Wonderful! - Wonderful! 204: So Many Wahs

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Rachel’s favorite choose-your-own seminars! Griffin’s favorite celebration-themed retail establishment! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6...zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya 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.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is a show that we do because we love each other. Yes. This is what this is. This show is the glue that is holding this family together. I would say that you can love each other and not have a show. No, actually. Yeah. You learn about that at podcast college where I went or I matriculated at podcast college. They said, you know, this road. When you
Starting point is 00:00:42 fall in love. Well, no, the podcast comes first. They're like, you know, this podcast has to be your partner, your lover, your guardian, your protector, your warrior. So if you ever fall in love, the podcast has to be the glue that holds the family together. Wow. Yeah, I know. Like, there's so many things I love about you and our beautiful children. And you guys make my life complete. But, you know, Like there's so many things I love about you and our beautiful children and you guys make my life complete. But, you know, it's the glue. Okay.
Starting point is 00:01:10 So please keep listening. Those are the stakes. Yeah. Keep listening. Keep doing it. So if I ever turn to you and say, I don't know that I can do this show anymore, you're going to interpret that. I can't even joke about this. Okay.
Starting point is 00:01:22 I can't even joke about this. I would end this show today if you were like, it's me or the show. There's a lot of like hypothetical situations I'm floating right now that are big bummers. And so I'd like to stop. Okay. Do you have any small wonders? Little guys? Little wonders.
Starting point is 00:01:40 Yeah, just little guys. Do you have one? I'm going to say the shootout in hockey. I know we've talked about hockey a great deal, but today I'd like to i'm gonna say the shootout in hockey i know we've talked about hockey a great deal but today i'd like to really zoom in on the shootout yeah in hockey if the score is tied at the end of the third period they do overtime which is just three on three well i guess the goalie but three on three hockey which is pretty boring but if you can stomach five minutes that you get to the shootout, which is thrilling. It's just each team takes turns sending one person against one goalie.
Starting point is 00:02:09 I told Griffin last night that I only like it when it turns out positively for us. Yeah, when the Blues win it, it's so exciting. Because it just reduces an entire game to just like a couple shots on goal. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:21 And that's a little devastating if you don't come out on top. If you don't win it. But if you have a very good goalie, like the Blues have, several of, it's so fun. It's so exciting and fun.
Starting point is 00:02:32 And yeah, the Blues won a game last night with a shootout victory. So maybe that's why it's front of mind. But I just like the shootout. I wish every sport did it. I feel like there shouldn't be
Starting point is 00:02:42 overtime in football. There should just, each kicker sees how long they can kick it. And then that's it. That's the end. And in baseball, they just do a quick home run derby. Like there's so many ways to juice these things, you know? I know.
Starting point is 00:02:54 That's true. Okay. With NASCAR, they just play a game of chicken. Nah, that's probably too much. They used to. And I've told you this before, but they used to not do the shootout. The shootout is a new thing. They used to just play a full.
Starting point is 00:03:04 No, they play a full additional period. And they continue to play like like they do in the stanley cup playoffs like they continue to play 20 minutes until i remember i remember our local team the huntington blizzard which i don't even remember like what minor minor minor league they were a part of uh we would go to like a lot of their games and one time we were there when i was just a little kid and they went into overtime and i was like what the fuck there's more hockey there's more okay do you have a small wonder now i do i wanted to give a shout out to only murders in the building yes we have not finished it yet so no we have not please no spoilies well and caveat you know maybe by the last episode we'll be like that was garbage i don't know but uh we are really enjoying it um i think
Starting point is 00:03:51 it's so charming uh and it's kind of unlike a lot of shows you'll see today uh it's got martin short and steve martin and selena gomez among other people yeah uh and just, I don't know, it's just really charming. We were talking about, actually, right before we recorded Besties, right before this, about that show, because, of course, Chris and Russ live in New York and have some thoughts about the sort of co-op apartment experience.
