Old Man Jenkins

Day 4 of Brawlin’ Summer features Reg and Squidward both vying for the right to face Scooter in the Bracket A Finals! Elsewhere on the card, it’s a clash of Boys Who Cry, Craig Mammalton faces his biggest match yet and Larry the Lobster finds himself stuck between The Rock and a hard place!

Saw Dial of Destiny a week ago. I went in with the barest, most minimum expectations and turned out being just aight to me. I’m sure others expecting slightly more will say it amounted to less than that, but who’ll go into an Indy movie in 2023 with expectations at this point? I haven’t seen Crystal Skull since the first time I watched all those years ago, but I wouldn’t say I was one of those people who outright hated it. Flawed sure, but it was a decent Indy flick for me at that time. I’d say Dial of Destiny and Crystal Skull rank about the same for me, but if I had to absolutely choose, I guess I’d choose Crystal Skull but not by a whole lot. Crystal Skull still had a sense of, I guess, “whimsy” that I felt Dial had less of. I didn’t quite feel the grandiosity of this particular adventure until the very end. Mads does well as the villain, he and his crew felt like an imposing enough threat throughout the movie. Better than Crystal Skull’s baddies but maybe that’s just my Mads bias. Wish they used Antonio Banderas more. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish makes me wanna see his future roles make the most of him. I wanted to like the Fleabag actress’ character, but she was mostly ehh. She plays the role well, but the character itself needed more work imo. It was pretty depressing to watch knowing this’ll be Harrison Ford’s last hurrah with the hat and whip and this movie is very much for nostalgia bait purposes to get more people into the theater (which for my showing, the room was definitely less than half capacity. On premiere night), and Indy goes out more with a light spark than a bang here. Again IMO. Just let this franchise rest already. And Harrison Ford, you finally go home and get that rest, champ. and last night, I finally got to watch No More Hard Feelings. I’m not necessarily as big of a J-Law fan as the next person, but this one was really good and she turns in a hell of a performance for something as raunchy as this. It handles the outlandish premise with enough tact to wring something genuinely heartfelt out of it. Big recommend for the R-rated comedy aficionados out there!

Day 3 of Brawlin’ Summer features the first ever meeting of Larry the Lobster and Scooter the Surfer as they collide to decide who moves on to the final round of Bracket A! Elsewhere on the card, Pearl and Grubby Grouper teams up for the first time ever and The WEENIEBOT pulls double duty!

Day 2 of Brawlin’ Summer features some first time match-ups such as; Gary vs Plankton, Pearl vs Kevin C. Cucumber, Reg vs Luke Hobbs and Mr. Krabs vs Squidward.

Spent all day organizing the match cards for the remainder of SpongeBrawl’s Brawlin’ Summer and if my last round of calculations are correct, then the finalized match count comes out to a grand total of 109. With the cards finally organized and all locked in, I can finally confirm that Brawlin’ Summer will officially last for the next 15 days straight! Once Brawlin’ Summer concludes, SpongeBrawl will be going on break probably until the Halloween season. I might fit one match card in in-between, but no guarantees. Once the Halloween show is in the books, there’ll be at least one more show near the end of the year dedicated to viewer choice dream matches. So you have some time to think on what you want those dream matches to be. You can pick from the roster I currently have on hand now or you can suggest new characters that I haven’t gotten to yet. Wanna make this a good last hurrah so I’ll take most anything and run with it. In the event that I don’t get much or any suggestions in, then I’ll just whip up a dream card to the best of my ability. I originally had plans to keep this revival run going for a full calendar year, but I’m already reaching my quota for custom wrestlers on WWE 2K22. I’ll have to start deleting stuff, which kinda sucks cuz a lot of these creations are my own and they took long and hard to create. I could always upload them to the freakin servers, but that also looks like it has a certain limit. And knowing my Tony Khan-ing ass, I’ll fill those spots up in no time. Plus, I wanna just free up space on my PS5 so I can play more games that I actually wanna play and not just use the character creator for. Non-SpongeBrawl things aside. I still plan on bringing the Die-In Theater back for one more special feature, that feature being “The Secret Box” (the original first two episodes) for its 10 year anniversary. Once that’s done, that’ll probably mark the official end of the Die-In. It was fun running it while it lasted, but it hasn’t been open for like two years for a reason. If anyone wants to join me for The Secret Box commentaries, feel free to let me know in advance either in my PMs, on my ask thread or on discord. Otherwise I’ll have to dust Ben Mankiewicz off to keep me company again. I’ll probably start work on em at the end of August. this year has been pretty fun and productive so far, between the SpongeBrawl anniversary revival and the Deathmatch anniversary farewell runs, this is probably the most I’ve got done since about 2020 or so. I’m pretty happy about that, pretty proud. It’s a nice “make good” on my part for unceremoniously skipping out on the final Spin-Off Festival a couple years back or so. I don’t wanna speak too much on what the future may hold because more often than not, I promise stuff that usually never comes to pass, but I’ll probably still keep on doing this washed up/hack fanfic writer thing for as long as this section lasts. Yes, until the SBC apocalypse finally happens.

