Welcome, dear listeners, to The Last Smashtoberfest! To kick off our final month of horror-inspired content, aka "just a flimsy excuse to make Halloween jokes in silly voices," we have a pair of video game vampires at each other's throats!
When the nameless world of Dark Souls requires an undead hero to find the Kiln of the First Flame, it's clearly a job for Raziel, wielder of the Soul Reaver and longtime nemesis lover frenemy of the vampire Kain! The time-traveling savior of Nosgoth might have to take possession of a random corpse every time he gets killed by the notoriously bad-ass monsters of Dark Souls, but that's nothing when you've already arranged your own resurrection or whatever. Soul Reaver is a hell of a drug, y'all. What matters is, he's up to the task.
Unfortunately, Raziel isn't the only deathless abomination wandering these parts. Alucard, hero of Castlevania and winner of Spelling Your Dad's Name Backwards as an Act of Rebellion Magazine's Sexiest Man of the Year award three years running, is also here, and also eager to prove that he can conquer Dark Souls. Which gothic vampire boi will get the job done first and make their way to the Kiln, and the narratively impressive moral quandary that lies inside?
Liz Logan breaks out her signature opening argument moves, Claire has a complicated history with Soul Reaver, and Alucard moons everybody. Plus, a brand new Smashtoberfest intro from Miles and Sharon that is simultaneously a labor of love and DEEPLY stupid. Thanks as always to Kevin MacLeod for the song we used, which is called "The Dread." Welcome to the end times!
With Doom's sinister plot drawing ever-closer to completion, the League know that they have to take any opportunity they can to strike out at the metallic despot. It's no wonder, then, that when Doom's secret time platform is discovered on the volcanic world of Mustafar, the League send five of their most dangerous members to destroy it. Will these heroes strike a telling blow against the lord of Phyrexia, or will they and their mission burn to ash?
Squirrel Girl puts her degree to work; Amethyst tries some identity theft; Brock Samson charges into danger; Godzilla points out the folly of Doom; and Dante is deeply unqualified for a leadership position.
Special thanks to both Mr. Jumbo for the intro music (youtube.com/jumboguitarist) and to Megaraptor for the final song before the credits (https://www.youtube.com/MultiPetriS)!
This podcast is contentious by nature, but if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that humans suck and animals are way cooler and more interesting in every way. At least, we all agree on that when Kit is running Surprise Party and everyone wants her to award them the most points! It's a jungle out there in Smash Metafiction, and when Claire, Liz, and Miles all find themselves in the care of a human dumpus who, while undeniably shitty, doesn't deserve to get torn apart by Shere Khan, it's up to them to gather a group of animal protectors to ensure the hopeless little bastard gets safely back to the Man Village. On a related note, smash the animated patriarchy.
But getting this kid home alive isn't the easiest thing in the world when hypnotic snakes, militaristic elephants, and pyromaniac monkey kings are all standing in your way. Which team of vaguely defined taxonomies will prove to have the Char(acter) Necessities? With our version of the Jungle Book downloaded and ready to hit your headphones, you're just the touch of a play button away from learning the answers and making all the other apes want to be like you!
Well, we asked our Patrons to vote on a list of matches that each involved four characters played by a single actor...and you voted for this one. The Tim Curry match. "Fists of Curry," some have called it. Personally, we prefer "Mad Tim: Curry Road." Mostly because of the "mad" part. This episode is rank lunacy, and you have only yourselves to blame. Don't look at us like that. You know what you did.
Of course, we did choose the specific characters, to be fair. We're the ones who decided this match should involve four extremely over-the-top Curry villains. We also decided to set the match in the context of the amazing Clue movie, also starring Tim Curry. Does the Lightning Round have something to do with Tim Curry too, you ask? Answer: yes, but only by accident. We'll explain when we get there. For now, the question is, can Pennywise the Dancing Clown from the 1990 miniseries It manage to discreetly murder all the characters from Clue using only their fears, and presumably some balloons? Will Hexxus from Ferngully poison their food and their air and clandestinely schlorp to victory? Will the Lord of Darkness from Legend get over his numerous crushes and remind everyone what they say about guys with big horns? Or will Long John Silver from Muppet Treasure Island use the power of reverse psychology to get away with the gold?