Starting point is 00:04:16 Okay. But we also talked about how, like, smart and refreshing it is that this is a show with two old dudes and one young woman and the whole show isn't about that in like a very sort of stereotypical way yeah whenever they are sort of out of their depth and how to communicate with a much younger person it doesn't come from that like traditional like oh kids these days place yeah it comes like, they are embarrassed that they don't like know how to text correctly. Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:04:48 But it's not like a- Look at these dumb old kids, right? Yeah, like a Robert De Niro and Hathaway, like, I don't know how to use Twitter. It's so endearing and so charming. And it doesn't go the other way of like, kids don't know how to do it these days. It is, it's sweet.
Starting point is 00:05:04 Like it's a kind of sweet show that is also about a murder and it's also a lot about podcasts so of course well yeah and it's and it's like three somewhat lonely people and they're kind of like an odd mix uh and so you're learning a little bit about them but you're also kind of chasing this murder mystery and a genuinely tear-jerking performance from martin short at times which is fucking weird for me i don't know that i've ever seen him in a role like that steve martin is also they're all incredible like selena gomez is i can't imagine anybody else playing that role and i've never seen like uh steve martin play like the straight man before which is very much what he does on this
Starting point is 00:05:39 show it's it's fantastic it's on hulu uh and it's it's really good although is he kind of the straight man see i don't know that i've seen planes trains and automobiles in a while but i feel like he's It's fantastic. It's on Hulu. And it's really good. Although, is he kind of the straight man? See, I don't know that I've seen planes, trains, and automobiles in a while. But I feel like he's kind of the straight man in that one. Yeah. I mean, when you're against John Candy, it's like you don't have an option. Yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 00:05:54 You go first this week. Okay. My wonderful thing this week is electives. Like in school? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:03 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do they do them? I guess they do them in college too yeah oh for sure well the at marshall university there was a thing called the marshall plan that you had to fulfill uh-huh uh and by the time i was going there it was pretty rigorous it was like you had to take uh four different earth sciences classes and four different foreign language but you didn't have any wiggle room? Not really. Not if I wanted to graduate in, you know, four years. That's unfortunate. Like, I remember I, so my roommate freshman year was pursuing accounting,
Starting point is 00:06:35 and she basically had all of her classes mapped out for her for the entire time that she was in college. Pretty much same here. And that was not my experience. I mean, I was an English major, you know, so like. time that she was in college pretty much same same here um and that was not my experience i mean i was an english major you know so like i will say by the time i got to my senior year of college i could pretty much take it a little bit easier like i was i did not have as many hours per week but well and you probably you had some college credit entering right i had a little bit
Starting point is 00:06:59 of college because i know by my senior year like i didn't have to take a full load just because i came in with some uh yeah it helped a little bit but uh also by my senior year, like I didn't have to take a full load just because I had came in with some. Yeah, it helped a little bit. But also by my senior year of college, I was also working full time for Joystick. So like I didn't have a lot of time to go and, you know, learn about the, you know, flamenco guitar or whatever. For me, electives started in middle school. And I think that's true for a lot of kids. It's the first time where you choose. Like you say like, oh, I have some things I can choose. And that was always really exciting to me as you get a little course catalog kind of thing. And you'd be like, do I want to take a
Starting point is 00:07:34 theater class? Do I want to take an art class? We didn't get that in middle school. In middle school, all you had was do you want to do choir or band for your music credit, which may not even be a thing that's asked of middle schoolers anymore. We did have to choose between the two i remember that in middle school like are you gonna do band or choir for whatever reason i picked choir for some dumb reason so mad at my earlier self well i mean did you i always felt like the people that did choir were actually better singers though like i feel like it actually helped yeah but like i would trade that for like being able to play you know some chicago tunes on a cornet or whatever. Cornet.
