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This is MJ. I'm an author. I'm an artist. I'm an analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.

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Join me as I analyze a thrilling

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Red Panda Adventures episode 5, The Devil's Dew featuring bloody contracts, bespoke torment, and

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mastering a master.

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For those of you who don't know, Red Panda is an audio drama series inspired by The Shadow and Other Pulp Heroes written and directed by

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Greg Taylor, but I'll tell you all about that in a minute.

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Red Panda Adventures number 5, The Devil's Dew, originally aired December 10th, 2005.

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It was written and directed by Greg Taylor, and this is from season 1, which is 12 episodes long.

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The great, wonderful, super awesome, gets me hyped synopsis for this episode is as follows.

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Someone's been collecting old debts and leaving a trail of corpses in his wake,

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but the city's most feared gang leader isn't going gentle into that good night, and he's found himself an unlikely ally.

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But will the Red Panda learn that not even he can stop payment of The Devil's Dew?

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Those are so wonderful. Anyway, I don't have much to say about this episode. It was a good episode. I liked it.

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There was some interesting stuff in it, but not too much to dwell on. It was kind of straightforward and very simple in a lot of ways.

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There was a like Abbott and Costello gag, which I actually think Kit said that in the beginning of these two goons who work for

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Sclerally the Mob Boss who

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wants his guys, his employees, his associates to find a certain masked menace, or masked man, I should say.

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Anyway, they do that by one of them sticking up the other guy, which is kind of funny.

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I guess it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek playing with the genre and playing with the

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fact that the superhero or the hero always arrives when somebody's in trouble.

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So if you have two bad guys looking for a good guy, you can make one of them be in trouble,

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pretend, by the other one and it'll all work out. It'll draw the attention of the heroes like a mothets to a flame.

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Anyway, so I like that we had Dueling Hypnotists that

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We had the scared Mob Boss and then that in Kit's delusion of

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Bliss that she was laying down looking up the red panda and I wonder what that delusion could have been referring to.

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But since this is a, you know, I guess a

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G-rated show to PG rated show, I won't say, but everybody who knows knows. But anyway.

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So the idea of these Dueling Hypnotists is really cool.

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I like that Red Panda learned hypnotism and it's not a power that only he has and we get to see that,

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you know, not the first episode, but you know five episodes in he's dealing with somebody else who has great hypnotic powers and

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the shared

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understanding and shared history and the fact that they're both master hypnotists in their own rights.

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It makes it an interesting battle, makes an interesting duel and like Red Panda brings up the idea of

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that it's easier to suggest somebody to suggest or it's easier to

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set a hypnotic suggestion to somebody when they're already predisposed to believe that. So a great illustration of that was that when

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Nick Diablos went to go hit

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Sclerale, the room was dark and the chair was turned away so that when Diablos entered the room, he

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was looking at the back of the chair and he told Sclerale to turn around and

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it

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I

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guess it sounded exactly like Sclerale. It was Christopher Mott who plays the voice of you know,

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Jack Justice or Black Jack Justice and does a bunch of voices here on Red Panda Adventures, but

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you know in the story it was because

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Red Panda was using a hypnotic suggestion to I guess disguise his voice as Sclerale's and

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Diablos believed that and

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that makes sense that he'd be able to because it was something that he wanted to believe.

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So if you want something to believe, if you want to believe in something even if you know it's not true, you can be more easily

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suggested or hypnotized into believing that and then perceiving that which is pretty cool.

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I did like that a lot. Let me see. So

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yeah, it was cool that Sclerale went to Red Panda for assistance and that he

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offered to turn himself in and then by the end of the episode we learned that he was not actually sincere in that he was trying to flee,

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but at least he you know tried his best.

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So I think that's pretty cool and I just like that he was so scared of

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Diablos that he went and turned around and he was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna go and turn around and he was like,

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Diablos, that he went and turned to you know,

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somebody who he could count on to thwart this guy's plan because he's been so effective at thwarting so much of the mob business

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before and maybe it was even an enemy of my enemies my friend type thing where he thought well

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maybe these two will kill each other and I'll be free from them somehow especially since he was looking to flee the country anyway.

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I think I thought that was a fun detail and then yeah, I won't talk about Kit's delusion of bliss, but uh,

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it's kind of funny. So if you didn't get it by this point and listening to the show Kit is

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romantically interested in Red Panda and we'll leave it at that.

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Something I think was odd was that the first guy to die, he was in a locked room.

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He tormented or you know Diablos cast him into the shadow realm where he'd be tormented forever, you know in his mind

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he did that to him. By the way, if you don't know what that is, that's that's kind of funny. Anyway, um,

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the uh, the idea that he

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was able to infiltrate the room that he was able to you know conceal himself that he was able to

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do all these different things. I buy and I accept.

