Penny Men

Welcome back to The Penny Men, where we’re still lost in the Cousin Oliver Zone and the exits are blocked by secondary mascots!

In Part 2 of our deep dive, we move past the classics and start unearthing the weird ones — the tagalongs, tone-shifters, and “Who asked for this?” additions that history forgot!

We’re talking:

• Orbity, the Jetsons’ moon-puppy who brought “season three” energy to a season one show
• Mork from Ork, beaming into Happy Days just to beam out again into his own sitcom
• Bubsy, the video game mascot who thought he could be Sonic
• Seven, Married… with Children’s mystery child who disappeared
• The inexplicable Baby Sinclair from Dinosaurs, who became a catchphrase machine

And we’re not done!

We go into:

• That one weird season where Diff’rent Strokes decided it needed a second kid
• Cousin Skeeter, because why wouldn’t a Nickelodeon sitcom need a talking puppet?
• Scrappy-Dum — yes, Scrappy-Doo had his own country cousin
• The Animaniacs’ Rita and Runt, and the strange spin-off energy they brought

We also somehow end up discussing:

• Disney’s mid-90s push for “cute alien mascots” that nobody remembers
• Cartoons where the new character just… replaced the old one without explanation
• Shows that added babies purely for the merch sales
• Why the “second mascot” is almost always the most unhinged

It’s Part 2, so the nostalgia’s deeper, the lists are stranger, and the zingers are flying like t-shirt cannons!

By the end, you’ll be thinking: If I show up now, do I get my own theme song?

Strap in, folks — we’re heading straight into the Cousin Oliver Zone!

You know the place! That strange, shimmering stretch of television history where perfectly fine shows suddenly decided, “Hey, what if we added… one more guy?”

This week, Ben, Gregory, and Tom chart the strange history of characters who arrived late to the party and somehow stole the spotlight! In other words, we dig into the great (and sometimes disastrous) tradition of late-arrival sidekicks, mascots, and spotlight thieves!

We’re talking:

• Scrappy-Doo crashing Mystery Inc. like an uninvited chihuahua at a Great Dane party
• Cousin Oliver moving in with the Bradys, bringing a bowl cut and the kiss of death
• Urkel turning “Family Matters” into “The Steve Urkel Show” without even trying
• The Great Gazoo, proving “prehistoric” doesn’t mean “alien-free”
• Wario, evolving from tennis court menace to Mario’s most profitable frenemy

And because this is us, we go further:

• Fonzie’s hostile takeover of Happy Days
• Tommy Oliver singlehandedly becoming the Power Ranger
• Popeye muscling into Thimble Theatre like he owned the place
• Wrestling factions that just… kept… adding… members (looking at you, NWO)

We also detour through:

• Sailor Moon’s sudden “cute mascot” phase
• Sonic the Hedgehog’s ballooning friend list (do we really need Big the Cat?)
• Blondie’s pivot from a comic about a flapper to a strip about her sandwich-obsessed husband
• The politest vaudeville trio ever — Alphonse, Gaston, and Leon

It’s part nostalgia trip, part pop-culture autopsy, and part “Wait, who remembers Orbity?”

By the end, you’ll be asking yourself: “Am I a main character… or did I just show up in season 5?”

Welcome to The Penny Men, the only podcast that starts with one topic, spins the wheel, and ends up in five different decades of pop culture before the first ad break! Tonight’s coin flip topic? Sidekicks! …Which quickly derailed into NES nostalgia, obscure toy lines, and which jelly bean flavor turns your blob into a ketchup-hating teleport machine!

We’re talking:

• Cousin Olivers
• Toy tie-ins
• Crazy Bones
• Muscle Men
• Boglins
• And the mysterious Transformers that become sippy cups!

We detour into Little Nemo, A Boy and His Blob, and the sadistic architecture of Battletoads’ motorcycle level! The NES hits keep coming—DuckTales, Blaster Master, River City Ransom, Low G Man, Astyanax—plus the eternal Megaman II vs. III debate, the glory of Jackal, and the curse of Fester’s Quest!

And because we can’t help ourselves, we wander into:

• Captain N airdate logistics
• The worst arcade quarter-eating tactics
• The Konami Code
• Licensed game highs (Gremlins 2, Goonies II) and lows (Back to the Future)
• And the crossover chaos of Battletoads & Double Dragon!

We even drift into X-Men deep cuts, luck cults, cereal box promotions, video store rental roulette, and the eternal mystery of “Why was this even a cartoon?”

Somehow, this also becomes the episode where we invent the next dozen Penny Men episodes—half baked, fully chaotic, and scribbled in the margins!

It’s sidekicks! It’s 8-bit dreams! It’s pop culture tangents multiplying like Mogwai at midnight! In other words, it’s The Penny Men in their purest form!