Starting point is 00:08:10 Yeah, I think also in high school, that's when I started doing stuff like child development. I actually had a really kind of a sweet deal, and I don't really know why I got it, but my child development teacher, instead of making me attend class would send me to the nearby preschool and I would help out in middle school no high school okay I was gonna say that's bonkers no I'm talking about high school now uh yeah so I'd walk down the street and then I would come back like once a week and she'd be like oh you we talked about babies and I'd be like, okay, thanks. Um, but I feel like high school is really, you know, like home economics is another thing,
Starting point is 00:08:50 which I know that you have a fraught relationship with. It's just, I don't, I straight up, I don't think I had a very good head home economics class or teacher because like that stuff is obviously hugely important. And I'm always vouching for practical, like education,
Starting point is 00:09:05 especially starting in middle school. And I did not mine was like here's how to sew a bag that will hold your grocery bags and it's like how do i write a check please god i'm dying out here did you do cooking yeah i did two two cooking classes in high school i think oh separate from home economics yeah i didn't take any home ec classes in high school, I think. Oh, separate from home economics? Yeah, I didn't take any home ec classes in high school. I don't think there was a home ec class in my high school. I think they had separated it out at that point. I also did newspaper.
Starting point is 00:09:34 Yeah. And we had to, if we were going to do newspaper, you had to take a keyboarding class, which was very smart. That's great that they made you do that. Very smart. And I don't know if kids still, I have to assume that they still do it. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:09:51 I know that a lot of people told me that is going to be one of the most valuable skills, and it absolutely was. Yeah. Because it's a hard thing to dedicate time to on your own. Yeah. Because it's a hard thing to kind of dedicate time to on your own. Yeah. My main elective in high school was the TV production journalism class that I actually invented two classes for.
Starting point is 00:10:20 It was only supposed to be TV media production one and two. And then I was like, can I do it again? And they're like, sure. It's TV production three. And my senior year, I was like, one more round? and they're like sure uh it's tv production three the next my like senior year i was like one more one more round and they're like okay tv media production four what was it about it that you like so much it was just um i mean we didn't do real news we just basically made dumb videos that they would string together and air in school like every friday so it was fun being like recognized for for doing that stuff but also like i love fucking around an adobe premiere and that's all that all that class was
Starting point is 00:10:51 have you thought about how like indicative that was of your future absolutely i didn't know it was it it shaped me in a huge huge way yeah um yeah yeah and that's i mean that's why i wanted to talk about electives, because I think there's a real focus on core curriculum. I mean, a lot because of standardized testing and funding cuts, you know, things like electives aren't seen as essential to, you know, complete high school and get into college or complete college and get a career, but they can really inform kind of where your passion ends up. And I did a little research on, you know, the power of electives. A lot of what I found is about music performance and music appreciation.
Starting point is 00:11:37 Sure. This idea that if you learn an instrument, and this is SAT data indicates that students that have experienced music performance and music appreciation score higher on the SAT and specifically higher on verbal and math. And students with no participation, like don't see that gain, which is kind of fascinating.
Starting point is 00:12:13 I mean, electives are traditionally viewed as this, like, easier class, you know? Like, it's not calculus. Like, you can go and, you know, you can make a cake and get an A, you know? But I think a lot of the skills you practice in those courses can benefit you yeah in a lot of other ways and it's not only that i feel like every class in your you know school day doesn't have to be fucking hard like that's a that's active listen to yourself say that please if you're thinking that way because it's it's not a good idea having an elective that is either easier to give you a break during the day so you can like actually focus on the more boring traditional educational stuff is one thing but also just being passionate about something that you do at school i think makes you more passionate about the school day in general
Starting point is 00:12:55 which like i got great grades in high school and terrible grades in college and i did a lot of electives in one of those things yeah yeah uh i will also say in regards to music education the world music central and the texas commission on drug and alcohol abuse said that secondary students who participated in band or orchestra reported the lowest lifetime in current use of substances which it's hard to say what came first there you know yeah well i think like our kids that choose band predisposed to to stay away from risky behaviors because as a band student i would say yeah probably choir kids were very much the same like if you nobody's like toking up in chamber choir right like there's there are no none of those kids there i will say though there's another funnel called the theater kid route that will, I
Starting point is 00:13:46 think, lead more toward that sort of behavior. But that may be apocryphal. Uh, so, um, the other thing I want to talk about is that studies that show that students are more likely to get a degree or major in a course that they took as an elective. Uh, so for me, like I, I took art history as an elective and then i was like oh i guess that's gonna be my minor uh it was almost actually a second major for me but then i got lazy my senior year because i had a professor approach me and say you know if you just took four more classes your senior year you could also be a major and i was like four
Starting point is 00:14:21 uh and so i didn't do it. What was your major in high school? Did you have to declare a major? No, not in high school. No, is that a thing now? Yeah, we did. What was your major in high school? I mean, it was journalism with a minor in theater. So that's a good, well-rounded experience.
