Things to Look Forward to the Remainder of 2023

With Star Trek: Picard and The Mandalorian finished for their seasons, and Ted Lasso coming to a close in a few weeks, I thought I’d jot down some of the remaining nerdy things coming around the bend in 2023 that I’m excited for. You know, a little carrot on a stick for me to keep on keeping on. Ha!

May 5 - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

May 10 - Muppets Mayhem

May 12 - Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

May 23 - Gremlins Secrets of the Mogwai, Clone High

June 2 - Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse

June 15 - Strange New Worlds (Season 2)

June 16 - The Flash, Stan Lee Documentary on Disney+

June 21 - Secret Invasion

June 30 - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

July 14 - Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning

August 4 - TMNT: Mutant Mayhem

August 8 - Only Murders in the Building

August 23 - Ahsoka

October 6 - Loki Season 2

November 3 - Dune: Part Two

November 10 - The Marvels

November 29 - Echo

December 20 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife Sequel

Live From Your City: It’s The American Gladiators

Back in 2018, I wrote a ton of fun pieces for the COMET and CHARGE television networks. Sadly, in the transition of the stations being sold, I think some of the pieces were lost in the shuffle. One of those is the below article where I interviewed a contestant on the live traveling show of American Gladiators.

I figured, what the heck. Let’s give Vince his due.

Presented here is an article originally written April 4, 2018 for CHARGE. Enjoy!

At the height of its popularity, American Gladiators was a pop culture powerhouse worthy of its monumental namesake. At surface level, the show seemed exploitative and even kitschy. But the show quickly gained a massive following, and after two seasons spawned spin-offs in the forms of Mattel toys, Nintendo Entertainment System video games, clothing, bed sheets, trading cards, and much more. In October of 1991, the series was riding an all-time high. According to the Los Angeles Times, American Gladiators drew higher ratings in 1990 than the NFL in Phoenix, Arizona.

Perhaps the beauty of the show and why it appealed to such a wide audience was the seemingly achievable feat that anyone to go head-to-head with a Gladiator and win. A steel worker from Ohio, a grade school teacher from Chicago, a former college football player, yes, even a fifth-grade chump out of Franktown, Colorado such as myself: an Everyday Joe or Jane face the Gladiators and be annihilated into dust on the sport court or emerge victorious. A traveling roadshow of the American Gladiators was an absolute natural, fitting square in the sweet spot of the Venn Diagram of what appealed to audiences the most. A live touring show would present the athletic spectacle, the larger-than-life heroes, and the exhilaration of professional wrestling and put them in an arena where audiences by the thousands could scream their heads off amid it all. American Gladiators was, and still is, a phenomenon. And packing local arenas for a series of un-televised live events across the country was a no-brainer. At the height of the show’s run from 1989 to 1996, the Atlaspheres were packed up into a touring van and the show hit the road.

In 1991, during production of the show’s second season, American Gladiators co-creator Johnny Ferraro teamed with concert promoter David Fishof to conceptualize a live iteration of the popular televised series. Their goal: to book arenas and coliseums across the country and give every market’s local athletes a shot at defeating the colossal Gladiators. According to Dan “Nitro” Clark’s memoir, Gladiator: A True Story of ‘Roids, Rage, and Redemption, “Johnny [Ferraro] knows a thing or two about touring. Before creating Gladiators, he was a successful Elvis impersonator who played some of the world's largest venues. Fishof is coming off a successful Monkees reunion tour, and also Ringo Starr’s tour.” The two put their heads together and teamed with Feld Entertainment (the mastermind production company responsible for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus) and put together a 150-city tour across America, sponsored by 7-Eleven.

Once the dates and venues were booked, next came the audition process to find potential civilians who had the physical prowess to take on a Gladiator. Newspaper ads, posters at 7-Eleven, and local TV spots sent out the wide net casting call nationwide. And the people responded by the hundreds, even thousands, in every city. According to the Hartford Courant, as many as 2,000 turned out in some cities to put their athleticism to the test.

Denver, Colorado, the home-town of the aforementioned fifth-grade chump from a small rural town was to receive the American Gladiators tour in February of 1992 at the Denver Coliseum. Though my ambitions to knock Nitro off the Joust podium may have been a bit fanciful for a kid of ten, several hundred of those Coloradoans who did believe themselves worth of the competition put their physical prowess to the test. According to The Denver Post, the very first physical fitness test administered to would-be challengers was to do fifty pushups on their fingertips in under sixty seconds. That single and first test eliminated nearly 95% of the hopefuls.

