Podcast: The Ride - Arcades with Patrick Monahan

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Patrick Monahan (What A Time To Be Alive) joins us as we take a look at arcades. Featuring opinions on tokens, the arcades we grew up with, and some of the eccentrics who ran them. Mr. MacPhisto episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus WATCH THIS EPISODE: https://youtu.be/XEpXSSEtLI0 FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Forever! Dog! Warning! The following podcast may contain ruthless pinball racketeering, fat-wielding leather haters, and an evil horny energy. Patrick Monaghan joins us as we share formative memories of our favorite arcades on Podcast The Ride, the podcast that withdraws all their Patreon money straight to tokens.

I'm Scott Gerdner, joined by Mike Carlson. I am here. Yes, tokens. Tokens is something that I was obsessed with having tokens. Tokens is something that was, I was obsessed with having tokens. And when you'd accidentally take a token home from wherever you were in an arcade, it would feel like you took like a, I don't know, like something wrong. You did something wrong. You stole.

Oh, I didn't know if you were going to say that that's neat that that's a collectible from whatever local It is now. Uh-huh, sure. But I guess immediately you made me think of like being guilty and being scared. You've talked before about how you were afraid of prison as a child. Oh-huh, sure. But I guess immediately you made me think of being guilty and being scared. You've talked before about how you were afraid of prison as a child. Oh, yeah, yeah, for any minor infraction. And I felt like if I had a token at home, it meant Chuck E. Cheese himself was coming to get me.

You smuggled tokens across state lines or county lines, some lines, any line, the line of where the store ends. Yeah, exactly. That's not okay. This is currency within this pizza time theater ends. Yeah, exactly. That's not okay. This is currency within this pizza time theater only. You're right. Jason Sheridan, feelings about tokens? Quite the polar opposite of Mike.

I love taking tokens home because it meant one or two things. I had a little souvenir from a fun time, or it was the promise of like, we'll be back. I get to come back and cash these in we're going to have to it would be a financial loss it would be a financial loss it's the reverse of like leaving something at a date's house so you have to get that second date

oh yeah yeah I if my family was like oh what do we do this week what are we doing I was like well we got a $2.50 in tokens $2.50 you would. We've got $1.75 in tokens. Yeah, that's a heavy pocket. Well, usually when people would tap out every now and then, you'd end up with like, oh, we got too much. I accidentally put a pot in.

I feel like I was like, when I was like, oh, you have 15 minutes left, I would just be like, just feeding tokens into every machine to get rid of them. Because again, you don't want to be shaken down at the state line. Right, yeah, yeah. I don't want to go to prison. We'll see if our guest wants to go to prison or not. What a segue. Hey, look, first things first, we're back on video here. We haven't been in video for a little bit,

and this is on the Forever Dog YouTube channel, if you want to watch along. And this will also help us with a cleaner, nice, more professional connection with our guest who's joining us from New York City. He's a writer and comedian from the podcast What a Time to Be Alive, Patrick Monaghan. Hello, Patrick. Hello. You asked if I want to go to jail, or prison, rather. I'm always in a prison of my own making. That is my general state of being. What a thing for me to say. I've just, I've agitated you right at the top here. Well, you know the the different polls we've set up here

i would take like maybe two home you know i'm not gonna like not spend uh six or seven but you know i like the idea of having a little souvenir and uh i don't know it's not legal tender but if it just felt like a yeah and then being able to kind of cash in maybe play a little uh play one round of the simpsons game with money that you came, you know, you came with without having to ask mom, you know, that was, that was useful. I think. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I feel like also, uh, I was, I, maybe this is something everyone shares, but I also was just like, I felt it was dirty and maybe it was cause my mom told me like you wash your hands when you touch coins. So there was something extra, like, gross about it to me to have, like, coins from the Chuck E. Cheese. Not that I was some smart kid who knew, oh, this is a disease factory.

But I also was just like, oh, I don't want to touch it when I'm outside of Chuck E. Cheese's boundaries. Oh, sure. You want these off of you. You want these flying into machines as quickly as you can. Yes. To pass the germs. Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Do we think

tokens from a given arcade are more or less disgusting than just regular US change? Less. I bet it's less. Less. Because it's mostly just kids using them for games versus who knows what adults are using pennies for.

We've seen the UCB sketch. Yeah. We've all been taught it. You have to see it in classes. Ass pennies. Yes. So we know that's what's... So you're taking ass pennies literally.

A lot of people are using it as an intimidation move. Right. Or just as like a fun... There might be people who don't even know the sketch who are putting pennies up their ass. There might be some people who don't know the sketch from 25 years ago from the cult comedy show. Who don't know all the sketches from the UCB show. So I think, yeah, it's just like candies on the tokens and like syrup, sticky, like, you know, pancake syrup.

Like stuff like that. Kids taking entire pancakes, like having syrupy fingers. You know how kids always have maple syrup on their fingers? At Chuck E. Cheese. Sir Capital of Kidsville. Well, they do. For breakfast, Chuck E. Cheese would have like little sticks, like French toast sticks. What are you talking about?

That's 100% true. My sister had a birthday there. And if you got there at 11 a.m., they would give you toast sticks instead of like saturday morning exactly okay i here's what i i think that both sides of that voice raising was wrong i think that you might got very agitated but jason how could you find that so unbelievable that's not so preposterous that there would be a takeaway breakfast item it's not i just never thought about i i know i've been to morning chucky cheese but i have no memory of a breakfast uh like style breakfast you had an omelet at chucky cheese in the morning i did i had eggs benedict i had to send it back because the uh hollandaise was not uh correct right, right. You had scrapple. I had,

in California, we had a California omelet at our Chuck E. Cheese with our precious avocado. You had your avocado and spinach. We were just, it was the scrapple plate would come out, the pork roll plate would come out, you know. Patrick, what was your favorite breakfast at Chuck E. Cheese? Have you ever had

breakfast at Chuck E. Cheese? I have, I will say I've never actually been to a Chuck E. Cheese. There were no Chuck E. Cheeses near me growing up or near enough. So sorry. No kidding. Yeah. Wow. This is a recent Submit to Open episode, but we did have Discovery Zone for as long as that existed.

Oh, yes. We just covered on the second gate on our Patreon. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Which you mentioned to us. Okay. And where did you grow up also? Because that'll factor in... Yeah, Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Okay, okay. Oh, so that is the location. Just full disclosure, and we won't get into it yet. We're all going to talk about... Basically, today we're talking about arcades that we're very fond of, that were formative for us, where we had important experiences. And this was sort of inspired by Patrick's Childhood Arcade, which you sent me some stuff about.

And I looked it up and I thought, this is an unusual amount of information for one Connecticut arcade. This was written about in the newspaper a strange amount of times. This is a tease for what we're going to get into. But that's kind for what we're gonna we're gonna get into um uh but that's kind of what we're so so uh that particular arcade we'll talk about but that was a go-to discovery zone was a go-to uh um any anything else you want to shout out yeah uh the the there were in the trumbull mall

uh which i think is i think it's called westfield Trumbull or something now I don't know whatever but but it's they had an FYE the four-year entertainment store but half of it was like a big arcade basically so it would that was that was the arcade because it was like that was the arcade at the mall when like you know you know when you're like in middle school you just get dropped off at the mall and just kind of do whatever people do at the mall that's where we would go spend our time Discovery Zone the only thing I remember other than the ball pit is that Big Bertha game do you kind of do whatever people do at the mall um that's where we go spend our time discovery zone the only thing i remember other than the ball pit is that big bertha game do you guys remember that oh absolutely yeah bertha i felt like i was kind of good at big bertha that's ski ball and big bertha that was the extent of the arcade part of discovery zone that i remember it's a very

strangely particular memory now that i think about it we talked about how their their arcade component was kind of diminished because and if you haven't heard this on our patreon discovery zone was more of a run around climb ball pit kind of place because we stress that we stress the the physical activity for the kids because we don't want kids being lazy with tvs that's why we only have 10 arcade games instead of 24. They still did it, so it was a weird posturing for them to have.

Now, what kind of kid were you, Patrick? Were you more of a physical run-around kid or were you just like, take me straight to the arcade stuff? God, no. I think I liked the ball pit conceptually. i think that was like something that i couldn't believe existed in real life but at the same time i wasn't like

aching to uh do any kind of physical activity i was a video game and arcade type kid so not really an ideal place for me uh given the focus um so probably for a lot of kids yeah i think yeah uh i should say big big bertha probably not around anymore right i mean they're not making new big bertha machines that's sort of uh oh interesting yeah probably not probably a sort of cancel for those who don't for those who don't know it's a it's a uh thing where it's an arcade where you a game where you throw um i think they were like those balls that were like in the ball pit they were like those hollow kind of balls into the mouth of a large woman. And she had a huge, you know, like opening and closing mouth.

So you had to time it. And I think the points were weight that was being gained by Bertha, I believe. Oh, really? That was the. I forgot that she inflated. Yeah. And it does say feed big Bertha that you're given the express uh instruction and you you kind of you got a a uvula to hit oh yeah that's dangling there which i don't know

that's how the new it went in right you had to hit the uvula otherwise i guess you wouldn't get the wouldn't get the point this feels like this could be become some sort of uh part of the culture war now that we've put it out there like you could see like ben shapiro saying he's going to start his own line of arcade games and we're going to not cancel the big bertha game and a bunch of senators will start playing the big bertha game in the in like the capital or something we'll get mad at like and they're removing the big bertha like they got mad because of the m&ms campaign uh recently they just got mad at the a and w root beer uh uh post parroting the m&ms campaign really yeah what's the name of that mascot again uh i forget it's a bear but the joke was that like our bear is gonna wear pants now oh okay and there was a segment on fox business

where it's like unbelievable and they're making the a and w root beer bear wear pants now yeah wearing pants is of course woke as we all know, and something that should be shunned. That's true. When did women start wearing pants? It's been in the last, like, two years, right? I think until this woke, crazy time. Never has a woman worn pants. Things are getting out of control.