Starting point is 00:14:40 Yeah, I saw a lot about public speaking as an elective and how valuable that can be just for anybody. But yeah, you know, and then like in college, for example, I took a creative writing class. And then it so happened that English majors, you could do creative writing emphasis. And so that's what I ended up doing after taking one. So yeah, I just I feel like it's really powerful. A lot of budget cuts will cut elective courses because they can cost more just based on, you know, the equipment and supplies that you need and the expertise you need to bring in. But that is in comparison to the average public school budget, which is already too, too low. Like, yes, of course, it is cheaper to do that than to teach a history class with books
Starting point is 00:15:25 from 1978. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the thing. Like, yeah, if your math class only requires a textbook, yeah, there is a huge cost savings there. But then they're budgeting for music class and they're like, you need how many tambourines? This is why, by the way, it's not anything I thought about, but this is why a lot of public school districts now have foundations so that they can apply for grants to support these kind of programs. Sure. Which is both good and also a sad state of affairs. Sure. on like you know art class or or music class i wanted to talk about just that power of choice that ability as a kid to say like i want to take this you know and then to like kind of pursue your
Starting point is 00:16:10 interest based on that and then develop enthusiasm for school just because you know on monday wednesday friday you know you get to do yearbook right you love your book yeah you know uh so yeah electives they're great i would be curious to hear like the the modern experience of like electives or you know not electives not being offered from like a younger person because i know it's i know it's changed in ways that are unthinkable to me as somebody who graduated high school in 2005 yeah uh which still doesn't seem like that long ago but damn that's 16 years but that's quite a while yeah can i steal you away please got a couple bumper boats here and i would love to read this first one because it is for kelsey
Starting point is 00:17:02 and it's from Maggie who says, Happy late Kelstimber, Ringo. I'm so lucky to have shared a bunk bed and a brain with you. You're an amazing big sister and the only person who could have convinced me to watch Trolls 2, my first dip into this wonderful McElroy world. I'll always feed you donuts when your nails are wet
Starting point is 00:17:20 and drive six hours when you need some company. Love, Ringo. A sweet message. This is why I always wanted a sibling. Yeah, I mean, this is what it's like. Yeah, I mean, you had the bunk bed. Sure, and whenever Travis painted his nails, I would feed him donuts. One quick note, though, it is called Trolls World Tour,
Starting point is 00:17:37 and that is something we've learned they are quite serious about. You think they're listening to this bumper boat right now? I have to be incredibly careful. DreamWorks' eyes and ears are everywhere. Can I read the next one? Yes. It is for Jordan. It is from Ash.
Starting point is 00:17:55 The message is. Yeah, a lot of buildup to this one. You and Greg are finally newlyweds and starting your married life together. Congratulations and thank you for being the single greatest human on the planet. I cherish every moment we have together and can't wait for this new journey. Thank you for being the definition of a platonic soulmate. And here's to being y'all's third wheel forever.
Starting point is 00:18:17 Love, Ash. Really sweet message, but God, I love a Greg. Man, I love it. I think I've probably talked about this on one of our shows before, but I love a Greg. Man, I love it. I think I've probably talked about this on one of our shows before, but I love a Greg. Just like you meet somebody with the name Greg and they're universally fantastic. I'm like, okay, Greg, I'm looking forward to what you bring to the table. Because there is a Greg precedent, a Greg super precedent that I'm very serious about also. Hi, it's me, Dave Hill from before. serious about also. from the future. If you like delightful conversation with incredible guests, technical difficulties, and actual
Starting point is 00:19:06 phone calls from real-life listeners, you've just hit a street called easy. I'm also joined by my incredible co-host, the boy criminal, Chris Gersbeck. Say hi, Chris. Hey, Dave. It's really great to... That's enough, Chris. And New Jersey chicken rancher, Des. Say hi, Des. Hey, Dave. The Dave Hill
Starting point is 00:19:21 Good Time Hour. Brand new episodes every Friday on Maximum Fun. Plus, the show's not even an hour. It's 90 minutes. Take that, stupid rules. We nailed it. I think we're going to have fun with my thing this week. Well, I'll be the judge of that.
