Wonderful! - Wonderful! 186: Arboreal Childbirth LARPing

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Rachel’s favorite toy craze! Griffin’s favorite documentation medium!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Support AAPI communities and those affected by anti-Asian violence: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate Support the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund: https://aapifund.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. I ain't got no kids to hold me down. I'll do podcasts while they're out of town. Just kidding. They're both at school in this town because that'd be inconvenient if it weren't.

Hey! Hey, you know that song. Let's get loud! No babies napping in uh griffin is very excited that we went through the somewhat emotional somewhat traumatic drop off these babies of our baby at daycare i love our baby i love our big child too big son small son love them both to the ends of the earth and back yesterday i took a nap for an hour and a half, and I turned into a sort of primordial slime inside of a chrysalis,

and I emerged a new, well-rested gentleman. I am hoping that I will get there. Right now, I'm just like bouncing around the house like a nervous pinball. Yes. I am hoping eventually I will become used to not having a child attached to me. Yes.

Love these babies, though. Love these babies though love these babies this is super cute super cute and the you feel a fulfillment and but there's somebody else's problem right now man they sure are um this is wonderful it's a show where we talk about things we like things that we're into things that are good do you have any small wonders i do actually i thought about this just a moment ago and that is expiration dates yeah uh so uh loyal listeners of the show will remember that our master bathroom flooded in the great freeze of february uh flooded is a is a not a like accurate way of describing i mean it did flood but it also kind of exploded yeah uh we have not been able to do anything because of earlier mentioned babies in the house.

But now that they are off site, we are able to get everything ready. And I have been going through so many bathroom products and so many of them are expired in the great year of 2020. And those dates are really helpful when you're thinking like, should I maybe take this medicine? No, no, you shouldn't. It won't work anymore. And let me feel it feel it's so good that you brought this because let me fill you in on something else they also put those on food and sometimes you oh here we go here we go can i tell you how many expired bottles of mouthwash i found which says a lot about us but also made me think does it really you spit it out like you're not

drinking it is it okay like i don't know okay yeah this milk went bad in 1994 but as long as this is not the same this is not the same this is like a lot of alcohol it's probably okay yeah sure anyway what's your small wonder it's this it's this big beautiful whiteboard you got me no it's my father's day present rachel got me a big beautiful whiteboard to hang up on my wall to help organize uh ether c stuff um and uh i'm so excited about it's got all these magnetic tiles and so many markers of different colors and organizational systems yeah i didn't know if you were really into organization. I am, specifically for DMing. Like it's kind of necessary. And I know you put a lot of stuff in a document,

but when the document is not open, you are not able to access it. Yeah, it's like, I thought this might be better. It's one of those things where like handwritten notes also kind of like lodge into your brain a little bit better. Yeah, I feel that way. I had a wall covered in Post-it notes. I talked about Post-it notes,

but they all like very slowly eroded and fell off the wall. So this is a nice, more permanent solution. Yeah. Stoked for it. I'm also stoked to hear what your topic is for this episode of Wonderful, a podcast. My topic. Yes.

And we're only doing one still, right? Yes. Okay. My topic is Cabbage Patch Kids. Oh my gosh. You ever have these guys and at some point in the like we had all that shit like we had a teddy ruxpin and we had a like this this but oh god okay that was so long ago now huh wow i didn't know i mean it was it was a huge craze it was arguably the the first big Christmas toy craze ever. Yeah, of a certain scale, for sure.

Yeah. Prior to this, the only competitor was really the Etch-A-Sketch, apparently. The industry was making Etch-A-Sketches on Christmas Eve to try and meet the demand. My God. But, yeah. The Etch-A-Sketch? The Etch-A-S-sketch it's not a very good device people didn't have computers back then you know this was your own little way to

this was your old computers yeah your way to make my email well i made a square um yeah i had i had two cabbage vegetables. Wow. One was given to me by my parents. One percent or much? I know. One was given to me by my parents, and one was given to me by my mom worked in an elementary school. And I spent a lot of time at that school as a kid waiting for my mom to be ready to go home.

