{"podcast":{"title":"the Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast","slug":"the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast-330209","podcast_index_feed_id":330209,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/6702424/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast--6702424","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/f62a2a47d37e297e2e981c38b2d25b81.jpg","author":"TruStory FM","episode_count":171,"summary":"It’s the podcast where a filmmaker (Nathan Blackwell of Squishy Studios) and a comedian (Krissy Lenz of Neighborhood Comedy Theatre) take a hilarious look at the 80s movies we think we love or might have missed with modern eyes and probably a significant haze of nostalgia.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-29T20:19:56.251208+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast-330209"},"episode":{"title":"Purple Rain (1984)","slug":"purple-rain-1984","published_at":"2026-04-22T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast-330209/purple-rain-1984","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast-330209","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/purple-rain-1984--71551188","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/op3.dev/e/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71551188/b2cb8f3b.mp3","summary":"Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here to Talk About Purple Rain Welcome to this episode of The Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast. Hosts Krissy Lenz (comedian and director at Neighborhood Comedy Theatre) and Nathan Blackwell (independent filmmaker at Squishy Studios) are joined this week by not one but two returning special guests—podcaster and writer Kyle Olson and podcast producer and improv impresario Pete Wright—to dig into one of the most electric, beguiling, and undeniably Prince films ever committed to celluloid: Purple Rain (1984).Neither Krissy nor Nathan had ever seen the movie before this episode—a confession that earns them some gentle ribbing from the two superfans across the table. What unfolds is a warm, funny, and genuinely insightful conversation about Prince as performer, The Kid as character, and what it means to watch a film that is less a story and more a time capsule from another world.🎸 The Concert Film That Got a Plot Attached to ItThe group quickly zeroes in on Purple Rain's greatest paradox: the performances are absolutely transcendent—opening on Let's Go Crazy, arguably one of the greatest concert openers in film history—while the story threading them together is, as Pete diplomatically puts it, a little rough around the edges. Kyle suggests there may exist a perfect 50-minute cut of this film that is simply the greatest concert film ever made. The consensus? Every time the band steps off stage, the movie struggles; every time they step back on, it soars.Pete brings essential context: Purple Rain was a massive cultural moment in 1984, released the same summer as Ghostbusters, and it landed especially hard for Minneapolis audiences who recognized First Avenue and Hennepin Avenue as their own streets, their own stomping grounds. Kyle—who lived in…","meta_description":"Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here to Talk About Purple Rain Welcome to this episode of The Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast. Hosts Krissy Lenz (comedi…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3850,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast-330209/episodes/purple-rain-1984/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-most-excellent-80s-movies-podcast-330209/purple-rain-1984.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}