Citation Needed - American Gladiators

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

American Gladiators[3] is an American competition television program that aired weekly in syndication from September 1989 to May 1996. The series matched a cast of amateur athletes against each other, as well as against the show's own "gladiators", in contests of strength and agility. Following the success of American Gladiators, other countries began to produce their own versions of the show.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnik, and I'll be hosting this Battle Royale. But I'll need some shredded monsters of the battlefield of JAPES, Noah, Cecil, and Tom. As long as they get to shoot tennis balls at you, I am fine. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons. Patrons, without you, long ago, work would have biffed us into the foam cube of life. But no, your money presses us forward

onto glory, and if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event we'll be talking about today. Very excited. We will be talking about American Gladiators today. Yes. Yes. Amazing.

You remember this show's premiere from your early 40s? I'm sure you remember. Jesus Christ. All about when real men had hair. Okay, the last part, that last part I am. Okay, so yeah, so as you may have guessed, Bill Bryson never wrote a book about American gladiators. So-

He's not even here, Noah. He's not even here. So unfortunately, I had to base this essay mostly on a five-part documentary series on Netflix called Muscles and Mayhem an unauthorized story of American gladiators Um highly recommend if you get to the end of this episode and you're like what I want is that story but four hours longer It'll be like this episode but on a Cialis mishap sure yeah exactly exactly and remember if your pugil stick lasts longer than four hours

consult a doctor Exactly so tell us Noah what, and I really mean this, American Gladius? That is a great question, Eli. I am going to hammer and haw and eventually I'm even going to answer it. So back in 1987, America was treated to the Arnold Schwarzenegger death best classic, The Running Man. It was based on a 1982 Stephen King novel and like probably 60-70% of the movies based on Stephen King stories had nothing in common with the book except the title and the main character's name. But the premise of the movie was that in some depraved

dystopian future there's a popular show where contestants compete against themed gladiators and fight to the death on live television. And some fucking TV producer in America saw that movie and thought, holy shit, that's a great idea. And thus American Gladiators was born. He wasn't the only person. Yeah, he's not here to wildly divert us from our topic this week, so I'll say, if you like this genre, Chain Gang All-Stars is a fabulous modern contribution that does a great job of talking about spectacle and the penal system without being too preachy. Highly recommended.

Jokes killed. I'll also hear fun facts since Heath is not here. Fun fact, Running Man appeared under King's pseudonym, Richard Bachman, was sold in a collection called the Bachman Books. That also included the novella Rage, a story which inspired at least one school shooting, which King has since taken out of publication. So I'm just saying if we're going to work to make books into real life, perhaps let's pick a different collection of stories.

Perhaps just a different author entirely. Let's just skip over him regardless of which ped name he uses. Yeah, I'm sorry. You don't like the gunslinger series? No, I don't want to live the gunslinger. Yeah, no kidding. I don't want to get on a fucking train named Blaine. OK, I would love to train David Blaine.

You want to run a train on David Blaine I want to run a train on David Blaine Yeah, that's what I said. Thank you. Very poetic. That's consensual right when you run a train on something That's like that could be a thing that all participants When I do what it is, what do you do? No, but I don't want to get tweets I don't know what most words mean and sometimes I say them and people are like, actually they, I don't, I don't, that's the thing Tom, that's the time you locked me in my heart and you know I don't. No he doesn't, he doesn't, he said chimero once.

I just wanted to make sure everyone in the train that are running on David Blaine is into it. Thank you for taking up Heath's derailment duties. So, OK, so to be clear, the running man was not the actual inspiration for American Gladiators. The concept predated the movie, but not the book. It was loosely based on what the movie actually did. I think more than anything was prime the public for this to exist. The original concept was the brainchild of two guys named Johnny C. Ferraro and Dan Carr. And the only thing you really have to know

about these guys is that Dan spells his name with two N's and Johnny C. Ferraro is a grownup who goes by Johnny. Like seriously, if you met this guy and then were asked to like guess his name, there is a non-zero chance you would guess johnny c ferrara yep i'd be like uh meatball sub body glitter no okay how about johnny c ferrara great got it in two got it in two okay but elai now if i ever become a gladiator or pro wrestler for drag performer i am 100 calling myself meatball Sub-Body Glitch. That I'm taking. Yeah, you are. That's what I've been calling you for years, Mansell.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I'll have a reason for that t-shirt you sent me. So now, apparently, when Carr first pitched the idea to Ferraro, all he had was the title. He wanted to do a show called American Gladiators that, while not ending in actual death, would otherwise be akin to the horrific blood sport so popular in first century Rome and thinly veiled gay porn of the 1980s. He knew that he wanted competitions, specifically the kind that would result in occasional injuries, but that was all that he had. Right?

