Special: I’m Sorry Dave, But This Reference Is Getting Old

The Great American Pop Culture Quiz Show

It's an off-season special featuring three great contestants from The Incomparable podcast network. Incomparable founder Jason Snell goes up against tech reporter Glenn Fleishman and our pal Monty Ashley across three rounds of pop culture trivia. Round one looks at famous references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and round two goes deep in the weeds on opening themes to some real kooky animated series adaptations. A back-and-forth lightning round leads to an exciting conclusion. Join us next week as we kick off season six!

NOTES

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

🤖 Also in Watto's junkyard: Robby the Robot

🥼 The episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 referenced, is one of the best regarded of the run, “Mitchell.”

🐸 If that episode of 1984 Muppet Babies sounds cool, and you’d like to stream it somewhere, you’re (still) out of luck.

🕒 Mel Brooks paid Orson Welles for a week’s working narrating, but Welles knocked it out in three hours.

🎺 The Euphonium Scorebreak. The Euphonium: The brass instrument that no one can identify but everyone loves when they hear it. No it's not a tuba. Not, it's not a saxophone. It's a Euphonium.

⛄️ Snowpiercer was a European comic before being a movie, but would hardly qualify as classic. It’s very different from the movie.

🍄 The Swamp Thing cartoon only lasted 5 episodes, but still was re-run for years.

🗣 The Wilhelm Scream Scorebreak. The Wilhelm Scream: [Dan does wilhelm scream].

⚓️ The name “Nausicaa,” from Homer, means “burner of ships,” which is kind of a spoiler for the anime.

🔫 Murderbot watches serialized "feed" programs that aren't exactly TV shows, but pretty close. They (the non-binary Murderbot itself) has also been optioned for their own TV series.

⚾️ Yes, The Natural is a riff on Camelot: the bat is Excalibur, the team is the Knights of the Round Table, etc.

🎧 Jason's podcast network, where you can find all of today's competitor's is The Incomparable

🔤 Glenn is a font of knowledge at the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule

👖 Listen to Glenn on the Pants In The Boot podcast

📚 Browse Glenn's Take Control series of tech books.

🐦 Monty can be found on Twitter

🎞 Monty does Letterboxd too!