it’s the 4th of July, you know what that means! If my last count was accurate, there are a whopping 111 matches currently in the pipeline for this Brawlin’ Summer event. Maybe not all of them will get to see the light of a summer’s day, but rest assured that there will be plenty of beach brawls to be had by Brawlin’ Summer’s end! I went into this thinking it’d be the final hurrah for this anniversary project. That more than likely won’t be the case going forward (I can only let this die happy once it has a Halloween episode in the tape library). But I hope you enjoy me going all out for this summer shit anyway!

I used to collects DVDs/blu-rays a lot, but then I realized that they eventually accumulate enough to take up a lot of space, so now I either reserve physical purchases for stuff I really, really like (my last two physical purchases being Bullet Train and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish lel) or I just get movies digitally off the Xbox store whenever they’re on sale. Whether or not I buy something digitally mostly depends on its streaming availability. Sometimes I catch stuff on cable if it interests me enough and if it comes on like right after wrestling or something. Last thing I can recall watching on cable was The Great Wall, which I regrettably don’t own. I have Regal Unlimited still, so I try to catch as much as I can in theaters. I’m still very much fond of the movie theater experience. And I don’t pirate because this lil number on like every mid-2000s dvd told me not to.

It’s the official start of SpongeBrawl’s summer celebration, culminating in a 30-brawler battle royale to determine who will ride home on their very own summer segway! ALRIGHT @Mr. Krabs! Enjoy your new mode of transport! Not like you couldn’t afford one on your own. Just wrestle the prize out of the hands of a character who could’ve really used it. Just don’t flip it on eBay. Anyways, will hopefully have Brawlin’ Summer all ready to go by next week. It’s the biggest SpongeBrawl event yet; spanning multiple nights and maybe even weeks! Who knows!? I’d gonna be a Brawlin’ Summer ALL THE WAY! The SpongeBrawl faithful will be eating good in July. SpongeBrawl will hold its first ever “Big One Classic”! Who will go on to win The Big One and challenge Patrick for the Shazampionship by Brawlin’ Summer’s end? We will also crown a brand new Champion of Wumbology, as well as Dominic Toretto and Luke Hobbs keeping the Fast X festivities going well into the Brawlin’ Summer! Watch as they continue to mix up with the best that SpongeBrawl has to offer!

I was a bit iffy about the whole “let’s put SB characters in the roles of famous characters shtick!” since those are usually hit or miss for me in any sorta show (and the description, to me, made it sound like a contemporary/somewhat more original adaptation of the tale), but I’m happy to report that this one really surprised me for good reason. The roles given here gives a more unique take on the SpongeBob/Squidward dynamic that I, myself, don’t see often with SpongeBob in a position of authority and Squidward as more of the plucky upstart. I like that it upheld SpongeBob’s moral code of letting the jellyfish go after he captures it. I like the villainous Krabs/Plankton team-up as someone who’s also trying to pull off a villainous team-up between them in SpongeBrawl. The animation is hella on point in this one. The references and callbacks are also on point. I never thought I’d see myself marking out for a Home Sweet Pineapple callback in 2023. Definitely my favorite of the bunch I’ve seen recently. Just plenty of fun to be had here. I give Dopey Dick 5 doys out of 5. Now excuse me while I Skod this ish.

