Penny Men

You Can’t Have These Comics – From Paul Blart to Pep Comics

Paul Blart Mall Cop! Ralph Snart! Henry Winkler! Escalators vs. Elevators! Toy penguins climbing fake mountains! The Fonz jumps sharks, wrestles in The One and Only, and somehow we end up at You Can’t Have These Comics!

• Independent blob demons (Yets!)
• X-Men “Negative One” month (Thunderbird, Warpath, Rachel Summers, Bolivar Trask’s mutant son)
• Transformers’ worst bot ever — Ballpoint the evil pen — and why every villain lineup needs a Sharkticon!

Plus:

• Brak CDs
• “The Hootily Hoo”
• Milo & Otis underwear swaps
• Grape Ape standards
• Lobster butter autographs
• Archie’s endless spinoff multiverse (Pureheart, Hot Dog, Jughead’s Time Police, Archie vs. Predator)
• Pep Comics jungle cosplay
• Harvey Comics roll call
• Monkees style hijinks
• Sonic/Sabrina crossovers
• Riverdale cave-people
• And Atari Force mini-comics!

It’s a full-stack platter of mall cops, mutant cops, talking animals, sentient office supplies, and comics you definitely can’t have!

The Penny Men are back with another title-only movie pitch, and this week it’s the mysteriously ominous “The Last Return!” Nobody knows what it means, but that’s never stopped us before!

In this episode you’ll get:

• At least three completely different movies with the same name!
• One tragic revenge saga, one unhinged noir fever dream, and one… well, let’s just say Tom brought something weird to the table!
• A heartfelt goodbye to Blockbuster (or possibly a lawsuit waiting to happen)!
• Too many theories about VHS tapes for a 2025 podcast!
• The phrase “time-traveling librarian” used in a sentence like it’s normal!
• A reminder that we really should not be allowed near Hollywood!

So is The Last Return a gritty reboot, a cosmic finale, or just what happens when you forget to rewind your rental? Tune in to find out!

The Penny Men are back, and this time they’re armed with nothing but a title: The Last Return!

That’s it! No notes, no outlines, no budget — just three guys and a microphone trying to spin cinematic gold out of a vague, Blockbuster-sounding phrase!

Gregory pitches a Mad Max–by-way-of-the-library epic, where one man must carry the most overdue book in history across a wasteland of burnt trees, weird McDonaldland warlords, and Christopher Lloyd’s gang of Foot Clan rejects!

Will the library accept the last return? Or will Judge Doom himself burn the Dewey Decimal System to the ground?

Then Ben takes it to space — literally! His version is an intergalactic city-station where the last contact with Earth happened a century ago, known only as “the last return!” Pirates, refugees, and descendants of every Earth nation live in a drifting New York–sized station, trying to survive without governments, supplies, or alien attacks (that never showed up in the first place)!

Tom… may or may not have a pitch! But he’s got a notepad, a few sarcastic asides, and an encyclopedic knowledge of movies the other two keep accidentally plagiarizing!

Along the way:

• Is this secretly a PageMaster sequel?
• Why does every apocalypse come with French fry armor?
• Can we cast every Christopher? (Lloyd, Walken, Pine, Evans, Pratt, Hemsworth, Columbus?)
• And would Wishbone still be able to read after the end of civilization?

It’s the ultimate crossover of post-apocalyptic trash heaps and space-station politics! Grab your overdue fines and strap in — it’s The Last Return!

Saturday mornings were a lawless frontier! If it existed, it had a cartoon! Sneakers, cereal, California raisins — heck, even Chuck Norris had his own animated kids’ show, and the man barely needed dialogue in real life!

This week, the Penny Men dig into that strange golden age and rediscover the forgotten relic known as Laser Tag Academy (1986), a series so committed to selling you a toy gun that it casually rewrote all of human history!

Naturally, this leads the boys down a rabbit hole of “was that real or just a dream I had at 3 a.m. after too much chocolate milk?” Did MC Hammer really fight crime with magic shoes (Hammerman, yes)? Did Damon Wayans really make a cartoon about himself (Waynehead, yes)? Did Rubik the Amazing Cube actually exist (tragically, yes)? And why didn’t Hammer Pants get their own spin-off series where the pants themselves solved mysteries?

From there, it’s only a short leap to building out a new contender in the Hookshot & Brickman universe: Laser Tag Guy!

Is he:

• A mall cop dropout who insists the plastic blasters are “set to kill”?
• A time-traveling vigilante who blacks out every time the strobe lights kick in?
• A desperate birthday party entertainer who thinks Chuck E. Cheese is a worthy nemesis?
• Or all of the above, but with an expired Pizza Hut coupon as his calling card?

By the end, one thing is clear: the line between real Saturday morning nostalgia and collective hallucination is extremely thin, and the Penny Men are determined to cross it, laser vests glowing in the dark!

The Penny Men take a swing at world-building with the launch of their own comic universe: Hookshot & Brickman!

What starts as two goofball heroes quickly spirals into a full-blown rogues’ gallery, supporting cast, love interests, and crossover event potential!

Along the way, Gregory, Ben, and Tom debate:

• The logistics of a grappling hook gimmick
• Whether a guy made of bricks is intimidating or just masonry cosplay
• And how many catchphrases one superhero is legally allowed to have!

