Episode 43 – Marv Wolfman Interview!

A Comic Book and Animation Legend

A Comic Book and Animation Legend

This is it guys!  This an interview with a Wolfman…  Marv Wolfman!  We have as a special guest host once again, Thomas Revor(how could we not get a big time comic book fan with a guest like Marv Wolfman?).  This is by far my favorite interview yet.  We hope you all enjoy listening to it as much as we all enjoyed doing it.

Topics Covered
The Death and Rise of Optimus Prime
Working with Sunbow
Writing Comics vs Cartoon episodes
SUPERMAN!
The Beast Machines Series Bible

Episode 42: GI Joe

Ze Viper is Coming....

Today, we talk about some REAL AMERICAN HEROES with Thomas Revor and Eric(Eric slips out silently… is Eric a Ninja?).    80’s Patriotism, Consistent animation, hot chicks… this cartoon had it all!  Well, except for people hitting targets worth a darn, but it was the 80’s!

Topics Covered:
Jello fights
Punching a dog!
The Cobra Clutch
Five-Part Episodes
Whatever happened to Major Bludd?
A Cobra to the heart!(and you’re to blame!)
…And knowing is half the battle!

Before Team America, THIS was “America, FUCK YEAH!”

How are our Commentaries?

So guys, we’ve started adding commentaries to the end of some eps.  We want to know what you guys think.  Should we continue doing these commentaries?  Stop them alltogether?  Remove them from the regular podcast and have them as extras?

Vote now!

[poll id=”2″]

The Shirt of Awesome

This weekend was a rather lazy weekend, except for of course recording a new ep on Saturday.  The eps were rather awesome, so you guys are in for a great treat when they’re ready.  On the weekends, if I’m not going out to meet anyone or going on a date, I usually wear what I call a ‘house shirt’, one of several t-shirts I have.

This weekend, I wore a Halo ODST shirt I got when I was working at Gamestop Corporate(they had a table of merchandise that always had stuff we could just grab).  Heck, I don’t even have an XBox.  So I wore this shirt, went to a Chick-Fil-A and some random guy saw me and said “Whoa!  Awesome shirt!”.  I was never a frumpy dresser, and always got nice collared shirts for the week and clean, well-pressed slacks.  I’ve never had my clothes complimented before, much less by another guy.  I was like “Really?”  I mean, what was I SUPPOSED to say?

It seemed he wanted to continue a conversation about a game I never played, but luckily, his order was called so I was able to get my food and duck out.  Just another strange adventure in my neck of the woods.  New ep will be forthcoming!  Marvel fans should rejoice, this one’s special.

P.S… upon google searching, it appears the ODST shirt I have was a prototype that was never made.  Interesting….

An Apology: Regarding David Willis

Alright folks.  I have to admit something; something that nearly all our listeners know.  I get passionate.  I get heated.  And now I must admit I went too far.

Should I have created the episode “David Willis is an idiot”?  No.  Not in the form that I did.  Do I think Willis’s math argument is flawed? No doubt.  Whenever one person hears “2 million POSSIBLE fans pissed off”, that’s a poweful number.  However, when I first saw it, I knew from my history of looking at comic book sales that 2 million viewers never translate to even a meaningful percentage of readers.  No, not even 100,000 readers.

DC’s Batman Adventures comic was always on the verge of cancellation every year it ran.  It was a tie-in to the heavily successful Batman: The Animated Series.  It also ran the same time as the cartoon aired.  The Gargoyles comic, which had a huge fan following had…. okay-ish numbers.  The only cartoon franchise that had a comic book revival years later that had any sort of huge comic success was Transformers.  And even then, it had an on-going comic series, and passed several hands before arriving at Dreamwave.

The big thing Willis ignored was the Teen Titans cartoon had a tie-in comic, Teen Titans Go.  Even with 2 million viewers, they reached only 10 thousand readers.  That’s a less than half a percent pass-through rate.  If the cartoon was considered marketing for the comic, it failed.  But it wasn’t.  The cartoon was marketing for… the cartoon.  DVD sales and toy sales made up it’s bread and butter, and it made it’s money back plus a tidy sum, easily.

My tone in the recording was wrong, and off-putting.  I hope I haven’t alienated any new listeners with it.  I have enjoyed some of David Willis’s work in the past, however at times, his tone is off-putting.  As off-putting as my own tone was, I imagine.  I’m sorry, listeners, and I’m sorry David Willis, for calling you an idiot.  But your math is still wrong.