De La Soul joins forces with the Teen Titans to save their legendary music from a space monster!

Topics discussed:

3️⃣ The episode pays tribute to the legendary De La Soul as a fun and influential hip-hop trio.

🥊 There is a major theme around the group's lengthy battle with Tommy Boy Records for the rights to their own music.

🥚 Multiple Easter eggs in the episode will delight De La Soul fans.

Also check out:

A clip from the episode

"Eye Know" on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

And remember:

Don't hate...animate!

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Hip Hop Movie Club is produced by your HHMCs JB, BooGie, and DynoWright. Theme music by BooGie.

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Welcome to Hip Hop Movie Club

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the show that harmonizes the rhythm of hip hop

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with the magic of movies.

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Today, we're going to have some fun and discuss the awesome episode of Teen Titans Go

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called Don't Press Play, which features hip hop royalty, De La Soul.

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We are three old heads who put their old heads together to vibe on these...[record scratching]

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cartoons for you.

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I'm DynoWright, podcaster, filmmaker, longtime hip hop fan,

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and my favorite De La album is Stakes is High.

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I'm JB, 80s and 90s nostalgia junkie, long time hip hop fan.

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And I place De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising in my top five hip hop albums of all time.

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Nice.

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I'm Boogie, a DJ, long time hip hop fan,

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and De La Soul is easily one of my favorite groups of all time.

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I mean, I've listened to 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul is Dead more times than I can count.

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Like front to back, no skips.

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No skips.

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In this episode we are going cartoonish and breaking down the Teen Titans Go!

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De La Soul episode.

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And here are three takeaways from the Don't Press Play episode of Teen Titans Go.

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Number one, the episode pays tribute to the legendary De La Soul as a fun and influential hip hop trio.

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Two, there is a major theme around the group's lengthy battle with Tommy Boy Records for the rights to their own music.

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And three, multiple Easter eggs in the episode will delight De La Soul fans.

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This was such a fun ride and the episode was only

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15 minutes in length or actually when you condense it down without commercials

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like 11 minutes or so and they, it's just

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amazing.

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They packed so much fun and energy and excitement and knowledge into this short episode.

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And I really think it does a good job of,

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demonstrating how much fun De La Soul and positive, you know, positivity, fun, lightheartedness.

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influential that De La Soul was.

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Boogie, what's your take on how it portrayed them in that light?

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Yeah, I mean, like the episode, first of all, I think the episode was way too short.

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I could have watched like, I could watch easily like a full, you know, hour or so, hour and a half of it.

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It was so good.

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Like, it captured their personalities pretty good too.

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Like how they played off of one another.

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It was just, you know, great to see them on screen.

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Like even if they were animated, I mean, they just, I mean, every scene with them in it, it was just crazy.

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So.

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I did like how they had their little powers in the beginning as they were, it showed them fighting the monster.

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Talk a little bit about that.

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And I also like how there was a little bit of humor with them

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as far as wanting to call the big guns in the, the Justice League and how they kept wanting to call in the Justice

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League.

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And it was just funny because,

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Robin was like, hey, you we can handle this.

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We can handle it.

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He said bro, We can handle this.

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And they're like, no, no, no.

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We want the Justice League.

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Justice League.

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It was just funny.

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And I like the lighthearted

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humor that the episode carried, even if it was,

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you know, kind of, you know, was shadowing their real life struggles as far as royalties are concerned.

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We could talk about that a little bit as well.

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But yeah, I think it was great.

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Yeah, DynoWright What do you what do you say about

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the light-heartedness of it and the fun aspect?

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Yeah.

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any great cartoon, it's fun for kids and adults.

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so you get this discussion about intellectual property, like you'd never see that in

cartoons.

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And it's done really well.

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So you're not going to get bored with discussions about legalities of using intellectual property.

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Right.

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And even if you didn't know who De La Soul was, it even does the introductions,

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you know, it says their name and it's AKA Plug One AKA Plug Two.

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It was just so well done.

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Yeah. You can get away with that in a cartoon.

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Yeah.

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So, you know, it's a lot of fun.

