Fuel Your Fandom Kevin Saint

Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes you'll hear a song, and it takes you right back to where you were the last time you heard it. Or maybe it's a scent — like baked goods, or a spring flower bloom — that makes your brain light up. But food-based nostalgia? That's a different animal entirely. If you eat something you haven't had in awhile, that can really set off the cranial fireworks. On this episode, Saint and Jim take a look at the discontinued snacks and beverages from years past that aren't available anymore, and that they'd really love to see make a return. So grab some Dunkaroos, Magic Middles and an OK Soda, and earhole this. PLUS: the nerdiest of news.  

Saint and Jim usually like to keep things light around the ol' Fuel Your Fandom...dom. Still, there's no arguing that a lot of people are dealing with a lot lately. When a cute Muppet asks an innocuous "How is everybody?" on social media, only to be deluged with people in genuine pain? It's apparent we're all just ambulatory bundles of raw nerves just looking for anyone to support and listen to us. So for Episode #180, the FYF boys DO a bit of a 180°, and talk through some mental health stuff. Time to ask the listeners how YOU'RE doing, kick around some coping mechanisms, and maybe even get around to some hope. PLUS: the finals of our March (Madness) into Villainy evil-off, and plenty of nerd news.   

If there's any one thing that unites us all, it's that sooner or later we're gonna shuffle off this mortal coil. And as long as we all have to check out of Hotel Earth at some point, why not do what we can to make our final moments in this realm as notable as possible? Granted, not everyone is in line for the luxury of knowing when the Reaper is gonna tap us on the shoulder and tell us it's time to go, but some of history's most notable people did have caregivers and loved ones hanging on their every word — right up to their last breath. So in this episode, Saint and Jim dig into what a smattering of these folks used that breath to say, from the poignant to the profound to the downright silly. Plus: all the news that's fit to nerd.

Kids' entertainment has always leaned pretty heavily toward the fantastic. Not only do young people have the sort of imaginations required to really appreciate the impossible, but since so much of kids' TV and movies tends to be (either literally or figuratively) animated, it's a good medium to explore some out-there concepts. That said, there's a pretty big difference between fanciful and farcical. Because while it's entirely plausible to accept, say...a prince who turns into a superhero when he holds a weapon aloft and says some magic words, it's a little less easy to swallow that nobody around him seems to realize that whenever the king's kid disappears, a guy who looks just like him (down to the identical haircut and green cat sidekick) just happens to show up. On this episode, Saint and Jim take a look at improbable concepts in kids' entertainment that felt like a teensy bit of a suspension (of disbelief) bridge too far.

Saint and Jim still aren't sports fans, but they can't give up on the March Madness runoff just yet. Reason being, there's another friendly neighborhood superhero — one with a baddie bracket so big, it takes a whole separate universe just to hold them all. Of course, we're referring to Spider-Man. The web-slinger. The wall-crawler. Peter Parker himself. With a fiend folio just as Robust as the Dark Knight's, it was necessary to break this out into a second edition to match up these miscreants into their own head-to-heads, and determine the best of the worst. So lets put them all in a jar, shake it up, and see who comes out on top. Plus: NEWS.

Look, Saint and Jim aren't sports fans. They're just not. BUT. That doesn't mean they're not totally into elimination-style matchups! So in honor of March Madness, the FYF boys are running their own brackets to determine a much-contested set of win/lose outcomes. BUT. Because this is nerd territory, the combatants aren't athletes. They're antagonists. And since geeks have argued since time out of mind over who has the better rogues' gallery — Batman or Spider-Man — this episode seeks to answer that question once and for all. In the first part of the contest, Batman's biggest baddies will square off to see who comes out on top. Next week, we'll hash out which of the friendly neighborhood wall-crawlers opponents is the best of the worst. Then it's a head-to-head Bat vs. Spider enemy duke-out to crown the crossover champ. Plus, as always, oodles of news. EARHOLE TIME.