Succotash Epi342: A February Foursome of Clips

Welcome to another installment of Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast! This is Episode 342 and, each week, we’re edging ever closer to April 2023, which will mark the 12th Anniversary of this show. I’m your every-other-weekly host, Marc Hershon, and I want to thank everyone who has taken time out to Venmo us donations to help keep this show going!

Our grand total since first announcing that we’d be accepting funds through Venmo a couple months back is…zero. Zip. Zilch. Apparently you guys aren’t really fans of commercial-free content — and no, I don’t count our phony Henderson’s Pants ads — so we’ll stop beating the Venmo drum. Instead, this week starts my concerted effort to find this show some REAL paying sponsors. A lot of the shows that we feature clips from have them, so why shouldn’t we? It’s high time that me and our co-host, Tyson Saner, start to see some kind of return for cranking this thing out every week. (So, if you’re interested in sponsoring Succotash, just email our sales team at [email protected].)

The aforementioned Tyson was here last week with Epi341, a show entitled “Cartoons, Shakespeare & Tinseltown”, a show that included a trio of clips from The Bancroft Brothers Animation Podcast, Willy Shakers, and The Hollywood Experience. You can still grab that handful of Succotash from your favorite soundcast distribution points, including Apple and Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and so many others, not the least of which is our homesite, SuccotashShow.com. That’s also where our archive lives, with over 11 years of clips n’ chats.

I myself have a “February Foursome of Clips” in store for you in this episode. We’ll be hearing from Extra Nuggets, Hollywood Gold, and The Downside, as well as from a show that we’ve featured before, one of the hosts is not just a friend-of-Succotash but a close personal friend of mine, and that I have appeared on several times including just last week. It’s Monster Party and we had a great time talking about…well, you’ll hear it when you jack into the 'sode.

This week’s installment (until we can find some sponsors with some real money to bring to the table), is brought to you by Henderson’s Pants timely Parka Pants, just the stuff to keep your chilly getaway sticks from snapping off in the cold.

CLIPS

Monster Party
Let’s get this Succotash party started with what I was just talking about a moment ago – the Monster Party soundcast! The four gents behind this show came up with this idea when they were crashing in a hotel at the San Diego Comic Con a number of years ago. As they partied and got increasingly blotto, their discussion turned into a loud argument about what monster or sci-fi or superhero or action movie, TV show, or comic book was better than the others. Realizing this was a nerd idea sure to get them laid, the fab foursome — Matt Weinhold, Shawn Sheridan, Larry Strothe, and James Gonis — kicked off their show. I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest a number of times and just last week was the latest. Their topic: Superhero Obscura. Namely, digging up some of the most forgotten and unknown comic book heroes ever to don a cape. Since I was the guest of honor, I sliced out a snippet where I talked about the mysterious and forgotten…Captain Marvel! No, not that one. The other one. No, no, the OTHER one. Never mind. You’ll see…

Hollywood Gold
At a couple dozen episodes under her belts, the host of the Hollywood Gold soundcast, Daniela Taplin Lundberg — a movie producer in her own right — interviews other producers and filmmakers to help us look under the hood of some of the films we know and love. I grabbed a clip from an episode that dropped last month where she focued on the movie The Big Sick, written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, which was a fantastic, kind-of-surprise hit six years ago. SIX years ago? Yes. 2017. Crazy. Anyway, she caught up with her old friend and the director of the movie, Michael Showalter, to deep dive into how this movie got made. The clippage is about some of the casting of the film and the process of getting it down in the funny, touching, sweet style that he did.

Extra Nuggets
Even as the soundcast ocean continues to fill with thousands upon thousands of shows, I’m amazed at how inventive so many soundcast creators have gotten at finding that little niche, that undiscovered nugget – if you will – of a subject or fodder for a new soundcast. Nugget is exactly the right word for this next clip, which comes from a relatively new show.  So new, in fact, that they only have about a dozen episodes dropped at this point, going back to October of last year. The hosts are Dan Rubenstein and Adam Amin. Dan’s one of the brains behind the Solid Verbal Media soundcast network, and Adam is a sports announcer with Fox Sports. The hook to their show Extra Nuggets is to take categories from old Jeopardy shows and challenge each other to answer them. But it goes beyond trivia. They only tackle a couple of categories an episode because every answer leads into some extra nuggets of information behind the topic. On a recent drop, one topic was “Historic Planes”. See how much of this stuff you know…

The Downside
Our final clip for this episode takes a kind of cynical look at the world around us. Or at least around host Gianmarco Soresi. He’s a comedian and a “lifelong cynic”, according to the show’s description and it seems when he brings in a guest who’s not a stranger to cynicism, like the amazing droll Todd Barry, the level of cynicism goes up exponentially. Here the guys are talking about when Todd started out doing standup back in Miami.

Tyson Saner will be here in this same feed next week with Episode 343 and some entertainments for you. So grab yourself some of that. And, if by some chance you’re flying high over American soil, somehow having found yourself attached to a Chinese spy balloon, and an Air Force fighter jet scrambles by and the pilot yells out of the cockpit at Mach 2 “Have you heard anything good lately?”, won’t you please pass him the Succotash?

— Marc Hershon