Succotash Epi338: First-of-the-Year Foursome!

Welcome to our first “real” Succotash episode of 2023! I’m Marc Hershon, your host for this week’s Episode 338, “First-of-the-Year Foursome”. Here’s wishing you and yours a fantastic New Year. As your Comedy Soundcast Soundcast, we’ll be bringing you a whole bunch of clips throughout this coming year. Mostly from comedy soundcasts – our name for “podcasts” – but we also vary from that from time to time. All to give you a taste of the hundreds of thousands of shows that are out there in Soundcastland. We sample ‘em for you with hopes you’ll be curious enough to go check ‘em out yourself.

When I say “we”, in case you’re new to this program, it’s all about me and my awesome co-host Tyson Saner. (Although we’re co-hosts, we prefer to divide and conquer, meaning that we each host alternating weeks.)

And the reason I call this the first “real” episode of the year? The past two installments of this soundcast were Succotash “Second Helpings, with the most recent one, Epi337, with your aforementioned loyal and faithful co-host Tyson, featured a reheating of Episode 173 with special guest Hunter Block. You can still catch wherever you find, get, or trap your soundcasts, including Soundclouds, Spotify, PodBay, iHeart Radio, YouTube, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Apple and Google Podcasts. Feel free to start your hunt right at our homesite, SucccotashShow.com, where the entire archive of almost 12 years of shows has been loving curated for you.

So what do I have in store for you, snippet-wise in this installment? I have delectable samples from SNAFU, The Retrospectors’ Today in History, The Worst Idea of All Time, and Unpopular Opinion. As if that’s not enough, we also have a sparkling, brand new advertisement from our longtime, non-paying, and completely fake sponsor Henderson’s Pants, featuring the new Bottoms Up Cargo Pants, with a design inspired by our very own Bill Heywatt.

CLIPS

SNAFU
Our first offering is a clip from a show hosted by comedian, actor, and now soundcaster Ed Helms, who you hopefully know from his stints on The Daily Show, The Office, and the Hangover movie franchise. The show’s description puts it best, in that the show is about history’s greatest screw-ups. The first season of SNAFU, which recently concluded, delved into the story of something called Able Archer 83, a NATO military exercise that almost touched off a nuclear was in November or 1983. Maybe. If you ever saw, heard about, or remembered a feature film from that same year: Wargames, starring Matthew Broderick as a kid who ends up tangling with a military battle simulator computer that, well, almost starts nuclear Armageddon. Or does it? Anyway, it’s a great show, uncovering stuff in history most of us probably don’t know anything about. As part of his uncovering the story, Ed talked to both Broderick and the director, John Badham. And after the season was mostly over, he recently dropped a bonus episode featuring his chats with the two Wargamers. We have a sample of his convo with Matthew…

The Retrospectors: This Day in History
This is a daily show, as evidenced by the title, but each episode only runs about 10 minutes. So it’s either a great kickoff to your other soundcasts or a nice palate cleanser between shows. Hosted by Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina, and Arion McNicoll, each episode is packed full of fascinating tidbits about something in particular that occurred that particular day in the past, as well as many of the trappings that surrounded it. Our clip comes from an episode that dropped last Friday called “Rink-O-Mania!” and rips the cover off the invention and introduction of the first roller skates…

The Worst Idea of All Time
I’m reasonably certain that you had to have heard of the next soundcast we’re featuring. Hailing from New Zealand, TWIOAT quickly got notoriety when it popped onto the scene in 2014. That’s because the two hosts, Guy Montgomery and Tim Batt, centered the whole freshman year of the show by watching and reviewing the Adam Sandler movie Grown Ups 2. Once a week. Every week. For an entire year. Then they went on to do the same thing with Sex and The City 2, Sex and The City, We Are Your Friends, and the Emmanuelle franchise of softcore porn films. Their latest challenge? The Fast and Furious franchise. The franchise. In reverse order. While they still mostly go it alone – who else would want this crazy duty – they occasionally bring in people that are fascinated by their ordeal. Just last week, they dredged through the details of F9, as the 9th installment is lovingly known, with none other than comedian, actor, and soundcast host, performer, producer, and all-time most frequent guest Paul F. Tompkins. In our clip, Paul starts to explain the plot of the film as if he had to pitch it to a crowd of people fleeing a burning theater.

Unpopular Opinion
Comedian and writer Adam Tod Brown and co-host Jeff bring you Unpopular Opinion every week. It’s often relevant news and pop culture-related topics, of which the guys often have contrary perspectives. Back a few weeks ago, in December, they dropped an episode entitled “The Ballad of P22”, which was the designation of an storied and infamous mountain lion roaming the Los Angeles environs. They talk about P22’s history and recent demise, some news stories about the Los Angeles city council, Dungeons and Dragons as therapy and the saga of Burnt Toast, which was the name of a cat that, well, just may have killed an alligator. Listen up…

That’s it for the clips this week but now is the time to get yourself ready for our next week’s show, Episode 339, because it is Tyson Saner’s ONE HUNDREDTH SHOW! I’m not sure what he’s got in store but man, am I glad we have him. Speaking honestly, if Tyson hadn’t accepted the challenge to jump in hear – first as a host to relieve me for a couple and then to alternate weeks with me since the start of the COVID pandemic, you would not have a Succotash Show to listen to today. So be sure to grab next week’s show from this feed and don’t be shy about sending in some congratulations, either on our @SuccotashShow Twitter and Instagram accounts but directly to him here at [email protected]!

See you week after next. And, in the meantime, if you get pulled over by a police officer and you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, just wait until he strolls up to the car, roll down the window and expect him to ask, “Have you heard anything good lately?” At that point, won’t you please pass him the Succotash?

— Marc Hershon

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