Fuel Your Fandom

Send us a text

Fuel Your Fandom touched on sitting in front of a full schedule of favorite Saturday-morning animation awhile back, and noted that the shows themselves were only part of the experience. After all, what's sitting criss-cross applesauce in front of a cartoon without some Apple JACKS and a cartoon on the front of the box? That's because somewhere along the line, Post, General Mills and Kellogg's figured out that if there was a cute character on their containers of cocoa-frosted sugar bombs, kids would be more likely to beg their parents for bowl after bowl of the stuff at the grocery store. And thus, cereal mascots were born. In this edition of FYF, Saint and Jim take a look at the flake-flogging powers of the Capn's, Tigers, Frogs and Toucans of yore with a milk-soaked spokescritter rundown. Plus, as always, all the biggest news from the Geek-O-Sphere.

Send us a text

Of all the things that it should be impossible to hurt yourself on, kids' toys should be the #1 item on the list. And yet, there have been COUNTLESS playthings that were created, marketed and sold to kids that have had the potential —and sometimes even the sad result — of causing harm to children who were just trying to amuse themselves. And we're not just talking about toys with sharp edges, projectiles, or parts that were choking hazards. We're referring to molten lead smelters. Model ovens that could deliver second-degree burns. Innocent-looking dolls whose rictus grins remained fixed even as they gnawed off your hair. And even science kits with ACTUAL RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL. It's a wonder any of us survived. Join Saint and Jim as they deep-dive into these deadly toys, plus — all the news that's fit to nerd.

Send us a text

Not every technology has what it takes to survive. As the inevitable progress of tech has unwaveringly marched on, we've seen countless types of storage media come and go. Punch cards gave way to refrigerator-sized disc drives, which in turn gave way to floppies, then smaller floppies, then magnetic drives, optical drives, solid state and now cloud and streaming data. It's all efficient, convenient, and cheap. That said, the slow death of physical media hasn't been without its share of problems. As long as a given piece of information only exists as ones and zeros in the ether somewhere, there exists rampant opportunity for chicanery – such as a gaming executive going on record as saying, "You'll need to get comfortable not owning your games." In this episode, Saint and Jim break down what the death of hard storage means to those of us who enjoy entertainment. And believe this: the irony of doing so on a podcast isn't lost on either of them.

Send us a text

Are you guys ready for Season 6? Saint and Jim have a whole bunch of fun surprises in store for their favorite Fuelers this time around, including awesome special guests, all-new takes on timeless topics, and even some stuff they can't really announce yet. And it all kicks off with this opener, where your intrepid hosts dive face-first into VR. But not in the hilariously physical way you see those people in the "fail" videos do it, where they destroy their televisions. Plus, the usual tangent-fests into superhero happenings, celebrity peccadilloes, and other nerdy news. EARHOLE THIS FOR SEASON 6!

Send us a text

It's the final episode of the season, and it's time to get meta. Surprising though it may sound, Saint and Jim have never before had occasion to actually talk about...podcasts. and although it may seem a little bit recursive to do so, they also couldn't think of a better way to put a cap on the year, or the season. Because they not only do a podcast (obviously), they also listen to plenty of them. All the better to continue immersing themselves in the most self-indulgent of "art" forms, right? However, since two guys hanging out on a podcast talking about podcasts wasn't enough of an audio fractal, they also welcome old friend and former fellow cyber-vigilante Matt Luria (a.k.a. Twitch streamer SoonerJetta) to add a dash of panache onto the top of the usual ouroboros of oral narrative. So let's all hunker down and say goodbye to 2023 with an episode so ridiculously introspective that it has to open its own mouth to see where it's going.

Send us a text

For every thousand fans of anything, there are always one or two people who go the opposite route. Not apathy — but rather, active opposition. Literally nothing that exists in pop culture is so innocuous that some busybody moron can't clutch their pearls and raise a high-heavens-level stink about it. Enter: the hater freakout. Sometimes it's the fact that a video game has a character of ambiguous gender. Other times, someone tilts their heads, squints, and decides something is about drugs or sex when it's obviously not. Ultimately, the rallying cry of "wOn'T aNyBoDy tHiNk oF tHe cHiLdReN?!?" is the pearl-clutching mantra these colossal killjoys hide behind when projecting their own dark desires and/or insecurities on people just trying to enjoy some light entertainment. In this edition of FYF, Saint and Jim look at some of the downright dumbest dustups — and maybe even one or two where they have to kinda admit that MAYBE the buzzkills might have had a point.

Send us a text

Fans are often conditioned to see layers of subtext within their favorite entertainment properties. That's because sometimes the creators are intentionally building in sneaky plot hints for sharp-eyed devotées to discover. Or, putting in subtle references or background events that point to larger symbolic meanings. But most of the time, the human tendency to indulge gestalt musings leads us to assume things that may or may not actually be there. Three years ago, Jim's first episode as a co-host of Fuel Your Fandom centered on looking at fan theories. And since they couldn't get to them all the first time around, Saint and Jim thought the milestone warranted another trek through this fertile topic. So get ready to hear pop cultures ideas about everything from the nature of super-spy secret identities, to whether dinosaurs might have been friskier than they were hungry, to how a beloved Muppet may have been somehow been involved in a nefarious terrorist attack. Earhole time.

Send us a text

Music is entertaining enough all by its lonesome. But the narrative histories of our favorite bands are often pretty compelling, as well. So Hollywood often dramatizes the stories of bands that don't really exist in order to tell similar stories. But since you can't tell a nonexistent band's tale without actual music to back it up, you sorta need to fill that gap with legit compositions and real-life performances. Enter the "Fake Band"; i.e., a musical project that exists in the liminal spaces between fictional and factual existence, but that's still more or less obligated to somehow produce real music. In this edition of FYF, Saint and Jim take a look at some of the best not-exactly-real-but-still-kinda groups in entertainment history, as well as the (often great) music they put out.

Send us a text

Spoilers. We've all seen 'em, and we all hate 'em. Part of the reason why so many blockbusters do such huge business on opening weekends is because fans are afraid some loose-lipped loser will blow the plot points of a highly-anticipated film before they have a chance to see 'em for themselves. Hell, friend of the show Smo rightfully hates spoilers so much he got his own interstitial jingle. But what happens when the spoilers come not from a big-mouthed fan, but from the studios themselves? On this edition of FYF, Saint and Jim take a look at some instances of massive disconnect between the creatives who make the movies, and the marketing and merch folks who promote them — the latter of which often miss the "no spoilers" memo when it comes to not divulging big story elements.

Send us a text

It's one of the few universal truths of television: every show has at least one absolutely detestable weasel; that one character who seems to exist in the narrative for the sole purpose of making everybody else look wonderful by comparison. Sometimes it's a character that was legitimately set up to be a villain. Other times, It's a persona we were supposed to identify with, but that nonetheless displays a less-than-likeable arc over time. Or maybe it's even a precocious kid the producers decided to add to infuse a shot of fresh blood into an atrophied cast dynamic. Regardless, there are certain characters viewers just gleefully loathe, and usually for good reason. The irony is, these characters are usually so hated because the actors portraying them are uncommonly good at being bad — so there's a double-edged sword of cognitive dissonance to a lot of how we feel about them. On this edition of FYF, Saint and Jim step up to the pump, and fill up an entire tank's worth of vitriol for these  on-screen targets of deserved fandom ire...even as we celebrate (most of) the actors themselves.