Rudy. His name is Rudy. Rudy. R-O-o-t-y and we will do an episode about him that will be at least 90 minutes great not this year necessarily but at a certain point okay yeah okay rutty since we bring up a mascot uh uh patrick on on your show what a time to be alive um you uh talked about recently i think on a patreon episode of your show uh a mascot that i i have seen but never fully processed and um i'm talking about duncan cuppy uh and hashtag d dance for dark roast at

nasdaq uh that is that is cuppy at the nasdaq can you describe a cuppy also it's a it's this is a dunkin donuts yeah anthropomorphic cup it's a big cup it's a big cup and uh i was just poking around to see what copy i could find and i guess eight or nine years ago they did a campaign where they were pushing a new dark roast and so there's lots of videos cuppy dancing at duncan donuts franchises here duncan uh uh dancing at the Nasdaq exchange and he's having a great time what's his full name again? I've seen him both as Cuppie

and as Duncan Cuppie so Cuppie might be his last name? yeah I've also seen like feminine Cuppie so I think there's an iced coffee Cuppie and a hot coffee Cuppie we have to have feminine cuppy don't we we just oh it all has to be the lady the ice caught is the lady the ice

coffee i think so i think that's what i encountered yeah we didn't get into that level of the lore all i i have met only the iced cuppy oh you met ice cuppy oh wow yeah at a at a jimmy buffett concert this summer. What? In Massachusetts. Yeah, no, the copy was just there. It was not part of the thing. They probably got fired.

I think you've completed the podcast, the ride bingo card already. Yeah. Bob Iger was also there. Let's see, what else? Michael Eisner. Michael Eisner was there uh unfortunately green day green day came out and played i don't know why these are on the card but they are uh uh wait

i'm sorry explain these circumstances patrick oh no i know my fiance's family uh her dad is a big parrot head and his wife and uh so we went with them and she and she's also a fan i am uh i would call myself a novice what is that what is the gross term they do this call me they just call me a virgin the whole time i was there is that what they do like a rocky like rocky horror yeah like yeah no maybe they were all just all these old people were just bullying me uh no i think it's like a they call you like a Buffett virgin or something. I don't know this term. I think that's your first show.

Oh. Huh. And it's just that? I mean, I guess that's – look, it works because there's an alcoholic connotation. So it's like in keeping with the – but it does feel like there could be something a little more Buffett specific. Right. You're a baby pelican or something. Right. A baby pelican. Because you're a baby pelican or something right a baby pelican because you're a

parrot head now there are people wearing shirts that said like buffett virgin and they had like a shot glass or you know on a necklace you know what i mean i guess the idea being right right if i look at something buffett virgin i get sierra's buffet dining in the virgin river hotel and casino first um maybe this is just i don't know we'd have to i'd have to go on to the various facebook groups of different parrot head fan club that i am part of uh i'm not like in the like on the board or anything i'm just following these groups on facebook yeah yeah i'm just thankful that like they didn't like because the thing is like there's a i mean at these shows, there's a,

it's the, you know, boomer or just sub boomer, you know, folks. And there's a lot of kind of like sexual energy that I would prefer not. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We did. We saw. Oh yeah. Go ahead. Okay. So I'm just thankful that the expression doesn't involve like, you know,

uh, uh, popping one's cherry or something no one said that to me well you're popping a lime traditionally the uh uh that we were all that we went to a jimmy bubba concert at the hollywood bowl which i believe was lacking in the horny energy of an average jimmy bubba concert because then i went to one in anaheim right before the pandemic and boy was that a boat a horny boat people concert everyone was drunk we were getting like yelled at by like 60 year olds in line well the Hollywood Bowl is kind of safe like sectioned off

it's a little like that's part of it there's a lot of hoops to jump through to like get it, get there, get inside and do it. But like was the Anaheim one at Angel Stadium? No, no. It was at whatever the is at the Honda Center, whatever it's called. Oh, OK. But massive parking lot. Right. Yeah.

So they got tailgate like the tailgate. And we, of course, went to the Sammy Hagar's Cabo Wabo Cantina at Hollywood and Highland first and then walked up, which was great. But it was still lacking in that, I would say, evil, horny energy that you're talking about. The like sinister. It's not even good. It's not good. It's it's like the end of Hereditary. All the naked people are standing around. You know, it's it's it's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they had like there were a lot of or we saw at least one where there was like a sheet of, you know, like that, like, I don't want to call it fiberglass, but like clear, you know, plastic. And it had two holes cut out and it was like, put them on the glass for a shot or something almost.

And it's just like, all right, what is the average age of the concert goer that is putting them on the glass and i i don't want to know and then there we walk by that and it goes just like everyone has rvs and stuff set up and there was like a group of like a half dozen men between the ages of like let's say 40 and i don't know 50 60 that were just kind of like pretending they weren't standing there waiting to see who would put them on the glass but we're clearly just like just far enough away that they have plausible deniability about wanting to see them on the glass yeah it's uh our friend of the show it's malevolent is i think you're right yeah there's an evilness uh our friend of the show anthony geo worked at a concert venue in indiana and he said

by far the biggest maniac crowd was the buffett crowd worse than any metal show or anything the buffett crowd was just it was k it was anarchy on because there was a lawn it's one of those places was like an amphitheater with a big lawn and it was just debauchery people definitely had to get woken up that like have like kids in college like to get like kicked out of there you know like an hour after the show yeah yeah i mean that's i went to billy joel which is probably the long island version of this as well at the garden a few weeks ago and it was the same it's like man these ladies are out of like out of control is something i said about like another adult like this is too much like penn station is just a war zone because these are people that are not used to being told like they can't do something you know what

i mean like what do you mean i can't like sit in the stairs it's like well you know if something happens people have to be able to leave or just you know because they want to go get a drink or something oh okay whatever i'm just having fun you know that kind of thing uh just very yeah and that turns hostile very fast anyhow buffett is a much sunnier version. Some of the Billy stuff was getting a little dark. But people probably come to these things ready to fight. So it's on their checklist of things to do tonight. Hoping to fuck, hoping to fight. The two Fs.

I want to hit all the two. Two Fs in Buffett, two Fs for what we're going to do. Oh, yeah, yeah. Lines up with his name. Two Fs in his name. Do you want you want to steer back to uh to some arcade stuff here yeah um you mentioned this fye which is is very strange uh uh that that was the childhood um because it's mostly that's a music store like a

poster store mainly it yeah it was well i think it was all all media um it was the the the yeah i guess posters were there yeah yeah the cds and those like the the tall things remember when they had them in those like rack things that were like twice the height of a cd case it was like that's what i and then yeah right i guess you know vhs and eventually dvd i don't know if they sold video games maybe they had a small and then also obviously uh collectibles of various kinds yeah little statuettes and things like that all of the fies uh that i went to growing up it used to be the wall it was the wall got flipped to fye and wall was the name of the story the wall was like all music and you could i remember you could

take any cd to the front and go like can i listen to this and they had listening booths and then oh yeah it was kind of like like more like a borders and that it was like kind of dimly you know a lot of dark colors and stuff and then when it became fye became very bright and fye to me always seemed like a store that as soon as it opened it was flailing like discovery zone discovery zone had a few years where they were really going strong and then they started to lose their way fye immediately seemed like this is a sinking ship media is changing and i'm scared fye would feel like it was it would feel like anytime i've been in one it feels like a spirit halloween in the sense like oh they just threw all this stuff up

on the wall I guess like oh okay because they have a lot of stuff I would like collectible etc but you'd be like oh this is on its way out right or this is a temporary store but it's it's hung on for a while yeah yeah but yeah it always seemed like like they're planning on being out of

there in three weeks yeah they could they could get everything in a big sack and get out the door pretty quickly and it's funny that i'm saying this because all the arcades i have notes are are gone are pretty much gone there's one of them still going but the rest like ate it very you know in the recent past yeah yeah well let's talk about yours then jason let's let's let's hear some of the uh your formative arcades and we we'll talk about stuff that we love about any of these as we go, what our arcade tastes are, what our game tastes are and such. Jordan, can you pull up that first picture of this was the arcade in the mall, Aladdin's Castle, growing up. This was a chain, and there's a couple different versions.

You can just cycle through the Aladdin's castle pictures. This is what I remember it as also very dark. Not just another amusement center, it says. Yeah, this is it started on. That is the very last Aladdin's castle that closed, I believe, last year. And so you can see kind of the design changes over the years. By the time it got to the 90s of like the height of like X-Men and Ninja Turtles and fighting games, I think they had removed a lot of the like decorations and stuff. Again, I just remember it being very dark. And my big memory of it is that we took a trip with the Cub Scouts on like a Sunday night.

And as the mall was closing they kept the arcade open for us and everyone got ten dollars and quarters and when everything cost a quarter or 50 cents we were there for a few hours like you could really make that last and uh the the other uh and you're emotional about it yeah and time out was the other big chain like one mall had an Aladdin's castle the other malls had time out arcades and I think we have a picture of that too and this was very color this is time out oh my god we're looking at this world of sin marty croft kind of stuff yeah and and so this is um never looked like this this is how it used to look in the 70s and 80s aladdin's castle 2 used to have a lot of features but i think they're on a downswing

um also look uh not to keep being gross but if this picture that we're looking at is kind of you descend the layers. And then towards the back, it gets more kind of like oval shaped. I don't know. Does this remind anybody of any type of canal? Are you saying birth canal or rectum? Because the circle to me more suggests rectum. That's where I thought you were going. I didn't see all the way down.

It really could go either way. Okay, you guys are going off of circle, which seems... I'm looking all the way down, which seems a little bit more vaginal. The colors suggest vaginal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you start heading into some purple.

Yeah, yeah. It also looks like it's bored into flesh, so it's kind of Cronenberg also. It doesn't look like it's a natural orifice this looks like that ai art that's been going around where people make like fake movies from the 80s it's like david cronenberg's arcade yeah that one about the arcade yeah it's like a giant crutch living woman who an arcade is in her yeah the timeout tunnel is much more suggestive than probably jason imagined jason so i was it like this no no no no both of them were just like neon sign no decorations inside

by the time to pass through the tunnel no i think this is a holdover for like the 70s and 80s because when the rise of arcades kind of lines up with the rise of indoor shopping malls because before that right before arcade cabinets there were you know pinball machines but those were like sleazy uh they were like in bars and bowling alleys and stuff and often uh run by the mob like pinballs pinballs were pinballs and jukeboxes and slot machines were like of a piece because it's an all-cash business that like that the rest of the the business and facility was not but they ran the machine specifically yeah somewhere down the line they there's like old photos of like just piles of destroyed pinball machines and like the local sheriff giving a thumbs up because it was just seen as gross and seedy.

