Greetings lovely listeners! This one’s a bit late on account of Clint’s whirlwind sojourn to Sundance, but now he’s back and we can subject you to another shockingly one-sided cinematic duel between John Travolta and Nicolas Cage! This time around, we decided to go without a guest, since a) we got busy and b) we didn’t want to subject the hard-to-find Nic Cage sporting drama The Boy in Blue on a third person. That’s right, in 1986, Nic Cage starred in a Canadian historical rowing flick as the Canuckier-than-thou bad boy sculler Nick Hanlan in The Boy in Blue, an absolute slog of a sports movie where Cage barely pretends to be Canadian, let alone act.

Luckily, we got to leaven that with a Travolta movie about an equally confounding sport (mechanical bull riding) in James Bridges’ surprisingly textured Urban Cowboy. Think of it as Saturday Night Hoedown — another big Travolta vehicle that peers into an under-explored subculture for the time and ends up popularizing it. Where Fever brought disco back from the dead, Cowboy kickstarted the ‘urban cowboy’ revival of cowboy aesthetics and brought a new, radio-friendly style of country music into the mainstream. As the self-destructive Bud, Travolta’s stll firmly in his hot-stud wheelhouse, swigging back beers as vividly as he beats his girlfriend Debra Winger. (Romance!)

Anyways, listen to us take a short-and-sweet look at these two very different sports movies starring two actors in equally disparate places in their careers.

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