You might have brought this chaos down upon the world, but hey, we tried to make the best of it. And by "the best of it" we mean "several attempts at Tim Curry accents with varying degrees of success." Even Hub from Titan Up The Defense gave it a shot. YOU'RE WELCOME.
Time to fire up the ol' bunsen burners again, because Claire, Kit, and Miles, joined for the first time in a long time by special guest Tim Mulkerin, are back in the lab to try and somehow stitch a compelling screenplay together with randomly selected characters and story elements drawn from existing works of fiction! But this time around, the group faces possibly their toughest challenge yet. Can they make a happy Christmas movie out of stuff from A Quiet Place and The Shining, with a set of characters that includes at least one professional wrestler? Do they even need to? Where did these Japanese cat demons come from? Why are zombies? You know what, no more questions. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
It's been many years and many iterations, but Ultron finally holds victory in his indestructible metallic grasp! So what if he had to travel to the Earth of a parallel universe to do so? He still managed to put all of that Earth's heroes in a comatose state, and that counts as a win!
...
Well, except for the one hero he missed, a plant elemental calling himself Swamp Thing, who now stands as the last bulwark of defense between the Earth and mechanical doom.
The stage is set for the ultimate clash between these two immortal foes and their vast armies. Can the plant-based forces of DC's verdant vegetation-based vigilante outgrow their android nemeses? Or will Marvel's creepiest construct and his waves of robots finally tear up Swamp Thing by the roots?
Hub from the fantastic podcast Titan Up the Defense joins us for this epic battle of plants vs. robots, and you should too!
While Stitch leads a rescue team and Archer tracks down a bounty hunter, Luna has a very different mission. Along with a motley group of other Leaguers, she sets out to the ruins of a Jedi temple in search of ancient secrets of the Force. The League isn't the only group with their eyes on this temple, however, and if the agents of the Empire don't get them, the Dark Side just might.
Luna knows how to ask politely; Geralt shows up a bit underdressed; Morgana reaps the whirlwind; Bowsette has to confront her past; and Tuvok may have just broken the game.
Special thanks to both Mr. Jumbo for the intro music (youtube.com/jumboguitarist) and to Thanasis Lightbridge for the final combat theme (youtube.com/thanasislightbridge)! Additional music from https://filmmusic.io - "Killers" and "Oppressive Gloom" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
This episode originally aired as the Patreon bonus episode for August 2019. The original description follows:
So this is probably going to be the final bonus episode of Extraordinary League on this feed, and I wanted to make sure that we went out strong. I wanted to tie up the loose threads from the previous Patreon bonus episodes, but I also wanted to make sure that this session had plenty of opportunities for antics and character-based fun. And, as always, the character votes that our $5+ Patrons turned in meant that we were dealing with possibly the weirdest group of League I've ever had to deal with.
I quickly realized during play that we were dealing with something special. Each of the players came to the table with an unusual degree of enthusiasm and commitment, and approached the adventure with glee and an overwhelming desire to have fun. You'll hear plenty of moments where one or more players are incapacitated by laughter, and even after I spent many hours editing this final cut, I still find myself laughing out loud at many points. League has been a labor of love for me over these last few years, and this is definitely a high point for me. I hope you all enjoy.
-Dan
It's that time again, naughty children: educational budget cut season! Under the Boris Johnson government, there's just not enough money in Britain for silly things like "schools" and "teachers" and "preparing the next generation to avert, or at least survive, the upcoming post-capitalist apocalypse." We're trying to turn a profit here, after all! Surely you wouldn't want to impinge upon our freedom! (Incidentally, there are several similar analogies to the current political climate sprinkled throughout this episode -- see if you can catch them all!)