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know, the Teen Titans are fanboying and girling over them.

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And so you get a little bit of license for this

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here he is.

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Here's your exposition.

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Here's Plugs One, Two, and Three.

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But yeah, I definitely like how they introduced all of them, starting with their government name,

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you know, Plug One, AKA, AKA, AKA, AKA.

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That was cool because I've definitely, in all of the names, I've heard them called all of those names.

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So was pretty cool to see that,

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you know, they acknowledged all of those different monikers that each one of them carried.

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Yep.

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And it's cute.

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The character Star was like, The De, The La, and The Soul is just cute the way she said that.

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She was starstruck.

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I think she said it best.

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It was Star that said, their importance to hip hop and the culture cannot be overstated.

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That's a true fact there.

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Yeah.

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and even tells you where they're from.

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They're from Amityville, Long Island.

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And there was even the joke about Amity Island from Jaws.

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And the one guy turns into the shark.

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And that was kind of funny.

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I like the battle with the monster.

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Actually, was it Posdnous His headphones shrunk into a...

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A cannon, yeah.

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and we're shooting out and then then then Mase was chucking the vinyl.

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It's like 45/45/12 inch

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Yeah, definitely as a DJ, I definitely appreciated that.

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Ha ha ha ha ha.

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That was pretty cool.

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Yeah, so it was so much fun.

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moving on to the lesson, and telling you about the history because

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as hip hop heads know, there was a lengthy battle that De La Soul had with Tommy Boy Records for the rights to

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their own music.

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That's the takeaway number two.

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There's a major theme around that.

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And they do that in a fun and informative way.

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Yeah, Boogie, you want to talk a little bit about that as well?

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Yeah, so, during the course of the episode, Robin breaks down a la Schoolhouse Rock.

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The subject of music royalties and how, you know, once an MC creates a rhyme, you know, it becomes theirs.

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And then, you know, if anyone else wants to use it or stream it or et cetera, you have to

pay the artist.

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And, it shows the importance of that.

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of that subject and that topic

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and why there was a big thing going on as far as the

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space alien that was stealing their music because he was just taking it without...

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they weren't getting any money for it.

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He was just taking it.

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And I do like how I I believe it was Pos said that

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it's not necessarily just about the money,

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but it's about making the music available to the fans.

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I was like, ah, see?

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I mean, yeah, you want to get paid for your music.

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And I'm sure that, you know, they definitely don't want

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the money to go elsewhere because they deserve it.

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But yeah, the fans have been wanting it as well.

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So it's been a battle between, De La Soul and Tommy Boy.

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And also the fans have been pushing back as well.

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You know, I mean, I've seen like

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full on posts where people just tagging Tommy Boy all in the posts

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saying, give these guys back their music so we can listen to it.

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Like we want to listen to it.

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Like we grew up on it.

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I have so many fond memories of 3 Feet High and Rising

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and De La Soul is Dead, like just hours upon hours upon hours of listening to those songs with my boy at the time.

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So like, you know, you get to a certain age, you're like, want to hear that music again,

because a lot of the stuff out now,

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I mean, it's good stuff out, but I still think a lot

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of the stuff out now is crap.

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So I want to go back and pull some of that, you know, nostalgia back

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and some of that good stuff, feel good music with a nice positive vibe to it, you know?

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So yeah.

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That lesson was very much appreciated that Robin put out there.

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that, when I say anybody, know, just pay attention to it.

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It was good.

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Broke it down real quick to the point, easy to understand.

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Yeah, anything to add to that DynoWright?

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Yeah, again, explanation of intellectual property.

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we won't get into too deeply, but

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they were very famously sued in the 90s for sampling the Turtles without...

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sampling "You Showed Me" on "Transmitting Live from Mars", which is also referenced in this.

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We'll get into this in Takeaway 3.

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But that lawsuit was very instrumental, so to speak,

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in figuring out what to do about how to handle intellectual property and sampling

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and how to compensate the source material and

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all of this.

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it is kind of full circle at this point now.

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that De La Soul was working to get control of their music

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at the time.

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Yeah, and what you said Boogie, like having it available for the public was so key.