I thought this was a fun lil diddy. Would’ve been funnier if SpongeBob was revealed to be the music teacher, like some inversion of Artist Unknown, but what we got here was still good. Always interesting for me to see whenever more layers get added on to the Bikini Bottom law enforcement scene. Idk, writing stuff like S(lums)BU and Crime Wave way back when does that to a guy. And the ending was honestly pretty freakin’ sweet seeing Squidward getting recognized for some sorta talent. Curious to see if they go all in on him being a nose player from here on out or just go back to the status quo of him sucking on the clarinet since the clarinet has been so synonymous with him for over two decades. But I feel with the team the show has now, they’ll probably follow through on the nose, which I wouldn’t mind and I’d find it to be a pretty nice way to put Clary to rest. I give this episode 4 court orders out of 5

“Sir Urchin and Snail Fail” is now “Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy Redux”

Bringing Skodwarde back just for this

Been catching up on sixth season of The Eric Andre Show. Still cracks me up, but it kinda sucks that he’s apparently only still doing this show because he made next to nothing on Bad Trip. Bless adult swim for continuing to fund this man’s chaotic vision, but come on Hollywood, throw the man a bigger bone. And Hannibal’s presence is still missed.

Also saw this yesterday during my brief excursion to Nickelodeon, so I might as well post about it! The overall idea of this episode gives me some vibes of the old Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy episodes, specifically the first one since that one revolves around SpongeBob and Patrick trying to get them out of retirement, which sorta runs parallel to here with SpongeBob and Patrick trying to reunite Sir Urchin and Snail Fail. It was pretty cool seeing an urchin and a snail not being portrayed as mere pests or house pets for once, which raises some questions about the hierarchy of the underwater world in which they live in, but I’ll refrain. I probably would’ve appreciated their shtick more if they had more of a Tom and Jerry-esque dynamic (given they’re the mouse and cat of the sea). Like have Snail Fail be fed up with being on the losing end of the shtick all the time and have that be the catalyst for their breakup. But other than that, pretty mellow episode that harkens a bit back to the MM & BB formula. And dost thine eyes deceive me? Was that a cameo appearance by Joey of Boys Who Cry?? And he’s trying to go solo like on SpongeBrawl?! I agree with jjs, I wanted to see grandma give them all cracks by the end. If this was her Tom in Chocolate With Nuts moment, then good call. I give it 3 Boys Who Cry out of 5

Finally got around to watching the first episode of AEW Collision. It was definitely a different take on AEW than Dynamite, and welcome that direction for it. The set was awesome, things went at a nicer change of pace, matches were good, crowd was hot as per Chicago. I know audio mixing hasn’t been one of AEW’s strong suits, but the commentary sounded especially quiet in this episode, at least for me. Hard to get a real gage on how I felt about the team of Kevin Kelly and Nigel McGuinness. When JR got on commentary, he sounded in real rough shape. You hate to see it. I know he had a spill/accident on the way to the show from what I heard, it probably would’ve been best to at least hold him off until he gets better. I know JR likes being a busy body, but it was just depressing to hear him like that. Favorite match of the night was probably Andrade v Buddy, but the main event wasn’t shabby neither. Surreal seeing Punk and Joe share a ring together again after ALL this time. Nice to see Skye Blue get a much needed W in her hometown. Nice to Miro back just AT ALL. I don’t know why Khan let him fall by the wayside the way he did. The TNT Championship changed hands AGAIN. It’s hard to believe that it was roughly a year ago that Wardlow was one of the hottest acts going in the company. And he loses it to Luchasaurus of all people. And if anything, they’ll probably just have Wardlow win it back anyway. Wardlow was an unstoppable force, now he’s the force that can get stopped at times but then takes off again with less speed than he had before, which makes the next stop less impactful. Idk, maybe Wardlow was just doomed to this inevitable fate from the start because as hot as he was last year, he still wasn’t ready to hold the world title. I was hoping a nice reign as the longest reigning TNT Champ would get him there as being one of the few guys who could dethrone MJF, but the start/stop-ness of it all (and at the dual expense of another potential heavy hitter in Hobbs) has just done more damage than actually building him up. Pairing him up with Arn was a good call tho. I just don’t think the AEW Cody Rhodes way of booking him, is the way to go. Overall, I give the first episode of Collision 3 and a half Counterfeit Bucks out of 5. Solid start, a nice breath of fresh air from Dynamite. Seemed very much like Tony at least had help in putting this show together, and hopefully this current arrangement continues putting out solid shows like this. As well as continue giving the lesser featured guys time to shine, cuz AEW definitely has the talent pool to sustain more than two shows. Hopefully they make the most of these extra two hours every week.