And the very sweet custodians gave me a cabbage fetch doll because uh this may not surprise anyone to know uh very close with the school personnel not surprising even one of those kids one of those only children one of those rare only children that uh had profound relationships with adults yeah wow um cabbage patch kids uh first produced uh by calico industries in 1982 do you remember the name of the guy it was written on every butt of every cabbage patch so i don't think i ever had my own personal cabbage he had a family doll that was it was a sort of communal no i, I don't remember. I don't know. Travis, I would like to hold the doll now.

Travis, your turn is up. It's my turn to hold the doll. Don't smell it so deeply. You're taking all the good smell away. Leave some of the vapor for me. Those were the original vape rigs were Cabbage. No, what was the name on the butt? Xavier Roberts.

Why did he put his name on the doll butts? Oh, Xavier. Okay. Wow, I'm putting my phone down. no what was the name on the butt xavier roberts why did he put his name on the doll butts oh xavier he okay wow i'm putting my phone down so when he started so this was uh 1978 he called them the little people okay which once they wanted to do wide release if you all know fisher prize has their own tm little people. But he more or less stole it from a craft artist named Martha Nelson. Sounds about right. He was a 21-year-old art student at the time. He discovered Martha Nelson's doll babies, and they came with a birth certificate and adoption papers.

That's the thing, right? Yeah, that's the big thing. papers that's the thing right yeah that's the big thing yeah so roberts cleverly modified the look of her dolls uh to get a copyright and told potential customers his little people weren't for sale but could be adopted for prices ranging from 60 to as much as a thousand dollars that was that it was all like that like it was like a way to sidestep she ended up like suing him and got a settlement because he you know went on to make a lot of money from this yeah this was in georgia he took a medical clinic uh and converted it into a toy store calling it babyland general hospital in cleveland georgia yes so this is what I know about Cabbage Patch Trolls. And I don't know how I know about it, but that there was like, it was essentially like arboreal childbirth LARPing.

Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about Babyland later. Y'all, I know we have lots of younger listeners who listen to this show who probably don't know any of this shit. Buckle, like, think about how you spend your day. listeners who listen to this show who probably don't know any of this shit buckle like think about how you spend your day think about what you like to do on the weekends and then imagine deciding to go to babyland general hospital usa and experiencing this because this is what it was this is what we were fucking up to uh so xavier roberts what's interesting about these dolls is they are not particularly cute

and that was kind of minute one of the design so i wanted to show griffin on air yeah the earliest design oh boy uh oh my what the fuck 1976 uh he had an interest in sculpture and quilting. And so these were soft sculptures. Here's 1978, still not a very cute creature. No. We're talking about one pound of face in a 100-pound head bag. Yeah. a 100 pound head bag it's all it's it looks like a it's like a six inch wide circle with about a half inch worth of face right in the center of it so he won a first place ribbon for sculpture

at an art show in florida okay based on this doll And then came- Someone saw that and said, this is the best thing here. And then came home to Georgia with his friends and started mass production of these guys. Okay. Here's the gentleman, by the way, on the cover of a magazine with his early creations. Just holding all these large headed. All right. So it was not his idea to really build the Cabbage Patch myth. That was a designer and licensing agent named Roger Schlafer.

He was the one that created this idea of cabbage patch kid and him and his uh partner at the time wrote the legend of cabbage patch kids to make sense of how cabbages gave birth to babies do we have is that like a thing that is written out oh yes that can we can we read that i mean it's quite lengthy uh but here's a summary so if you go i'm getting a lot of this information from cabbagepatchkids.com are they still making them oh yeah oh okay i didn't know yeah no it's changed hands a lot so like a bunch of different companies have tried to kind of regrow the brand after calico lost it then it was hasbro then it was mattel then it was toys r us like everybody's like trying to get a hand on that early success um it's weird that that hasn't come back in fashion these big

ugly babies with names on their butts so the legend uh if you go to the website what am i fucking looking at xavier roberts insisted that he get connected into this story. So when he was working with Schlafer, he was like, alright, if you're going to create a legend, make sure I'm in there. He wanted a self-insert in his fucking doll fiction? So, once upon a time, a young boy named Xavier Roberts

was playing in the woods near his home in the Appalachian Mountains of North Georgia. He saw a woman making folk art dolls and said, I will steal those. He saw a woman making folk art dolls and said i will steal those he saw a curious creature uh that looked like a bunny but flew in the air and buzzed like a bee he tried to catch it and flew into a waterfall oh shit what and there was a cave behind the waterfall okay Okay. And the bunny bee led him to the cabbages. And the cabbages were sprinkled with magic dust by the bunny bee. Okay.