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And I lived through that because I have two teenage kids

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and they grew up on streaming and I've been teaching them about old school hip hop.

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And my son was able to pull up the entire catalog of Tribe Called Quest

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and Run DMC and all of my other old school classics that,

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and he loved them.

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And I was like, for a while we were just hitting a roadblock with De La Soul

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And that's like the only way he'd be able to hear it.

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is if I would find the CD, find a way to play it, or find on YouTube clips.

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And it was really quite troublesome to be able to play the songs just like anything else.

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Where a streaming service like Spotify

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or Apple Music, whatever, like you could pretty much bring up any song from any artist in the world, almost every single one, unless

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there's some sort of, you know, copyright issue.

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And it was just frustrating.

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And one of my favorite artists of all time,

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to not be able to share that.

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So it was such a big relief.

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We kind of celebrated on, know, was March 3rd, 2023.

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Yeah.

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And unfortunately, as we had stated earlier,

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Dave Jolicoeur, Trugoy, Plug Two, had passed away just prior to that, a couple of weeks prior.

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So he didn't get to see that come to fruition.

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Yeah. Sad.

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It was very sad.

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But, and I think you alluded to,

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some of the Easter eggs that are in this, which is our takeaway number three.

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Multiple Easter eggs in the episode will delight the De La Soul fans.

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So I'll just remind what you mentioned already, DynoWright was "Transmitting

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Live from Mars".

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They mentioned that because that's where the music was being transmitted by the monster.

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That was actually one of their songs that De La Soul had on 3 Feet High and Rising,

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which spurred the lawsuit from the Turtles.

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I got, that's kind of like...

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sad in the sense that that song was not like a true single that came out like a "Me,

Myself and I" or "Eye Know"

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or "Plug Tunin'".

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It was just like a little interlude where they were just having fun with it.

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And you know, they were speaking some alien language, but they were, they did use the beat.

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So yes, the Turtles did deserve to get some credit for that, but

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the tune of like $1.7 million, that is what they settled out of court.

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That was kind of wild.

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Other Easter eggs throughout.

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Who wants to talk about a few of those?

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I think one of the funniest ones was when they

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fell for the boogie trap, the don't press play boogie trap.

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And as they're trapped and the water's coming in and they're like,

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rattling off the album titles.

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And I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool.

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That's pretty cool.

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It's funny because I watched this episode with my mom.

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So she's like, you know all those.

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I'm like, of course I know all these.

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This is one of my favorite rap groups

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Like I tell everybody, know, Public Enemy is my favorite rap group of all time, but like

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but like De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest

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are right there with them.

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I mean, it's just, you know, they're right there.

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Like I grew up on all three of them.

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I mean, yeah, I'm like, yeah, that's an album title.

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Yep, that's an album title.

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That's an album title, you know?

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It was pretty funny how they were throwing the titles in there.

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And they actually did the wink with the sound effect.

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Every time they said the album name, right?

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The water was three feet high and rising.

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We better get out or De La Soul is dead.

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wow.

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The stakes is high.

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And then what got them to escape was all right guys Buhloone mindset,

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you know, and they inflate their heads and then they're able to escape.

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So that was awesome.

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Yeah, that was cool.

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That was the biggest of the Easter eggs, but quite obvious.

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Another one that I saw was at one point they who wants some yogurt?

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And yogurt was the origin of Trugoy's name, which is yogurt spelled backwards.

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Y'know, Plug Two.

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So I thought that was kind cool that they just mentioned that.

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I this might be a little bit of reach, but I actually thought when they did the lesson, you mentioned like Schoolhouse Rock, they did a lesson.

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always, thought right back to the Me, Myself and I video,

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they're in the classroom and they're sitting down at the table.

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And that was kind of how Robin was doing the lesson on music royalties.

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Yep, absolutely.

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There is a turtle in the beginning of the episode.

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there is that.

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was the, that was the, okay.

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And at the end of the episode, they do play the song “Pain”, which is a De La Soul song.

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So not truly Easter egg, but.

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I wasn't super familiar with that song and I played it back in its entirety.

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That's a collab with Snoop Dogg.