Wait a minute. Was it just a phenomenon that there were a lot that were mob run? Or what percentage do you think in America in the 60s or 70s of pinball machines were mob run? I can't speak to that, but they had to change i i don't know you know i think uh they had to change the perception and like having these dago colored family oriented centers as arcade cabinets as you know pong and centipede and all these early games are starting

to catch on yeah like it became a real profit you know profitable place for like your aladdin's castle or your time out uh aladdin's castle eventually bought by bally's the slot machine company and then bought by namco and at some point namco owned time out and aladdin's castle do you think that the mobsters who ran i knew this would be back to mob immediately jason's gonna talk and then as soon as mob yeah yeah i ignore what he just said i Do you think that the mobsters who ran... I knew this would be back to mob immediately. Jason's going to talk, and then as soon as mob... Yeah, yeah, I ignore what he just said. I ignore the last couple sentences of what he said. I literally, I knew...

Too unusual to not talk about more. We've got to go back to the mob room. I didn't discover this at the last moment. Like, I was baking, and I was like, oh, this will be an oddly enough thing, or we're going to talk about it for half an hour. It'll be half an hour so Mike continue I mean I look this I was going to

introduce some comedy for ideas here really that so we don't have to actually have a real discussion about it but like was that like a lower level of the mob or was it the high level guys doing was there like a lower level like yeah I'm in the pinball I do the pinball circuit and you're like oh well I run

drugs I'm the guy who does like you're a fucking loser you're a pinball circuit. And you're like, oh, well, I run drugs. His wife's like, you're a fucking loser. You're a loser, Tony. You're a pinball guy. Pinball small potatoes. Well, we got an Addams Family machine coming up, and all the kids are going to put the tokens in it. It's like, you're a loser. You get out of my house.

The Irishman steals steaks, and he paints houses. You're not doing as well as Henry down the street. He's friends. Henry Hill. He's friends with the Teamster guy. Oh, okay. Well, we got a Laverne and Shirley machine coming out soon, too. That's been off the air for 10 years.

We couldn't figure out the rights. But when the ball goes up, you get it right in Lenny's mouth. And the kids are going to love it because he says his catchphrases. I like imagining that they were mob run until, like, the death of John Gotti. I love the idea that we're talking about the Terminator 2 machine is mob run. We're partnering with Cameron. It's a big deal for real legitimizing. John Gotti took care of the city.

John Gotti got us a dozen kiss slot machines. We were never on tilt when John Gotti was. Do you think anyone got killed over pinball? How far did this go? Probably. If that is true, probably. That's tough stuff, man. Your last few moments like real

okay all right this is it this is how it ends yeah killed with pinballs oh if you could get up the right projectile to share i mean they're they're bullet-esque they're silver they're hard if they came flying hundreds of miles an hour at you i think you could you could kill somebody with a barrage of pinballs very easily. I think, yeah, if you took the back off of a pinball machine and just pointed the pinball machine at your enemy and just shot the pinballs from the, whatever that thing was just spraying.

Yeah, like in Goodfellas, when Pesci thinks he's going to get made, they're actually lining up a pinball machine behind him. Yeah, they took the back off of it. Oh, no. Oh, what the hell? Yeah. Bad news, mult took the back off of it. Oh, no. Oh, what the hell? Yeah, murder bug. Bad news, multiball.

Mm-hmm. Ow, ow, ow. I have one more arcade. This one a little more wholesome. This one is still open. And if you can bring up the pictures of Jilly's Arcade, this is on the boardwalk in ocean city new jersey uh still going strong and for a long time it was one of the few 24-hour

businesses uh on the island of ocean city um and i this is how it looks now. And they have expanded the Jilly's company. That's how the storefront, I remember it, a little less intense, a little less decorated. And then there's one more picture of like what it looks like inside. It's a big, tall ceiling. I see a Rolling Stones pinball machine. They have like every pinball machine.

I feel like they- Batman forever, not Batman forever, but is it Dark Knight? That's Dark Knight. Oh, it's Dark Knight. I see a Rolling Stones pinball machine. They have like every pinball machine. I feel like they- Batman Forever. No, Batman Forever. Wait, is it Dark Knight? That's Dark Knight. Oh, it's Dark Knight. It's got Ledger Joker, I think. I was hoping it was Batman and Robin.

I assume that. It'd be great. I was there last summer. I think I played the Munsters machine. Sure. But they have so many pinball machines next to each other, I think they have a lot of the music and sound effects turned down because I think it would just sound like hell. Sure, yeah.

If they were doing it um but i i had not really processed that the jilly's family in ocean city like the jilly's company now has a million other businesses too they have a candy factory ice cream factory french fry factory t-shirt factory uh bike rentals and a parking lot um and multiple vacation rental properties so this is they are they are just like the conglomerate like the vacation conglomerates like the waterside vacation conglomerate yeah a lot of these beach towns there's like two or three companies that own a lot of stuff like the biggest amusement park on the island is called gillian's uh and the mayor's name uh his name is jay gillian and his father roy gillian is also was also the mayor in the late 80s so this is a mob of its own i was gonna ask is this a sort of a mob i don't know it's always it's a car it's a carny town it kind of and this is like one of the most wholesome jersey

short towns like this in cape may um but yeah yeah i was gonna say it seems like arcades in the u.s at least like the only places that they're really left and thriving like this are like waterside like like where you take the kids on vacation to like get them out of your face if you're like parents you know what i mean yeah i feel like that's like the last place where they exist like this like kids in the suburbs like i don't know they just i don't know they just go scream slurs at each other while playing call of duty or whatever right they don't need to leave the house to play video games so or to be social in that way i guess right wonder it's like malls still have them every every mall i can think of around here still has an arcade but but they're smaller.

They're not as stacked, I wouldn't say. And there's not a ton of kids and people. It feels like the whole genre has shifted more to adults and to the version where you can drink. It's the Dave and Buster's and the Round Ones. Yeah, Round One. And it's got karaoke and bowl. It has to have a lot of different things and yeah it's got it can't just be arcade games anymore because that's not so novel it's got to have as a party that you put together mike it has to have karaoke in the brightest room karaoke that feels like a library

meeting room yeah it's an odd choice at round one if you do karaoke which i had a perfectly fun time yeah yeah me too but uh it is like it's like somehow brighter than their main floor the main show floor or whatever you'd call it is where like a city council would meet yes yeah yeah and it's bright enough that they can broadcast it to local tv right and uh and the web i feel like you need to bring in like intravenous alcohol or something with that level of like we need people to get drunk immediately we need instant drunk people cannot come in here sober uh yeah that's karaoke where you can see the wrinkles in veins in someone's face the dream uh um but yeah i know what you i'm looking i'm looking forward to by the way

speaking of how everything is becoming like drinking and video games I think we're all around the same age As we become, you know, once the boomers Start to kind of, you know, die off Culture is going to shift around To be people our age And it's going to be fun for about 20 years Probably, right? Aside from the whole

You know, the oceans boiling and, you know All that kind of stuff, but, you know Just in terms of the way that Things are bent to make us Try to spend money, you know the ocean's boiling and you know all that kind of stuff but uh you know just in terms of the the way that things are uh bent to make us try to spend money you know i'm pretty psyched for that personally yeah i mean just the way like at theme parks like universal and disney pulling out like uh retro merchandise or like stuff for rides that have closed i always am wondering it's like is this for the parents who remember it or the kids who throw back stuff? Yeah.

And when I'm 60, I'll be in an evil horny mode at a Barenaked Ladies concert. Like, that'll be... When they finally dump the Briggs truck back to Stephen Page. When they bring Stephen Page back, which is, of course, my big thing, is they need to. I think they're keeping him out of the band. You think it's that way.

I believe it's that. And I believe I will not see them until he's back in the band. Mike, if you remember, I went to a Barenaked Ladies concert with my family in Atlantic City about 10 years ago. Yes, right. And my brother and I were easily some of the youngest people there. Oh, I believe that, yeah. Yeah. And Stephen was out of were easily some of the youngest people there. Oh, I believe that, yeah. Yeah.

And Steven was out of the band at that point. I think so. Sorry, you're saying the Barenaked Ladies have not made the transition to a Gen Z audience? We are failing the generation behind us. That's true, but they did the Big Bang theme. They got the Big Bang theme. Sure, sure, sure. So there are some, at least they're familiar with the song.

There was just one group of people in Bazinga shirts and that was it we just need to we just need a tiktok dance to one week and that should set things up well right or uh or tiktok dance to if i had a million dollars from the live album sure you can figure out a way to make all it takes is one we just need to like we need the kate bush situation or the hollywood mac dream situation if megan too if in the sequel to megan she can dance too oh wow what a good idea to the old apartment um a really danceable song oh yeah one of their most danceable songs uh uh you know yeah it hits pretty hard you know so i think it's perfect for megan yeah yeah um i'm picturing now like in an old folks home you know when everyone ends up there that's our age they're gonna have like uh instead

of watching like you know i don't know old war broadcasts or whatever they do for like people you know now it's gonna be watching like class classic era simpsons like between seasons three and eight simpsons and all the uh all the going to know all the lines, and all the women are going to be looking at whatever the version of the phone is then. I don't know what it's going to be. Well, and everybody like, no, see, it got a lot worse in season nine. Yeah, that's what I was. That's the most, like, people who are, like, about to die,

that's their last gasp of energy. Yeah, that's right. Wait a minute. Well, the carny one was okay. Behind the laughter, that had some spark to it. Disney Plus converted them all to high definition, and they stretched the four right there. Orderlies having to pull apart two guys just fighting about the principal

and the pauper and whether that was when the show. They made too big of a deal of it. Oh, it betrayed that we love the characters. The show, of course, would still be on the air then and Al Jean would still be running it. That's right. So a lot of bionic parts. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Never thought we'd make it to episode 4 000 season 102 wow there are three shows family guy gray's anatomy and the simpsons that's all that's left and every other she just started gathering up characters uh from other shows you know like like the stranger things characters got added to Grey's Anatomy. Bob's Burgers just morphed with it. Like the Belchers moved in with Family Guy. So Family Guy just swallowed Bob's Burgers. Everybody's represented in some way though.

