S08.E01: Pinball Wizardry

We're back for another season! That's right: season eight has arrived, with new players (along with some old favorites) returning to claim all the pop culture trivia glory. Abhi, Alexa, and Ethan kick off proceedings with a snooty, French round of My Champion, before pivoting hard back towards the absolute trash bag nadir of American society: New Jersey. With a quiz about all the horrible things that movie and TV characters do when they're there, we'll lighten things up with a round all about pop culture-themed pinball machines. All that, plus the venerated lightning round!

NOTES

⚠️ Inline notes below may be truncated due to podcast feed character limits. Full notes are always on the episode page.

💃 Amber Atkins is the Kristin Dunst character from Drop Dead Gorgeous.

🧶 There have been attempts to codify the rules of “Calvinball,” which seems to go against the spirit of Calvinball.

🦈 Julia Child worked for the OSS, but was not a spy. She mostly worked developing shark repellant.

🪴 According to Dan’s research, 40% of people in New Jersey don’t know why it’s called “The Garden State.”

👽 The second season episode of The X-Files which introduced the Flukeman of Newark isn’t in every top 10 list of best episodes, which is a travesty.

🗺️ According to some DC comics materials, Gotham City is in New Jersey.

🍟 The McDonald’s Happy Meal for Adults Scorebreak: The only thing dumber is the fact that you can re-sell them on eBay. [2/10 Going to choose to believe that’s not a thing.]

🥵 The pinball machine from The Thing is Heat Wave from 1964

🏫 Ingolstadt is where Victor Frankenstein studied, as it had a famously modern medical school.

🦖 Anguirus is a big old ankylosaurus kaiju who first appeared in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again.

📖 The People Magazine Scorebreak. People Magazine: Did you used to get Entertainment Weekly? Now you get People. Did you used to get InStyle? Now you get People. Everyone gets People! [5/10 Sad but true.]

🎩 Deception on ABC centered on a “consulting illusionist” who would help the FBI solve crimes.

🗞️ Paper Girls was loved by critics, but didn’t get the audience numbers needed to pay for such an expensive series.

🕵️‍♂️ The Middleman was also loved by critics, but really did not fit on ABC Family at the time.