From tragic backstories to Saturday-morning-cartoon vibes, the gang designs a superhero line that would either dominate the 90s toy aisle or get cancelled after two issues!

This week on The Penny Men, we dive headfirst into the wild spectrum of superhero storytelling—starting with the corniest of corners: a Super Friends-style team-up!

We’re talking:

• One-note heroes
• International diversity
• And powers that make zero sense but look great in a coloring book!

Then, we slam the tone dial all the way down to gritty reboot territory, where the same characters are reimagined as brooding vigilantes with deep scars, moral compromises, and citywide conspiracy boards!

It’s spandex vs. leather, catchphrases vs. trauma arcs, and the eternal question: which version do we secretly want to watch more?

Hookshot’s rolling through town on skates with a grappling hook and brass knuckles, while Yo-Yo the Moon Monkey bounces in with his moon boots and trusty yo-yo! The Shabby Cabbie pulls up as a part-time ally, and the chalkboard-screeching Disciplinarian keeps everyone in line!

But looming over them all is Hookshot’s Superman-type brother, flawless in every way except for a strange weakness to imitation leather! And in the shadows, The Butler quietly runs crime through fake rehabilitation charities, serving as a meek servant by day and a mastermind by night!

It’s a lineup of oddball heroes, bitter rivalries, and one very sinister butler!

The Penny Men boot up their Commodore 64-bit Draft Lineup for episode seventy — which, naturally, means derailing into Sean shout-outs, ocean water hygiene debates, SpongeBob references, and whether Ween belongs in Crazy Taxi!

Gregory pitches Batman water-skiing, Ben accidentally rebrands the Justice League, and Tom tries to list Pixar movies but keeps getting sidetracked by Dick Tracy villains (Big Boy, Mumbles, Pruneface, Flattop, and yes, Littleface)!

Somehow, The Princess Bride makes it in:

• Abridged books
• Missing chapters
• The true identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts
• And why this fairy-tale parody is Shrek’s more literate cousin!

Meanwhile, the tangents are relentless:

• The Roger Corman Fantastic Four
• Smash Mouth vs. the Butthole Surfers
• Kingdom Hearts theme lyrics
• Bands with intentionally misspelled animal names (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Chikn Biskit, Def Leppard)
• And the still-unexplained “Girlver Slurfer”!

All that, plus:

• The official hierarchy of swords (rapier, cutlass, “that one from Final Fantasy”)
• Worst superpowers to get from a vending machine
• How to fight a Rodent of Unusual Size with only a breadstick
• And which member of The Commodores could beat André the Giant in arm wrestling (spoiler: none)!

To the list, to the zinger, to the pain!

We didn’t want to say the funny number, so we flipped it upside down and called it 64! That spiraled into:

• Commodore 64 nostalgia (the games, the loading screens, the beige plastic smell)
• Oregon Trail dysentery trauma (plus: cholera, snakebites, broken wagon axles, and a suspicious number of “you have died” screens)
• Sled dogs with broken legs (and whether oxen can row if you shout at them through a megaphone)

From there, we take a long detour into the pixelated backroads of:

• RollerCoaster Tycoon (and the ethics of $25 bathrooms)
• Sid Meier’s Pirates! (the only game where you can dance, duel, and get scurvy in the same afternoon)
• Zoombinis (featuring the allergy wall, the pizza troll, and that smug little “yep, we solved it” walk)
• Secret of Monkey Island — including:

We debate whether Guybrush Threepwood is immortal, whether the three-headed monkey is real, and whether Carmen Sandiego is secretly just a geography tutor with bad PR!

Also featuring:

• “It’s not your turn, my friend” frog (the original rage quit)
• Dabney Coleman’s extended video game universe
• Lode Runner monks
• And the eternal question: Did Hot Tub Time Machine rip off Rescue the Scientist… or was it the other way around?

Zinger count for this episode: at least 12, depending on whether you count “scurvy jokes” as zingers!

Welcome back to the 64-Bit Podcast, where the film reels are melted, the facts are suspect, and the Saturday mornings never ended!

It’s part two of our deep dive into non-Disney animation, and things are getting even weirder! We’re plumbing the bargain bins of memory for every knockoff, fever dream, and forgotten toon that never quite cracked the vault!

This time, the Penny Men and friends wade through psychedelic fairy tales, European oddities, and a parade of cartoons that feel legally inadvisable! We’ve got rotoscoped freak-outs and communist gnomes!

Is this media archaeology or a sleepover hallucination? Yes!

We hit:

• The other Yellow Submarine
• Czech claymation war crimes
• The Fievel Cinematic Universe
• That time Garfield went full horror
• And the greatest cartoon villain you’ve never heard of

Plus:

• Live-action elves
• Animated Bela Lugosi
• No Anastasia discourse
• 200% more Bakshi

Blow the dust off your bootleg DVDs and join us for another trip through animation’s forgotten fringes! You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll ask, “Wait, who let this go to air?”

🎞️ Featuring:

• More obscure toons than a LaserDisc collector could handle
• Hot takes from three unpaid animation professors
• And a whole lotta goblin energy

Roll tape! Hit play! Get re-booted!