, this is a classic "chosen one" narrative. At the beginning of the first film, Mia feels very un-special. Her prep school classmates either mock her or ignore her entirely. Even her one friend, Lily (Heather Matarazzo), treats her with some degree of scorn. But then, out of nowhere, her grandmother Clarisse (Julie Andrews) shows up with the very unexpected news that Mia is of royal blood. According to Clarisse, the unassuming American girl may be Genovia's last hope for survival. And so, Mia has to overcome her own self-doubts and rise up to claim her rightful place on the throne.

There's no denying that the Princess Diaries movies were made in the shadow of another, even more popular multimedia franchise about a chosen one. The first Diaries movie actually beat the first Harry Potter movie to theaters by three full months, but J.K. Rowling's books had been a worldwide sensation since 1997. To me, the influence of Harry Potter on The Princess Diaries (at least the movie version) is undeniable. It's a very short distance from "You're a wizard, Harry" to "You're a princess, Mia." Mia is Harry. Clarisse is Dumbledore. Clarisse's bodyguard Joe (Hector Elizondo) is Hagrid. Lily is Hermione. And throughout the film, Mia divides her time between a fancy private school and the Genovian embassy (where she studies to be a princess). Put these two together, and you've got Hogwarts. Mia even has a snotty, blonde-haired rival, Lana (Mandy Moore), the equivalent of Draco Malfoy.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. Is this sequel merely a cynical cash grab or does it manage to tell a compelling, entertaining story on its own? That's what we're hoping to find out. Please do join us.

A few kind words about Doctor Dinamite, the mad YouTuber

The funny, interesting, and awesome logo for Doctor Dinamite.

The Doctor's online avatar.

There are many, many, many countdown-style videos on YouTube, but there is only one Doctor Dinamite. As you probably already know, the popular site is positively strewn with documentary-style "infotainment" videos that bombard viewers with obscure (sometimes bogus) trivia, crazy (occasionally dubious-looking) clips, and bizarre (often Photoshopped) images, all of it linked together with quippy commentary and eye-assaulting graphics. If grotesque, unsavory trivia is your thing, especially when combined with snarky narration, YouTube has you covered. Thoroughly. Sometimes, it feels like half of YouTube is devoted to one, big, never-ending episode of Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

So how do you stand out from the crowd? In Doctor Dinamite's case, the answer is: be even crazier than the stuff you're counting down. I don't quite know how to explain the Doctor to you, mainly because I know next to nothing about him. He has a sketchy, near-useless blog and a sketchy, near-useless Twitter account, both of which seemingly exist only to publicize his YouTube videos. When it comes to Doctor Dinamite, the videos are all that really matter. I know nothing of the man behind them or why he does what he does. His official YouTube description only says: "Let's bring a bit of originality in the world of countdowns, where information is copied all over and over again."

So what will you find on the Doctor's channel? Just as his own description implies, it's the same stuff you'll find on most of the other countdown videos and at content-aggregating sites across the web: Photoshop fails, tacky tattoos, dubious parenting choices, photos taken at just the right moment, etc., etc. Typical Internet clickbait. It's the Doctor's personality that makes these videos stand out. I'm not sure what nationality this YouTuber is, perhaps Russian, but his accent is fairly heavy and his approach to the English language is, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic.

His caffeine intake must be substantial, too, because he's an incurable motormouth who seems to have rage issues. His videos often seem like a cross between a used car dealer's desperate sales pitch and a psychotic rant by a street corner weirdo. Watching a Doctor Dinamite video -- or, better yet, watching five or six of them in a row -- is like tuning into a weird Twilight Zone version of the Home Shopping Network at three o'clock in the morning.

I don't have any particular recommendations as to where one should "start" with Doctor Dinamite's videos. They're all pretty much the same. I'll semi-arbitrarily pick "20 photos that will make you mad" as it contains the classic Doctor Dinamite quote: "I hate Harry Potter! But now I hate him even more!" His anger at this moment seems genuine.