And so he fertilized them? From the nearest cabbage, a little boy came toward Xavier and offered to shake his hand. He introduced himself as Otis Lee, one of the Cabbage Patch Kids. The way you are reading this is wild. Like, I don't know if you hear. I know your mind is kind of racing in a way to, like, summarize this in a way that is palatable for our audience. But your intonation is, he got a doll from the Cabbage Kids. I'm trying to read it like a news story.'s great it's good i love it uh otis lee the cabbage patch kid that xavier roberts met uh explained that the

uh babies are of all sizes and shape are born in the secret cabbage patch great the bunny bees sprinkle a magic crystal and the mother cabbages. Wait, what? They pollinate. Yeah, they like pollinate the cabbages. And the mother cabbages do what? They have the babies. The babies come out of the mother cabbages. And then what do we do with the cabbages after the baby comes out of them?

Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's probably like placenta encapsulation. You can. Right. Are the mother cabbages. baby comes out of them oh i don't know i mean it's probably like placenta encapsulation you can right are the mother cabbages can i buy a mother cabbage and then have my own sort of like factor i guess i would need my own that's kind of what hatchimals are right you remember hatchimals i mean in name only you could get the egg and then you'd like rub the egg and then the little thing would come out so the mother cabbage let's little thing would come out. So the mother cabbage, let's get into this. Once the mother cabbage has produced one cabbage patch child,

it withers away and passes along? I don't know. So this would be a good question for baby land. Yeah, it is a great question for baby land. What happens to the mother cabbage after the cabbage patch child comes out? Can a mother cabbage make more than one cabbage patch doll? Is there just one bunny bee fertilizing all these things?

And where is he getting these crystals from? Does his body make the crystals? Do they come out of him? You know what I mean? Like, is there some sort of genetic material inside of the crystals? Because if so, where are those genes coming from? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't

know. These are all good questions. Why was it behind a waterfall is my next question. Why did it have to be behind a waterfall? Because when I think of a lot of sort of like common agricultural hotspots, behind a waterfall is not usually. I think the idea is that Xavier had to discover it. Like there had to be a reason that people didn't know about this and Xavier had to happen upon it. Right. So, okay. Yeah, no, okay. He was the first one to see this flying bee rabbit

and to follow it because everybody else who saw it was like, I don't know, I'm too busy. So yeah, so Babyland. Yeah. Let me pull that up for you. God, I can't believe we haven't even gotten to Babyland General Hospital yet.

The thought of me going to a place called Babyland now, knowing what I know, seems bonkers. So it is situated on 650 acres in North Georgia mountains. And it is a big Southern style home where you can go and visit and witness the birth of a hand-sculpted cabbage patch kit yep like you see it pop out of a cabbage in and there's people who do a whole so can i tell you i have had friends that have visited okay uh i texted my friend amy when i was going to do this segment. And she said, when they announce a Cabbage Patch doll is about to be born, they tell you that the cabbage is dilating.

Hands up. What? It's apparently like a big ceremony where they dim the lights. I don't care. Of course it's a big ceremony. And I'm glad they dim the lights. I don't care. Of course it's a big ceremony. I'm glad they dim the lights to give the fucking cabbage mother a little bit of modesty. A little bit of dignity. I don't imagine that there are groans or noises emitted from the cabbage, but they do make it.

You cannot say that for sure. And then the child that is viewing viewing can name the the doll that is being born okay i would i mean i would leave that up to the cabbage mother or perhaps the bunny bee who um but yeah you can take a self-guided tour uh you can play with the cabbage patch kids and you spend like an hour just roaming around and probably 305 dollars at some point oh yeah that's a good point. I mean, but you're not spending, and it's an adoption fee.

It's purely a formality. It's all above board. So in the 80s, they set an industry record, $3.2 million. That's a lot. Between 1983 and 1986, Calico got into a bitter legal battle with Roberts That's a lot. the game here and this is gonna be my thing and this time they're bears and calico was like hold on a minute we have a deal with you and now you're trying to compete uh everything fell apart and that's when cabbage patch started bouncing around between hasbro and mattel and choice rs and all

different wow uh but yeah they're still out there you can still get them um i mean it's difficult they've tried a bunch of different things calco tried a talking cabbage patch kid, which was equipped with a voice chip and touch sensors and it could communicate with other dolls. So touch sensors and the hands enabled the toy to detect when and how it was being played with in response.