So it was basically the equivalent of saying like, I have an idea for a sport. And then upon being asked for details, elaborating that it would involve scoring. Yeah. And, and then some guy with a giant pile of money and a bunch of coke dust on his face screamed, hell yeah! And the sport was born. Yeah, that's exactly how it worked. Yeah.

Yeah. In walks Johnny C. Barraro, because that's apparently all it took to get a green light back then. So, Barraro agreed to finance the production of a pilot, or honestly, it would be too generous to call this thing a pilot. It's like the JFK junior of television pilots, like a co-pilot. Basically he, he financed the film. At least some kind of that one got me. So, okay. So basically he fighters, the filming of a bunch of randos in a gym in Erie, Pennsylvania, facing off in poorly thought out competitions that had never been tested by anyone. Like one glorious fucking example involved a competition where everybody's on bungee

cords over a trampoline and they're dressed in Velcro hooks with Velcro loops on the walls all around them. And the object is to push your competitor into the Velcro walls in such a way that they stick But the problem is is that the people doing this shit weigh upwards of 200 fucking pounds So there's no goddamn way you're gonna stick them to a wall with Velcro So at least in this instance competitors just kind of flounced bouncily about for a few minutes until the producers were like All right. Well, I was fucking dumb. Never mind They like quickly try metal walls with fridge magnets The producers were like, all right, well, I was fucking dumb. Nevermind.

They like quickly try metal walls with fridge magnets. Fuck, this is impossible. Podcast listener, Tom is vibrating with excitement at the idea of doing this. It's interfering with the Skype call signal is how much you are. Tom wants to do this. All I care about in the world is trying this now. Eli, that's it. I'm on Amazon right now ordering industrial quantities of Velcro. This is great vulgarity for charity like goal or whatever.

That we have to do. So, yeah. OK, but but slapdash is was car for our cut their footage together as in like, like, here's the basic idea sizzle reel. And they set out to sell this idea at a syndicated television trade show. Now, they didn't generate a lot of interest among producers, probably because this is a dumb idea that had been poorly executed. There were a couple of production companies that made a note of their pitch, but nobody who said, here's money, go make some episodes.

But whatever interest producers lacked was more than made up for by the interest that news media showed. Because there were news crews at the trade show as well. And the whole idea of American Gladiators fit perfectly within their omnipresent kids these days narrative about how bad TV has gotten. So even though they didn't walk away with a contract, they did walk away with a bunch of newsreels saying, and now TV has gotten so bad that they're literally doing a show

called American Gladiators. Yes, just hi, I'm Tim Timberson with the evening news that will prepare your mom's brain for QAnon. I'm here to tell you about how bad the thing you're watching is. Okay, I felt exactly this way though in 2008 when I saw commercials for the show, Hole in a Wall. It's phenomenal. Which for the uninitiated is a show where you try to fit your body into a moving hole in a wall. And to be fair, I also don't think things have gotten much better since 2008.

No, no, sure. Haven't. They're so bad at it though. Tell me it's so bad. All right. So public, they never just stand sideways. They always think they're going to make the perfect shape. That's not how moving objects work. It fucking rules. I thought that was a joke show when I saw it. I keep thinking things are not real and then they're real.

And then I want to hide. I'm like, no, that's. I mean, deal or no deal is guess the number, right? That's the game we're playing. Right. So yeah, it's, it's, but there's a mystery banker about whether or not you guess the number. So, okay. Well, apparently public despondency about how doomed our culture is, uh, was apparently the kind of publicity you just couldn't buy those days because pretty much immediately after those reports started rolling in the Samuel Goldwyn company decided to sign on the dotted line and begin a production run for the show. And yes, that's Goldwyn as in MGM Goldwyn.

So we're talking absurdly about what was at the time kind of a prestige television company. Yeah. I thought that having someone side tackle Judy Garland into a big foam cube pit in the middle of somewhere over the rainbow for the promo was a little tasteless. But you know, whatever represents your brand. Well, you know, we didn't want to go tasteful for this. Sure. Yeah, that's fair. So, okay, so now Card Ferraro, they have to set about actually making this thing happen.