Starting point is 00:19:41 My thing this week is Party City. The store you go to for party stuff i had never been to a party city until uh very recently uh because like uh in looking for places to like take henry for like a reward for you know doing well in school or like being helpful with the baby or stuff around the house uh on the weekends you know we'll take him somewhere take him somewhere fun to like maybe get something for himself and we have gone to target so many times he exclusively wants to go to target the brand loyalty with this kid is unbelievable well he loves isaac mizrahi and his many good things um your references gone to my head I couldn't tell you anything about Isaac Mizrahi or his many good things. Does he do clothes?
Starting point is 00:20:29 He does furniture stuff and plates and bowls and stuff. I mean, he started with fashion. Maybe he does bowls now. I don't know. Just imagine everything at Target has his name on it somewhere. Party City, though, is a wonderland. Can I ask you, because my recent trip to Party City was Henry's Halloween costume, correct?
Starting point is 00:20:49 Yes, yes. Is that the location you went to with him? Yes, yes. Okay, I'd never been there before. It is the biggest Party City I've ever seen. They're probably bigger. They are all sort of warehouse-sized. Really?
Starting point is 00:20:59 Yes, that is the specialty of this. I wonder what I'm thinking of, but what I'm picturing is much smaller. I was overwhelmed by how many party options I had at that location. That's what they do. It's a stunning sort of attack of overwhelming you so that you buy too many balloons or pinatas or whatever. If you've never been to a Party City, maybe you're only familiar with it from that great burn that somebody did on Drag Race that one time. Saying like, go back to Party City
Starting point is 00:21:25 because somebody's thing was basic and they sell costumes anyway. It's a store that sells a bunch of stuff for parties. The name of the store, I encourage everyone at home to say it out loud because I think maybe we're inoculated to it, but it's a store that is called Party City and that's very good.
Starting point is 00:21:42 You can't deny that it's a very good name for a business. So like if you were going to a knitting store and it was called Yarn City? No, that's not even as good because the word yarn doesn't carry with it the sort of like payload that party does. So it conjures for you an idea of a location you could go to that is just always- It's just full of many different kinds of party opportunities. So they have costumes, so many costumes. They have infinity balloons, which is,
Starting point is 00:22:08 actually they don't have, I'll get into this later, but they don't have as many balloons as they used to. They have streamers, they have paper plates with Fortnite guys on them. They have SpongeBob SquarePants themed pinatas. They have little like 25 cent shitty toys that you can put in grab bags of every stripe. They have all candy that exists on the planet.
Starting point is 00:22:31 They have in like big variety bags. A lot of seasonal decor too. A lot of seasonal decor. A lot of napkins and cups and streamers and shit with any sports team or league. You could imagine they have like pool party toys. They have sprinklers with those wacky hoses on them that wiggle all over the place. Just everything. And I enjoy taking Henry to birthday parties
Starting point is 00:22:56 just to see like what kind of heat the parents are bringing from the decoration side of things. Like, oh damn, there's a lot of Lightning McQueen in this trampoline stunt room right now. Yeah, stuff like that you wouldn't think about at an adult party. Like, oh, my napkins have to match my plate, which has to match the tablecloth,
Starting point is 00:23:18 which has to match the centerpiece. This is not anything I think about until Party City. Or if you're very rich, because they do work. And that's what's so fun is there's a gamut, right? There's I'm a little kid who loves dinosaurs. So everything in my whole party is going to be dinosaur based. And then here's us in our 30s who are like, come on over. We made dip.
Starting point is 00:23:40 And then later on or fancier, there's people who are like, this centerpiece is not quite centered. Like that's on the other side. So kids and very fancy people are on the same side of things. And I love that. I love the nostalgia factor too. Because I remember going to parties that had like Power Rangers matching like table settings and decor. Or like Jurassic Park was such a huge thing because that came out when I was like in elementary school
Starting point is 00:24:11 or maybe early middle school. And so like I went to several Jurassic Park themed parties. And if you're at one of those parties and you see gift bags to take home, it's like, this is the best. If they have an actual pinata filled with candy, it's like, yes, it's happening. One time we did a pinata at the gym factory, which was like our big trampoline place that they did on a trampoline.