And the doll might say, hold my hand and give an appropriate response when the touch sensor in the hand was and what's the what's the response when the doll says hold my hand and you hold its hand does it say like good thanks thanks kind of sweaty all right well we're doing this it could also as i mentioned interact with other dolls uh and they could synchronize sing in rounds. So like Furbies then? Yeah, basically.

Okay. Yeah. And there's been any number. They've come out in different sizes. There's been big and little ones. Everybody's trying to figure out what it's going to be to get these back in the public consciousness. It is just...

We're done. It's not going to... It is done. I would go so far to say, it will never happen again for you, Cabbage Patch Kids. I'm so sorry. We've, like, moved on. We're into slime bags now.

That's it. Yeah, in 2018, Cabbage Patch Kids celebrated 40 years of adoptions in Cleveland, Georgia. Congratulations. They did it. They've really done it this time. So wild. Yeah. Can you imagine. They've really done it this time. So wild.

Yeah. Can you imagine when they put Legoland together? If they were like, yeah, and then the Lego broodmother, we ring a bell when her cloaca appears and from it, a hundred minifigures come spraying out. It really does generate a lot of questions, right? If you've taken your child to the baby land and you have not yet told them how babies are born, can you imagine? Well, I imagine there's lots of parents who do that so that they don't have to have that conversation. You know how you saw the doll come out of the cabbage?

Well, it's like that. It's a similar story to tell. Sort of like that. You know the bee with the crystals? Well, it was kind of like, it was sort of like that, if you think about it. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes. Thanks.

Do we have personal messages? We have personal messages, a.k messages, aka Grumple Pops. And here, this one is for future Chris. And it's from past Chris who says, Dear future Chris, you've always wanted someone to buy you a Jumbotron. Well, it's time to be the change you want to see in the world.

I'm here from the past to say you've worked really hard and you've come a long way to get your life happy, healthy, and stable. Hopefully the insane housing market bubble will pop soon and you can get yourself a house uh that is from chris and um chris not yet from what i understand it's still tough out there uh houses are uh just it's a while it's a wild time for

homes true in general but you have taken the first step to take care of yourself and purchasing a jumbotron yeah something you've always wanted that's it it's the first stage of uh if you talk to our realtor yeah they'll ask have you purchased a jumbotron yet yeah and if you say no then you're not even on step one not even visualizing it like what are you doing? Can I read the second one? Yep, yep. It's for Courtney. It is from Noah. Hello, Courtney. It's your boy here. Just wanted a way to say I love you to you while you're working.

Well, maybe you're listening to this at home. Either way, you're very special to me and I love you a lot. Working hard or hardly working. Listen to podcasts. You're not really, you're not giving it 100% if you're listening to these two clowns. Griffin has not had to make small talk

in a very long time. Hump day, huh? Ah. Thank God it is hump day. Did you see the bosses? Real piece of shit, huh? Oof. I don, huh? Oof. I don't know.

Oof. I'm sorry. Hi, my name is Graham Clark and I'm one half of the podcast Stop Podcasting Yourself, a show that we've recorded for many, many years. And at the moment,

instead of being in person, we're recording remotely and uh you wouldn't even notice you don't even notice the lag that's right graham and uh the great thing about this go ahead no you go ahead okay okay go ahead and you can can listen to us every week on MaximumFun.org. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Your podcasts. My first thing is impossible to Google for. And you wouldn't think it.