And the first thing they need to do is find themselves some American gladiators. Now, they managed to pick one up early on a former player from the Canadian football league named Mike Horton or as you know him if you watch the show, Gemini. So okay, so now the whole Gemini thing is a great microcosm of everything that was wrong with this idea at the beginning. So the whole idea was that they were going to make stars out of the gladiators and then pit contestants against them. And one of the ways that they did that was by giving them silly names like Laser and Zap and Gemini. But at least early on, they also wanted to give them fucking comic book villain level quirks and shit.

So Gemini's whole thing was supposed to be that he had a split personality that was nice some of the time, but naughty other times. So they put this poor ex football player out into the fucking world and they said alright So get hit in the head a lot and act like you have two personalities at polar ends of the niceness spectrum And then he was like fucking what they really sorry. I'm on break. I can't So much easier just keep feeding them giant doses of horse growth hormone

And then just call him roid rage or the Roy I mean it writes itself man. See so I'm pretty sure they did that too so. More of a season two thing but yeah so okay so luckily for Mr. Horton the idea of the split personality was quietly dropped midway through the first season but unluckily the silly name thing stuck and to this day he probably has to introduce himself as Gemini for people to know where they know him from. So in addition to Gemini, they managed to pick up five more gladiators in their open trials. They dubbed Lace, Malibu, Nitro, Sunny, and Zap. That gave them three men and three women. You've got to wonder though, if they got to pick their names

or if this was like an out of the hat system. Because like if I have the entire lexicon of the English language to choose from, and I'm like, zap, I deserve to be shot in the face with a tennis ball for a living. I'm just saying there's not a lot of brain cells popping around there if you chose Seth. So okay. So the next thing they needed was a director. And for that they called in self professed adult film advocate, Bob Levy. What is a Bob deserves his own citation needed essay. He's a fucking hero.

Honestly. Yes. Yeah. So Bob was no doubt a competent director, but he was also in the habit of displaying a collection of sex toys in the show's control truck. He also reportedly had a collection of porn on VHS that would rival the internet. And though I won't bring him up again in this essay, I feel like directed by a guy surrounded by plastic dick totems is the kind of flavor text that really tells you what you need to

know about this show. Oh my god. I have so many fun facts about Bob Levy, but we need to keep this show under seven hours. So I will control myself. My question is, do you think he was ever editing in his little truck, surrounded by dildos, in front of a full set of ass smashers, one through 16, and thought to himself, this is tasteless. I don't think this is good for the world.

What's amazing is that you know that happened, right? You absolutely know. So okay, so they got their financing, they got their gladiators, they got their director. The next thing they need is their competitions. So they set about coming up with these various games that the gladiators could compete in with shocking disregard to the safety of everyone involved. Okay. Like for example, Tom, you'll remember this one.

One of the games was called breakthrough and conquer. So the way this game works is that the contestants would have a football and they would try to run past the gladiator and the gladiator would try to tackle them. And if you're thinking, well, surely they'd have been given the kind of padding and helmets that football players get when they do that. And surely they wouldn't do this on just concrete. You would be overestimating the production team.

I mean, it's nice though, because the contestants on American Gladiators came pre brain damage. So it's kind of like, that was not us. Right? Yeah, man. I'm trying to summon some concern about John Q. Public getting hurt. But then I remember like, like nobody was drafted into this. You know? All right, Tom, you and I both would have done this shit three years ago.

You do it now, Tom. If they walked into your house with Zap, you would do it right now. You'd get on your little lad bicycle with your flinging little streamers on the side and your baseball cards and the spokes. You'd sign up tomorrow. I would do it. All right, so. I would fucking do it.

I would, you guys, you're not wrong. I would fucking play. Oh, pre-heart attack, I would have to, absolutely. You could post your heart attack. Why are we lying to the audience? All right, so another thing you have to keep in mind, like, no, I'm not a idiot. Like a hundred percent would not do this. Are you kidding me? A hundred percent. You couldn't pay me money. I wouldn't be the gladiator. Are you kidding me? To do it. That's the difference.

Yep. Yep. So, okay. So another thing you have to keep in mind here though, is that these gladiators were not chosen for their athletic abilities, right? So Gemini played pro football, but the rest of these guys were bodybuilders, which means among other things, they're not used to getting hit. And yet here they are delivering hits and taking hits on concrete dressed in nothing but fucking short shorts and leotards and shit. So surprise, surprise, there were a fuck ton of injuries. No.