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It's a great song.

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Yeah.

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There was one part that

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they were on Mars and the music was released and it empowered them up

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and their suits changed.

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that, that when they were all standing, all three of them were standing there,

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it kind of reminded me of the cover, the album cover from the Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump album

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cover.

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I mean, it wasn't exactly the same, the way they were standing is like, hey, this kind of reminds me of the cover.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, more subtle reference to the album names, album titles.

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And the balloon mind state, like when they do inflate their heads is similar to the cover from this, that same title album.

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And I saw something online about actually the trap.

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was like, could be a nod to the real life Jezero crater in Mars that was thought to have once flooded with water.

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Possibly, some scientific aspects of that.

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Yes, possible, yeah.

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They do pack a lot of stuff into these episodes.

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So it's entirely possible.

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Yeah.

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The one thing I didn't know what the reference was was Plug Two's shirts said Jaxon, J-A-X-O-N.

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Do you guys know what that was a reference to?

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I didn't know if that was someone in his family or anything.

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I couldn't find anything about that.

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Everything's intentional, I'm sure, but I was just wondering what that was about.

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J-A-X-O-N.

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Yeah, it's Jackson.

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And we can maybe find that if we do discover something, we could put it into the show notes.

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Yeah, I'm not familiar.

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I didn't know that.

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I saw that.

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I noticed that.

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I didn't quite understand that either.

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Unless it's a reference to Michael Jackson.

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it didn't seem like it was.

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could be related to one of the producers or editors of the episode.

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Listener, you know the answer, hit us up.

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Yeah, definitely.

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Yeah, but man, that was such a fun episode.

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Like you said, Boogie, I could watch that for, I watched it a few times ahead of this as we were leading up to this.

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I had seen it already in the past and again, that was my idea.

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was like, hey guys, let's cover this.

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Cause this is a lot of fun.

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And I encourage you listeners to go back and watch this.

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It is on Max If you have the Max streaming service is where you can find it.

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It is in season six.

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And I believe it's episode 30, either 34 or 36.

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I forget what it said there.

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Yeah, it's somewhere near the end of season 6

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Don't Press Play.

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Don't Press Play.

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Another De La Soul related clip, which I

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highly recommend is

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the episode of the Stephen Colbert show

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where De La Soul performs “Eye Know”.

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And they're talking about sampling, how they're mixing beats in the pot and guitars.

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And they talk about how they created it.

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And I think this was definitely after Plug 2 had passed away.

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it's Posdnous and Maseo on that.

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But that was really well done.

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Maybe we can put that into the show notes as well.

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It's a lot of fun.

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This leads me to believe there's a lot of content in De La Soul's music.

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Like, you can make a whole episode about

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any of their songs, really, like, Potholes in My Lawn or Say No Go, which has the Hall & Oates sample.

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there's a lot of message Stakes is High has a strong message.

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We talked about that.

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Like, so much content and like, there could be a lot to that.

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I mean, that's maybe an idea for

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other creatives out there to maybe extend the life

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or to, you know, have these songs live on further

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and add different value and meaning to others for this next generation.

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Create more content with these songs.

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Hip Hop Movie Club is produced by your HHMC's JB, Boogie and Dyno Wright.

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Theme music by Boogie.

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On November 13th at SteelStacks in Bethlehem, we are presenting a screening of Boyz N the Hood

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in 4K with a special panel discussion.

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Tickets available at SteelStacks.org.

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We're on Instagram, Facebook and Threads at Hip Hop Movie Club.

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Whether you're listening to the podcast or watching us on YouTube,

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please give us a follow.

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It's a real power up for us.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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And remember, don't hate, animate.

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Of course, gotta animate!

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Had to do it after this one, had to do it.

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gotta do it.

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Here's the layup.

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Alley oop pass.

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Hey there’s a lot of hip hop in Animaniacs as well, we can maybe check out some of that

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absolutely.

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Man, my kids learned all the US states through the Animaniacs.

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Mm-hmm.

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Rap version.

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Yeah, animation and hip hop is a marriage made in heaven.

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rich topic.

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Absolutely.