But, like, I'm not sure that there is a codified name for this thing and if there is it it has very little uh seo juice behind it i want to talk about home video home movies or home videos and i'm not talking about the animated show home movies with uh h john benjamin and i'm not talking about the animated show home movies with uh h john benjamin and i'm not talking about america's funniest home videos yeah you almost have to look for like a story behind the like home video camcorder that is the only way i can make any sort of uh progress in in in like looking for any sort of supplementary information on this because you can type in like real home videos and it's like america's funniest home videos is real funny and it's like that's not what i that's

not what i want to know about yeah it it was i don't know so i you know i don't have any of these no but it depends on like how uh quick your family was to adopt like technology. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because I think also when you are an only child, I mean, I have dance recital videos that, you know, could be purchased at the event itself. Right. That's how they get you. And I think my mom would borrow a camcorder from the school she worked at occasionally to make those videos herself uh but i do not i don't know i don't i don't think i knew anybody with a with a camcorder you know clint mcgaroy no i know man he he we went through a lot of different a lot of different camcorders yeah this is not

something that i think is going to register with everybody. But boy, howdy. Clint churned him out like the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. The commentary he provided. The commentary he provided was very good and also kind of adult at times in ways that I did not appreciate until I watched them as an adult. Yeah, they're incredible. I think one year for Candle Nights, I asserted a real desire to have McElroy home videos shared

at the performance because they're just the cutest, most great, wonderful thing in the world. Yes. I mean, it helps that you got this guy. A little Griffey. A griffy in a basket maybe or uh you know a tiny tiny car when we watch footage before griffin was born he's he's like boring well there isn't much that because my dad got this like big ass hitachi vhs yeah camera uh like right before i was born uh because in that first home video like there's a little bit of him like in the office and there's a little bit of my incredibly pregnant mother uh and then

there's like little me little me just just home from the hospital uh and i sort of like grew up on on on camera like kirk cameron or something uh so much brother love in these videos too like like i i don't know if there is a a dark cloud that we have yet to uncover about the young mac aureus but it seems like you all just got along famously from day one um yeah until we all worked like teens and then it got a little rowdy from time to time. So home camcorder technology started to become sort of commercially available in the early 80s. In 1983, Sony came out with the Betamovie BMC-110, which recorded Betamax format cassettes, which was not something that anybody really used or had. cassettes which was not something that anybody really used or had uh and throughout the 80s like uh media storage on cassette like evolved like really rapidly uh media storage like in general evolved pretty pretty quickly throughout like the 80s and 90s and and aughts and then now it's just like well here's an even bigger sd card back then it was here is a betamax uh v8 a betamax recorder here

is a vhs camcorder we had one of those here's an s vhs camcorder uh then you get into in the mid 90s dv cassettes which were like tiny cassettes that you couldn't put in your vcr without an adapter and uh you remember how if you recorded stuff at different speeds you could get a longer tape yeah yes it was like a four hour at this speed or eight hour at this speed but if you do the eight hour speed the quality wasn't as good yeah but from like probably from about 1987 to 1996 like we went through like four or five different camcorders because the media kept changing like the format of the thing like kept changing a lot um and there was definitely like a dark ages period where like we couldn't watch that stuff uh because dvd players

were like the only thing we had in the house and so we didn't have a vcr let alone a mini dv adapter like that you would need for all that stuff but fortunately like now there are you know companies that can yeah still to this day like i feel like every christmas your dad will unearth some vhs tape and turn it into a dvd and it's it's just always a treat yeah so we have about i would say 15 dvds or so covering about as many years of my life starting from the year I was born. And I just, like, I feel so grateful for that stuff. Like, I genuinely do because my memory is quite bad. And so for that reason, like I'm very grateful to have these things

that I can like look back on. But also like I have been wrestling a lot with like what I am nostalgic for now and like where I'm at in my life and just how long ago those days were, which is I think something that everybody in their mid thirties like starts to kind of wrestle with

and having kind of a you know an omnibus of uh of McElroy events of countless Christmases and birthdays and you know uh the Easter pageants and well yeah not to mention the fact that you used to watch those when my dad was still making them yeah and I hope that wasn't like a narcissism thing as much as it was like i've talked also a lot on the show about like how back in in you know my childhood i felt so empowered by being able to like create some sort of like media right like whether it was programming a really simple game in QBasic, like that was so cool to me.

All the way up to like when I burned my first CD, I was like, holy shit, like I can make CDs now. Like there's no going back from this. And I was sort of empowered to do that from birth because we always had a camcorder in the house while I was growing up. And so, like, I would make also very, very, very stupid, like, movies with my friends at my house after church. And, like, I always, I don't know, I felt like it was just so cool that I could commit something to a cassette, like a video cassette. I feel like there's a direct correlation between kids that had an access to a video camera and like,

and how they become creators as adults. Cause you hear that over and over again about like kids making movies with their friends. And then now they do like some kind of creative production. Yeah. I think about that a lot. We have a book that Henry loves and it's all about uh jim henson growing up and like how he uh like made these like uh like old old videos with his friends inspired by these old

uh old old movies and his grandparents would like make props out of their old clothes and stuff like that yeah i think i also think about that a lot um the nostalgia factor is intensified by the fact that my dad would frequently record these home videos on vhs tapes that he had recorded tv shows on so you'll be watching like uh an easter pageant and then you'll get like a couple minutes of like fucking babylon five and you'll jump to like a halloween party that my school had uh just swinging from vine to vine like that and being like oh damn but what did happen in that episode of babylon five now i need to go find it um yeah i just wrestling with sort of where i'm at in my life and like how how old i really am i find myself also doing this a lot which is like thinking about if things will ever

be like that again which is to say like I document Henry and Gus yeah just as much if not more than than my dad did on our old camcorders but like it's different now because you know I put that stuff in our you know family group and our like private group that I share with our family. And our cassette, like our VHS tapes, our old home videos were really just for us until, of course, we became internet popular and started to share them with the world. It was like our own sort of family history thing and that was like that's different than how how it works now i'm not saying that like how it works now is better or worse or whatever but that i don't know that henry or gus will like grow up watching old old videos of themselves in the same way that i did because it's not as novel like it's just how things kind of are now you would have to like

compile them and put them in one file because that's that's the big problem right is that everybody posts things discreetly and so if you were to like sit down and try and watch for an hour right there would be a lot of scattershot clicking yeah sure yeah um but yeah i'm i uh i don't know too many people that had as many of these home videos as we did but it's it's a thing that i am uh the older i get and sort of the foggier my memory gets like the the more and more grateful i am to to have these yeah no it's it's awesome i i i don't know why I enjoyed them quite so much, but I really did too. Hey, thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You'll find a link to that in the episode description.

And thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Yeah, thank you, Maximum Fun. If you are looking for a new show to check out, I would recommend Can can i pet your dog yeah you can you can recommend it and you can you can pet my dog thanks i've kept a dog in this house secretly uh without you knowing uh he's very quiet whoa that's very quiet he's a really quiet dog he has no mouth but he must scream god and um i think that's it uh thank you all so much for listening and uh we'll be back next oh we should mention live show your live show got live my bim bam uh here in a little bit on friday at 9 p.m eastern time june 25th we're gonna be doing a live my bim bam it's gonna be a summer boy-be-cue.

Yeah, what does that mean? It's like a barbecue, but with boys. Are you guys going to do, like, stuff? Oh, we're going to do some stuff. You can find links to that. If you go to macroy.family, you can find out all the deets. And, oh, our next graphic novel for The Adventure Zone comes out in a couple weeks also. Yeah, it's summertime, y'all.

The Crystal Kingdom. Yeah. And you can find a link to that at TheAdventureZoneComic.com. Please preorder it. That would be so cool of you. And we're also doing a live event for that one on July 13th. Yeah. And you can find details for that also at McRoy.Family.

Okay, now for real. Oh, we have merch also at macroy.family okay now for real oh we have merch also at macroymerch.com for real though we should go we don't have the easy out of like the baby's screaming bye but what we do have

is lunchtime lunchtime ring-a-ding-ding-ding that's the lunch bell not sure why it sounded like that bye Money wall, hey! Working all day. Money wall, hey! Working all day. Money wall, hey! Working all day. Money wall, hey!

Working all day. Money wall, hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported. Hi, I'm Allie Gertz. And I'm Julia Prescott. And we're the hosts of Round Springfield.

Round Springfield is a Simpsons adjacent podcast where we talk to Simpsons folks about non-Simpsons things. That's right. So in the past, we've gotten to talk to legendary showrunners and writers like Al Jean, Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Dana Gould, Mike Reese, and David X. Cohen. Voice actors like Maurice LaMarche, Maggie Roswell, and Yardley Smith. The voice of Lisa Simpson herself. Hell yeah. So we've been away securing guests for our final five episodes.

We won't tell you everybody, but we'll let you know that the last episode is kind of a big deal. We got Matt Groening. Homer's dad. We got Homer's dad. Check out new episodes of Round Springfield starting June 21st. On Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Smell you later.