Decided to watch this ep for myself after seeing the talk about it on discord (luckily for me, it premiered at 10 AM here). I mean, I feel like I’m numb to all the SpongeBob/Squidward shenanigans. It just is what it is at this point, 24 years into the game. The least they could do was make it somewhere close to funny, but it wasn’t, even by my low standards. Squidward losing his marbles was pretty fun tho, as was the callbacks. Krabs keeping the safe combo within SpongeBob’s memories sounded kinda dumb at first, but the more I thought about it, Plankton’s previous attempts to do anything with SpongeBob’s brain (that I seen) majorly backfired on him so I can see what the intent was there. Outside of the sadly only an eel Eel looking like she was waving right at me, I can agree with the negative consensus. 2 Eels Waving at Me out of 5

How the hell is it already 7 years since Finn won the Universal Title and relinquished it? How is it already 5 years since “OH WENDYYYYY!”??

Damn, they even got the clown from As Seen On TV to do a callback

Exercised my Regal Unlimited privileges by pulling a double feature of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and The Flash. I thought Rise of the Beasts was an awesome follow-up to Bumblebee. The story and emotional element may not be as strong as Bumblebee’s, but it was still an overall strong installment for this franchise. Great action, great lines, seeing Maximals on the big screen and getting some long overdue spotlight was awesome. Though I wish they had Cheetor and Rhinox do more, like, I don’t think Rhinox had even one line of dialogue which was very off to me since he was one of the cooler characters in Beast Wars and one of the OGs alongside Cheetor. Also wish we got to spend more time with Airazor to give her overall arc more oomph because she was cool whenever the movie decided to focus on her. They also pulled a particular page out of Revenge of the Fallen’s playbook that I kinda rolled my eyes at. Beast Wars was one of the first cartoons that I ever followed religiously at a very young age (and was the first Transformers thing I was ever exposed to), so I got kinda teary eyed at parts because nostalgia is a hell of a thing. The ending tease was fucking wild, I personally didn’t see that coming at all. Has me intrigued to see where it all goes in future installments, but it also makes me wonder just how the hell does Bay’s movies even still connect at this point. Here’s to The Maximals getting a spin-off of some sort that plays into their conflict with the Predacons more. The Flash was pretty good. It had a slow start but once it gets to where it needs to go, things pick up. Like other Muschietti movies I’ve seen it seems. Fundamentally as a superhero movie, I liked it more than a lot of Marvel’s recent slate (Multiverse of Madness, Love and Thunder, Quantumania), as well as the DCEU’s last two offerings. Emotional story beats hit pretty hard, tho I’m speaking as someone who also lost a mom so that kind of stuff will always get me. Keaton’s Batman might not be my ideal live action Batman as much as he is to others, but he did awesome here with what he was given. Sasha Calle was a pretty dope Supergirl too and it kinda sucks this is most likely the end of the road for her. There’s things that Flash/Barry does that can make things awkward considering the person who’s playing ‘em. The CGI is whack as all hell, but that just seems like par for the course with these kinds of movies at this point. Made it more entertaining for me at least. The Flash was definitely the weaker film between it and Rise of the Beasts for me, but it’s still decent. Don’t know how dat ending will play into absolutely anything at this point going forward, but it’d be an ironically fitting end to such a chaotic chapter in DC films. The next time I pull a double feature will probably be the much fabled Barbie/Oppenheimer one.

Gimme dat sweet, sweet movie theater a/c baby

Posting this now because I don’t want it to clash with the Riffing Theater’s 10th anniversary, that deserves all the time and the space in the world. This page is also starting to crash a lot on me now, and I can only assume it has to do with all the embedded video links (hence why I edited spoiler tags with playlist links into every previous post). So I guess to help alleviate that pressure on this poor ol’ page of mine, I’ll just share this link to the latest Fast X Your Seat Belts! video playlist, in which you can watch the entire show in order! And all the info and context you need for each match will be in their respective descriptions. Witness history as SpongeBrawl crowns its first ever pair of tag team champions in the It’s All About Family Tournament! Brought to you by Fast X, still playing in theaters and now available on digital and on demand! Our next show, “Summer Segway”, will be up in 2 weeks time. And as the name suggests, it’ll serve as a segue into our grand “Brawlin’ Summer” series. More info on that will be revealed when Summer Segway drops, but it’s currently shaping up to be SpongeBrawl’s biggest outing yet!

Not even Patrick’s own body can take his crap

I think the Culture Shock section would be the place to go. everything tv-related goes there. https://www.thesbcommunity.com/forums/index.php?/forum/296-culture-shock/

Well I don’t see why not.