Fuel Your Fandom

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The range of human motivations is complex and layered — as is the spectrum of human emotion. Still, for years, our entertainment focused on some pretty binary archetypes. Specifically: mustache-twirling black-hatted villains, and square-jawed white-hatted heroes. But at some point, the creators of our entertainment decided to give fictional characters more realistic ranges of feelings and agendas, thereby changing the storytelling game forever. In this episode of FYF, Saint and Jim break out some of their favorite examples of dramatic heel-face turns, face-heel turns, and flexible, antihero-style grey morality. Not to mention all the nerdiest news in the nexus.   

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Right up top: both content and trigger warnings are in full effect for this edition. Regular listeners of Fuel Your Fandom know that Saint and Jim first met while working as activists — fighting online child predation for the Perverted-Justice.com watchdog org as well as Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator." So when the Max limited series "Quiet On Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV" dropped, it was more or less required viewing...even if it was undeniably uncomfortable. In this episode, your hosts break down the content of the show from the perspective of people who spent a significant portion of their lives fighting exactly the sort of people and events that took place behind the scenes at Nickelodeon under the auspices of Dan Schneider's television empire, and offer the unique perspective of a couple of everyday schmucks who were involved in a broadcast-based movement that operated on the polar opposite of the same issue.   

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Iconic vehicles in entertainment is a uniquely western phenomenon, fueled by American "car culture" and a certain sense of gas-fueled adventure. Almost everyone who has ever seen a TV show or movie almost certainly has a favorite legendary ride that made them sit up and take notice, and maybe even wish they could borrow the keys for a joyride. Whether it was Doc Brown's "Back to the Future" DeLorean, The Gran Torino of "Starsky & Hutch" or even the Ghostbusters' ECTO-1, these cars were often characters themselves in their respective franchises, and deserve the same reverence as their human counterparts. In this edition of FYF, Saint and Jim kick the tires on Hollywood's most famous wheels, and take 'em out for a little speculative spin. Plus, all the nerdy news and tangents you've come to know and tolerate.     

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There are just so many amazing avenues of entertainment to be into these days, it can be hard to keep up. So admittedly, Saint and Jim have the odd blind spot when it comes to certain areas of fandom. One area in which they share somewhat of a collective question mark? Horror movies. So on today's episode of Fuel Your Fandom, the boys welcome Milwaukee's Maven of the Macabre, Katie Kadaver. She's not just a fan of horror films, she walks the walk 24/7. From performing in horror-themed burlesque with Grindhouse Tease, to heading to horror conventions to kick it with Lloyd Kaufman and the crew at Troma Films, to her co-hosting duties on "The VHS Vault" podcast, Katie knows horror like the inside of her eyelids — making her the perfect guest to come onto the show to give the neophytes a crash course in all things creepy. Shove this in your earholes...if you DARE.   

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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.  

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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.   

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.