So, yeah, right, yeah. So the dude that played Malibu, the shortest lived gladiator on the show, in the course of filming one half of the first season, he broke two ribs, he broke his thumb, he got a concussion, he tore a bicep, and he cracked his fucking head open. In the first half of the first season?

Yes, in 12 fucking episodes, according to the documentary, he had to beg his doctor to clear him to go back on the show because they were afraid another concussion would kill him. Jesus. So and it wasn't just the gladiators that were getting hurt, by the way, the contestants were taking minor injuries constantly and major injuries here and there as well. One contestant broke her fucking leg in the middle of a competition.

And if you're thinking, well, surely they at least had the minimal sense required to have medical personnel on site to deliver emergency treatment. You're overestimating the minimal level of sense once again, because no, when they first started filming this thing, they did so with the walk it off attitude towards grievous bodily harm that made Tom Cecil and myself the shattered men we are today. I mean, why do you think Heath's not on the show the last two weeks? I texted him that he couldn't do a kip up on a moving vehicle then the rest is history. Oh, they didn't have doctors, but they did have medical grade dirt you could rub in it.

So they sure fucked it. Yeah. Okay. But somehow even around all the injuries, wantonly dangerous games and cheap assets, grade dirt you could rub in it. So they sure fucked it. Okay. But somehow even around all the injuries, wantonly dangerous games and cheap assets, they did manage to put together 12 episodes, which though that would count as a season and a half by today's standards was only considered half a season back then. So, I mean, honestly, to even get through enough episodes to reach their contractual obligation for half a season, they had to cannibalize the first 12 for like a best of episode for 13.

And given all the injuries and the low budget rickety sets they were playing on, it looked for all the world like one half a season was all they were going to get. But then those 13 episodes aired and America loved that cheap ass, stupidly dangerous shit so much they licked the spoon. And suddenly, the Samuel Goldwyn Company had a hit on their hands. All right. Well, looks like it's time to remind Noah what P.T. Barnum said about underestimating the stupidity of the American people again.

So we'll be back in a minute after a little apropos of nothing. Alright everyone, welcome to the first ever American Gladiators. Now as you know, you'll be running through a series of dangerous challenges against the toughest warriors we could find in front of a crowd of screaming fans. Now, you might break bones, you might lose blood, but you are American gladiators. And we are not aliens testing to see if humans are ready for first contact. Dude. What? I said we are not.

Yeah, but right. But now it makes it seem like you are. Right. Yeah. But well, if we if we were, you all wouldn't be here, right? Like you would all say no to this if if we were. I don't know. Maybe. I yeah, it doesn't matter. Just to be clear, you all understand what we're doing here. And nobody wants to like

say anything and protest, appeal to the better angels of our nature or something like that. What's a better whatever you think said? Okay, I'm just checking. Let's get you all suited up. You tried, Mel Carr. Yeah, no, I know. Thank you. And we're back. When we left off, we had the circus, but when did they start handing out bread? All right. So, the viewership numbers made it clear that it was in everybody's best interest to keep making the show, but it's equally clear that they had to rethink their strategy.

So, they sunk a bit more money into it. They rebuilt a bunch of their games. They added at least a little bit of padding here and there and hired medical personnel to be on site in case of injuries. Oh, and thus began the pussification of America. Now, another thing they did, and this actually mattered quite a bit, was they changed the way the show was produced. So the seasons of American Gladiators were shot in a couple of days time. They couldn't fill a big arena over and over and over again for a weekly competition, right, for 13 episodes.

So they just get one crowd in and they filmed like all 12 of those episodes in front of that crowd. It's like, well, and apparently it was, it's even worse, right? Because what they would do is they would set up one competition and then they would run all the contestants for the whole fucking season through that competition. Then they would spend like a half an hour to an hour tearing that down and setting up a new competition while the audience just fucking talked amongst themselves I guess. Still less boring than baseball. So in the revamped second half of the

season they set things up so that all the competitions could stay up the whole time they could just like follow one set of contestants through a whole episode. They also upgraded the set so that, for example, in the joust game, which consisted of two people trying to knock each other down using giant Q-tips, the competitors would be on two separate platforms instead of the original insane design, which had them no shit on a bridge that was just randomly. Come on. Yeah. And it would randomly fall out from under them if nobody got knocked off. design which had them no shit on a bridge that was just randomly... Come on.