Though the rigors of the audition process seemed insurmountable, there were a very select few who qualified and represented their local city in the live tour.

Results of the Denver auditions similarly echoed across the country. Vince Pecchia was one of the competitors who represented Youngstown, Ohio when the event was scheduled to hit the historic Cleveland Coliseum. Having seen an ad in the local newspaper, Pecchia’s girlfriend signed him up to audition, without her significant other being aware she had done so. At the time, Pecchia was juggling working at a steel mill with taking night courses. Fortunately, when his girlfriend (now wife) informed him that he’d be auditioning to battle the American Gladiators, he found the idea amusing and welcomed his girlfriend’s challenge. A month prior to the big show, Pecchia auditioned for the live event at a local auditorium, taking on bodybuilders, lightweight speedsters, boxers, and other local athletes hoping to make the cut. After successfully completing the fifty-fingertip push-up challenge that eliminated most hopefuls, running a forty-yard dash in under 4.8 seconds, a grueling amount of twenty-plus behind the neck pull-ups, and beating out other competitors in one-on-one Powerball and Joust competitions, Pecchia emerged as one of six locals (and two alternates) finally chosen for the Ohio live event.

Qualifying for the big show was a notable achievement, instantaneously propelling Pecchia to the status of hometown hero. Even before the actual event took place. In fact, a speaking point of order at the House of Representatives was for a congressman from Ohio to wish Pecchia luck for the upcoming event.

Having found this remarkable point of order, I decided to seek out Pecchia. Fortunately, I was able to catch up over the phone with him twenty-five years after his live American Gladiators experience. Reminiscing about the experience while seaside at the beach brought an energy and an enthusiasm to Pecchia’s voice that was infectious. And understandably so. Competing against the Gladiators essentially turned him into a rock star. “They brought the six of us to the Cleveland Coliseum for an NBA game and introduced us at halftime,” Pechhia says. “And they made a pretty big deal out of it in our local paper.” Before the main event, there were no rehearsals, no pleasant meetings between the competitors and the formidable Gladiators. Pecchia didn’t come face-to-face with Nitro, Gemini, Laser, and the entirety bevy of the iconic original Gladiators until the Saturday of competition. And that was okay. “They were out to kill you,” Pecchia jokes. “They were the real deal.”

On the day of the main event, the Cleveland Coliseum was packed. Pecchia remembers the massive audience turn out as surprising. And though the Gladiators were all recognizable by name and beloved by fans around the world, it helped to have a few people cheering in the challengers’ corner. “I had everybody there,” Pecchia says, referring to the friends and family that were in the stands. Pecchia and his fellow competitors were put through the wringer, competing in the Joust, Wall, Powerball, and one that was particularly aggravating to Pecchia: the Atlasphere. “Whenever you won an event, you would get ten points,” Pecchia says. “And they took the top two of whoever accumulated the most points to go to the Eliminator at the end.”

Sure enough, out of the six competitors (seven, technically as one of the civilian competitors suffered a concussion during the live event and had to be replaced by an alternate), it came down to Pecchia and one other challenger in the renowned obstacle course, the Eliminator. “And he actually had more points than me, so I had a five second penalty to start,” Pecchia says.

But the five second delay proved easy to overcome as Pecchia raced through the Eliminator and ultimately was the victor of Cleveland’s American Gladiators live show. “Oh yeah, I crushed him,” Pecchia says with a wry laugh. Among the prizes awarded for being the grand champion of the day was a medal awarded at a ceremony following the event, an at-home American Gladiators themed gym, a watch, and a few other parting prizes. But most important to Pecchia was the bragging right that he had faced the American Gladiators and won. Friends and co-workers still love to bring up Pecchia’s day in the spotlight all the time. “I laugh about it a lot too. It was a goofy event but nobody else could do it. They made a big deal about it here,” Pecchia says. “Youngstown is a pretty small town and it made the paper for a month. There was a lot of press from the moment I tried out until the event. When I won, they asked me to go around and talk to the kids in schools. It was a very nice thing.”

Enter the Time Vortex

My parents insist that after the birth of a child, time speeds up. And, in part, I think they’re right. It seems like it’s been the blink of an eye since the meeting my daughter in the fall of 2017 to her walking, talking, and spinning around like Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman in the living room.

On the other hand, I also have non-scientific belief that we are caught in a time vortex. One where the laws of time and space have completely been defied. Time, as we perceive it, has been forever altered because of the current landscape of popular culture and how we’re consuming media as a whole.

In short, binge-watching culture has put us into timey-wimey-wibbly-wabbly territory that would make even The Doctor’s head spin.

