Conan O’Brien, Ramy Youssef Joke About How ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Was ‘Financially Woke’

The comedians discussed on O’Brien’s podcast how Maverick and his pilots took on a generic, completely unidentifiable enemy country

Top Gun Maverick Conan O'Brien
(Getty/Paramount)

Like countless millions around the world, comedians Conan O’Brien and Ramy Youssef are big fans of “Top Gun: Maverick.” But the two also couldn’t help but notice how the blockbuster is a special kind of “woke.”

“They really don’t mention another country. It’s kind of nice. You don’t know. You don’t know who it is,” Youssef remarked on a recent appearance on the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.”

“I did walk outta that going, ‘Wow, I didn’t hear Arabic.’ I didn’t know what country it was, it was pretty impressive,” he added.

The decision to not give hints as to what enemy nation Tom Cruise’s Maverick and his band of Navy fighter pilots are trying to sneak into was quite a change of pace from the original, Cold War-era “Top Gun,” which didn’t explicitly make the Soviet Union the film’s enemy but hinted at it through the use of Russian-made MiG fighter jets facing off against the Navy’s F-15s.

Last year’s sequel offered no such hints, not even when the Navy attacks the enemy nation’s nuclear facility with an aerial mission that was filmed in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s kind of not clear where it is, but there’s just a lot of fir trees and a lot of snow and it looks really beautiful. And um, like the lights came up afterwards and I said, ‘Why did we go to war with New Hampshire?’” O’Brien joked.

When Youssef called the film “woke” for doing this rather than having the Navy fight a vaguely Arabic, Al-Qaeda-esque band of terrorists, O’Brien noted that it was probably done to make “Top Gun: Maverick” more palatable to non-American audiences. Youssef called that strategy “financially woke.”

“Let’s start that movement,” O’Brien said. “The financially woke movement. Just like, ‘No, no woke. That’s very financially — that was very offensive. Well, but financially — very woke.’”

“Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” is available on Spotify, Stitcher and other podcast platforms. “Top Gun: Maverick” is now streaming on Paramount+.

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