That's right. All the media companies consolidated and soon the TV shows will consolidate as well. That's what you're saying. We're just heading towards game master. Anthony being ready player one. Right. Right.

Is going to happen. If you know, if you're, if you can't, if you're kind of tribal about like, I like star Wars. No, I like Marvel.

No, I like avatar. Well, they're all going to be one thing. That's right. We'll find out which characters are officially the best when they all fight. That's right. That's entertainment soon. I want to talk. I want to talk more about the idea of the arcade in the same way that the Hall of President talks about the idea of a president. Because to me, yeah, when we grew up,

we had Nintendo, we had Super Nintendo, but the arcade would give you a better, like, graphical presentation. It feels like it was a different, like a high-octane version of a video game, especially if it was like a racing game and you got to sit in a seat, because it finally was, like,

it was obviously, like, more horsepower, it was obviously like more horsepower, whatever the actual name of a graphical processor, whatever that is. Was there even the issue at some point of like, can home consoles, will home consoles ever be as good as what you can just drive a short distance to go do? Probably. Probably.

You forget what a big sea change it was that it was an arcade centric medium and then it completely switched to a home right um i'm not smart enough to know exactly when like that threshold was met uh um but it feels like around nintendo 64 is when you start going oh this is pretty good and pretty close like I think graphics were still better in arcades for a while longer. But in my mind. But you're picturing, like, a cruising USA type, like, well, that, like, there's bigger, flashier stuff if you go to a place to see it. So, yeah. So all this stuff, like, we've talked about on the show before.

Enchanted Castle was a crazy place that I loved, which had so many arcade games and had an animatronic show. Of course, the Jam and Jesters. Oh, yes. This came up because of Sally Darkrides on the Patreon, correct? Yes. It was this really odd, only there animatronic show.

And now gone. But it involved a lot of songs from the musical Pippin. For some reason, it was a lot of Pippin in the Jam and Jester show um but yeah there was an aladdin's castle as well um but i remember just being in the same way that i would go into like a retail store and be like desperate to find the toy section anytime we went to like a roller

skating party an ice skating party i had my eye on where's the arcade. And the really when I think about what the most exciting arcade was for me, it was in Poplar Creek Bowl, which is a bowling alley that had three or four games. And it's still there. It's still in Schaumburg. And it was primarily because I was so obsessed with Ninja Turtles that it had the Ninja Turtles game. And in the same way that when we watch a movie in school and the New Line Cinema logo would come up, I had I had a mono focus when it came to arcades. And it was do they have that Ninja Turtles game? I love the Simpsons game.

I like a bunch of other games, but I was almost more consumed with just being near my friends than I was being with a big option, a big bunch of options. When I was little. When I was a little older, there was other stuff. Wait, by your friends, you mean the Ninja Turtles? Yes, I thought that was clear. It's possible that there could be friends around. I was going to say the actual social aspect of arcades were a big component of their success because with malls spraddling up, parents could leave the kid with a few bucks at the arcade and come back. you anytime you go to a place that you kind of got like a sense like oh this place might have a couple games like it would be i would be almost more interested in that primarily for ninja turtles

than the actual activity i like bowling fine but i wanted to just stay in there and wait for the older kids to be done playing the ninja turtles game so i could sneak in there and play yeah this is when you talk arcades in general that's a big thing thing I flash to is like, oh, older kids, older kids are doing the thing that I want to do. Yes. Older kids are behind me wanting to do my thing and I will cave immediately or I will get so sweaty and start playing this thing so badly that I that it's game over and I have to go. Yes. The older kids situation makes this all dark to talk about. Yes, I have such strong memories of that turtle, like a bunch of older kids. And when we say older kids, they were probably two years older.

They're nine years old. I'm seven and they're nine. And I think these are like 30-year-olds. This is so interesting because I never encountered this. I think I had like short, by default of being short and always young looking they probably all thought i was five or six years younger than i actually was so i didn't get in any trouble but there was i'm remembering there it was another ocean city arcade called aquaport and that was by like the center of town it was by a big ice cream parlor big playground and that's where the teenagers would smoke and uh

poorly skateboard outside but it was more of an ordeal to go there it was more of a rigmarole you were never scared of them at the arcade the older kids no really yeah this is wild patrick yeah patrick kids you have an older kid i mean i don't think i definitely didn't have any run-ins that i can remember i think i was probably intimidated but I also kind of I never played anything that was competitive unless I was with like you know you can't leave an open play the computer in like a fighting game and leave the option for somebody to come in because then you could get beat and it's embarrassing yeah right so so you got to make sure you have a pair for that but I mean other than that I played a lot I played a lot of like the you know x- X-Men or anything with the three screens or like you said, Ninja Turtles.

Yeah, yeah. The four player kind of thing. Yeah. Anything that was like Simpsons was that way. Certainly if there were older kids there, I would want I would find something else to do. That's OK. So you weren't afraid of them, but maybe you steered clear. I'm not going to I'm not going to like put my quarter on, you know, you put it on the little things to mark your place. Like, I'm not doing that. Oh, right. When there's somebody who's 11 there.

Oh, 11. Oh, God. Yeah, because also I remember even when fighting games really, like Mortal Kombat, which we've talked about before, I was obsessed with playing Mortal Kombat with the blood. And I had Super Nintendo. And Super Nintendo did not have blood in mortal kombat it would not allow it and i hated that i wanted to see the blood i was a child who loved blood i guess but it felt like adult like or whatever uh but this could the blood situation ever come across your mother's desk was she aware that you had this blood fascination?

Did you keep it secret at all costs? I'm sure I kept my bloodlust secret from my mother. I had to. I had no choice. She didn't catch you playing the blood version, and there were consequences. I never had the blood version. Did you have Super Nintendo or Genesis?

Super Nintendo. So you couldn't get the blood. Couldn't get the blood. Because that was only on Genesis. That was Genesis' main selling point, was the blood. Yes. Was Mortal Kombat 2? Did Super Nintendo allow it't get the blood. Couldn't get the blood. Because that was only on Genesis. That was Genesis' main selling point was the blood. Yes. Was Mortal Kombat 2, didn't Super Nintendo allow it to have the blood?

Oh, maybe for 2 they did. I'm talking about for the first one. Yeah, for the first one. That's what I was talking about too. But anytime I would try to play it, I would never win a fighting game in an arcade. I never won a round. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You get killed by an older kid. Yeah. I don't recall a single time. So I play Street Fighter, I play Mortal Kombat, and I would feel, I would be humiliated, which we've talked about recently, like, when you were a little kid, we talk about it a lot, I guess, and you were humiliated by, you were humiliated

because the older kids would literally dominate you, and then you just, because you get a dollar or whatever. It is literal domination, yes. In a technical sense, yes. Because, yes, I'm talking about in a video game. You would be dominated in a video game. Yeah, yeah.

And I would just be like, I felt like shit. I would be feeling so bad about myself because I could never beat anybody. And even to this day, I don't think I've ever beaten a stranger in an arcade setting wow yeah I I would play those occasionally but I think I gravitate it more towards

besides Turtles and X-Men and Simpsons the shooting game light gun games yeah like the Aerosmith Revolution X excuse me. Terminator 2, and then I don't know if anyone remembers the oddly photorealistic Lethal

Enforcers. Yeah, yeah. Where you were shooting. Yeah, yeah. You were just shooting bad guys in normal clothes. It was just regular people, but they had mean sunglasses on or a flashy jacket, and they'd be shooting at you sure and this is a great it's it's a wonderful uh poster where it is real people who i i can't imagine

they look like that in the game well that's such a great well but there was there was that era of video games where they were used moral combat we've talked about this i think before mortal combat does a little of like it was actual people and using whatever technology of the day, it would look a little bit more, like they were actually scanning them in. I remember the Batman Forever Super Nintendo game was like that. And then there were a lot of arcade games. There was that Scottie Pippen Sega CD game

where it was like live action Scottie Pippen, which I'm sure was impossible to play. I'm sure it was a bad game. Yeah. There were four people played that game, right? I don't think I've ever even heard of that game. Sega CD in and of itself was already kind of one of those formats. Like it was like the, what is it?

Like the babysitter murder game, right? It was on there, right? Night Stalker or whatever. And then Sewer Shark. That's like all I remember from Sega CD. I never had it, but a friend had it. It was a similar Virtual Boy situation where it sounded cooler than when it lived up to be. Slam City with Scottie Pippen is the name of the game, which is great.

Revolution X, I remember, at a lot of the Disney World hotels had Revolution X. Like no one was thinking at the time, like should we have all these gun games at the happiest place on earth? You know? But I, the arcade. Maybe that was part of their contract. Like if we're not doing the rock and roll.

That's a good point. Get those machines in. Yeah. Brand expansion opportunity for us. Right. The, the arcade. I remember.

What does that say? What is that? What was that? That was very arcade. That sounded cool. It's the evil, whatever they're called, the bad guys from Revolution X have hacked into the Zoom. Oh, no.

Oh, no. That would be great if it happened. We'll need a gun that shoots both bullets and compact discs at them. Yeah. They're called the New Order nation regime that's that's the disney uh arcade memory i have very weirdly is uh i i think a lot of people fondly remember like oh the contemporary hotel used to have big arcade oh yeah they're arcaded you know getting off space mountain in florida and california but I remember a very small arcade at the beach in Yacht Club

that we would end up going to to kill time before we ate at the Cape May Seafood Buffet. That was one of my family's like, all right, we're here too early for our seafood buffet. So we're going to kill time at the arcade. Sounds like such a chore for young Jason. I know. What a burden.

My seafood, my endless seafood. You also called it the beach and yacht club. Oh, instead of the yacht and beach club. I found that interesting. That was bullshit. I'm glad you called Jason on it. I'm getting my ass roasted today. I consider that a roast of Mike for

thinking that was enough to care about. Just to clarify where my roasting is. Yeah, yeah. He roasted me. You're clean. Fair enough. You're doing fine. Fired a bunch of pinballs. Eventually, oh, is this some Slam City with Scotty Pippen? Slam City with Scotty Pippen.

