Author: Travis LeBlanc

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1930’s Just Imagine is a movie that I feel like I should have heard of before now. Not that it’s the greatest movie in the world or even a good movie, but it’s very odd and unusual, and it’s rating on Trav’s Time Capsule Meter™ is off the charts.

I first found this movie on Tubi under the category of Musicals. Looking at the description I see the release date of 1930. Cool. It’s a pre-code. Then I see it is a science fiction movie and now I’m really intrigued. Americans were slow to embrace sci-fi. It was primarily a European thing through the silent film era. So good or bad, Just Imagine is notable for being one of the first American sci-fi movies. (more…)

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In this edition of Trav’s Time Capsule Classics we’ll be looking at another made-for-TV movie, which while largely forgotten today, was one of the biggest of them all.

If you ask the trivia question “What was the most watched made-for-TV movie of all time?” many will correctly answer that it was the 1983 nuclear war drama The Day After. It was a big deal when broadcast, and its record-breaking viewership was a major news story. (more…)

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On the 21st of March, 2024, I kept seeing the same avatar popping up on my X timeline and wondered, “Who the hell is Leonarda Jonie?” I first talked to her that very day.

Before she popped up on my timeline, Leonarda was an established comedian from Austin. She was a regular on the comedy podcast circuit and was known enough that Sam Hyde invited her to be his opening act for one of his Texas shows. She had 18,000 X followers, which she built up from standup alone. (more…)

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For most of my life, it seemed like the Left had all the entertainers. We pretended not to care or we coped with shrugged shoulders, “What do they know about politics? They’re just entertainers!” Or we had to pretended to be thrilled with having Charlton Heston and Tony Danza on our side. (more…)

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There are a few Antifa Twitter accounts I monitor to get a feel for what the other side are up to and who they consider high priority targets for doxing. Recently, Patriot Front and Goyim Defense League appear to have been the most under the Antifa microscope. In the last month, however, a mysterious hero has emerged and become their Public Enemy Number 1. (more…)

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In this edition of Time Capsule Cinema we’ll be looking at a film that has a lot in common with the last time capsule movie I wrote about: The Amityville Horror. They are both from the 1970s, they were both based popular books that claimed to be stranger-than-fiction true stories, and those “true stories” have since been come to be seen as likely hoaxes.The movie is Sybil, a 1976 made-for-TV movie starring Sally Field about a working woman in New York trying to get through life while burdened with multiple personality disorder. (more…)

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It’s Halloween season and so to honor the holiday, I thought it would be fitting to write about a horror movie. But which one? I’ve recently acquired an interest in the nostalgia catnip that is 1980s slashers. I could choose one of the landmarks or an overlooked curiosity of that genre. Or I could indulge the classic movie fan and go with one of the lesser-known gems from the early 1930s horror boom which turned Dracula and Frankenstein into the instantly recognizable faces they are today. (more…)

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On August 26, Apple+ released the trailer for an upcoming miniseries called The Savant. From the trailer, it looked like a series about a woman who by day is a soccer mom in an interracial marriage but by night is an antiracist super-spy. She goes into a secret bunker where she logs on to a computer and infiltrates “hate groups” in order to thwart their violent plans. (more…)

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There’s a guy on X who goes by the name European Revolution. He’s an oldhead who has been around since the Alt Right days and won’t let you forget about it. A recurring theme of his posts is how much better things were back in the good old days of 2016-2019 or thereabouts.

I have some sympathy for Alt Right nostalgia. There are a few things I miss about those days. (more…)

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Longtime Trav readers know that I am a big fan of what I like to call “time capsule movies”, that is to say movies that only could have been made at a specific time and place. Movies about a short-lived fad while the fad was still ongoing are particularly a favorite of mine. Along those same lines are movies made about a moral panic while the moral panic was still going on. (more…)

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It is said that Alexander the Great wept for there were no worlds left to conquer.

I feel you, Alex. Sometimes it feels like there are no normies left to redpill and all the debates have been won. (more…)

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In the late 19th century, there was a debate raging in the salons across Europe over what is the proper aim of art. You had the modernists who believed that art should try to reflect reality and then you had the aesthetes who believed that the purest art was art that was entirely the product of the imagination. There are legends about how Vincent van Gogh lost his ear, and one of them is that van Gogh lost his ear after an “Aestheticism versus Realism” debate with another artist escalated into violence. (more…)

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Cancel culture started out as low hum that at first was easy to ignore. The first few celebrities to be canceled were people I didn’t care that much about. There was that lady I had never heard of who had a cooking show. Paula something. A C-list actor here and a former sitcom star there would get canceled but life went on for me. But then they came for Whirr. (more…)