Welcome to the B-side of Christmas, where the tinsel’s tangled, the canon is questionable, and the Home Alone sequels never stop coming! We start with Tolkien’s elves vs. Santa’s elves (V or no V?), detour into Dudley Moore at the North Pole, hit all six Home Alones (and their continuity crimes), and somehow end up in a cage match between The Grinch, Pee-wee Herman, and Nicolas Cage in Trapped in Paradise!

We’re talking:

• Perfect Strangers tearjerkers that will melt even the Grinch’s heart
• Prehistoric Christmas paradoxes (what was the gift exchange policy in the Jurassic period?)
• Phil Hartman deep cuts that deserve Criterion releases
• Wrestling Santas and their steel-chair stockings
• The Urkel–Sonic–Inspector Gadget Holiday Cinematic Universe (a box set you can’t buy, but you can dream)

Along the way, we ask the hard questions:

• What’s the optimal reindeer-to-sleigh horsepower ratio?
• How many snowmen does it take to pull off a heist?
• Which holiday mascot could win American Gladiators?
• And if you turn the Muppet Christmas Carol soundtrack backwards, will Michael Caine reveal the true meaning of Boxing Day?

It’s festive, it’s fractured, and it’s exactly the kind of holiday chaos you didn’t know you needed—half gift, half regift, all Penny Men!

Grab your ugly sweaters and a thermos of spiked eggnog, because we’re plunging headfirst into 18 Rankin/Bass Christmas specials—those gloriously weird, stop-motion nightmares that somehow became holiday icons (and childhood trauma)!

From Rudolph’s questionable red nose to penguins with more attitude than Santa’s elves on overtime, we unpack every yuletide oddity, including:

• Puppet designs so bizarre they’d make Tim Burton say, “Uh… maybe not.”
• Voice actors channeling pure holiday magic (or just desperately trying to get paid)
• Plot twists twisted tighter than Aunt Marge’s Christmas tinsel after three rounds of fruitcake
• Sequels that nobody asked for but we’ll review anyway, because holiday misery loves company
• Holiday clichés flipped on their heads harder than a reindeer on ice
• Santa Claus lore so weird you’ll wonder if Kris Kringle’s been hitting the nog a little too hard
• Sidekicks ranging from sassy penguins who should’ve gotten their own Netflix specials to talking donkeys who really need a career change

We’ll make you laugh, cringe, and maybe question your entire childhood—and possibly your taste in animation—while riding this sleigh through puppetry gone wild, song parodies that sound like Santa’s karaoke night, and moments so bizarre they belong in the North Pole’s secret vault of “What were they thinking?”

Warning: May cause sudden urges to rewatch Rudolph with a cocktail in hand and an eye twitch! Prepare for chaos, nostalgia, and enough holiday weirdness to jingle your bells off! Ho ho hold onto your candy canes—this is one jolly rollercoaster you don’t want to miss!

1. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

2. Cricket on the Hearth

3. The Little Drummer Boy

4. Frosty the Snowman

5. Santa Claus is Comin' To Town

6. 'Twas the Night Before Christmas

7. The Year Without a Santa Claus

8. The First Christmas

9. Frosty's Winter Wonderland

10. Rudolph's Shiny New Year

11. The Little Drummer Boy, Book II

12. Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

13. The Stingiest Man in Town

14. Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July

15. Jack Frost

16. Pinocchio's Christmas

17. The Leprechaun's Christmas Gold

18. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

Welcome back to The Penny Men, where “so bad it’s good” is just the start! In this sequel session, Ben, Gregory, and Tom keep the cinematic confessions rolling, from animated oddities to misunderstood blockbusters!

We’re talking:

• Flight of Dragons – Rankin/Bass wizard wars, dragon encyclopedias, and James Earl Jones as evil Magneto-in-a-robe
• Comedy sequel safety net – Wayne’s World 2, Ghostbusters II, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Dumb & Dumber the cartoon, and the Home Alone multiverse
• Cult cartoon corner – Wish Kid, Eek! the Cat, Terrible Thunderlizards, Better Off Dead, Three Stooges pie-throw stats
• Underrated oddballs – The Shadow, Dick Tracy, Rocketeer, Mystery Men, Man Who Knew Too Little
• Animated treasures – Three Caballeros, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Don Rosa’s duck diplomacy

Plus:

• Space opera spectacle with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
• The Phantom Menace defense (Jar Jar and all)
• The George Lucas / Dan Aykroyd “someone please edit me” theory
• Flintstones live-action, Jetsons wishcasting, and why Carpool is perfect ’90s chaos
• When cult status comes late (Dark Crystal, Willy Wonka, It’s a Wonderful Life)

If you like your nostalgia weird, your blockbusters messy, and your animation segments ending with “and then he wakes up,” this is your kind of bad!

Welcome back to The Penny Men, where the popcorn’s stale, the critics are wrong, and guilty pleasures get their day in court! This week, Ben, Gregory, and Tom champion the cinematic underdogs — the ones you love, the ones they hate, the ones you can’t quite explain!