This is the full game. Oh, yeah, 55 minutes. This is a whole version of it. So, you're in space. I hope I'm right in this actual video and I don't look like a fool here. The iconic Sega CD logo has appeared. Yeah, there's Sonic.

You know that sound. That's Sonic. And it's got the little Sonic chime. Somehow sounds worse than the Sega Genesis chime. Pretty similar. Oh, yeah. Digital picture. Oh, wait.

Oh, but it transitioned to a basketball beautifully. A 3D-looking basketball. Look out. That's the power of the processing you get with the Sega CD. Oh, they're showing off there. I like by the way I like how this is gearing up Yes, daddy my man, I love it The top of the Scotty, oh here we go. Yeah. Yeah. All right High quality video.

Is this like Mad Dog McCree, but with Scottie Pippen playing basketball? Dominate. Dominate. You and me will play one-on-one. What do you say? I say I'm in. That is way too much pressure for me. This is great.

You're playing that at home, and then you just press eject silently back in the case and walk away. There is no way I will earn enough respect to top one of the best NBA players of all time. Yeah, sir. I don't believe I can dominate. I still I am seven years old. I am Jason talking to the screen. I am Mr. Pippen. I apologize.

Thank you for your sir. I'm sal saluting you i didn't know it was a one-on-one situation i thought maybe you were the host of this i didn't realize you were a participant and frankly i can't go totally sir i thought this was the musical pippin i was very confused i am returning this to wesco's video to live vicariously through the adventures of Vector Man. I will be. I am more comfortable with Vector Man. Yeah, this, oh, by the way, I still have unopened the Scotty Pippin Digits bourbon. I'm saving it for a special occasion. Geez.

And that was not the birth of your child. That's not special enough. I was thinking that was going to happen, but it didn't happen. So it's going to have to be different. You made digits. You produced. Those digits didn't exist before you. Very true.

And those are your. You made the digits. Very true. You had to open some digits. Okay. Well, soon. We'll figure it out. Maybe the first birthday or something.

That's nice. I hope that's at a park or something and you got to discreetly. Yeah, I got this digits under the table. Yeah, Scottie Pippen's world. You know,otty pippen uh uh uh not the musical not the musical scotty from the bulls not a branded bourbon to the musical you know ex-husband of larsa pippen come on oh and larsa was dating michael jordan. Yeah, that's right. I was picturing that intimidation video. I was being sent to Michael Jordan's son. I said that, and both Jason and Scott just started typing. What do you mean?

Wait, she was a real housewife? Yeah, yeah, Larsa. Yeah, they divorced a couple years ago. And she dated? Whoa. And she's been going places with Michael Jordan's son, and they're like, we're just friends. I know, I know.

I love to be friends with somebody who's 18 years younger than me. This is wild. This is like Jada and that guy. I think they need a red table of their own. I guess they gotta pick a different color. Red's taken. The Bulls was red.

The Bulls was red. Black was in there too. I don't know. Black and red table. Black and red table. There we go. Now it's Bulls branded. We're taking this to Michael Jordan's steakhouse. Oh, man. Real quick before I also this, we should just do a future episode on this. The arcade shows of the era to like a Nick.

Remember Nick Arcade? Of course. Yeah. And then Nick Arcade was a dream. A dream. Oh, my God. It probably was the dumbest thing in the world to try to play but man when i was like i'm in the game i can't believe this like yeah it's probably a nightmare nightmare to play super at the end of the the

final have to the final round where you go inside the game it was basically you were just like in a green screen and you were trying i think the kids were like looking at a monitor or something trying to see what the digital elements of the video game like dodge something right and they're confused and like it's like you're looking at two places like it would because you'd always get mad as a kid like why are they doing better they've achieved my dream yeah they are flushing it down the toilet like you get the girl just got hit in the head with a ghost. Just duck. Idiot. And that's how every kid felt watching kids somehow not be able to put together the silver monkey, right?

Oh, yes. There's three pieces. For God's sakes. 100%. That one feels like, well, okay, let's pull the room. I think that I'd be bad at Nick Arcade, despite all that. Like, come on, idiot, do it. I think I would be horrible at it. And I bet the green screen is really confusing.

But the silver monkey, I kind of feel like I could have done. But maybe it's like dark or stressful or I don't know. You mean the whole thing? Oh, no, no, no. Oh, I'd be bad at much of the physical effort involved in Legends of the Hidden Temple. But the actual putting together of the puzzle i okay it seemed that hard to me but what do you think patrick yeah well the only thing i would say is if if there hadn't already been like the scary guy that gets you right came through i think maybe i'd be

distracted by waiting for like the jump scare and thinking i was gonna have a heart attack at age 10 right uh maybe that would like derail the the monkey you know thing i i can't count on myself under pressure in that kind of situation. So as much as I'm talking shit, I think I'd probably have a little trouble. I wouldn't like it wouldn't be like blowing the whole thing for my team, but it would definitely cost a few seconds, I would guess. Gotcha. And real quick, the show I also learned about because I never saw it. There's a show called Video Power that was similar to Nick Arcade and it was hosted by a kid named Johnny Arcade. I'm very excited about diving into more.

I don't remember that one. Johnny Arcade. At all. Rather lazy. Okay, so he's the video game master. Yeah. So he's the guy you have to like beat or something? I've never seen this either.

There was trivia, I think, involved in it, but also there was, yeah, an element of playing video games. You didn't go in the game like Nick Arcade, but it was a similar show. This is like a Beat the Geeks, but one guy. Similar, yeah, I think. But yeah, I just came upon it while I was looking around for stuff. Aesthetically, it's wonderful. And I'm looking at a kid who's the most Bobby Budnick, red hair, mullet kid ever. It one of the straight

it's a bowl cut with a mullet underneath it manages to be too unflattering hairstyles wait here let me show you so you guys can see at least oh sure that's an that's an insane look that's interesting why would they punish children with these but that's not johnny arcade johnny that's not johnny arcade i don't Johnny Arcade's like this cool dude. Yeah, yeah, in the big chair. Yeah, yeah. Played by actor Stivy Paskowski. Yeah, of course.

Stivy Paskowski. Yeah, Academy Award nominee. Right, yeah, of course. He's on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so Johnny Arcade is in the MCU. That's great. Finally, Johnny Arcade is in the MCU. That's great. Finally, Johnny Arcade is joining the MCU. I love when they have those announcements. Mr. Arcade, welcome to the MCU.

Morgan Freeman is joining the MCU. That was one of the, like, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., like Ike Perlmutter had his iron grip on it. It's like, okay, we can't use most characters, but we're cleared to use Johnny Arcade. We're cleared to use Johnny Arcade. They're letting us use Johnny Arcade. Everything's consolidating. Much expense, I have purchased the character Johnny Arcade

from, what's the show called, Video Power? Video Power, yeah. Video Power. I faintly remember Video Power. It was the last time Ike ever put on a television. That's what was on. So he assumes Johnny was big with the kids. He catches it every now and then at Mar-a-Lago out of the corner of his eye.

Before he says, turn that shit off. Yeah. Put on a golf match. No, this is like a Haim Saban thing, apparently. Oh, I didn't actually know that. Video power. That makes sense. Another kind of like notorious, odd right he's like a

cantankerous scumbag guy yeah yeah yeah he's a big time uh political donor uh but made a lot of his money underpaying uh all those child all the power rangers yeah yeah that's right that's right uh um well when the hollywood reporter reported that he did not actually compose all the music in all of the shows he made. What? Which totals 3,700 pieces of music. Oh, I don't believe that. He did not himself compose 3,700 songs while also producing all of the shows. Oh, my.

I thought he did. I thought he did. I thought he did. Okay, well, having branched out into arcade world a little bit more, I think we should narrow focus a little bit and talk about the place that Patrick came in to talk about, which inspired this episode, which I'm so excited to get into. Do you want to introduce us to the general premise and place and the basics here. Yeah, so this is, I'll start from my perspective as a kid. This is a place that opened in, well, eventually opened in 1982.

We can get into sort of that whole thing, but it was called Arnie's Place in Westport, Connecticut, which is a couple of towns over from Where I grew up and Apparently it was much more controversial Than I knew but by the time I was you know paying Attention and going to the place when I was Probably 1990 or so You know it closed

In 94 but it was just a It was a freestanding building that was An arcade it had a Now it's like a, it became an anthropology after Arnie's closed, I believe. And now I think it's an Ulta, but they took off this. There was like this weird, I want to remember it as being either brown

or like a dark purple, kind of like a very dark, you know, purple, kind of like, you know, maybe a little tinged, like almost like a rubber skin. Like that was like the facade of the building i don't know how else to explain it um like it was coated in something almost kind of like i think like like legos but not with his raised um circles you know does that make sense yeah um but it looked like this was like the facade toy type building that's that's really crazy but they were they were small they were like quarter sized i'm trying i'm trying to like like but but so it was anyway it was very like distinctive like

it wasn't like in a mall is what i'm saying because like you know it was like its own this guy built this place and it was built by this guy named arnie k um it had uh you know arcade machines it had um uh pool tables i guess um it had also like a little ice cream parlor off to the side which had a little very weird animatronic little performance thing called georgie the ice cream place is called georgie porgies how far is this from your house you have an animatronic show this this close to you what's that you have an animatronic show this close to where you live that's that's incredible well i did i did yeah uh and then uh and i'm trying to think what else

there was uh i think there was some kind of food i don't i don't think there was like a well there was a there was a deli is what i found which will also get the factors yeah there was a yeah there was a deli and that later became i think i think the deli was like I found, which will also get the specters. Yeah, there was a, yeah, there was a deli. And that later became, I think, I think the deli was like, it was not, it was on, it was like next door. It wasn't like part of the same building. I don't think. But I think it became like a Balducci's, which is like a higher end kind of Italian marketplace. That's like a chain up around here. So that's, yeah,

that's, there's a lot of details obviously, but that's the general, and that's where they had their own, their own tokens, like custom tokens, which I thought was very high end considering. But it's just one establishment.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, Chuck E. Cheese will have them, but these are, these are for Arnie's place only. That's great. Right.