...although it has to be said, there is one good thing to come out of this horrible public education budget. Two particular schools are up for inspection by the superintendent, and due to cost constraints, whichever school is deemed the lesser will see its headmistress sacked for incompetence. Why is this a good thing, you ask? Well, one of the headmistresses is Agatha Trunchbull, the massive Olympian and notorious child-thrower who was recently chased out of Crunchem Hall (and indeed, her home town) by the telekinetic five-year-old Matilda Wormwood. And the other is Dolores Umbridge, lately of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, from which she was removed after her gross abuses of power caused several prominent students, led by Harry Potter, to revolt against her. Both of them are absolutely horrible people with no business teaching children of any age or level of magical ability, but alas, the one that can best keep their students under control during the inspection will (somehow) keep her job at her new school. Still, one out of two ain't bad, as they say in the fictional 1980s England that exists only in my mind.
Two former Smash Fiction champions, Natasha Winters and Marissa Bond, return to help us decide which evil teacher is better at tormenting children into temporary subservience, because we're all terrible and everybody here deserves to lose. The jokes are still funny, though! Promise!
You know, here on Smash Fiction, we're pretty open and honest with our fans. But that doesn't mean there aren't still some secrets we've been keeping close to the vest. Like the fact that three of our hosts are aspiring Pokémon trainers, for example. Not something we usually advertise. But it's true! Dan, Kit, and Claire have each caught and trained six fictional monsters (I mean, characters -- though at least three or four of them are also monsters) of varying types from across the multiverse, and are about to begin their greatest adventure yet!
But between the nefarious Squirtle Squad, a mysterious Pokémon in a mech suit, and the ever-present machinations of Team Rocket, it's a dangerous world out there for our trainers and their fictional companions. Which of them will become the very best, like no one ever waaaaaaaaaaaas? You gotta catch every minute of this episode to learn the answer! Podcast listener, we choose you!
When Doc Brown and Marty McFly pick up evidence of a time traveler in 1995 Los Angeles, they take the DeLorean there hoping to find a new friend in their temporal travels. What they find is the killer liquid metal cyborg known as the T-1000... and it turns out that Marty and Doc are both on his hitlist! They manage to escape their first encounter, but the DeLorean's time circuits are damaged in the process. Can they stay one step ahead of the murderous robot until they can escape back to 1985, or are they OUTATIME?
Come for special guest advocate Rafael Medina, stay for Space Judge Liz waxing nostalgic about 90s fashion... and for a very unique shindig in the Lightning Round.
The League are actively seeking information about Doom's secret weapon, but reliable sources are few and far between. They learn that a bounty hunter in a swanky Cloud City casino may hold the secrets they're after... but there are three potential hunters and not a lot of time. Can our heroes get in close to these killers-for-hire, or will they blow their cover?
Elphaba slips into something less comfortable; Archer is Randy; Lara places a long bet; Blasto finds a new fan; and Miss Piggy cuts a rug.
Thanks again to Mr. Jumbo for the intro music used in this episode! Check out more of his work at youtube.com/jumboguitarist. Additional background ambiance taken from Sleep Sounds Express at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7lKPm75KvH73aVhJYp5WXQ?fbclid=IwAR0eX6NpG4MhixrWBMOlb76cgb258CPFUivJn7ndd9x_adHy7o1ij4PQbzQ.
Hey look, the anniversary episode is on time this year! Maybe we ARE improving!
Join Claire, Dan, Kit, Liz, and Miles, with a special appearance from the vacationing MeganBob, as they celebrate four years of complete madness, inexplicably aided and abetted by all of you. Once again, the episode opens with a patented SmashFic Supercut (longer and more self-indulgent than ever!) followed by the hosts, as usual, attempting to answer more listener questions than they could possibly get to. And finally, the special ends with an important announcement about the future of Smash Fiction.
Thank you all so much for listening to this dumb show for four whole years. It bears repeating, as it always does, that we could not have done it without you.
And once again, eternal thanks go out to Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com for our music, which in this episode includes his songs Amazing Plan, Balloon Game, and Rains Will Fall.
This episode originally aired as the Patreon bonus episode for July 2019. The original description follows:
After recording Smash Fiction episode 139 (The Shadow vs. The Phantom vs. Darkman vs. Dick Tracy), Claire, Dan, MeganBob, and Miles decided to have a brief but in-depth conversation about the experience of watching some of the weirdest films to emerge from the 90s. Enjoy this rare chance to listen to our hosts not scream at each other as we chat about bizarre characters, unfortunate creative decisions, and--strangest of all--stuff we actually kind of liked about these movies.
As a side note, at one point Claire shares a video link with us so we can watch a pretty perplexing ad from the era. Here's the link if you'd like to watch along with us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZO-Gf2_J4s
The villainous crime boss known as the Octopus has kept the citizens of Central City held tightly in an eight-tentacled grip of terror for a long time--perhaps too long a time, as it turns out, for the Octopus has drawn the attention of a quartet of dark and brooding heroes. All of them have designs on the Octopus and his criminal empire, but which will be the one to take this villain down? Will it be the evil-slamming Phantom, the mind-clouding Shadow, the strangely anachronistic Darkman, or the watch-having Dick Tracy?
Tune to hear Kit cling to the past (tense), Dan invoke Robocop, Claire struggle not to gush about the Shadow, Meganbob try out yet another personality, and Miles... well, Miles is beyond earthly cares at this point. Plus a very unexpected guest advocate shows up!
Programming Note: We had a somewhat long and fun side discussion about the films we watched for this match that we've moved to our Patreon page. It's available to anyone, whether you're a Patron or not, so be sure to check it out at patreon.com/smashfictionpodcast.
Additional music this episode from https://filmmusic.io is "Deadly Roulette" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Claire, Miles and MeganBob are back in the lab, and joining them is Lawful and Orderly's own Andrew Young! Andrew brought a rather unique side dish to this particular picnic, and as a result, crafting a workable story out of these random pop culture artifacts is perhaps more of a challenge this week than usual. But of course, the greater the challenge, the sweeter the taste of success! Can Andrew and the rest of the gang prevent this episode from eating itself to death, with a set of tools that includes a Marvel Comics antihero, an insane news anchor, and a controversially cast baby? Or will they discover that the real screenplay was the terrible recurring jokes they made along the way?
Hey all! Our four-year anniversary episode is coming up, meaning we'll be taking your questions once again! If you have any questions you'd like us to address on the show, please get those into us by July 24th. We'd prefer an email with "Anniversary" in the subject line, but any of our usual methods of communication--Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc--will also work. Thank you!
Welcome, once again, to Tokyo, Japan. Once again, the stage is set for an age-old conflict to play itself out once more on the streets of this iconic city. Is it kind of insane that this keeps happening? Sure. Is there any end to the cycle of violence and confusion? Probably not. But are we going to try, once again, to repair the rift between opposing forces and find some sort of common ground? I mean, it's not what we usually do around here, but hey, you never know.
...wait, WarGreymon vs. Mechagodzilla? A pitched battle between a pair of powerful pugilists? Oh yeah, I guess that's also happening. I was talking about the conflict between Miles and all things produced by Japanese media. See, Miles is the judge for this one, and he knows almost nothing about Digimon. So in order to make their arguments, this week's advocates are going to have to... explain a few things. Will Miles' brain survive long enough for him to reach a verdict? Is there any hope that he might come out of this match with something resembling a better understanding of how and why these small digital monsters transform into larger monsters? And most importantly, is there any limit to the number of words you can add the prefix "digi" to?
Have no fear, listeners, there is also an actual match in here somewhere. A match in which Tai Kamiya's faithful friend, Agumon, must use all the powers of his final form in an attempt to defeat the metallic cyborg version of Godzilla! Will WarGreymon's Dramon Destroyers and Chrome Digizoid be enough to overcome the evil impostor and protect the DigiDestined? Or will Mechagodzilla's eye lasers, missile fingers, and gun knees bring it the victory over its comparatively diminutive adversary? Find out in what might be the most convoluted and yet joke-packed episode of Smash Fiction yet!
