Pod Yourself A Gun Was a Jeopardy Clue
Plus, the best ads from the Super Bowl, and the best quotes from the Emilia Perez actress.
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One thing upon which all the LinkedIn influencers and hustle grind bros seem to agree is to “celebrate your wins.” And this week we had what I think of as one of the biggest wins possible when Pod Yourself A Gun showed up as a clue on Jeopardy (specifically, Celebrity Jeopardy, not sure if that makes it a greater or a lesser honor).
For anyone not already aware, Pod Yourself A Gun is the Sopranos rewatch podcast I started with my podcast partner, Matt Lieb (with help from producer Brent Flyberg). We’ve since gone onto rewatch all of The Wire (Pod Yourself The Wire) and just finished season one of Mad Men (Mad Yourself A Man). We interviewed Joe Gannascoli (Vito) and Robert Iler (AJ Soprano) and even got a mention in the New York Times. You can find all of those episodes (plus the Frotcast, which we’ve been doing since 2010) on Patreon.
I remember when we came up with the idea for Pod Yourself A Gun in 2019. It happened to be the 20th anniversary of season one of the Sopranos, and we were thrilled to come up with an idea that for once seemed both timely and had a hook, and wasn’t too esoteric. I was still working for Uproxx at the time and I approached them about making it, and I don’t remember the exact response, but the gist of it was that they were like “Eh, we don’t really want to make podcasts.”
I can’t remember who else we talked to, but no one seemed interested or we weren’t asking the right people so eventually we just made it ourselves. Uproxx has since gone on to make a bunch of podcasts since then (as well as partnering with Will.i.am, who does a radio show with an AI bot, not sure if that’s going to be one of their podcasts as well).
I don’t know if showing up as a Jeopardy clue proves that we were right all along, but either way I’m glad we had to make it ourselves. Because if someone else had actually bought our pitch they probably would’ve laid us off by now and we might never have gotten on Jeopardy. Eat your hearts out or whatever, suckers!
Apparently the rest of the category was all former actors from the shows they were podding about presenting the clues themselves. We clearly were not important enough for that, but conversely it makes me extra proud that Matt and I were still deemed worthy of being a clue despite being objectively unfamous.
Anyway, I had to celebrate that win with you all. It made me very happy, having been a Jeopardy viewer for at least 20 years. We didn’t get any more money for it or see a spike in our subscriptions or downloads (yet?) but hopefully this means more people will return my emails. Time will tell!
The Best Ads from Super Bowl LIX
You guys watch that Super Bowl? That sure didn’t play out the way I expected, thank God. I actually started to feel bad for the Chiefs by the end, despite them being the team that has ruined two previous Super Bowl parties for me. For once a Chiefs game didn’t come down to crushingly efficient last minute drive. They were inevitable, and then suddenly they weren’t.
Anyway, ads. As Matt Christman used to say, it used to be, you’d watch the Super Bowl, see the ads, and those would be your memes for the entire year. Wazzzap. Bud Weis Er. Dilly dilly. And so forth. Now we have many different places to find memes and they mostly only last a few weeks, but still we have Super Bowl ads. What do they mean anymore? Eh, I’m not going to wax nostalgic about commercials.
This year’s ads were… shit, mostly? It wasn’t as bad as four or five years ago, when every ad seemed to be a corporation apologizing for something, or as bad as three or four years ago, when every ad was for something crypto-related. This year mostly struck a balance between something high concept trying way too hard and barely connected to the product pitch at the end, with the occasional weird PSA probably sponsored by some religious cult. That’s not including the 37 ads for FanDuel and DraftKings that run during every sporting event. I do appreciate the streamlined efficiency of sports gambling ads. /Kramer voice: Why don’t you just GIVE me your money?
One ad emblematic of the evening was the commercial that was just a touching montage of different people singing “Country Roads” by John Denver. The song went on and on and then it just said “rocket.com” at the end, without ever explaining what rocket.com was or how it related to West Virginia, mountin’ mama, and all the rest. Didn’t ads used to explain what they were actually for?
That ad in turn led back to the telecast, with the same song playing live in the stadium, cutting to all the people at the game dutifully singing along (nothing worse than being asked to participate in a commercial, but hey, it’s a catchy-ass song). Still no explanation of what rocket.com was or how it related to John Denver. I guess because Rocket sells mortgages, which people need to buy homes, and the song says “take me home,” that was the connection? Whatever, man!
That’s sort of the state of advertising in a nutshell: some too-clever-by-half inside joke between marketing people that you can sort of understand the gist of if you squint real hard.
Anyway, I promised you the “best ads from Super Bowl LIX” in the subhed, and that turns out to be a really easy list because there was really only one ad that made me chuckle at all or that seemed worth remembering the next day. And that was the Liquid Death “Drink on the job” ad.
Not only was it a funny ad with a great jingle and eye-catching imagery, it didn’t make you guess what the product was and the joke didn’t seem disconnected from the pitch. A few years ago we’d get a funny skit and then you’d find out it was an ad for crypto and everyone in the room would groan.
Liquid Death is a company that figured out that Americans are too stupid to ban terrible-for-the-environment-and-for-zero-net-gain single use plastic water bottles (literally you can just put it in a can or a carton!), but that we would nonetheless go for an alternative so long as they packaged it like a Monster Energy Drink wrapped in Attitude Era branding. Don’t be a pussy, drink Fuck Your Face Off Fair Trade Coffee! Helping the environment through ironic detachment and the Freudian death drive feels very much my shit, so I guess it figures that I’d also enjoy their commercial. Well done.
Emilia Pérez Actress Keeps Digging Herself Deeper
If you’re normal you probably haven’t been keeping up that much with Oscars season drama, but there is at least one pretty funny story to come out of it. As we’ve covered, Emilia Pérez became the most-nominated film this year with 13 nominations. Considering it’s a Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug lord getting a sex change directed by a Frenchman, it seemed exactly like the kind of movie that would win a million Golden Globes but be ignored by the Academy. But actual Oscar nominations? And 13 of them? That came out of left field.
I tend to think it was an entertainingly silly movie that I had fun watching, and I agree with what John Paul Brammer said: