Wonderful! - Wonderful! 219: The Place I Come to Fletch

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Griffin’s favorite empowering culture realm! Rachel’s favorite sport automaton! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum: https://www.napawf.org/about Harmony House: https://harmonyhousewv.com/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

🎵 Hello, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. No glasses. I'm going no glasses today. Ooh, I'm going glasses. I'm going no glasses today. Ooh, I'm going glasses. I'm going no glasses. You're going glasses. You're going bespectacled.

I'm raw dog in it. I really, I was like, my brain was going, don't say that. Don't say that. Don't say that. Don't say that. Here we are. But here we are. It came out anyway. It's wonderful. Should we talk about things we like? Things that we're into. I'll tell you what I'm like and what I'm into is unconsciousness sleep rest

the where is this your small dreams yes my small wonder is we definitely use it as of course it is but here we go again here it's not even a small wonder nor is it a wonder that i would sort of discuss at length on the show it's just great when you can rest, when you don't have to be awake and doing stuff and you can instead be unawake. Yeah. That's a new way of referring to it that I've come up with.

It's been a pretty rough ride around these parts, I would say, for a little bit now. Yeah, we just, I mean, our listeners of the podcast will know that we almost never have any kind of backup plan for anything we do. So we have no fail safe. If something doesn't go exactly as it's supposed to, it throws our entire pendulum off its axis. Yeah, pendulums have axes.

You looked at me like, did I say something wrong? But I think you're totally clear there. Yeah, so sorry this episode's late. But we are doing our, we're doing our darndest. I can say that much. And I can also say, we should do real small wonders. Yeah, we should. Do you got one just off the top of the head?

Oh, you know, this is a tricky recommendation. Uh-oh. Do you even want to make it? I know. That's what I'm trying to decide. I'm watching the Netflix show Inventing Anna. Okay. And it is a Shonda Rhimes joint.

Okay. Okay. And it is a Shonda Rhimes joint. Okay. And I think more than the story itself, I just, I really appreciate the way Shonda puts a story together. Yeah. Because we are looking at this con artist from this journalistic angle of like the journalist is hunting down the story a la like All the President's Men. Yeah.

And I love a good journalist story. You do. Good night, good luck is another one that's one um what is what is the other one i'm thinking of spotlight yes that is the one uh i know all of them because i am a journalist um and yeah and so i just i i just finished watching that show, and I liked it. Okay, good. That's about as tepid a seal of approval you can give them, but that's great. I'm all about this game Elden Ring. It's the latest game for my favorite sort of currently active game developer.

Is this the one that takes 100% of your attention when you play it yeah okay yeah i mean most games do require a certain amount of attention be paid to them but sometimes i can talk to you and you will look up from a game this is not that game uh no i don't play i mean i play this on my computer i don't usually play this in your presence oh well you're playing something else in my presence lately too yeah uh no it's it's just so big it's it i keep having conversations with people and by people i mean russ and chris and justin on the besties about like i'm having a hard time not calling it the best game i've ever played and it's hard to sort of put that recency bias aside but it's like i'm i am perpetually excited can you give me a comparison like a frame of reference that I would know?

Do you know Skyrim? I mean, I know Skyrim from you playing it. Yeah, like huge, huge, huge open world, but also incredibly difficult and requiring a level of practice and banging your head against it to make progress in a way that is like so satisfying. Huh, okay.

It's phenomenal. So good. Not everybody's cup of tea, but I'm very glad to have it. And yeah, I go first this, listen, we're coming in hot and heavy with this week. We have like exactly one spare hour. And so we are going to try and do this episode.

So my prep on this one is almost non-existent so i'm gonna speak from the heart that's good should be doing we should be doing that i went to my first renaissance fair this past weekend oh here we go i went oh shit what's it called the uh the one here in right outside of robin hood related the sherwood forest renaissance Robin Hood related. The Sherwood Forest Renaissance Fair. Yes. It's a big deal. They've been doing it for a long time. It's like 50 minutes outside of Austin. So it's not like really in it,

but it's huge. It's a huge sort of thing. And I took Henry because it seemed like the kind of thing he would be into and he was pretty into it. And we had a really nice time. Just walk around all the different sort of shops

from the different shop keeps and their various trades. Griffin told me about his elaborate decision-making process around whether or not he would say good day back to people. Yes, so the first, I rolled up there and you didn't have to dress in the garb, which is good. I don't think you ever have to. I mean, I think there are some

where the role playing is sort of more enforced than other places but this is a very like uh visitor friendly thing uh the the sherwood forest fair uh and yeah because henry was wearing like a space jam t-shirt so we weren't even really trying yeah um but he had a lot of fun just sort of like walking around at the different like shops so they were like here's a person who makes toys out of wood and here is like an old-timey candy shop and yeah uh we watched like a blacksmith do some stuff and we saw some big ass horses that henry was quite quite afraid of but they did cool tricks and stuff like that uh and he was really into it but there's something about sort of this uh having a spot where it's just sort of agreed upon

anachronisms that you are volunteering yourself into right this idea of like i'm going to cross the threshold of this place and be in another time. And that is inherently very cool. I don't know why it took me this long to get in there and do this. Yeah, it surprised me. You told me you'd never been to one. It's not my, there are lots of different types of like nerd culture. And this, what it represents is like not mine and and that's

not me i i hope i am not protesting too much i think it's interesting because you are somebody that role plays quite often um just through the nature of your job yes and there's a difference i think between doing that in telling a story and doing that in like in like inhabiting right yeah inhabiting is the word i think exactly because like i don't i've never cosplayed before really and and so that i was worried that i would feel like an outsider so when i showed up at the very first like shop and someone was like good day i was like hello hello because i didn't feel like i would be able to say a good day about hail and well met because i didn't want that like i don't know what comes off as here i am with my son in his space jam t-shirt if i come back and i'm like fare thee well is are they going to think i'm like making

fun of them or something okay but i also realized that is folly because it's like they could not have more of a home court advantage yeah in this in this place yeah um i will say as somebody who went to colonial williamsburg uh as a young person yeah and really enjoyed it i kind of get the immersive quality of it like like there's something about it's like when you go to a good theme park and they really like set up the area as like a particular place yeah like there there is something that i like about really getting to like be in the space and and and and the hope i guess is that you are transported in a way. So I get it. It was really fantastic.

I have very strong feelings about cons and conventions. Yeah, I bet. Because I've been to a specialized sort of convention where people who don't usually have the opportunity to be enthusiastic about a very specific thing in their real life now feel like they are the ones with like the ones in charge the ones with the ones with clout the ones who's like like interests and skill sets will be acknowledged in a way that they won't outside of this pocket universe that they create for themselves right i have i've seen that break bad in a lot of ways yeah i've seen it break bad in

ways where that turns somebody into like a real dickhead or create like a really toxic environment yeah but at the renaissance fair it feels like everybody's just like i don't have another opportunity to leathersmith for you like i am a fletcher this is all i like this is it this is the place i come to fledge and there is something really kind there is something really great about that it just i don't know maybe it that's not true for every renaissance fair and you know everybody's different in the way that they react to that level of you know uh empowerment that is a really good point it's difficult to go somewhere and see a craftsman crafting just in your daily life yeah of course yeah no for for sure it's yeah and i especially for a kid right like i am pretty far removed from the concept of like how did this thing get to me like how did the how did the uh you know on a sort of wild example like how did my macbook

get made till but to like simplify it like the glassware we use to drink out of like where'd that come from i don't know but we can go see a glassblower at the renaissance fair and it's very like one-to-one and i think there's something very cool about that uh especially for for kids um plus you know sword like sword fighting like there was a little part of the of the ren fair where people were larping and there was like a boundary for it. Or it was like, this is where you come to fight.

Don't fight in the non-fighting areas. So we could just kind of like stand at the perimeter and be like, they're fighting. And that's cool. I don't have a whole lot prepared sort of about Renaissance Faires. They are sort of a creation of the mid-20th century like post-world war ii people got into like medieval music like early folk music and sort of the the uh obviously that is a early early predecessor to like the folk revolution that

came about in like the 60s and and what have you um but there were just a few people who were like hey i like this and so it there there came sort of weird fancy parties uh there was the in 1957 there was a folk musician named uh john langstaff who held what was called the christmas mask of traditional revelss in New York City, which was essentially like a medieval folk festival. And then he threw another one in Washington, D.C. the following year. And I feel like sort of parties kind of branched out of that that grew bigger and bigger and bigger until we got sort of the traditional Ren Faire that a lot of people saw that happening

in these major sort of cities and said, hey, that's what I want to do. That's the thing that's been missing from my life is medieval culture. And so let's all go out into the forest and just like, you know, joust. And I think that that's great that they have found a place,

a place to do that, a safe place to do that. Yeah, well, when you told me, which I didn't realize, is that it is not just Renaissance cosplay that you will see at a Renaissance fair, which I did not realize. The first Renaissance fair was held in 1963 by an LA school teacher named Phyllis Patterson, who held it in her backyard as a class activity in the Hollywood Hills. I like that. Yeah, I like that a lot. activity in the hollywood hills so like that yeah i like that a lot uh she called it the renaissance pleasure fair uh which was actually a fundraiser for a radio station and like it just kind of like

wayne stock grew out of grew out of that too um so yeah ren fairs there's i'm sure that like there are lots of people listening to this going like, yeah, man, duh. Like, yeah, man, Ren Fairs, they're dope. Go eat a big turkey leg. I did not eat a big turkey leg. You did not. Because I'm worried about my sensitive tummy.

I did eat a sausage on a stick. And I will say that Henry was very pleased with the quality of the French fry that he received. He ate a traditional medieval French fry that he enjoyed. Yeah, we ate lunch. I ate my sausage on a stick and he ate like a corn muffin and some French fries. A very healthy lunch while we watched a man in stocks have tomatoes thrown at him. And that's, I mean, you can't beat that.

You genuinely can't. That's perfect. He got worried. He was like, I liked when the man who was having the tomatoes thrown at him made fun of the people, but I didn't like when he got hit with the tomatoes because I bet it hurt. And I was like, they were hollowed out. Although there was like an eight-year-old kid who must be like on like the star player of his like minor league team because he lit this fucking shell up. Like right in his face over and over again. It was brutal i could see at a point where the crowd kind of turns and it's like wait after the first one the dude in stocks was like okay

okay good throw and then he started to like flinch for the first time as he got buffeted anyway uh ren ferris get get there do them if you you live in Austin, the Sherwood Forest one, I think, runs every Saturday through April. And it's a good time. Ben, can I steal you away? Yes. Cool. Got a couple glumbo bramps here. And this first one is for Ben.

And it is from Sarah who says Ben gosh darn it you're my wonderful thing every day you're the best cat dad friend partner and gamer boy a girl could ask for one day when science finally gets its act together and makes Pokemon real I'll get us a Gengar to show my appreciation for you but until then this will have to do love your butt

XO Sarah that's a big scary ghost okay I was gonna ask if you could tell me what a Gengar was. Gengar is like one of the scarier ghost type Pokemon. He doesn't really, I think he's even- He's not cute or cuddly in any way? Not at all. He is also part poison type.

I think maybe in the most recent generations, I want to say that might be BS, but it does seem to me like this is a real spooky situation that they've got going on over there. And I love it. You know, their love seems very pure and good, but you don't want a big, it's a big ghost, like a big ghost. Anyway, you want to do the next one? Yes. This message is for Rosie and Casey. It is from Lee to Rosie and Casey of Wash DC. It is from Lee to Rosie and Casey of Wash, D.C. A silly poem from your good friend, Lee. I just wanted to say meeting y'all was a joy, bonding over our love of the family McElroy.

Two years later, with your friendship, I'm blessed. The best silver lining from the ongoing unpleasantness. But all that's to say, I think y'all are rad rad and I can't wait to see all the adventures we'll have. Delightful. I mean, you are the poem sort of expert. Uh-huh. How's that? Because I felt like it had great meter. I like family McElroy. That's inventive right there. Sure.

Yeah, you twist, you put a twist and a spin on it. And that's what art is all about, isn't it? And rhyming blessed with unpleasantness. That's next level shit. Yeah. on it. And that's what art is all about, isn't it? And rhyming blessed with unpleasantness. And that's next level shit. That's some shell silver... I have to learn some other poet names. How do you not know poet names?

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Will James and his guest co-host talk about news, pop culture, history, and all things nerdy? Probably. Yeah, that's probably the one that will definitely happen. Find out on the dramatic conclusion of Minority Corner right here on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Minority Corner. Because together, we're the majority. What do you have prepared for me, my lady? So much like you, my topic was put together mere minutes ago. Good. So we're going to kind of take a journey together, I think.

Okay, okay. I am basing a lot of my content, one might say all of my content, off of a Fast Company article that came out in 2019 called The Secret History of Cletus, Fox Sports' Bizarre Football Robot. This football robot means so much to me. I have a little video. This is not like— Just some of cletus's greatest yeah just in case you weren't familiar this actually isn't like his greatest hits or anything i just in case you weren't familiar about who cletus the football robot is yeah he kind of

he he's a robot um like animated robot heavily armored i would say who like in between plays will kind of dance and hop on the side of the screen. Well, he's stretching, isn't he? He's, like, getting limber and, like, kicking his legs, getting them ready for the sports that the other people are about to do. Yeah. Cletus the football robot, it's an incredible story. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about that.

Because, you you know I mean here at Wonderful Enterprises we love a good mascot we love sports too all of them equally oh my gosh so speaking of so Cletus the football robot had a twitter account an official one or a goof one you, it had 12.6 thousand followers. Did it have that blue check? Did Twitter authenticate? No, but it was 2013. It joined in 2011.

So I don't know if you could really get the blue check super easy back then. It has not tweeted since 2013. Oh, okay. All that to say I got excited. Like, ooh, I bet this is really funny. And it is so football that I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, it says, here's March 14th, 2013. When hearing hashtag Ed Reed was visiting the hashtag Texans, hashtag Ray Lewis immediately broke into tears.

No idea. I don't know anything about football, and that is impossible. That's so deep. I've heard some of those names maybe another another one from that same day the hashtag dolphins have been the biggest off-season winner so far enjoy that fins fans it won't last long oh this one was interesting yeah the twitter account is a little spicy so i imagine if you know football this is like whoa the mascot's saying that this uh chiron robot uh okay so this came about fox uh got the nfl football rights away from cbs in 1994

uh in 1995 fox sports was kind of putting together their brand like their look which was very like kind of futuristic like if you think about fox sports it's all like metal and gears for some reason um and then in 2005 cbs comes back and signs another nfl deal and at that point fox is like okay like we we need to we need to make this our own like we need to wrestle this back so wasn't it that it that CBS had like Sunday night football and Fox had like Thursday night football? Yeah. It's so fucking weird. Again, I'm not a football expert.

who was with his son, who was seven or eight years old at the time, who had drawn a picture of a hybrid football robot player slash cowboy. Awesome. Wait, like Dallas Cowboys, the football team? Or like he had- I mean, I can show you the picture. I don't see the cowboy in this picture.

That is a great, that's a cool drawing for a,'s like uh that's like some old dnd in this fast company article they have the original sketch uh i also just on i like unironically unintentionally said drawing do i say that word like that because that's the first time i've ever noticed myself and maybe it's because I have monitor headphones on. Drawing? I said drawing. Oh.

Do I usually say it like that? I don't think so. Or was that just an... I don't think so. Okay. Okay. All right. So anyways, this drawing that his son did, he kind of thought, okay, let's maybe explore this idea of a character synonymous with the Fox logo that gives us the authority to interact with the viewer.

That gives us the authority to interact with the viewer. To engage them. You don't have to make this make sense. You don't have to make the thing they said make sense on it. You don't work for Fox Sports. Thank you. Thank you. And so they just kind of kept going with it the chief strategy officer at the time

had developed branding for starbucks and thought like oh a mascot's a great idea like a mascot as a way to kind of do advertising and and connect with the audience right so they just kind of kept going with it and and sketching more formally what this robot would look like and then the 2d sketches became 3d uh and then they hired a studio to handle the motion capture fuck yeah who did they use for the mocap um it said uh they hired blur studios to handle the motion capture for special effects helmed by co-founder tim miller who has since gone on to become a major director with Deadpool. Whoa. I mean, I was asking,

did they use like an actual football player for- Oh, so that's what they said. They used green suited actors to perform all sorts of things the robot might do. That's good. Which include pointing, flexing, and taunting. Yeah, you gotta have the real deal in order to get that kind of action accurate so they just kind of

they just brought it up on the screen like they just made it part of it they didn't address it they didn't do any kind of big campaign around it they were just like hey here's a fucking football robot handle this robot and then it kind of became more of a thing that they played with like they put the robot in costumes, they wrapped him in Christmas lights, had him throw a snowball, programmed him to mime, put him in a hula skirt. Always using a motion capture actor

to act out the performances. That's great. They have so much money. Did nobody at that point just go, you guys have a lot of money don't you to make the robot do very accurate hula dance right they even started having him interacting with branding so they had like the burger king king interact with cletus oh man and then the twitter account that i mentioned uh fox i didn't realize this fox also also tried out a NASCAR bot called Speedus.

I need to see Speedus right now. Yeah, I didn't actually look up Speedus. I'm going to look up Speedus. Let's do that in real time. Show me Speedus. Twitter, Google, show me Speedus, please. Let's see. I mean, Speedus just seems like a car.

There's a series of NASascar mascots that i'm looking at right now i'm looking at a vimeo that's just a bunch of jets that the jets are transforming into nascar cars which one's speedus though there's speedus the robot is driving the car the robot is driving the car i mean speed is just looks like cletus but he's driving an automobile uh when fox signed the ufc in 2013 oh beat us yep did i really get it right yep yes oh they said uh the person who was interviewed the evp of marketing said in retrospect we should have left that one on the cutting room floor what beat us the beating robot yeah i think that one probably could have apparently beat us resembled a what they say in the article quote b-list manga

superhero with fierce red eyes and two big boxing clothes fucking beat us damn it he made multiple appearances on tv in the studio, and at events, not just as a graphic, but as a live-action mascot, a person wearing a Beatus suit. Whoa. Whoa. Beatus looks dangerous. The music is very Beatus.

Look at. Whoa. Whoa. That's a dangerous robot, Beatus is. Whoa. Get him, Beatus. Beat us is. Whoa, get on beat us. Wow. Cool.

Hey, who do you think would win in a fight? Cletus, beat us or speed us? Ooh. I mean, what kind of fight? Right.

Cause if it is, if it's a racing fight, speed, this is going to take the cake. You're right, honey. I didn't even think about that. Can we think of one more

oh i mean there is the band weedus but that's a real thing yeah if fox had some sort of penile health show you could just have meatus um well you go ahead and keep talking but i will not be paying attention because i will be thinking of more Edis robots. Okay. More recently, Cletus got a kind of a rebrand. He got what they refer to as a Gears of War makeover. He was getting bigger shoulders and a Ken doll waistline. Do you understand that reference?

I don't know what that means. Do you understand that reference? I don't know what that means. It's a shooter game franchise where the characters are notably unimaginably thick. Like big, big, big fucking boys. Big boys. They decided at that point on his real world size for the first time. Whoa. Give me that.

Give me those stats. 12 to 17 feet. That's a big boy! That's a big Cletus! I don't know if Cletus is still around or not. Sounds like he died nine years ago because he hasn't tweeted since then. I haven't watched enough football

to really... No, God no.... to say for sure um we watch one sport and it is hockey which is robotless tragically tragically robot what what what edis could we do for hockey yeah i mean there's there's there's puck and there's stick and there's ice sk Skiedis. If we were. Or for skating. Yeah. See, this is hard. Here we are making fun of Cletus. But let's all admit here that this is hard to do.

Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's Cletus. This was parodied a lot at the time. Just on a variety of like talk shows. Because I think this was really the first time. You know how now you always see the banner at the bottom and the little characters from the TV show were like moving around to get your attention?

This was kind of the first time that was really like happening of like, here's this guy inexplicably moving around while you're trying to watch something. So that was parodied a lot on like various talk shows. But I think it's great. I think it's good good i think it represents a pure time where people were people were like what what are we what's going to give us the

edge over our competitors and the answer was a cgi football robot yeah cletus so cletus i again i don't know if cletus is still around this This would probably be easy to figure out, but who's got the time? But he has worn Beats headphones and done cameos with Ford trucks. So there is a lot of co-branding happening. Beats, I know, wasn't too long ago, so I imagine that he was still around. Maybe he's still around. Who knows? The football season, I think, is over for a little while. But we'll keep an eye out for this robot.

Is NASCAR happening? Where's Speedus? That's my question. I'm sort of a Speedus head. Thank you all for listening. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. I'm going to link to that in the episode description.

Thanks to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. And thank you to you, my wife. Oh, thank you. I my wife oh thank you I love you I love you too you did a great job today thank you you did too

you do a great job every day and we have merch at McElroy merch we're going on tour there are still tickets on sale

there are tickets on sale if you go to McElroy.family we did have to move our shows scheduled for this month in DC

and Detroit and Cincinnati very sorry about that I think those are did have to move our shows scheduled for this month in dc and detroit and cincinnati uh very very sorry about that uh did i think those are going to be in november now all the dates since i'm terrible at remembering all of those uh but they are all on sale and you can find them at macroy.family and i think that's it sorry again for being late and then coming at you with let's call it pretty informal heat or we talk about things we like about ren fair late and then coming at you with, let's call it pretty informal heat, where we talk about things we like about Ren Faires and then a football robot. I mean, it speaks to my exhaustion that I can't think of a single other Edis robot.

And that breaks my heart. I feel like I've failed you and our listeners by not thinking of another Edis. I mean, we haven't said fetus. You're right, we haven't said fetus. You're right. We haven't. That would be complicated. I don't want to think about really what that mascot would be for. Yeah. Cause you would think like for feet,

but then also fetus is a word. Hetus is another one. Hetus. But what are like a hell's kitchen? Maybe, maybe. We're not going to get there. Yeah, that's okay.

That's okay. Sometimes you just got to walk away. And that's what we're doing, right? Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay. Money won't pay. Working on pay.

Money won't pay. Working on pay. Hey!