Hey, Friends of Fandom. Saint and Jim don't really have a topic this week. They just wanted to spend a little time just before their holiday hiatus to reflect on a great year of guests, geekery, good times, and — most of all — gratitude. So that's what they did! Thanks to everyone who was a part of Fuel Your Fandom in 2022. We appreciate you all. And here's to Season 5 to come!

The Man. The Myth. The weirdest legend of them all. How has it taken Saint and Jim this long to get around to the national treasure that is Weird Al? Not only is he universally beloved and an undeniable creative genius, he’s also a peerless parodist, funny filmmaker, virtuoso squeezeboxer, and all around nice guy. On this episode, your intrepid co-hosts are joined by Al superfan Josh Bohmbach of The Benchwarmers Sports Trivia podcast. What results is less a “podcast” per se, and more just three nerds gushing endlessly about a legitimate icon. Couldn’t be helped. He’s just so awesome. So earhole it up, and let’s get weird.

Something curious has been happening in the land of live music lately. Cover bands and tribute acts have ascended to a level of draw (and ticket sales) previously only reserved for their "original" counterparts. Whether a given band is emulating a single celebrated act or representing a specific genre's greatest hits, the public's appetite for familiarity has never seemed higher. Is it nostalgia? Post-covid "comfort food"-style tendencies? Or something else? Today, Saint and Jim are joined by Kevin Sucher, Grammy-nominated producer and bandleader of America's favorite Yacht Rock band The Docksiders, to break this one down.

Few characters have captured the imaginations of escape-seekers like the ultimate gentleman spy. Y'know, 007. Bond. James Bond. The "license to kill" guy. In this episode, Saint and Jim are joined once again by friend of the show and host of the "Mission Log" Star Trek podcast, John Champion. In a Blofeld-worthy twist, he's actually not here to talk Trek this time. But he IS good enough to help us dive into some Bond-centered subjects that might leave you shaken AND stirred. Among them: how do we parse the misogyny of Bond's earliest outings with modern standards? Who was the best Bond? Is there a future for the character after "No Time to Die"? How much of a difference is there between Fleming vs. Broccoli? And how good is all that music, anyway?

First things first: MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS EPISODE. If you somehow haven't seen "Wakanda Forever" yet, then please save this one for later. Reason being, Saint n' Jim both saw it the weekend it opened, and were so moved by it that the usual months-out spoiler moratoriums are out the window. But if you HAVE seen it, then we hope you enjoy the breakdown of all the reasons why this film is one of the best the MCU has produced thus far. Among them: rich depictions of culture, incredible action, powerful Afro-futurism, touching tributes, inspiring depictions of Black excellence, and SO many implications for the MCU as a whole it'll make your head spin. Earhole it up!

There's no denying it: technology is an integral part of all of our lives. We all have smartphones in our pockets. We'd get lost without GPS. And most of us don't really remember much before the internet. But our reliance on tech isn't necessarily a net positive. As we've seen given some of the news stories that have recently surfaced involving Facebook, Twitter, layoffs, and other "we'd rather not think about it" kind of stuff, sometimes tech can be more trouble than it's worth. In this edition, Saint and Jim take a look at our over-reliance on tech, and what it means for the culture.

We all know that TV and movies aren't real life. And most contexts, it's a really good thing they're not. That's good for a lot of reasons. But one of the biggest ones is — let's face it — some of our favorite fictional characters would be horrible people to know in real life. And we don't even mean the sociopaths and supervillains. We're talking about beloved characters who just happen to be low-key horrible people. In this episode, Saint and Jim take a look at why we'd never actually be friends with these folks. Of course, they also dip into some news, tangents, and meandering. Like they do.  

There's no doubt about it — there's never been a better time to be a nerd. Given the abundance of entertainment aimed directly at us these days, it's become obvious that the geek have truly inherited the earth. HOWEVER. How much of a good thing is TOO much? Given the frankly absurd proliferation of movies, comics, TV shows, video games and countless other channels of media, it's feeling ever more impossible to keep up with it all. In this edition of the FYF podcast, Saint and Jim take a closer look at just how bloated the nerd mediasphere has become, and how overwhelming it feels trying to keep up with it all. So if you can find the time (amid obsessing over your growing Netflix queue, stressing over your heavy Kindle backlog and sighing over the fact that they just announced 17 new "Assassin's Creed" games), we'd love it if you could earhole this one.

Some weeks, episode themes reveal themselves. Others, there's just so much nerd news, it can be hard to narrow it all down into one installment. This was one of the second kind. In this edition of the Fuel Your Fandom podcast, Saint and Jim face down an absolute deluge of newsworthy geek-o-sphere goings on, and hand-pick some of the biggest standouts. And in an unprecedented move, some late-breaking nerd news sent the boys back to their mics to record an addendum — since something absolutely huge happened just after they wrapped up. So get this in your earholes, and get plugged in to what's up.

Time travel is a sticky concept. While the IDEA of trekking through the timeline is totally feasible (especially given commonly accepted Einsteinian theory), the PRACTICE of traipsing across the ages can be complicated, indeed. What happens if you encounter yourself? Are you risking disrupting the timeline? Can you give yourself stock tips?  How do quantum physics factor in? In this edition of Fuel Your Fandom, Saint and Jim are joined by time travel expert and filmmaker John Lampson, who breaks down the three types of temporal travel, his favorite on-screen examples of the concept, and why so many of the paradoxes that could theoretically arise for active chrononauts shouldn't be a real worry in reality.