The League find themselves on the back foot with most of their members imprisoned on an inhospitable world of ice. Thankfully, some of their still-free members have taken it upon themselves to infiltrate this prison and rescue their captive friends... but with soldiers, droids, and war machines standing between them and their goal, this will be no easy task.
Stitch shoots for the moon; Adam Jensen is very new here; Vivian creates a monster; Yoshimitsu shares some sage wisdom; and the Cheat wears the pants in this group.
Thanks to Mr. Jumbo for the intro music used in this episode! Check out more of his work at youtube.com/jumboguitarist. Additional music licensed from Graham Plowman.
Ever since the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a Thing, there's one question that nerds have been arguing about with their nerd friends: What's your ranking? Well, since here at Smash Fiction, we're all about settled the great nerd debates, we took it upon ourselves to settle this one.
And how might one go about coming up with a definitive ranking of the MCU movies? No, not a time heist, but that's a good answer. In this case, we assembled six podcasters from across the internet in our own legendarily powerful Infinity Podcast, asked them to rank all 22 films from Iron Man to Endgame, and then averaged the results! In this giant-sized special episode, our six hosts will discuss their favorite MCU films, their least favorite MCU films, the MCU films they believe to be overrated and underrated, and much more! By the end, you will finally have an MCU movie ranking that is eternal, undeniable, and beyond question. You know, until we change our minds.
Your hosts include:
NERD PODCASTERS ASSEMBLE!
After the stunning outcome of last episode, Ship Wrecked returns... with original host Yvonne Datgotaway at the helm! And guys... this one is especially weird. Like, thieves and vampires and giant monsters and cosmic entities weird.
I know that Ship Wrecked isn't typically the Smash Metafiction show where you go to get scenes of giant robot fights, drunken speeches, and horses getting promoted to knighthood, but prepare to have your expectations blown away by this one. Plus, we check in with a previous Ship Wrecked OTP to see how things have gone, and... are those wedding bells I hear?
Pit children against one another? What an excellent idea! That's probably what Professor X and Aizawa said to themselves as they planned to bring students from UA together with students from the Xavier Institute for a giant danger room maze-running competition. The first group of students to reach the center of the maze as a complete team wins!
The students with their permission slips signed off for this one are Kitty Pryde, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Rogue, Nightcrawler, and Spyke. Will their cool costumes and repeat exposure to Wolverine's irritated mumbles give them the edge?
The other set of signed permission slips belong to Bakugo, Todoroki, Iida, Asui, Uraraka, and Midoriya. Has their intense training and their even more intense feelings prepared them to take the win?
Let's be real though, neither of these schools actually bothered with any permission slips. Not a lot of firm policies about adult supervision and the like at these institutions. To be fair, this match didn't have a lot of adult supervision either. Judge MeganBob presides over the court as Claire and special guest Jake Mason take the side of those big-hearted kids from UA and Dan and special guest Brad Bultman advocate for those cool X-teens.
Get on the bus and join us for this wild field trip! No permission slip required, just hit play!
Final frontier, Starship Enterprise, boldly go where no [insert preferred gender identifier or lack thereof here] has gone before...look, you know the drill. Star Trek has been a thing for so long that pretty much everyone knows at least the basics. But one thing Gene Roddenberry's classic sci-fi series has always done is push itself further, test the limits, explore new horizons. And, you know, what could possibly be a better example of that than a new version of the story replacing Kirk, Spock, and McCoy with Disney characters, Hogwarts students, and superheroes?
Join Miles, Claire, and MeganBob as they staff their own Enterprise bridge crew from the ranks of all existing fictional characters, each hoping to spout off the perfect technobabble solution to the challenges Dan throws in their flight paths! Will these new representatives of Starfleet's finest bring peace and knowledge to the Federation, or will they be forced to separate the saucer section and declare a red alert?
For the answers to these and several other questions you definitely haven't asked, set a course for this episode! Maximum warp!
Sometimes when we have to take a break mid-recording, magical things happen. In this case we were treated to an impromptu piece of live theater courtesy of Liz and a host of dragon sound effects.
Gather round for a tale of dragons, divisible hearts, Draco Malfoy, and how cool gold is!