Mourning the End of the Happy Cast

On Tuesday a little before noon I am going to do something iTunes tells me I have done fifty times before:  I will sit down in my home office inside a closet, boot up Cast on my laptop and then record a podcast with my friend and cohost Clint Worthington. 

This time, however, everything will be different. After forty nine episodes, the humble little sonic caterpillar we call the Nathan Rabin Happy Cast will be going into a chrysalis and emerging as the beautiful butterfly known as Travolta/Cage, a Podcast about the Greatest Actors in History with Worthington/Rabin. 

I am so enamored of that metaphor that I thought about naming our new/old/rebooted podcast Nathan and Clint’s Beautiful Butterfly Podcast, but since we’ll be talking exclusively about the filmographies of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, and probably not discussing butterflies at all, except perhaps in a symbolic sense, Travolta/Cage seemed like a better, and more accurate title. 

I am atwitter with excitement about recording the first real episode of Travolta/Cage with very special guest Scott Weinberg in a way that I haven’t been in a very long with Happy Cast. I still like doing Happy Cast and I still think it is a good podcast but I feel like we’ve been coasting a bit, that the hunger and the passion have dissipated over time. 

I feel like whenever you go through a major life change and end something important to you it’s important to acknowledge the change and to mourn the loss. So I am going to take this time to mourn the loss of Happy Cast and to thank everyone who gave it life and made it a thing. 

I particularly want to thank Clint Worthington, my co-host of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast and my co-host of Travolta/Cage. I started the Happy Cast in no small part because I wanted to work with Clint. He’s been a tremendous guide to this whole process. He made it possible for me to be a podcaster. God knows I would not be able to figure it out on my own. 

I also want to thank all of the guests who have devoted their time and energy to the Happy Cast when it wasn’t really a thing and they didn’t have a whole lot to gain from appearing on it. One of the joys of doing Happy Cast was getting to podcast with some of my favorite podcasters and some of the funniest people in the world. 

I’m talking about people like Dan McCoy of The Flop House and Andrew Jupin and Eric Szyszka of We Hate Movies, all of whom were kind enough to guest on the podcast multiple times. We also had some of our favorite film critics on as well, luminaries like Amy Nicholson and Alonso Duralde, who was our most frequent guest and invariably one of the best. 

When recording the Happy Cast felt really right, like we were on the right path and doing what the good Lord put us on earth to do it was generally because we had a guest that made the always terrifying prospect of talking to other people a pleasure and a privilege. I always enjoyed doing a podcast with just Clint but it felt like the podcast never reached its true potential unless we had a guest. 

Here’s the thing. To me, podcasts are all about connection. That’s what drew me to the medium as a fan and soon obsessive many years ago, the weirdly intense, even life-affirming spiritual connection I felt both to my favorite podcasters and to my fellow fans. I don’t think it’s coincidental at all that I first connected with Clint as a podcast fan, of The Flop House, most notably. The same is true of Felipe Sobreiro, the illustrator for the Weird Accordion to Al book. 

I feel like the Happy Cast just did not connect the way we had hoped. We often lacked even a single question from listeners for our mailbag section. It similarly was not a promising sign that when we did have a question it tended to be from the same two or three lovely, very supportive and encouraging human beings. 

That’s partially because we lacked a strong hook. It’s hard to sell the world on two middle aged white guys talking about new movies when that describes half the podcasts that aren’t comedians talking to other comedians about things of interest only to comedy professionals. 

I felt like I never did a good enough job of establishing Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place as its own entity and not as a component of the website with which it shares a name. 

If someone were to ask me what the Happy Cast was I would half-heartedly mumble something about its connection to the website and its features but I wouldn’t feel confident, like I had something great that I couldn’t wait to share with the world, the way I feel about this website and the second My World of Flops and the Weird Accordion to Al book. 

We have a strong hook with Travolta/Cage, something to set us apart from every other podcast in existence. I’m legitimately super fucking pumped at the prospect of spending five years in the world of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage and taking all of y’all along with me for the ride. 

Travolta/Cage just feels so goddamned right, like it’s the podcast we should have been doing all along but if you were a fan of the Happy Cast, or listened occasionally, or even pledged to our perpetually suffering Patreon account, I want you to know that we see you and we appreciate you and that we want you to listen to Travolta/Cage. 

I could not be more excited about the birth of Travolta/Cage but it would not be possible if it were not for Happy Cast. Our beautiful podcast butterfly would not exist without the humble little caterpillar that was my first attempt at being a creator in a medium I love with an obsessiveness and intensity rare even for me. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

OR get in on the big Travolta/Cage excitement at https://www.patreon.com/TravoltaCage

AND the Weird Accordion to Al book campaign is also still very much active at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders