Before we get back to glowing space jewelry and deeply dysfunctional mentorship, The Con Men take a moment to remember Dolly Parton — songwriter, performer, philanthropist, businesswoman, champion of childhood literacy, and one of those exceedingly rare public figures who somehow seemed to belong to everybody.

Adrian and Dan also preview the absolutely stacked Arkansas Comic Con, featuring everyone from Ming-Na Wen, Danny Trejo and Tom Welling to Nana Visitor, Matt Ryan, Kane Hodder, X-Men voice actors, Red Dead Redemption alumni and enough wrestling talent to body-slam the Statehouse Convention Center.

LANTERNS.

Episode 2, “Trust Fall,” keeps Hal Jordan and John Stewart firmly in reluctant-buddy-cop territory while giving us our first real clues about just how powerful John may actually be.

Hal’s ring is running out of juice. His relationship with the Green Lantern oath is looking increasingly complicated. Rushville gets stranger by the minute.

And John accidentally creates a bird that survives after the ring is removed. It acts independently. It protects John while he’s unconscious. And everyone who understands Green Lantern powers seems considerably more impressed by this than John himself.

Meanwhile, Manhunters have entered the conversation, Sinestro knows considerably more than he’s saying, somebody is financing a deeply suspicious anti-alien militia, and Lex Luthor is beginning to look like an awfully obvious answer.

But sometimes?

The obvious answer is still the answer.

Lanterns has arrived in the DCU, and apparently somebody decided the best way to bring the Green Lantern Corps back to live action was True Detective with power rings.

Dan and Adrian dig into the premiere of HBO’s Lanterns, the strange state of DCU continuity, and the decidedly unhappy partnership between veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan and would-be replacement John Stewart.

Why does John’s father have such an absolutely bananas method of teaching his son not to be afraid? Is Hal training John, tormenting him, or both? Why does Hal seem happier without the ring than with it? What exactly happened in Nebraska? How much should we trust what the show has already shown us?

And perhaps most importantly:

Did we actually see what we think we saw?

Along the way, the Con Men wander through Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Creature Commandos, the increasingly fuzzy borders of DCU canon, Guy Gardner, Sinestro, Parallax, streaming-era attention spans, the lost art of waiting a week for television. Bonus Round: the childhood trauma of spending an entire summer wondering what happened to Locutus of Borg.

SPOILER WARNING

This episode contains extensive spoilers for the premiere of Lanterns. Watch first, then come back for some real down-home spoilers.

Course Description

PHIL 042: Nostalgia Philosophiæ is an interdisciplinary seminar examining the philosophical, cultural, and occasionally absurd nature of nostalgia, vintage media, and the collective memory of Generation X. Through case studies including Rush, Super Mario Bros. 3, The Wizard, Cheech & Chong, Popeye, The Honeymooners, Robin Williams, The Golden Girls, and the USS Flagg, students will investigate the criteria by which ordinary objects transcend age to become cultural artifacts.

Primary questions include:

• When does something become vintage?

• Is nostalgia measured in years, craftsmanship, or emotional resonance?

• What distinguishes retro from vintage?

• Why do conventions exist, and what role do they play in preserving popular culture?

• Can Popeye simultaneously exist as a comic strip, radio serial, cartoon, feature film, arcade game, and nostalgic touchstone?

Topics include the preservation of childhood media, inherited cultural memory, classic television, early video games, toys as historical artifacts, the evolution of counterculture into mainstream culture, and the strange realization that the things we grew up with are now museum pieces.

By the conclusion of this lecture, students should possess a greater appreciation for the cultural archaeology hidden within everyday entertainment—and perhaps accept the uncomfortable truth that they, too, may now qualify as vintage.

Required Listening: This episode.

Recommended Reading: Whatever comic book, VHS tape, cassette, or game cartridge happens to be closest to your chair.

Office Hours: Every Tuesday, wherever two nerds accidentally begin discussing something from forty years ago.

The people who shaped your childhood don’t stay forever — but the things they gave you do.

The news of Sam Neill’s death sends Dan and Adrian down a winding road through the actors, musicians, comedians and cultural icons who became fixtures in their lives. From Jurassic Park and a 33-year-old movie ticket to James Earl Jones, Sean Connery, David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, George Burns, Vincent Price, Princess Diana, Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Neil Peart, Freddie Mercury, Alan Rickman and more, this isn’t really an episode about death.

It’s about legacy.

It’s about realizing that a voice, a movie, a song or a ridiculous joke can become a timestamp in your own life — and that sometimes losing the person behind it feels strangely like losing a little piece of your childhood with them.

Naturally, somewhere along the way William Shatner becomes “Billy Shits,” Dragonheart is placed on trial, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen receives the faintest praise ever committed to podcast, and Dan reveals that Tom Clancy and Trent Reznor have something in common with the 40-year-old Macintosh currently sitting at his feet.

Because this is still The Con Men Show.

Who’s the actor, musician, creator or cultural icon you still miss?

San Diego Comic-Con 2026 has come and gone, and Dan and Adrian are unpacking everything that mattered—from Marvel's next big swing to DC's Lanterns, Spaceballs 2, Ghost Rider, Black Panther 3, Resident Evil, Rings of Power, and everything in between.

Along the way they celebrate Rick Moranis' triumphant return, debate the future of interconnected cinematic universes, lament the lack of Star Trek news during its 60th anniversary, and somehow end up discussing GI Joe convention exclusives, Twilight Zone festivals, and why Comic-Con isn't really about comic books anymore.

From Pong to PlayStation. From Atari to Xbox. This week, we're taking a long walk through video game history... not as historians, but as the kids who actually lived it.

Dan and Adrian swap stories about growing up during the golden age of gaming, remember the console wars between Nintendo and Sega, revisit the arcades that emptied our pockets, and celebrate the games that became more than entertainment. Along the way, they dive into Halo LAN parties, GoldenEye sleepovers, Mass Effect, Metroid, Mario, Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Spy Hunter, Mortal Kombat, and dozens more classics that shaped an entire generation.

Whether you remember renting a console in the blue plastic cases, reading Nintendo Power cover-to-cover, or arguing over which system was better, this episode is for anyone who ever picked up a controller and never really put it down.

What begins with Cotton Bureau notifications, AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail,” Jimmy Stewart impressions, and the Mandela Effect eventually becomes an exploration of the movie soundtracks and scores that permanently lodged themselves in Dan and Adrian’s brains.

The pair dig into why people so confidently misremember pop-culture history, from “Luke, I am your father” to Sinbad’s nonexistent genie movie, before finally remembering that they intended to discuss soundtracks. From there, the conversation moves through the glory days when movies came bundled with original songs, genre-spanning compilation albums, and music videos that were nearly as important as the films themselves.

Dan and Adrian revisit Prince’s Batman album, Weird Al’s UHF soundtrack, The Crow, Singles, Judgment Night, Spawn, Batman Forever, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I Am Sam, The Fifth Element, and plenty more. Along the way, they discuss Vanilla Ice’s suspiciously convenient Ninja Rap, Aerosmith’s revival through Run-DMC, the cultural power of “Kiss from a Rose,” and the lost art of giving heroes instantly recognizable musical themes.

The conversation closes with an important statistical discovery: nearly every episode of The Con Men Show contains a Star Trek reference. The three that do not must either be repaired—or buried beneath enough future episodes to become statistically insignificant.

It’s memory, music, movies, and nostalgia, played like fusion jazz—but not as smart.

What childhood toy would you buy back today, regardless of how financially irresponsible the decision might be?

Dan and Adrian rummage through the toy boxes of their youth, revisiting everything from Figment, Merlin, Speak & Spell, and Computertron to He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Boglins, Dino-Riders, Captain Power, and vintage Star Trek figures.

They talk about the toys they kept, the collections they lost, the friends who owned the playsets nobody else could afford, and the brutal adult cost of replacing Optimus Prime’s missing hands. They also explore the wonderfully questionable safety standards of 1980s toys, including sparks, cap guns, slime, and toy weapons that looked considerably more convincing than they probably should have.

It’s an hour of childhood memories, collector goblin behavior, thoughtful discussion about cartoons as storytelling, and the inevitable Star Trek reference.

Tell us: What toy survived your childhood, what toy disappeared, and what toy are you still trying to buy back?

Every fan has an origin story.

This week, Dan and Adrian trace the roots of comic conventions back to the 1960s before diving into the comics, characters, and moments that shaped their own fandoms. From the earliest Comic-Cons and the rise of San Diego Comic-Con to first comic books, Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, MAD Magazine, and the changing landscape of collecting, the conversation becomes a nostalgic tour through decades of geek culture.

Along the way they revisit the birth of cable television, remember growing up alongside MTV, Nickelodeon, and FOX, discuss why some 1990s comics never became retirement plans, and share what they’re currently reading and watching—including Spider-Man Noir, GI Joe, Robotech, and more.

Whether you grew up reading comics until the staples gave out or discovered superheroes through Saturday morning cartoons, this episode is a trip back to where it all started.

This week on The Con Men Show, Adrian and Dan take a nostalgia-fueled run through the strange, glorious, and occasionally cursed world of cartoons that became movies, movies that became cartoons, and toy lines that became entire childhood operating systems.

The conversation starts with Masters of the Universe, from He-Man lore and the Sword of Power to the 1987 Cannon Films live-action movie, Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella’s Skeletor, budget shortcuts, and why setting Eternia mostly on Earth still feels like a crime scene with shoulder pads. From there, the guys dive into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers: The Movie, G.I. Joe: The Movie, The Smurfs, Star Wars animation and live-action crossovers, GoBots, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Super Mario Bros., and the long list of shows still begging for the big-screen treatment.

Along the way: Optimus Prime trauma, Duke’s suspiciously convenient coma, Sergeant Slaughter, Smurfette discourse, Captain Lou Albano, ThunderCats, SilverHawks, BraveStarr, M.A.S.K., Robotech, and the eternal question: which beloved 80s property deserves another shot, and which one should have stayed in the toy aisle?