As they begin their 14th year of changing the way you listen to the internet, Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness have never seen times quite like these. As if shelter-in-place quarantines and global pandemics weren’t enough, now we’ve got murder hornets?! This week, your friends in podcasting will try to make sense of both, while also remembering several of the notable people who died this past week. They will celebrate one of the women upon whom A League of the Their Own was based, a beloved character actor from TV’s “Scrubs”, a golden age of TV’s private eye sidekick, a legendary poet who helped launch the counterculture beat generation, and one of the truly indelible soul voices of the 1970’s. In fact, it’s been a particularly troubling time for lovers of music, and in “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil will also remember a Was (Not Was) vocalist, a co-founder of Kraftwerk, a chart-topping Jamaican ska singer, one of the true fathers of rock n’ roll, a great Mexican protest singer, and an illusionist who headlined one of the most successful shows in the history of Los Vegas. Dean will also provide an update on his long-awaited graphic novel, and he and Phil will compare notes on all the movies – new and old, foreign and domestic – they have been devouring during lockdown, including the Back to the Future movies, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, film noirs (films noir?!), and a couple Japanese classics, as well as a new Netflix series Dean is “maybe” finding interesting. Irreverent, insightful, and insightful, it’s what long-time listeners have come to expect!

After a cold open in which Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness celebrate the fact that YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour becomes a teen-ager this week, they launch into what they do best, trying to make sense of a (Covid-19) world gone wild with humor, insight, irreverence and inspiration. In the return of “Wingnut of the Week”, Dean and Phil offer a wag of the finger at Covid-19 conspiracy theorists and a doff of the cap to UFO “truthers”. In “Celebrity Deaths”, they pay tribute to a true titan of comedy publishing and filmmaking, an international star who broke big in both Bollywood and Hollywood, a character actor-turned-casting director, an influential folk singer, and the musician who turned Hugh Grant into a pop star! Then, your friends in podcasting tackle how Covid-19 will affect the up-coming television season, and how it will affect the Oscars, before turning their attention to what years in cinema might rival 1962 as the best year ever for movies! 

Sure, Covid-19 may be no laughing matter, but Phil Leirness gets things started with a quarantine lockdown joke nonetheless before he and Dean Haglund dig down into the protests surrounding stay-at-home orders, the hopes they have for how society might change in the long-term, and about the dangers of placing your faith in “distrust”. Ageism in Hollywood gets discussed, and then “Star Trek: Picard” and season 2 of “Star Trek: Discovery” get compared and get praised before the commercial break. In the back half of the show, Phil regales Dean with “Star Trek”-related tales involving the likes of JJ Abrams and … Toshiro Mifune?! In “Celebrity Deaths”, two of the all-time great character actors, three legendary jazz musicians, a ground-breaking sculptor, a pop-culture influencing illustrator, an award-winning cinematographer, and a glass-ceiling breaking animator get remembered. Keep calm, stay safe, and enjoy YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour!

Because Phil hosted “Leif Erikson Day 1953” at Friendship Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night, he took a much needed day off on Monday. And so, this week’s installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour is one day late … Your friends in podcasting reconvene and compare notes on their respective “Live Events of the Week”, including upcoming comedy shows everyone in the Detroit area can enjoy at Go Comedy! Phil also reveals details of a party he attended in the actual Salem’s Lot house! In “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil remember the “King of Confetti”,  an opera soprano, an unsung blues artist, a punk rock icon, a pioneering actress of stage and screen, and a delightful character TV performer. After a discussion of a little-known Buster Keaton classic “talkie”, the subject shifts to comic book movies. Martin Scorsese’s (perceived) indictment of such movies, Cynthia Erivo’s (sure to be Oscar-nominated) portrayal of Harriet Tubman and Todd Phillips’ Joker, a fascinating mess of a psychological period piece and villain origin story, all get analyzed.

Phil was out late imbibing. Dean has been battling a bad late summer cold. Yet, somehow, they both come out guns blazing! This week’s show begins with several “Live Events of the Week”, ranging from immersive theatre to a Halloween X-Files improv show, from Leif Erikson Day to the first mixed cocktail! Then, it’s time for “Celebrity Deaths” wherein legendary journalists Cokie Roberts and Sander Vanocur, and performers Suzanne Whang, Aron Eisenberg and Sid Haig are remembered. From there, it’s on to the silver screen, where one of the all-time greats gets discussed in relationship to how we consume movies now, and a legendary “failure” gets re-appraised. In fact, the importance of “failuring” (Dean’s term) gets championed! Finally, the Emmy Awards were this weekend, and your friends in podcasting discuss “Fleabag”, Kirsten Dunst, “On Becoming a God in Central Florida”, and season 2 of “Big Little Lies” and the behind-the-scenes chicanery that may have been responsible for the season’s lack of focus.   

You will be hard-pressed to find another episode of this or any other show biz-centric podcast that covers as much ground thematically OR temporally as this installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour! Silent film legends John Gilbert and Harold Lloyd both made transitions to the sound era and Dean and Phil, with the help of a loyal listener like you (yes, YOU) dig into this history. Dean’s live streaming sci-fi adventure series “Gravity Hole” is back and Dean will tell all! Last week, Phil waxed rhapsodic while singing the praises of two female performers of Asian-American descent. This week, he reveals a startling personal connection to one of them, while previewing a potential “Live Event of the Week” and celebrating another actor he believes is due great things. The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA held a contentious (possibly contested) election and your friends in podcasting will try to make sense of it. In a jam-packed installment of “Celebrity Deaths” a multi-Emmy-winning TV star, a modern-day “robber baron”, the “king of puns”, a pioneering animator, a “Star Trek” actress, a comic book artist, and a counterculture icon of the late 60’s and 1970’s all get remembered. 

We have been experiencing great difficulty making this week’s show (recorded on Sunday) available across our usual platform of fine podcast providers! If you have found this episode, we trust you will find it though-provoking. A wide range of topics gets covered, including airplane crashes, anger, gun massacres, distractions, climate change, live storytelling, the history of U.S. Constitutional Amendments and perhaps, the greatest drummer ever! Oh, yeah, and DOBERMAN PUPPIES!

After last week’s outstanding episode, your friends in podcasting keep the movie talk going as they remember Robby Muller, the late great “Master of Light”, perhaps the most important cinematographer in independent cinema over the final 30 years of the 20th Century. Dean and Phil then discuss what it means on those rare occasions when critics like a movie far more than audiences do. It’s common for audiences to like a film more than critics, but who is to blame when critics love a film and audiences HATE it? Your friends in podcasting answer that question before shifting gears into an incredible “Live Event of the Week”. They welcome special guest Zac Greenberg, the composer of The Bradbury Tattoos: A Rock Opera, which premieres this month in Cincinnati courtesy of a National Endowment of the Arts Grant. Based on four Ray Bradbury short stories from “The Illustrated Man (including “Kaleidoscope”, which Dean once starred in on-stage in Los Angeles as part of Sci-Fest L.A.), this sci-fi spectacular promises to be a production like no other! Oh, and make sure to stay tuned following the closing music and announcements for a sensational Easter egg!