Starting point is 00:24:32 And it was the most visceral. Like once the candy came out and there were like 40 kids on a big trampoline. Can you imagine? I was thinking about the leverage you could get by jumping and then swinging a bat or being one of the bigger kids at that party and all you do is sort of sit down and let your sort of you know gravitational force that forms on the trampoline just like collect everything and then you lie down on top of it like a goalie until all the other kids go away pro technique absolutely um it's just it's it's an exciting place to be for those for those very reasons because even if you're not thinking about a kid's birthday party that you've got coming up
Starting point is 00:25:16 it's hard not to think about that stuff when you walk down an aisle that is just that stuff and that's exciting we should we, just an aside, this is not sponsored content. No, of course not. This is Griffin's genuine love for the establishment Party City. Although if Party City wanted to get at us and do a sponsorship, I don't know, I would have to maybe do a little
Starting point is 00:25:38 bit more vetting on that. So Party City was opened in 1986 in New Jersey by a guy named Steve Mandel, who had what i would call a pretty self-evident idea where he looked around he's like there's some small stores like here and there in specific parts of the country that are selling party supplies so i'm just gonna go ahead and make a big one he made a big one and everybody in new jersey was like oh yeah and they started going there and within a year he like, franchising it out across the country. Well, and that's, like, too, like, the real rise of, like, merchandising.
Starting point is 00:26:08 So, like, people wanted to have Star Wars parties. Yeah. You know? And a location where you could go get, like, an entire, like, floor-to-ceiling Star Wars. Which, of course, is, like, not great for the mom-and-pop shops who are, like, offering, you know, specific party supplies. But it was an unaddressed sort of market. And so, like, yeah, Steve Mandel capitalized on it. uh specific party supplies but it's it it was an unaddressed sort of yeah market and so like yeah steve steve mandel capitalized on it uh in 1987 he was like hey also there's not a great like
Starting point is 00:26:32 one and all halloween store so from that point he decided that every the store would have would dedicate a quarter of its like real estate to costumes and other halloween i did not know that was the thing i really thought like you just you had to go to a halloween specific store if you wanted a costume well there are also some halloween cities which i don't know too much about but i imagine maybe the ratio is a little bit different at halloween but every party city 25 of it is dedicated to halloween stuff and they run their And they run their costume sales with a sort of militaristic efficiency that I really appreciate. Oh my gosh. Can I talk about that?
Starting point is 00:27:12 Yeah. So we found, I was looking around trying to find Henry a Jack Skellington costume because that's what he decided he wanted to be. And I saw that Party City had it. So we go and it's like one of those t-shirt shops where they have a bunch of pictures on the wall and you're like A26 and then you go to an attendant and the attendant enters A26 into a computer and then hands you a slip and then you take that slip and you go to another attendant who then goes back into the warehouse and then brings your costume to the front of the store so that when you check out it is there waiting for you.
Starting point is 00:27:45 Which sounds like a lot of work but also we went there the weekend before Halloween to get this costume and we were in and out of the store in like two and a half minutes. That's very true. It's pretty wild. Another thing that is sort of admirable about Party City is that they don't miss a trick ever. In the 90s, they started to like start getting licenses for stuff. And to this day, like if any IP, any IP becomes successful, they immediately start licensing with them. Case in point, I took Henry there in like early or mid-September.