And like, I mean, even like, and they were metal. They were like subway tokens. Like that's kind of what they almost look like as opposed to like a, you go to like,

what is it? Fun spot, right? Don't they have wood? Do they have metal ones there? I guess they have metal ones there. Nevermind. The place in New Hampshire where the King of Kong.

Oh, right. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I've been there a couple couple times because i have friends who have a like a you know lake house kind of nearby so i made it a point to go there and take the picture uh framed like that awful toady guy who like is like billy mitchell's number two that guy did like the kill screen coming we got a kill screen we got a kill screen coming so i tried to like frame a shot like the you know where his talking

heads are because there's like a door right by the machine they haven't moved the machine anyway that's a place by the way i i'm curious you haven't been there because that seems to me like i forgot where that was but i remember watching that documentary thinking like well this is like the casinos that you go into where you're not supposed to be having fun like sometimes you walk into a casino and like the vibe is not good. I need to leave. These are all people playing hardcore. They are glaring at me because an outsider has come in.

I need to get the fuck out of here. That's always the vibe I assumed Fun Spot would have, just given the insane nature of everybody and the very competitive nature of everybody in King of Kong. But is that true, though? is it is it fun in fun spot yeah i i would say i mean it's a little bit colored by the fact that it was like summer of 2021 is when we went so it was like oh my god like that was the same weekend i went to the movies for the first time in like you know a year and a half or whatever so i'm probably but i mean it was there i think probably when they have that

tournament or whatever if you're anywhere near the Donkey Kong, you know, machine, you're not supposed to be having any fun, but it's a lot of kids. They have a lot of stuff. They had those really old machines where like, you're just like, there's like lights that are moving and you're just trying to hit a button when they're on the middle, like the really old, like trying to time things, you know? And then you, you know know exchange your tickets for uh spider rings or you know the classic all those classic kind of toys all that stuff or like a joy buzzer

you know it's kind of old-timey but at the same time uh yeah it's it's i would recommend it it's a good place it's huge also which is which is kind of fun they have like every kind of old arcade machine in that in that in that hall where donkey kong is oh here's a question before we return to to arnie's uh uh maybe to touch on briefly prizes what are prizes that you want today what are prizes that you wanted then what's everybody's prize taste i a lot of the ones that i talked about weren't really prize centric or if they were i didn't really occasionally i think time out had a small prize counter but i think i was going to play like video games not like ticket games oh sure okay oh so you were kind of out you were not necessarily racking up a ton for yeah i mean i often with my family and then like

around like 12 or 13 if i'd go to the mall with friends we'd like stop in the arcade between like the comic store and the pizza place you know but then they all pretty quickly shut down by the time I got in my mid to later teens you know Mike prizes? Plush! I needed plush

and as much of it as I could get and if it was I didn't have a Chuck E. Cheese plush, but I think they had like a decent size one and I never got it. But if, yeah, I was looking for like a stuffed animal or a toy,

but they had more, I feel like they usually had more like plush than they did some sort of good action figure. Right. Right. Yeah. Patrick price taste shittiest little stuffed animal that you've ever seen in your life.

Basically. That's like, and that's for 10,000 tickets That's impossible to get I'll just give you money I'll give you 100 US dollars Something that should cost 2 If there was any kind of prize situation

I don't remember It probably was crooked in some way I would guess Discovery Zone I was a big uh you know ticket collector for sure uh you know skeeball and all that uh probably Big Bertha I don't know if you got tickets for Bertha I assume probably did maybe a ticket one yeah um I'm trying to think of what I would have wanted though there was always some I don't know one one of those like dumb, like, like, you know, they're like a kaleidoscope thing where it's like, it's like a, it's like crystal on one end. And it's kind of shaped like a funnel and you're, and you look into the narrow end and it's like, that's about the best you could do.

I feel like, like a, like a, like a cheapo version of that. I never really collected a ton of prize tickets. Weird little tube. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. My just. Spider, I mean, spider rings always welcome, you know, black or orange. Oh, sure. Yeah. ton of prize tickets so weird little tube right right yeah yeah um my just spider i mean spider rings always welcome you know black or orange oh sure yeah um my and think about my favorite arcade memories i like you know i i had plenty that i went to growing up that i liked but there

were not a lot of stories necessarily but my favorite time ever at an arcade uh was when i was on a funny or die shoot that was in oklahoma city it was a shoot that involved me uh acting as a massage therapist to kevin durant and james harden okay uh so that was an odd experience i got to have while kate upton looked on this was a star study this oh these were the glory days of uh of branded web content for uh headphone brands um but a whole whole group of people was in oklahoma city and we had time to kill one day and we passed by a mall on the side of the freeway like oh that that's what we're doing we're going there we went to the quail springs mall and we had the most wonderful time it must have been a tilt i think it was probably a tilt um and we played the deal or no

deal game uh which is a good one i recommend that in general you can like get a couple rounds of action on it even if you end up losing like it's one of the you know like like roulette or something we're like well it's at least fun even if you uh sure just eat it but but uh this this brain trust of five folks involved andrew grissom and matt mazzani you've been on the show and other friends of the show buzz buzz uh uh we all got the full hundred uh in dealer as well what's that did kate come as well or is she at something with you oh okay no uh kate kevin and james did seem to be uh they did seem to have no interest in associating with us as soon as they were. Some of those people trying to leave the shoot while it was occurring.

And I was demanded to go dance around like a clown to get them to stop. What? Yes, that is something that happened. Like, yeah, here's a whole story. Yeah, I was just brought onto this thing. It's like, I don't know, maybe we'll throw you in there. We'll give you a part or something. You're like an on-set writer or something.

And the basketball players wanted to leave. Like, they'd been there for an hour and a half. And they're like, this is longer than anything should ever take. But they also heard one of them on the lav mic say, like, hey, that dude's pretty funny. And I, like, so, like, that's that's some inside information like maybe that's a way and they said just go entertain him go and i and i literally had then walked up to these very famous basketball players just like hey what's uh i just like i just like acted like i mean they were much younger than me also which is hard to uh think about when they're they are uh uh giants and uh sure multi-millionaires does anyone have eyes on kevin durant um yeah i know we were all

taking lunch he said he was heading to the airport does anyone know what that means did your dancing work uh it did it did keep him around. We finished. Technically, there were like all the shots were completed. Yeah, I did just like goof around as like I was a babysitter to Kevin Durant in Oklahoma City. This was an odd thing. And did you talk ever again after that?

I should hit him up again because I think he'll have such fond memories of that day. Member up again. That's what I'm saying. I think he'll have such fond memories of that day. Member Oklahoma City. He's probably been, you know, probably been lonely. Like, sure, he's successful, but like... Does he have any thoughts?

He misses true, innocent fun. Does he have any thoughts on like the Matterhorn or something? He could do the show. You know, I'll try to get a hold of him, but I think if it's just like literally you'd have too much space in the room, right? I think you guys would have to... That's true. the tall one so he's gonna replace you yeah that's true uh you probably get a reply on twitter at least right he's pretty active on there

so i'll send a nice screenshot if remember i'll remember the fun of the funny massage scene you were in for 15 minutes um hey they saw an old pic of the two of us thinking of you. Yeah. Thinking of you, Kev. Anyway, the point is, in Oklahoma City, the victory, like the Thunder had when we saw them the night before, we had a victory of 100 tickets in Deal or No Deal. And the game was right at the, like, we basically fed the tickets out into the mall. Like, it was right at the door. So we just kept going into the concourse. And I bring all this up to say,

having a hundred tickets and then a group of dudes was so fun. Like, okay, let's put our heads together. What are the ultimate prizes that we want to do here? And I recommend these to anybody. Little parachute guys. Oh yeah. Which we threw off the third level into the court.

And donated them to some local 10 year olds and then this is a really good prize uh whether you have kids or you're uh a 30 something hillbilly teeth do we have this uh picture jordan here's me in the oklahoma city disney store with yeah wow look at that i'm so happy here we invented a whole we were we invented a whole lineup of characters called the Hocals. OK. We had a whole mythology us with our hillbilly teeth. Hocals, I guess, you know, sort of like Yokel, but with Hocum added to it. And it was just like, you know, now the governor of New York, Kathy, one of your classic characters. Anyway, just fond memories of my hokal days. If you want me to bust out a little hokal, I'd be- I'd be happy to hear some.

What the heck is all this equipment in front of me here? I don't know about this big city equipment. I'm just a hokal. I'm nothing but a hokal. Have you written the hokals into any sort of scripts? No, I've thought. Maybe, is that like a juncture? Like, was that a sign at the time that hokals should have

been a show that we tried? This could be a whole different universe if we just had done it. The hokals causes Peacock to lose yet another billion dollars. That's what we're all trying to do. Peacock is all in on the Hokuls. This had better work. It's kind of like Yellowstone, but silly.

But all silly like. It's called Hokuls. After an abbreviated first season, Poker Face canceled due to money being diverted to the Hokuls. If only Poker Face was as fun as us to hokuls i still have the teeth i use them as a christmas ornament uh each year and um uh so so you know that's a budget right there we're already four dollars ahead uh we are we are we do already have the teeth so Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. I'll get pitching soon.

Anyway, I just recommend those as prizes if you get the chance. Here's Arnie's place. Oh, great. Oh, I didn't know we had this photo. Oh, great, great, great. Oh, wait. Oh, this tells you the- You can kind of see. Yeah.

Wait. This weird brown texture that's kind of bumpy. It's brown and bumpy interesting um you know how you like buildings to be i mean it does look like a building that you'd want to hug it's like a it's a big soft foamy building that's that that's has like a token cut out of the wall kind of it's got like this like two like semi-circle windows um yeah above and below the arnie's place uh logo a big space in between arnie's in place not sure what the decision there on the font was but um just give give kids a break from reading you read one word take a breather before you read the next yeah you

read all day you know you come in here you don't have to read in here that's what you did in school all day oh and look at this interior of oh my god like this is really straight yeah this is so glorious it's like i don't know can you describe this to like every game is in this glorious like golden wood liberace's bedroom is an arcade yes just these big rounded, it's like incredible woodwork. This is like, this is a top shelf arcade for sure. Every game has its own slot, its own peep show like privacy. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's like a urinal with the dividers. It's very strip clubby in retrospect.