Here’s why:

In August of 2014, on this very blog, I laid out all of the pop culture goodness that was to come from 2015 through the year 2020. Much of that has been shuffled around, cancelled, finally defined or did indeed happen. In fact, I had no idea at the writing of that particular article that a new Ghostbusters film was right around the corner in 2016. Let alone that a second Ghostbusters film would be entering pre-production as I write this now. Both of which would have been shocking revelations to that schedule.

But what I didn’t anticipate was what an abundance of riches would do to my consumption of popular culture. Not only that, but how I would perceive the passage of time. Let me take a few steps back. Sitting here in March of 2019, it’s difficult to believe that Marvel Studios released Black Panther just over a little than a year ago. It’s even more difficult to recollect that Thanos snapped half of the MCU out of existence a little less than a year ago in Avengers: Infinity War. Further still, Ant-Man and the Wasp feels like it was released ages ago. When in reality, it’s only been about seven months ago. Three movies in the same serialized storyline released in the same year was absolutely unheard of. I remember as a kid sitting and calculating the time between Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 and Batman Returns in 1992 and hypothesizing that it would be at least another three to four years before we’d find out what happened to Batman in a third film. And it turned out, I was right. As, for better or worse, Batman Forever was released in 1995.

That was seemingly the norm for what felt like my entire childhood and adolescence. Movie comes out. Wait a few years, follow-up movie may or may not be behind it.

That’s completely changed.

Captain Marvel hits theaters this Friday. Avengers: Endgame is a little over a month away from being released. Though it’s felt like forever since the cliffhanger last year, the wait has relatively been small. Hell, I feel like the wait for the next chapter in the Skywalker Saga, Episode IX has been excruciatingly long. But, as I mentioned at the top of this article, Star Wars: The Last Jedi was released just a month after my daughter was born. Remember how I said that felt like the blink of an eye?

We’re living in a renaissance age that would have blown ten-year-old Troy’s mind. Marvel, Star Wars, Ghostbusters movies hitting one right after the other. The time in between films and television shows (not to mention streaming media where you get ten episodes plus at a time) has been reduced to nearly microscopic levels. In the scheme of things, waiting five years from 1984’s release of the original Ghostbusters to 1989’s release of Ghostbusters II didn’t feel like that much time at all. But having to wait a whole year from the announcement of Jason Reitman’s new film since having just seen a Ghostbusters film in 2016 feels like an eternity. We want everything. And we want it now.

If we’re not in some sort of time warp, it means we’ve all transformed into Violet Beauregarde. And I’m not sure I’m cool with that.

Comet: The Best Television Channel You Probably Aren't Watching

Hey there, SPTers. Long time, no speak? Apologies for the lack of updates recently. Your ol' pal Troy has been slammed as of late with a variety of projects, including a couple documentaries, a couple book projects, and an exciting prospect or two. An unexpected window in the schedule seems to have popped up, so I figured what the heck, send out a quick blog to sing the praises of a newfound obsession.

This holiday season, I was visiting the family back home. My old childhood room still has a small TV with rabbit ears and my wife and I were flipping through channels late at night on New Year's Eve. We stumbled across one of the most bizarre b-movies. It was one of those films that you see 12 frames of in passing and immediately yell, "What the hell was that?" and flip back to the channel it occupied.

The film was New Year's Evil, and it was just exactly what the doctor ordered for a 3am post New Year celebration viewing. But with the discovery of the old 1980 horror film also came the discovery of a new over-the-air network called Comet.

According to the most-reliable resource, the internet, Comet was founded a couple years ago in 2015 but I've just now discovered it. The broadcast channel is airing across the country and their daily programming includes (but is not limited to) cult classic films, b-movies, episodes of The Outer Limits, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the various Stargate television series. Essentially, it's the modern nerd's dream come true. Since New Year's, my wife and I have watched horrible science fiction films. We've endured several takes on Dracula including The Return of Count Yorga and Blacula and its sequels. And of course, every Sunday night, we partake in at least one episode of MST3K like clockwork.

This is the television channel I would have been tuned into religiously as a thirteen-year old. And especially in this day in age, where adolescence is perpetual and nostalgic nerds are being catered to by the millions, it's turned into a station that I'm tuned to religiously as an adult.

And chances are, it's already broadcasting in the airwaves above you at this very moment. Only one way to find it: grab a set of bunny ears to hook into that 4K UHD flatscreen of yours, check the listings here for a channel number, and get ready for grainy 4x3 b-movie glory.