Penny Men

The Penny Men are back at the podium for Season Two of the Wishbone Wish Off! Tom faces the ultimate challenge: is he as well-read as a dog?

From The Prince and the Pauper to Treasure Island, David & Goliath to Scandal in Bohemia, the quiz spirals into:

• Digressions about dogs on TV (RIP Soccer, hello Moose from Frasier)
• Animal actors in Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life
• Lindsay Lohan’s missing twin in The Parent Trap
• And whether Wishbone could’ve played Wolverine or Thomas Jefferson!

Along the way:

• The Bible canon
• The Count of Monte Cristo’s superhero vibes
• Tim Curry impressions
• Robin Williams’ one-man cinematic universe
• And why Joe Talbot was a terrible water boy!

It’s classic literature, childhood nostalgia, and dog costumes — all packed into the Penny Men’s game show chaos!

This week, the Penny Men crack open the PBS vault to revisit Wishbone — the little Jack Russell Terrier who crammed classic literature, sitcom subplots, and dog costumes into 20 minutes of TV magic!

Ben, Gregory, and Tom put Tom to the test: Has he read the books behind Wishbone’s punny episode titles like A Tail in Twain, The Slobbery Hound, and Bone of Arc? More importantly, can Tom guess which piece of classic literature each pun is based on?

Along the way, they spiral into:

• Mr. Mister
• Spinal Tap deleted scenes
• Fast food toys
• Dickens being paid by the word
• Sherlock Holmes cameos
• Don Quixote dream sequences
• And whether Wanda the neighbor deserved her own spinoff!

Also:

• Larry Bird rules
• Alan Thicke’s theme songs
• PBS tote bags
• And Spring-Heeled Jack!

Holy Sidekick Overload, Batman!

The Penny Men are putting on the domino masks and diving headfirst into the bird’s nest of Bat-history — from the flying trapeze tragedy that started it all to Nightwing’s infamous disco collar phase, from Jason Todd’s crowbar rendezvous to Tim Drake’s world’s-most-dedicated-fanboy detective work! Along the way, we’ll meet Damian Wayne, the murdery little ninja son you didn’t know Batman had, and check in on a few Robins who didn’t make it past the Elseworlds!

We’ll untangle pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, New 52, Rebirth, and at least three timelines that may or may not exist anymore, plus the weird trivia DC wishes we’d forget (and some they definitely should)!

Expect:

• One death, two resurrections, and a partridge in a Bat-tree
• More costume changes than a Vegas magic act
• Enough retcons to make your head spin like a Batarang
• The only podcast where “crowbar” and “character development” appear in the same sentence

(Warning: this episode contains multiple Robins, conflicting origin stories, and a dangerous amount of “Well, actually…”)

Four voices enter, one Crisis leaves! We welcome West Coast Pennyman John for his first mic battle and immediately hurl him into the deep end of DC’s wildest continuity tangle: Crisis on Infinite Earths!

It’s a conversation that ricochets from manga gateway drugs to the dusty Superman stash in Dad’s basement, from the endless rabbit hole of Who’s Who trivia dumps to sudden debates about whether Hawk & Dove could win a fight if only one of them had powers that day!

Along the way we:

• Visit Earth Prime’s real-life comic writers
• Side-eye the many doomed Supergirls
• Detour into Mike Grell’s dinosaur-infested underworld
• And somehow end up discussing that random duck in Journey to the Center of the Earth!

Expect:

• Canon deep dives that will melt your continuity chart
• Trivia side quests with zero exit strategy
• “Wait, who is that guy again?” moments every five minutes
• More character deaths than a Shakespeare marathon
• Time travel logic so wobbly it needs a neck brace
• And at least one wild theory we instantly regret

All that… until the next reboot wipes it from existence!

Grab your tray, hold the pickles, and prepare for whiplash — we’re speed-running decades of deep-fried nostalgia and corporate fever dreams! That’s right — this is the episode where the fries are cold, the milkshake machine is broken, and the lore is piping hot!

We’re hitting the gas straight into the drive-thru of your subconscious to discover:

• The secret McDonaldland exile list
• The BK Kids Club witness protection program
• And the true identity of the guy inside the Noid suit!

Featuring:

• Ronald McDonald in his crime-fighting, fry-hair prime
• Grimace back when he had four arms and felony charges
• Uncle O’Grimacy and his seasonal mint milkshake racket
• The Hamburglar’s prison break years
• Mayor McCheese’s corrupt burger regime
• Birdie the Early Bird’s failed breakfast coup
• Fry Kids vs. Fry Thieves: Dawn of Grease

We deep-dive into:

• The BK Kids Club — Kid Vid, Wheels, Jaws, Lingo, Boomer, IQ, Snaps, and JD — plus the forgotten ninth member: Tax Fraud!

We roast:

• The Domino’s Noid
• The Pizza Pizza Guy
• Hungry Howie’s inexplicable face
• Mr. Slice
• Pizza Head
• Pizza Face
• The Little Caesar
• And the mysterious “Papa” in Papa John’s!

We dig up:

• Taco Bell’s Gidget era
• Mac Tonight’s lounge act gone wrong
• The Rock-afire Explosion’s decapitated animatronics
• And Long John Silver’s mascot nobody remembers because he drowned in the ball pit!

Side quests include:

• The time Chuck E. Cheese became a skateboard punk
• Why Quiznos Spongmonkeys looked like disease symptoms
• And which mascots would win in a steel-cage match against Kool-Aid Man!

Plus:

• Fast food deep lore
• Accidental horror icons
• Mascots that joined late and ruined everything

And the terrifying possibility that your residual self-image is actually Kid Vid in sunglasses!