That's something I obviously did not cotton to when I was a kid, but it is very much, yeah. It's mirrored ceilings essentially. Right. Liberace's bedroom. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. But so the thing to why, why are we talking about Arnie's place in general? What is the bit? Why have I built up Arnie's place? And I think it's because I looked into this owner, Arnie K.

And Arnie K was out of his mind this guy was nuts I as as alluded to earlier I could not believe how much literature there was about Connecticut arcade owner Arnie K uh which which Patrick you and our DMs alluded to a little bit like you had you had like the legends from your parents of of arnie lord you recall anything in particular yeah i mean there was something about him i remember being told he like chained himself to city hall or something because because they were like the town didn't want it to open like there was like a neighborhood or town association or something that like opposed the arcade opening because and this is all very quaint in retrospect you know but

like it was 1982 1981 i guess this was taking place and it was like it's gonna be a hangout for teens they're gonna smoke and play addictive video games and etc you know they should go to the ymca or you know uh school groups or church you know it's not very convincing in retrospect uh listening to listening to whoever the opposition was. But yeah, as part of that, I think he chained himself to Westport City Hall or Town Hall. And there's a bunch of other stunts that he obviously did or threatened to do. Let's pull up a picture of him. This is this is Arnie Kay, as in The New York Times. The New York Times covered this local arcade drama an astounding

amount of times. I got a subscription so that I could read. Not keep up with current events, but look up 1984 articles about arcade drama. For the listener, well, here, I'm reading this from the newspaper. Someone described him as

a hulk of a man. Probably around 350 pounds and it was his dream to build a video arcade uh he was the heir to a pinball fortune which now after what jason said at the beginning there's a lot of color okay all right yeah and i hate to profile off of his physical appearance but you know there's look he's he's got a paul sorvino certainly has a paul sorvino thing going on um so what does pinball fortune mean i don't know uh he um he was so he's very very wealthy he lived in connecticut in a house previously owned by a gershwin like george gershwin's sister francis who was married to the inventor of Kodachrome photography.

So that's who had those before. And then pinball heir Arnie Kay. So this is like clearly a very nice estate. And he really but anybody wanted to give back. He wanted to give Connecticut kids like you some fun but he ran afoul of something called the greens farms association who said we don't want our town to become a city that's what oh yes I see what you mean oh that's so city life but we are but a quaint town um but he in in in starting this arcade he's like uh this is not gonna be know, just some scuzzy kid hangout. This is going to be, you know, a classy top shelf place. We're going to have attendance in blazers.

Everyone who works here will be in a blazer. And I know that everyone in the town is worried about kids skipping school to go to the arcade and that's why our three uniformed attendants will be on duty and they will all have copies of all the school calendars in a 25 mile radius in their pockets and so if a young person unaccompanied by an adult enters we ask them no school today and then it's weird they said no school today while making this like a pay up game oh oh there's no school there's i hear there's no school if you can like scratch the scratch you know well arnie did his training and then he did his uh off the books training yeah that's not everyone the gestures uh um so anyway so look we can we're cross-checking the calendars.

We have a PA system to announce the names of children called home for dinner. Imagine the embarrassment of Patrick Monaghan. This is how I thought everywhere was all the time, actually, when I was a kid. I thought everyone would know if I ever did something wrong or knew what, like, they knew my name, they knew who my parents were, so I never decided to do anything bad. Michael Carlson, stop playing the Turtles game. Right. The arcade should know he got a B-plus on a recent social studies test. That's right.

And as a kid... Oh, I was going to say, as a kid, Mike's motto was, call me whatever you want, just don't call me late for dinner. Well, that's that's true. Be on your tombstone. Dispute that.

I mean, it's something very quaint about the idea. You've been called home for dinner. It's like, well, unless your mom is outside in the Volvo, like this is not Little House on the Prairie. Like this is on a this is on the post road in Westport. It's like a road that everyone goes like 40 on. There's car dealership across the street. You know what I mean? It's not a this is not like a walk home type, you know, area.

So just from a purely from a distance perspective, forgetting about, you know, being on the side of like a main road. So, yeah, mom's outside. So I guess I guess if that's what's being called home for dinner is then sure. The security guards didn't have like some sort of giant index of like, okay, little Billy's dinner is at 6.30. Little Sally's is at 7.45. Mom gets home late. We're going to be consulting with all the local children's meal calendars. Right.

You got to submit. You go door to door. Part of the census in the town was to give the meal calendar out to let everyone know when meals happen in the family. Talking 530, 6. And then what? Do you do like a steak night? Do you do like Mexican tacos?

The preparation of the meal is going to go into account when we're calling your kids. So you've got to tell us what is taco night. Is it Tuesday? You're making a roast. Is it going to take longer? Yeah, yeah. Because we got to have a grace 15 to 30 minute grace period, depending on how hot your oven cooks.

Yeah, give us your amperage. So, oh, and then one more thing, because he's, okay, Arnie is trying all that he can. He's ingratiating himself to the town. I want to get this arcade built. I'm going to have the school calendars. And, and oh you're worried about kids sneaking out of high school i'll build a gate the thing he offered i will build a gate this is trump's plan yeah i know how to stop what if we just build a very a high wall that will stop uh-huh uh high school miscreants um but anyways um the the city still will not budge we will not open this

place uh uh we just and we aren't zoned for it frankly we don't want an arcade in our town so arnie started going ape shit he called he called the rules unconstitutional he called the opponents of uh of his plans snobs and racists wow not sure where racism enters the picture arnie k seems like a white fella um anyway then he as you said chained himself to town hall uh uh then uh uh then he had a guy dressed as pac-man hand out 50 bills to anyone wearing an i support arnie's Place shirt. This goes all the way up and up to the Connecticut Supreme Court. And then finally, dream achieved.

It is opening. Great. Arnie's Place is open for business. Three weeks later, it is closed. A judge orders it closed again because it had something to do with zoning we're like okay we'll let you do this but max 50 games he put in 80 games so now he's like uh going back and forth with them like okay what if all right i'm gonna have 75 games and so a lot of them are just backups so it's only if the other games go down but then of course he's just running all the games at once. So this is immediately shut down.

How this place is such a firestorm, I don't know. But Arnie thinks about other angles. What else can we do to keep my place open? And he realized, wait a minute. The city's not okay with arcades, but I've checked the Constitution, and they say nothing about porno theaters. So here's what I'm gonna do there's this this is city councilman William Seiden and he has a bug up his butt about my arcade what if I open a

porno theater called the William Seiden pornography he's opening a spite porno theater that he doesn't even want to open named after a local politician that is one of the canniest moves i have ever heard of if you don't let me open my business i will open a porno theater and name it after you. So this idea is, he didn't copyright it. Anybody can do this. If there's listeners who are trying to start a restaurant, a cafe, a laundromat, anything. Yeah, yeah.

Just start doing this for fun. I do wonder if the initial scapegoating of this place, of this place is going to be trouble, was by a traveling boys band con artist salesman. Because it sounds very close to the setup of the music band, where he's like, you have a pool hall down here. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. It's a real life music band. They're playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Is that what you want your children? You want them experimenting with ooze at home with their pets? That's the only place this could lead. You want them to know martial arts and the art of being seen and not seen? You're not going to be able to call them home for dinner if you can't even see them in plain sight. Now do that in a little bit more of a musical way. You're not.

These kids are becoming lethal enforcers. They're trying to stage a revolution. They're living in the sewers. They're living in the sewers. They're sleeping on the sewer floor. They're going to start a revolution X. They're not looking at their local youth group pastor. They're looking at an old rat man.

Tell you we got trouble. Pornono theater not enough of a threat then he's like all right here's what i'm gonna do that nice house that i have that i i got from the gershwins uh i'm gonna let the hell's angels live in it um and then it just and then he says like oh this all goes through, if this works and I have the Hell's Angels riding around town and I open my porno theater, residents are going to drop dead. So things are heating up and people are like, why is this guy so nuts? And he says, well, look, I'm just very determined. Why? An example of this is when there was a burglar in

my home and i shot and killed him is that is that a one-to-one is that a good example of what well william seiden is attempting to kill my business right right my entrepreneurship uh-huh look i don't want to be severe but if you don't let me open the arcade I'm gonna shoot and kill you I'm gonna run for city council win for sure and then for order of business clear my throat pour myself some water bang bang bang bang shoot all the city council was it with like a

revolution x gun that's what they based the game on. Yeah. Anyways, he said it was another case of someone trying to take something away from me, said Kay, who was not charged in the shooting. Right. He also once got an unexpected tax bill for $1,100, which he said, fine, I'll pay it in pennies. Oh.

So this guy was just a troublemaker in general. In all of this, a guy said, I don't understand this man's persistence. He's worth $119 million, and he works 90 hours a week. You explain it. And then a reminder, Kay's family manufactures pinball machines. Jason, everything you said at the beginning I didn't know you were

doing the prologue for I don't get it how does he have all this money and he's just from a pinball machine family right and this was big money so what I was saying was wrong um there he is there's Arnie um was he eventually elected

mayor like that'd be the fitting end of the story. Then governor. No, I will. OK, here's here's the next few steps. Oh, he also in this article where he's doing a lot of threatening says, if the town does me harm, I will do the town harm. and all this is enough for arnie's place to victoriously open with as many games as he wants mr mayor alderman i've killed before i've killed again now on to my business today my my real concern with arnie k and this is a memory is coming back to me of like a regular carbon side arcades where you put a qu quarter in and the game wouldn't start. So they find the put upon worker and they would like jam their finger on the coin and sometimes use the key to open the machine and like toggle some

stuff. And eventually they go like, all right here. And then close it back up and just give you a few quarters and walk away, you know, like, all right, it should be fine. Now. I feel like, all right, here, and then close it back up and just give you a few quarters and walk away. You know, like, all right, it should be fine now. I feel like Arnie K., maybe not as generous. I feel like I'd be scared to ask him to like, hey, can you open this up? Him directly, yes.

Yeah, waggle it around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of his business suit wearing employees? Right. I'm picturing now, I don't remember who worked there. I assume they were mostly T. Andrews, although it said there were off-duty cops working there as well i don't it is getting much more strip clubby uh the more the more details you find out but uh really yeah i mean i don't remember like everyone looking like legs you know from fat tony's uh crew or

something did any of this this vibe that I'm discussing, did this ring true? Or was that in the past? Now things were innocent as far as you knew at Arnie's place. That was all before I was born. I was born a year after that. I didn't live in the area until a few years after that.