Yeah, and it would randomly fall out from under them if nobody got knocked off. What? What? Producers like, I'm sorry everyone, we're going to have to let go of whoever came up with that bridge idea. It's far too dangerous. And the guy who came up with it was like, it's a me, mama. To be fair for that one, in theboarding, they were writing ostriches.

So they did talk about that. So, and now they also brought in some new gladiators at this point, Blaze, Bronco, Gold, Jade, Laser, and Titan. And by the way, only two of those were brought in as injury replacements. And together, yeah, they put out a much more polished and at least ever so slightly less dangerous half of a season that set the format that would go on to make the show an international phenomenon. Now, when I pointed out they were filming 12 episodes in a single day, it might've occurred to you that that would be real hard on the fucking gladiators.

And you'd be correct. In addition to the rampant injuries, they also had to just deal with the kind of soreness and scrapes and bruises that you'd get from like, I don't know, fucking playing padless football on concrete for 12 hours of the stretch. Right? And if you think it occurred to the producers or to maybe like hire extra gladiators so that there could be injury replacements or so that they could spell each other throughout the day, it's your own damn fault for continuing to overestimate these assholes. Instead, as soon as the thing got popular, they said, let's take the show on the road.

So they packed all of these fucking gladiators up to do a national bus tour where they would compete against local Gladiator wannabes several times a week. OK, to be fair, you signed up to be American word that means fight to the death slave. It's not American CEOs. Yeah, I would like to join in the making fun of how dangerous this all is, but I've competed in CrossFit, so I'm just going to go ahead and keep my rocks to myself. Last time, Tom, those are your vertebra, not rocks. The doctor needs them back.

All right, so the show's going great. Merchandises flying off the shelves. You've got action figures. You've got Nintendo games. You've got fucking probably Trapper Keepers. I don't know. The show was phenomenally successful, but America's Prudery wasn't about to let anything become popular without freaking out over how f**king sinful it was. So in addition to the sort of glorification

of violence that undergirded the entire concept, America's prudes also found another angle to attack the show from drugs. See, because between season one and season two, a lot of these gladiators got way bigger in a way that just hitting the gym cannot physically accomplish. It's strange that no one put two and two together for all of baseball a few years later. Right. Yeah. Oh yeah.

We don't want an asterisk next to our pugil stick fighting records. No kidding. So there's suddenly a big concern among advertisers that they're promoting steroid use. So the advertisers are like, hey, have you even drug tested any of these guys? And of course they hadn't, right? And they didn't want to because they were all on fucking steroids, right? It would kind of kill the brand if they were like, yeah, so we implemented drug testing

and what do you know? The next day we fired literally everyone who works for us Even jone and accounting which surprised Man but the advertisers they were increasingly adamant that they had to do something about it Um a need rendered all the more visible when one of the gladiators went full roid rage on a referee during a taping and had to be removed from the building Come on ref. What kind of call was that? Laser we made this game up in the car on the way over here still though

Real close to that So yeah, so they go to all the gladiators and they're like, hey if we want to keep our sponsorships We're gonna need everybody to piss in a cup and and so all the gladiators freak out because they know good and damn well that none of them is going to pass a drug test. But they go in and they pee in the cup anyway, and then they never hear about it again. Because now the producers can tell the advertisers that, yeah, no, the gladiators have definitely been tested for steroids. Right?

It's like when pseudoscience supplements advertise themselves as clinically tested. Right? Yeah. Right? Cecil lived in a house growing up. Like there are words you can say. Make anything seem true. But after touring the country and seeing how huge the show really got, the Gladiators started realizing that maybe they were getting fucked on this deal. See, during the tour, a couple of them got pretty seriously hurt. And the Samuel Goldwyn company's response to that was to replace them and

Not temporarily right they got hurt bad enough that they couldn't gladiate anymore Well and that let pretty much everybody left over to step back and wonder You know what the fuck? Not a roided up dude named zap realizing that he needs to seize the mean of production. Yes, it's very much like that. Yes. First, the gig economy came from my gladiators and I wasn't a gladiator. So I said, so as soon as they started to sour on the company, it was pretty easy to find

reasons to feel like they were getting fucked over. Most notably the fact that they were getting fucked over. Okay. So the producers were selling the action figures and video games and Trapper Keepers and everything, but the actual people whose likenesses they were selling weren't making a dime off of that shit. They were paid what they were paid to do the show. And that was it. Buried in the contracts were clauses that gave the Sam Goldwynn company likeness rights and every penny of derivative income. There's a gladiator trapper keeper out there with a single tear flowing down one of their faces.