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But the fact that he was able to get out of the room with it locked

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doesn't really make sense to me unless he mind controlled his that particular victim to

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to lock the door behind him and then

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that was it, you know, and then he let him fall into his catatonic state, but that doesn't really make sense.

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That's not what was suggested or said at all, but it could be the case. It's just uh, it deepens the horror and the terror of the

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of the incident and it makes the power

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of the devil that Nick Diablos supposedly had even more terrifying because how is he able to get you know, he got in

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he got into the room when it was locked and he got out with it being locked so that adds to the air of mystery and his supernatural

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powers to help you know, help everybody continue to believe in the hypnotic suggestion.

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Moving on.

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So yeah, Nick Diablos is a master hypnotist of some sort. We don't know where he learned this. He's known

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this technique and this this wow, well, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. He's had this

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ability for

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over 20 years. So probably 23 years or maybe 22.

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And it

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that means that however long Red Panda has been active, which doesn't seem to be more than a handful of years, that Nick Diablos has been active for

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decade a decade or more. Well almost almost two decades more than him.

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So this guy could have been a hypnotist for 25 years and it's no wonder he was so

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I know I guess he'd lost himself to his power and what he could do and you know, taking his

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like he could have just let it go and had profited off of these people and

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you know, he makes the joke that the hours are pretty good when you're a parasite as opposed to doing something else with your powers, but

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he could have just dropped it and yet his greed and his avarice and his

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I don't know his refusal to do anything else with his powers and

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just to like take the win and go and cut his losses

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ultimately led to his falling into a deep sleep.

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He's ultimately led to him falling into his own torment

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under Red Panda, but he Diablos had a good reason to believe that he would be able to best Red Panda, which is that he

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how's your kung fu?

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He had been doing the hypnotism stuff for maybe 10-15 more years than Red Panda very easily and

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that's that's pretty darn impressive.

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So and that also kind of raises the threat of Diablos because look at how much more experienced he is with this stuff

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than Red Panda is and I mean

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yeah, there's no indication that Red Panda has been doing this for 10 years, so

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even he's been a master hypnotist for double the time that uh that Red Panda has been and that's that's pretty impressive.

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So

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yeah, that's

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pretty impressive and then just I think his playing is cool.

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Obviously it's bad and it's wrong to extort people like that, but boosting these people's confidence belief in themselves and like using their like

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just basically giving them like a big pep talk and then extorting them for that. That's pretty clever planning.

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It's good work if you can get it and more work, but good work.

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And uh last note, I just think it's interesting that 22 years is the length that

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supposedly in at least this Red Panda universe if not in the real world is the length of time that a hypnotic suggestion can work and uh

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and uh, I'm not gonna look into it and research it to find out if that's true or not because I'm sure the claims are

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dewey's either way, but it's just an interesting

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idea and it does show how studied Red Panda is at whoever he learned hypnotism from

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either taught him that or because he's so interested in diversifying his knowledge and uh

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making sure that he knows as much as he can about things so that he can be prepared for everything.

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You know like a Batman type character

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uh that he would have researched and discovered that truth about uh the efficacy and the length of time

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uh that hypnosis has worked for people. So anyway, once again, that was really cool great detail and uh

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I don't know just it's a good show lots of fun

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not much more to say about this episode because like I said it was pretty good and

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pretty interesting and lots of fun. I mean there wasn't really much to complain about and there weren't too many uh

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uh extra things to delve into so with that

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I'm going to go ahead and get out of here before I do I'm going to suggest that you go over to

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MJMunoz.com and check out all the other stuff I have there. I have a podcast page

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linked uh in the show notes that will take you to all my other podcasts if you want to discover what I'm working on besides

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uh the Red Panda reports and uh my coverage of Red Panda Adventures and uh, yeah

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I have pulp inspired heroes that I'm working on

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uh in my own superhero universe and

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before I get to those I'm going to finish writing my uh children's picture books

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inspired by stuff like Godzilla and

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I guess you could say like Power Rangers and Digimon and things like that

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so I've got a wide set of interests and I continue to work on them all because it makes me happy and I'm hoping to turn

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um

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turn myself into a full-time storyteller

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with these things so anyway, I encourage you to check all that out and

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That's all I have to say for now. This is MJ signing out

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I hope you enjoyed that go to MJMunoz.com to leave any questions comments or other feedback you might have

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There you can find all of my analysis art and fiction

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I cover books tokusatsu comic books anime and more

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Look around you're sure to find something else that you'll enjoy as well

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This has been a story over everything production