Happy Birthday, Phil!

 A longtime friend and creative collaborator, Phil Congleton, is celebrating his birthday, so I've decided to honor him with some my favorite works of that he helped create.

Phil has been a guest on three podcast episodes of Digging Star Wars - back when we did the whole podcast thing. This was his last visit where we talked about one of my favorite Buster Keaton movies.

After the Digging Star Wars podcasts, Phil and I launched into an ambitious project called Film366 - where we hoped to make 366 videos recommending a custom movie for each day of the 2016 Leap Year. We finished with 50 videos. Not bad. Not complete. But not bad. Two of my family's favorites are below...

The funny thing is that I first knew of Phil before I met him. A short film he produced in the early 1990s was an entry in a film festival I was a pre-screener for at The University of the Arts. My buddy Chief saw this film and made our gang watch it. We loved it! I noted the producer's name: Phil Congleton. When I was introduced to Phil at QVC a few years later, I said he couldn't possibly be Phil Congleton - Phil Congleton produced THE MAN WHO LOVED DOUGHNUTS (1993). "That's my movie!" Phil replied. I eventually believed him. We've been good friends ever since. Here's the movie that started it all:

Phil also worked on a funny parody of the old reality TV show COPS. Phil's film "MOPS" was mentioned in a recent podcast I guest starred on talking about parody short films.

One last thing, back in 2019, Phil started a Marvel tabletop RPG with me and our good friends John and Daulton. Since then, I've been adding mainly superhero songs to a playlist about Phil's campaign called "Earth 2020". Phil does a great job with the game, and I'm glad it's still happening. Here's the superhero playlist:

Thanks for years of fun and film, Phil. Hope you have a great birthday!