Yeah. So, so they take these concerns to the producers and they're like, Hey, what the fuck? But the producers position is that the gladiators are infinitely replaceable, right? The real stars of the show are the contestants. And we can always find more of those. And that probably seems like a crazy claim if you were a fan of American gladiators, but it was bolstered by the fact that when they introduced the replacement gladiators during the live tour, the crowd screamed just as loud as they did for the ones that have been on the program since the beginning.

Yeah. Do you think there was one hardcore fan who was like, I'm sorry, who the fuck is lava? Bring back please. Am I right everybody? Everybody. Please bring back. Nope, that's me. Okay. So after three seasons of getting fucked on the merch sales, a few of the original gladiators demanded a renegotiation and were fired. And while that shut up any talk among the remainder of trying to get a better deal, it also created a rift between the producers and the stars that would never fully repair. The show would continue on for another four seasons with dwindling viewership, but it would eventually be canceled in 1996. There were a couple efforts since then to reboot it and some of the international offshoots

at Spawn managed to have success afterwards. There was also a hilariously embarrassing effort to create a live dinner show on the Vegas strip out of Gladiators. That got cut short when the president of the company putting it together got charged with securities fraud though. American Gladiators dinner. I wanted a moose boost shot into my mouth by a tennis ball cannon more than I want anything else. They actually had tennis ball cannons at the tables, Tom.

You can see it in the picture. You would like it. I would like it. So, okay. So what ultimately brought down American Gladiators? Well, obviously I could only speculate, but the strained relationship between the producers and the on-air talent couldn't have helped, especially when the show started trying to recreate the challenges to diminish the role of the gladiators. But it also was probably true that the show had just run its course and people were

ready to move on. Now, I'd love to say that it ultimately proved to be too crass for the American public, but literally nothing ever has or could be that. And if you look at the proliferation of reality shows that followed in American Gladiators Wake, it would probably be more true to say that the fatal flaw with this show was that it was too thickly plotted. Yeah. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

This was an essay about American Gladiators. Eli, nobody learned anything. And are you ready for the quiz? I'd rather do the eliminator against Tom, but I will settle for the quiz. That sounds so fun. That's where you get poop, right? It's a poop off? Noah, if our cast were American gladiators, what would our stupid fucking gladiator names be? A, Heath, would be tower. Noah. You'd be cardiac. Oh, nice. Nice. Cecil. You'd be rapier. The ladies fans at Bay though.

A little bit confusion rapier. The name of the sword. Everyone at home. Of the sword and the Eli would be Jew. Oh, fair. All right. Well, I believe there actually was a tower and I believe that I don't think there was a rapier, but I think there was a saber as well. Okay. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with be me as cardiac because that actually is pretty fucking honest. That is right. That is right. No other kind. Your signature move of course would be the arrest. All right, Noah. I wrote my question first just in case people are wondering. We're of course wondering what our American brand of your names would be.

So which of the ones I came up with first? Check the Google doc. Do you think? It did. I think? the air a Cecil punching Italian B Tom Fury C Eli broad neck or D

B Fenright. Oh I noticed you I don't even Have a good one for you either, but you stood Be fed right row illusions is what I was playing, but it's nothing All right, you did it no the next season of American Gladiators leaned into the securities fraud. What were the new names of the roided out stars? A, capital gains. B, large margin. C, Viva Sector.

Or D, Barry Bonds. Hey, there it is. sector or D Barry Bonds. You can't tell, but Cecil spelled Barry B U R Y there. We are so unworthy of his puntery that I'm surprised that joke did not burn my eyes when I read it. It is clear. It's gotta be D Barry Bonds. It is Barry Bonds. Correct. All right. I mean, you even got the steroids angle. It's just so good. So far.

All right, Noah, nobody managed to stump you, which means you are this week's winner. Awesome, awesome. Well, we've been making fun of him enough. I feel like we should also heap some work on his plate. I'm gonna say next week's SAS will be heat. Yeah, let's see if that works out. All right, well, for Tom, Cecil and Noah.

I'm Eli Bosnik. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week. And by then Heath will be an expert on something else. Do you know and then you can't listen to fan friction or cami? Oh, no, you didn't. The two podcasts Cecil won't let me do no matter how many times I bring them up. But you can listen to our other shows wherever you get your podcasts.

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