We’re talking:

• Disney’s Black Hole – killer robots, middle-aged astronauts, and a trippy, cosmic ending no one saw coming
• Alien from L.A. – Kathy Ireland, squeaky voice, smoky dystopia, and a dad-lost-underground plot that somehow works
• Buckaroo Banzai – physicist, rock star, race car driver… spy? Why not?
• Matrix sequels – love ’em or hate ’em, they’re bursting with lore, AIs, and unexpected curveballs
• Cult comfort food – Night of the Comet, Blues Brothers 2000, Beverly Hills Teens, Gremlins 2, and more

Plus:

• NES nostalgia (River City Ransom, Empire Strikes Back)
• One-shot-kill video game challenges (Max Payne, Tomb Raider)
• Jack Kirby’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comic
• The Beverly Hills Teens intro on loop
• “Good, bad” vs. “bad, good” movie taxonomy

It’s part film court, part pop culture treasure hunt, and part “remember that one scene…?” If you’ve ever said, “It’s terrible — I love it,” welcome home!

Welcome to The Penny Men, where the fossils are fresh and the facts are foggy! This week, your three favorite non-paleontologists take a big bite out of dinosaur media! From the silent roars of Gertie the Dinosaur to the Cretaceous chaos of Jurassic Park, Gregory, Tom, and Ben chronicle the prehistoric parade of dinos on screen, in comics, and deep in the toy aisle!

We're talking stop-motion legends, lava-lamp lava pits, Land Before Time sequels (all 19?), dino-themed wrestlers, Power Rangers trivia, and that one William Katt movie nobody remembers! Whether it's puppets, pixels, or poorly dubbed pterodactyls, if it has a tail and teeth, it made it into this episode!

Plus:

• Dinobots
• Devil Dinosaur
• Dink the Little Dinosaur
• And a very confused discussion about Animorphs

It’s a prehistoric pop culture rampage—and it’s all off the top of our fossilized heads!

Still hungry? Sink your teeth into:

• The Dino Riders toy line (and its baffling backstory)
• A surprisingly in-depth ranking of every cinematic T. rex
• Hanna-Barbera’s Valley of the Dinosaurs vs. Denver the Last Dinosaur
• The era-defining chaos of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs
• Why Tom thinks dinosaurs should be allowed to vote

Episode sponsored by: Was (Not Was), the official band of The Penny Men!

Everybody walk the dinosaur!

Welcome back to The Penny Men, where the Moblins are multiplying and the timelines are diverging! This week, we’re pulling out our Master Swords and diving headfirst into Hyrule for an epic, full-length breakdown of The Legend of Zelda—the games, the lore, the cartoons, the CD-i disasters, and whether or not this thing could actually work as a movie!

Join Tom, Gregory, and Ben as they dodge Tektites, ride the Wind Fish, and debate the best game of all time (spoiler: it keeps changing)! Tom takes on the role of Zelda professor emeritus, guiding us through 40 years of rupees, masks, and alternate timelines! Gregory reveals his hidden past as the Crazy Door Opener, and Ben defends Majora’s Mask with all the strength of the Triforce of Opinions!

In this quest:

• 8-bit swordplay and Atari childhoods
• From top-down classics to open-world masterpieces
• Which Link reigns supreme?
• “Excuuuuuse me, princess!” – and other cartoons that shaped a generation
• Just how many Zeldas are there?
• And finally, our pitches for the inevitable Legend of Zelda movie (yes, we go there)

Whether you're a lifelong Hylian or just trying to find the next dungeon, this episode is your Cucco-dodging deep dive into Nintendo’s most mythic franchise! Ganon better watch his back!

It’s dangerous to go alone! Listen to this!

Welcome back to the Super Mario Memory Zone, where the pipes are leaky, the accents are dubious, and the opinions come flying faster than a blue shell on Rainbow Road! This time, it’s all about The Super Mario Bros. Movie—yes, the 2023 one—and the Penny Men have thoughts!

We’re talking Pratt, Peach, Bowser’s piano ballads, and whether or not the whole thing should’ve been live-action again (just kidding... maybe)! Gregory dissects the Mushroom Kingdom city planning, Ben wants to know why the penguins were so angry, and resident Mario scholar Tom brings out the big canon—decades of knowledge, deep cuts, and strong feelings about the Koopa family tree!

This episode contains:

• One sprawling Mario timeline
• A few tears for Captain Lou Albano
• Strong opinions on whether Yoshi should ever talk
• A heated debate over which Mario voice reigns supreme

Bonus: Is it a kids’ movie? A Nintendo commercial? A perfect cinematic artifact of our time? Yes! No! Maybe!

🍄 Featuring:

• 3 nostalgic hosts
• 1 Mario expert
• 0 Charles Martinet monologues

It’s-a us! And we have questions!