Starting point is 00:28:16 And they had a bunch of Squid Game costumes. Like already they had Squid Game costumes, which was like, this show did not come out that long ago. Also, they have longstanding relationships with Hasbro and Nickelodeon and the NFL and Major League Baseball, any sports league, any sports team they are working with. It is also, anecdotally, a wild thing for a store to specialize in, which leads to complications sometimes. This is the most buck bug wild part of this. Since 2006, apparently we have been in a global helium shortage, which happens from time to time, even though it's the second most abundant resource in the universe. It's been, we've been in a shortage since 2006. And it got so bad in 2019 that it affected,
Starting point is 00:29:03 it hugely affected the store's bottom line and they had to like close 45 shops because they didn't have enough helium to fill up their balloons with that's one of the wilder reasons for a downturn of a store that i can think of uh one thing i actually forgot to mention about their sort of opportunistic side is toys r us closed in 2018 and shortly thereafter they had opened 50 pop-up shops across the country called uh called toy city that just ran through the holidays that's brilliant they don't miss it i'm telling you um it's just novel it's a novel it's a novel establishment for me and it's great to take henry there because it's not like we go to target and he's like oh i want this this uh you know um puppy
Starting point is 00:29:45 dog pals toy that i'm gonna play with for like a minute it's like here's a riddler costume with a cane and then he played with that he wore that and like cosplayed as riddler for like the whole summer which is that was so good it was so good so yeah it's weird to like really celebrate this like enterprising sort of monolith of a business. But it is, I don't know, it's just so wild to me that there's, come to the party store. We do parties here. And balloons. Do you need balloons? We have a thousand billion, trillion of them.
Starting point is 00:30:18 Come get your balloons. No, I think I've always kind of liked like party decor in general. And it is fun to know that there's like a place I can go and just kind of peruse. Yeah. It's a good place to peruse. Hey, thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network.
Starting point is 00:30:38 You can find other great shows on the network that we know you're going to love. Shows like Judge John Hodgman or... Maximum Film. I was just about to say Maximum Film. Yeah, we did a crossover with during the Maxphone block party. Hey, Rachel reminded me of this a while ago. We have not been sharing our email
Starting point is 00:30:58 through which you can send wonderful, your own wonderful submissions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which we would like to do. We were talking about doing an episode about just wonderful submissions from our friends at home but we don't get them anymore we just get a bunch of spam and we did stop talking about that yes so we have an email address that you can send uh your wonderful submissions to uh that email address is
Starting point is 00:31:20 wonderfulpodcast at gmail.com. Don't hesitate. Send it in. I don't know when we are going to be doing this episode. Yeah, and we're looking, just as a reminder, we're looking for like two to three sentences. Like a lot of people are noticing something on a walk and sending that, and that's perfect. Yeah, just send that in. If you send in like a bunch of paragraphs, like, you know, that's nice,
Starting point is 00:31:40 but that's too much for us to share. Yeah. Okay, I think that's it. Thank you all for listening. Oh, if you like Adventure Zone, we just put out the first episode of a miniseries that we're doing with Abria Iyengar called The Adventure Zone Imbalance that you can find on the McElroy Family YouTube channel. So if you like Taz, you'll like that, I bet.
Starting point is 00:31:59 Okay. That's it. Thanks for listening. Thank you. No, thank you. Thank you. Didn't talk about your overalls, unfortunately. They're nice.
Starting point is 00:32:08 They're really nice. They're like yellow. I found these like sweat pant material overalls. So it's not heavy like denim and, you know, can really give me the space I need to do my kicks and my stretches. Yeah. And I don't know if this is going to come off as offensive because I mean it in like the best imaginable way but you look like a very very very sexy lady wario uh you know what they had red and i thought well i can't get red or green for that matter because i don't want to look like a mario brother yeah uh well wario is like a mario cousin so i thought oh i could get
Starting point is 00:32:43 yellow yeah and i'll be safe then. Yeah. Baby, it's looking good. I have no complaints here. But what did you say? I already forgot what you told me I looked like. You look like a very, very sexy lady, Wario. Lady Wario.
Starting point is 00:32:55 Does Wario wear the yellow? Yeah. I didn't know. It's okay. You could have gone with purple and been in Waluigi territory. Then we would have been in real trouble. Gosh, there's so many. There's so many WAs.
Starting point is 00:33:06 There's just so many Mario-related characters. Yeah. You could pull off any of those levels. Thank you. Could be toad with just a vest and a diaper. You've activated me. I'm on. Hey! I'm on. Hey! I'm on. Hey! I'm on.
Starting point is 00:33:46 Hey! I'm on. Hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.

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