When We Were Young - An 80s And 90s Pop Culture Podcast

DANTE'S PEAK and VOLCANO (1997) Don’t look back. The pressure is building. This thing’s gonna blow, and it’s hotter than hell! No, this is not When We Were Young’s episode on the best porn of the 90s — it’s the pyroclastic flow of natural disaster flicks unleashed by Twister’s sweeping success in the summer of ‘96. To blatantly rip off our first episode, Episode 33 surmounts Dante’s Peak and pokes around in the stinky tunnels of Volcano, two back-to-back disaster doppelgangers from 1997. First, Chris relates the real-life 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the basis for Dante’s Peak’s magmatic magic. Then, Becky harkens back to her days as a budding geologist to scientifically measure the likelihood of a volcano suddenly bursting from the loins of Los Angeles. One has Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton, the other has Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche. Both feature thwarted vacations, youth in peril, charred limbs, and dogs leaping away from lava in the nick of time — but neither was a seismic event at the