The 32X Anniversary Special

Welcome to The Penny Men, the only podcast that starts with a Sega 32X reference and somehow ends in a heated debate over Mockingbird’s publishing history!

In our 32nd episode (pure coincidence, we swear), we resurrect one of our earliest and most chaotic games: “Do You Want These Comics?”! Ben cracks open his reject bin, Tom and Gregory sift through stacks of Avengers, Thor, and the occasional Force Works pop-up cover, and we all get lost in a maze of Blue Beetles, West Coast Avengers politics, and Marvel werewolves with questionable fashion sense!

Along the way, we cover:

• The tragic tale of buying the wrong Starman
• The improbable origin of Great Lakes Avengers (Marvel’s answer to Justice League Antarctica)
• Why Thor villains are just better with Enchantress in the mix
• Comic covers that lied to us worse than 90s Superman issues
• The eternal mystery of how many Spider-Men is too many

It’s equal parts yard sale, history lesson, and roast session! Also, someone says “Buzzy the Hummingbird” and we just roll with it!

There’s laughter, obscure trivia, and enough comic shop smell in the air to make you nostalgic for 1994!

In our epic Saturday morning showdown, the hosts finally reveal their custom-built mystery-solving dream teams — and the claws, tentacles, and laser eyes come out! Four kids, one mascot, one superhero… versus three villains!

This week The Penny Men draft their ultimate Meddling Kid teams using the sacred Hanna-Barbera/Ruby-Spears formula:

• The Hunk
• The Babe
• The Loser
• The Optional undesirable
• A Scooby-style pet
• A superhero ring-in
• And three classic monsters or robots!

None of us revealed our picks ahead of time, so every lineup is a surprise (and yes, the predictions are sealed in the Phantom Jar until the end)!

Expect:

• Jabberjaw love
• Josie vs. the Shaggies
• Birdman sightings
• And some very questionable villain choices!

Play along—make your own lineup, send us your predictions, and tell us which team rules! All roads lead to the ultimate unmasking — and yes, it’s still Old Man Jenkins!

(Warning: Contains multiple unlicensed Scooby Snack references!)

The Penny Men gas up the Mystery Machine and take the long, winding route through the entire history of Scooby-Doo and his extended cartoon family tree!

We’re talking Scooby, Scrappy, Shaggy, and the rest — but also the knockoffs and spin-offs:

• Jabberjaw’s undersea drum solos
• Speed Buggy’s vroom-vroom detective work
• The Funky Phantom’s Revolutionary War ghost nonsense
• And even that time Josie and the Pussycats went to space!

It’s the golden age of the formula:

• Three kids and a dog
• Three kids and a shark
• Three kids and a ghost
• Three kids and a… sentient dune buggy?!

Along the way we stop for weird Hanna-Barbera public service shorts, inexplicable ‘80s reboots, and the mystery of why every culprit was somehow Old Man Jenkins in disguise!

(Special guest appearances by talking dune buggies, skateboarding sharks, and one very confused Great Dane!)

We fire up part two of our time travel movie talk, and things immediately get weirder—half because of the topic, half because of us!

This time we’re diving into

• 12 Monkeys (Brad Pitt as the patron saint of chaos)
• Time After Time (H.G. Wells vs. Jack the Ripper, because sure)
• About Time (time travel but make it romantic and British)
• Safety Not Guaranteed (classified ad, possible lunatic, actual heartwarming ending)
• The Adam Project
• Frequency
• Interstellar (the movie that made half of us cry and the other half Google “what is a tesseract?”)

We also hit the deep cuts: Millennium, Flight of the Navigator, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (time travel for whales!), and that Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner loses it over a jukebox!

We debate:

• The ethics of fixing the past vs. breaking it for fun
• Whether time travelers should be banned from playing the stock market
• The suspicious lack of dental problems in any century before 1950

We roast movies for forgetting language changes over centuries, note that apparently every time machine has a leather interior, and discover that the only people who don’t break the space-time continuum are… people in Hallmark movies, somehow!

Also featuring:

• The “don’t step on that” rule
• Why most time travelers would immediately get smallpox
• Which superhero movie does paradoxes best

And the age-old question—if you can warn your past self about a bad haircut, is it morally wrong not to?

Greg accidentally sings us into the episode with some questionable ’80s hits, before we reveal today’s topic: time travel movies!

We don’t just dabble—we barrel through The Time Machine, Rip Van Winkle, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Bill & Ted, Back to the Future, Terminator, Planet of the Apes, Timecop, Donnie Darko, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Hot Tub Time Machine, Primer (aka “Math the Movie”), Avengers: Endgame, The Butterfly Effect, Doctor Strange, The Flash, and that one Jean-Claude Van Damme flick where he does the splits on a kitchen counter like it’s a temporal necessity!

We argue over:

• fixed points in history
• paradox loops
• alternate timelines
• grandfather paradoxes
• predestination traps
• and whether “the butterfly effect” means you shouldn’t stomp on bugs or shouldn’t buy butterfly décor from HomeGoods

We wander into comics where the timelines are already broken, wrestling where chair shots are apparently a reset button, and sci-fi tropes where time travelers never pack snacks, cell chargers, or a clean change of socks!

Also featuring:

• the magic mailbox from The Lake House
• Christopher Reeve on Mackinac Island (Somewhere in Time)
• Dan Castellaneta’s “Ouch-a-ma-goucha”
• the morality of time heists
• the physics of time loops in Groundhog Day scenarios

And the eternal question—if you can go back in time, why not stop the invention of Crocs, clear cola, and the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie while you’re at it?