Ray, Alan, and Renee discuss Eddie Huang's coming-of-age, basketball drama and why it resonated differently among the team. They talk about the unique perspective of the Black/Asian cultural interactions, how the basketball scenes were shot, and where this fits in the ranking of popular basketball movies.

Hint: Space Jam is still the best.

Links to donate/educate/organize to stop AAPI hate: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate

DONATE so we can improve the show at [https://ko-fi.com/electricimageexpress] E-mail us at electricimageexpress@gmail.com Follow us on IG/Twitter @electricimageexpress/@the_electric_image_express

In episode 40, we sit down with Tik Tok creator Lily Lei as she shares her jourrney to obtaining Tik Tok fame over the last year. As we are all well aware, Tik Tok is an incredibly influential video platform. As a podcast interested in how Asian Americans portray ourselves across any creative medium, we were really fascinated by how Lily employed many elements of her Asian upbringing into her skits, and how those skits helped contribute to her rise. Lily also gives us insight into her versatile background as a design researcher and entrepreneur and how those experiences helped her gain over 700K followers on Tik Tok.

Before we get to Lily, we also have a 20 minute segment discussing the 2021 Oscars with Katie Quan from This Asian American Life. This year's awards marked many firsts for Asian Americans in Hollywood and Katie broke down her feelings about the necessity of the Oscars in 2021 and how she felt about the three movies that most prominently featured Asian Americans: Minari, Nomadland, and Sound of Metal.

Editors note: Sorry about the sound quality in some parts, some of these recordings were done while traveling!

Katie Quan's This Asian American Life Lily's Tik Tok

Notes:

1) Start of Oscars segment: (1:52) 2) General reactions on the 2021 shows (5:00)
3) Deeper dive into Minari, Nomadland, and Sound of Metal (10:23) 4) Do we (as Asian Americans) need the Oscars in 2021? (20:47) 5) Lily's background and how she decided to become a full-time Tik Tok creator (27:51) 6) How she identified what worked for her audience (35:27) 7) How she outgrew her initial Asian American Auntie/parent skits (38:15) 8) Accents or no accents? (43:06)

Links to donate/educate/organize to stop AAPI hate: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate

DONATE so we can improve the show at [https://ko-fi.com/electricimageexpress] E-mail us at electricimageexpress@gmail.com Follow us on IG/Twitter @electricimageexpress/@the_electric_image_express

It's our ANNIVERSARY! THANK YOU to all of our listeners and fans for your continued support! THANK YOU to our guests for lending your time and sharing your stories, and THANK YOU to everyone else who has contributed to the show!

We've added a BONUS episode for our anniversary: Raymond Luu and Alan Duong from [The Reel Asian Podcast] (https://www.reelasianpodcast.com/) join us to revisit Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale.

Notes:

1) The Reel Asian guys explain the appeal of Battle Royale and Sean shares some background and the impact of the movie (3:50) 2) Which characters did our high school selves' identify the most with? (14:25)
3) What does BR say about Japanese society's generational divide? (16:02) 4) We work through our strategies for surviving Battle Royale (24:40) 5) How Battle Royale's ultra-violence heightened its deisrability. (Aka the Streisand Effect (28:44) 6) If it came down to it: would you kill your best friend in high school? (30:50) 7) We draft our ultimate BR team (1 weapon, 1 BR character, 1 Asian film character) (40:13)

Links to donate/educate/organize to stop AAPI hate: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate

DONATE so we can improve the show at [https://ko-fi.com/electricimageexpress] E-mail us at electricimageexpress@gmail.com Follow us on IG/Twitter @electricimageexpress/@the_electric_image_express