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?

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!