Arnie's was just a business that was open, I believe, at that point. But it was like, you know, it had patterned, Arnie's was just a business that was open, I believe at that point. Um, but it was like, you know, it had like, um, patterned, like, I think it was like kind of space ish, you know, that kind of like eighties, like futuristic looking kind of pattern carpet also. Um, and it was just like, uh, yeah, I mean, it was just an arcade. I, I had no idea about the backstory. I think, I think my dad must've found out about it like retroactively because obviously he wasn't around either but it was then again it was in the new york times it seems like every week um another discussion so i don't know so many articles i was baffled by how much this was talked about and and and also that's not the end every single business

that he had every sub business had other stuff like this so just to close out that story uh william seiden uh the the almost but not named uh owner of the pornography theater lost his election arnie got his way but seiden lost and then years later when it was about to close circa 94 like you said um he the newspaper asked for comment, and he said it was a good place, and I will miss it. I made a big mistake. Wow. He kissed the ring. This man was completely owned by Arnie.

They didn't mention it in the article, but there was a red dot that appeared on the side of his. I have to go now. No more comments. Then just general memories that I saw on a message board about Arnie's place. Like, oh yeah, lots of good times. I remember one time when Arnie just snapped and everyone with a leather jacket was permanently banned and thrown out. He had the bat in his hand and everything. The bat?

Good times. The bat. Don't make me get the bat. Wow. He was like Sting, the wrestler Sting with his trademark bat. Wow. He was up in the rafters the whole time. Yeah.

Arnie, yeah, every now and then a spotlight. Come on, Arnie. Then they had the whole thing where there was a fake Arnie also. Yeah, yeah. Too many Arnies, yeah. The decoy. He had Arnie of decoys. Like Saddam Hussein.

Hey, are you 350 pounds in the Westport area? Would you take a bullet for me? Arnie's not here. Arnie's not here. His sons, Uday and Kuse, are running the Florida Nates. That's right. Man, the bat. Yeah, the bat.

And to break down this story also, everyone with a leather jacket was banned? Why? It must have been like one kid with a leather jacket did something that annoyed him. Yeah. So that's it. You leatherotties. Yeah, yeah. You never said for arnie's again

leather blazers caught on in the 90s so did arnie have to go like back in his office and think about banning that kid i come to think of it i was a big leather jacket kid when i was seven so my parents like whoa whoa you can't go in there like that i I do not own any leather. I don't believe. You can wear this anywhere, but not there. Don't want to die. Hide it in the bushes outside. Not allowed to bring that in. Maybe Arnie just heard the song Leader of the Pack, and he got really upset.

He was like, no more. All doo-wop based grievances. Jersey boy. He hated Jersey boys. The day they opened the door to the Brill Building, this country went downhill. All that popular music. He's a child. Child wearing a leather jacket, yeah.

Thank you, Jordan. Yeah, this kid, no, he's out out of there that kid's up to no good leather jackets banned uh snapping in unison banned definitely banned yeah definitely banned um so then he he opened a deli uh and the and again he ran afoul of the town. They're like, yeah, this time we'll impose some stuff on Arnie and I'm sure it'll be fine. No, he was denied a liquor license. So he just started giving it away. He's just giving away booze. He said, this is the new Boston Tea Party. And then they were like, guy, there were secret shoppers coming in

to see if we can get some of the we can see if we can order some wine but they gave themselves away because they came in and only ordered two cans of clam stock at 1030am he's done it he's fine to me

your next CVS for dollars off you gotta ask for a pound of capicola a pound of provolone and then the clam stock and it's like oh you have any wine floating around you're serving some wine free wine you giving away for free um so there was

that and then the last this is the most inane lawsuit ever that uh Arnie um lost a 1991 lawsuit against nabisco then the owner of the trademark for a1 sauce because his deli was selling a sauce called a2 sauce yeah fuck it those a1 guys sitting up on their i horse they think they're the only sauce in this country i mean he is he is i mean if he's really worth a hundred million dollars and he's this willing heady to like to go to like i i looked up the case it went to summary judgment so that means it went all the way through discovery, all the way through people getting deposed. They did probably trademark surveys to see like what the public,

how famous a one is, you know, and who was associated with what, all that kind of stuff. And so it's probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and he got his clock absolutely cleaned in the decision because yeah, of course. And, but somebody got paid a lot of money to work on that for probably like a couple years like it's completely insane right that he would not think like that he has an okay probably somebody told him right away you are not going to win this like hell i ain't we're going right because his attitude was you know fuck them you know and it's like well nabisco has a little bit more

of an ability to fight things and maybe inclination than you know a suburban town that's just like oh god okay he has like he's willing to spend any money all right we're gonna roll over here you know well there is a uh we're gonna open the nabisco porno theater that's his big and then he gets sued for trademark infringement again you see that's that's what would happen there. We got a wall with a glory hole, and the hole is in the O of Nabisco. I looked up A2 sauce and just got a lot of results for recipes for homemade yum-yum sauce.

Okay. You guys making the yum-yum sauce? I'm disturbed by the phrase homemade Yum Yum Sauce. That sounds like something you would hear at a buffet. Hell yeah. Yum Yum Sauce. It's just hot sauce, cayenne, mayonnaise, sugar, garlic. It's just like a spicy mayo, it seems.

That's one way to make it. Yeah, I know another. Hey, I've got another idea for yum yum sauce, too. Mr. Hogle, yeah. But I probably not taste any good. I'm just a hogle. Final preparation step says put yum yum sauce on the glass. You could get kicked out of a concert for that yeah i think even the even the parking lot all

right let's let's wind this guy down we've this is uh i i'm i'm exhausted by the story of arnie but so excited by it because you know we've been taught there's there's been this phrase guys on the show lately and i when patrick when you told me the vague uh situation with arnie and i and i started looking in like i think we have i think we have a local guy yeah on our hey it's hard to describe what guy is exactly but i i was thinking qualities of it are just like uh um it like endless wealth endless determination to uh make a really, like, limited dream happen. And that, like, you are, like, it fails a bunch. Wait, this is the phrase.

That you're failure prone, but also failure proof. Yes. Anybody who fails over and over again and yet just gets up and does it again immediately. Right. And that's definitely Arnie. That's definitely Arnie. Yeah. Yeah.

Man. A2 sauce. That's really good. You can't sue me. It's, you know, it's A2. What? It's way different. If I could direct.

Oh, wow. You found a bottle. You found a bottle of A2 sauce. Wow. Arnie would be so proud. If I could direct the jury to the second numeral in the. I assume he represented himself. Oh, yeah.

He would have to. Does this look like a one to you? It's the most bent up one I've ever seen. If that's a one. I'm sorry. I think this case is not. Oh, then can I direct your attention to the bat?

He's got a bat. His trademark bat. My client is prepared to offer not to name a porno theater after your client. We will not budge on this. All right. Well well what a delight thank you for bringing us this this local flavor giving us something to cut loose on uh patrick monahan um uh unless you if you cross us you will be patrick monahan of the patrick monahan pornography theater but for now we've had a good

time with you so we'll just say you survived podcast the ride. What a blast. Let's exit through the gift shop. Is there anything you'd like to plug? What a time to be alive. It's a, let's see, it's the podcast that counts down the things each week to make you say the thing.

That's the title of the podcast. It's a dumb news. Nothing too serious. It's me, Eli Uden, Kath Barbadador uh all comedians and uh that's the main thing and i don't know i'm like patty mo on the social stuff i guess so um that's about it fantastic uh um yes and you're super funny on there and so uh super funny with us we appreciate uh having you here and um and as for us uh thanks to jordan katz for producing this one and giving us some great visual aids.

Thank you. If you want to see the video of this episode, head to the Forever Dog YouTube channel. You can find us on the socials at Podcast the Ride. For three bonus episodes every month, check out Podcast the Ride, the second gate, where, Patrick, you'll be happy to hear there is an episode coming up that's in the can that does involve Mr. Belvedere sitting on his own balls. The great tale will be told, but only behind the second gate, which you can find at patreon.com slash podcast the ride. Well, what a delight.

And I also, by the way, on the fly, I cut, you know, how about a little music to go out on? Jordan, there's one more thing I want to say about Arnie's Place is that apparently it was a great place to play the game Journey. You guys know the game Journey? I don't. I can't say I know it. And when I say Journey, it is the journey that you might be thinking of. There is a game.

I think the home game was called Journey the Escape. But the other one is just Journey the Arcade Game. You know what? Screw it. Let's let's just play what video do you got day-to-age presents the world's first rock video game journey escape the concert's over now you must help each member of journey escape through mobs. Shifty-eyed promoters. Neil and Steve. Find your roadies and manager and run for the escape vehicle and live to rock another day. Journey Escape for the Atari 2600

from Data Age. Yeah. Journey the video game, which, yeah, apparently you could play it at Arnie's and a lot of places and people did pride themselves in having high scores in that game, which you would, of course, get by playing as each member, and I mean all of them. Wow, really?

So, yes, Neil, you can be Neil Sean. You have to retrieve Neil Sean's guitar, and then once you do, you can shoot energy bullets. Of course. Um, or you can play as Jonathan Cain, where you descend a series of ramps while jumping over moving hurdles to reach Cain's keyboard. Then shoot lines of it. The whole thing, it actually becomes that you're playing a concert in space and you have to watch out for alien groupoids. Oh, wow.

Really? Yeah. That's what would happen if you were Journey in Space. But with that exciting commercial having just been played, and we'll let this music play us out and this clip from the game. So that's how they dressed up the game on TV. Then you go play it in an arcade, and this is what you get. Here's some sweet sounds, and thanks for listening, everybody,

and watching on Forever Dog. Thank you. Steve is going to get his microphone and stand. Oh, he got it. That sound was him getting it. Now he's about to die. Oh, my God. Steve Perry has been compromised to a permanent end.

Forever Dog. This has been a forever dog production executive produced by Mike Carlson Jason Sheridan Scott Gairdner Brett Boehm Joe Cilio and Alex Ramsey

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