Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 56 of 581)

It’s not National Pizza Day or anything. That was in February.  I just wanted to bring you some vintage pizza commercials for no reason this week. Be warned that watching these may stir cravings.

There’s always room for pizza!

This week in our look back at Radio Free Charleston‘s video incarnations, we stop in February, 2015, for an edition of The RFC MINI SHOW starring The Company Stores, which was actually recorded the previous summer.

Since this performance, during FestivAll 2014, the band has released two albums and they’ve undergone some personnel changes. On this show, the band was Casey Litz, Matthew Marks, John Query, Joe Cevallos and Grant Jacobs. They are currently recording a third album with some new members and a new vocalist, but this archive recording shows the original line-up.

I told you about their fundraising efforts to finish that new album late last year.  In the coming weeks I hope to be telling you about new projects from their former members as well.

The PopCulteer
March 26, 2021

We have a new episode of our Disco Music showcase on The AIR, and an early impression of WWE Network on Peacock to tell you about today, so let’s dive in.

Friday afternoon we offer up a new episode of MIRRORBALL and encore a recent Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. The AIR is PopCult’s sister radio shation. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player at the top right column of this blog.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a salute to Larry Levan, the legendary DJ who held court at the famed Paradise Garage in New York City for ten years, and who defined the era of the extended dance remix, while pioneering what evolved into House Music.

We get an example of Levan’s remix wizardry on this week’s show…

MIRRORBALL 021

Jimmy Castor Bunch “It’s Just Begun”
LOGG “I Know You Will”
The Inner Life featuring Jocelyn Brown “Make It Last Forever”
Bunny Sigler “By The Way You Dance”
First Choice “Double Cross”
Instant Funk “Bodyshine”
Solsoul Orchestra “How High”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  8 PM, Sunday at 11 PM, Tuesday at 1 PM and Wednesday at 7 PM, exclusively on The AIR.  This week’s new MIRRORBALL will kick off a Disco Marathon Saturday night until Midnight.

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with an encore of an episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat celbrating the New Wave Music of Australia, which you can read about HERE . This is all-live New Wave extravaganza.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

You can also hear select episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat as part of the overnight Haversham Recording Institute marathon that starts every Monday at 11 PM.

Powerslamming The Peacock

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a big change on the streaming television landscape. WWE Network will cease to exist in the United States on April 4.

The Network is moving its library and all new programming to NBC/Universal’s Peacock streaming service, and while the realization of this Billion-dollar deal hasn’t been a completely smooth transition so far, it’s not as bad as some folks say it is. In fact, for some of us, the move brings a vast improvement in the service.

Only a fraction of the tens of thousands of hours of WWE programming from their vast library has made the move so far. It will take months for them to make every bit of that wrestling programming from the last thirty-plus years available on Peacock, if they go that far with it.  This is going to really upset people who loved diving into that library and reliving old classic matches and PPVs.

To make up for this, Peacock is offering a sign-up bonus. New subscribers can get four months for half-price, and that’s half of $4.99.  The WWE Network was $9.99 a month, so the move to Peacock is already saving fans five bucks a month. This introductory deal cuts that price in half for a third of a year.

However, in addition to the missing library programming, there are a lot of missing features that have ticked off some very vocal critics. Peacock does not yet offer viewers the ability to pause or rewind live broadcasts. If you see something spectacular and want to re-watch it immediately…you can’t. You have to wait until the live broadcast is over and then watch it again.

This has really angered the wrestling press, who rely on that function to make sure they get details right when they’re covering the live shows. It’s an understandable gripe for those folks, who actually use those features. Chapter breaks that make it easy to find specific matches in the old PPVs are also missing, and that has some fans and historians really angry at the new way of getting WWE Network.

However, the vast majority of WWE Network subscribers likely do not ever use those features. I know I don’t, and I’ve been a WWE Network subscriber almost since day one. I’ve seen reports that 90% of the WWE Network’s traffic is from people watching new programming, not the classic on-demand library.

Most WWE Network viewers get the network so they can watch the live Pay Per Views specials, plus the fresh documentary shows like 2020’s Undertaker: The Last Ride series. They don’t really use pause or rewind or chapter breaks. For the mainstream fan, ten bucks a month to watch all the PPVs was a bargain, and everything else was gravy…and now it costs half that, and they’re just as happy as before.

In my case, I’m much, much happier. The WWE Network stream was unstable and barely watchable for me much of the time. I have over a hundred channels on my Roku, and the only one that ever gave me any major buffering problems was WWE Network.

They switched up the service provider for their stream a few years ago, and since that happened, my signal would rarely go more than ten minutes without needing rebooted. Sometimes during a PPV special, the stream would break every minute or so. It got so bad I came very close to cancelling my subscription at the beginning of 2020. After much complaining, they did refund a month’s subscription fee to me, and I stuck with them because the service slightly improved, but it was still pretty damned annoying to watch a live PPV.

Last week I signed up for Peacock so I could see how they did with the stream for the Fastlane PPV.

It was flawless. I had a beautiful, full-HD signal for the entire event, and didn’t have to exit the app and go back in once. And the signal was consistently HD. On the WWE Network, oftentimes the picture would degrade and drop down to sub-standard-definition quality for several minutes at a time. At times the screen would look like Minecraft, it was so blocky.

So for me, WWE Network moving to Peacock means a vastly improved viewing experience. I’ll be paying half as much each month. I won’t have any more stress from constantly having to fiddle with the remote.

The picture quality is impeccable, and on top of that, I get the rest of Peacock included in the deal, so I have a huge library of programming, from current NBC shows to classics like Columbo and even weird cartoons like the 1990s Felix The Cat reboot.  I enjoy wrestling, but I’m way more likely to watch a classic Tim Kazurinsky sketch from a 1983 Saturday Night Live than ever watch an episode of WCW Nitro.

Peacock is doing one thing that gives me reason to be concerned. They are editing controversial bits of classic WWE programming. Some of this, like Roddy Piper in blackface, will not be missed, but if they start editing out the raunchier bits of the WWE Attitude Era, or the bloodier bits of ECW, then they will anger many longtime fans.

We will worry about that if or when it happens. For now, I’m just thrilled that, in two weeks, when Peacock is the exclusive home to much of the Wrestlemania week programming, I won’t have to deal with the constant headache of wondering when the stream would collapse.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for all our regular features and fresh content every day.

As you hear in the song posted above, it’s clean up time here in PopCult. I don’t have an elaborate post planned for today because I’m taking some time to restore old images and missing files to the early entries in the blog.

This isn’t hard work, but it is tedious and time-consuming, and because of that, it may take months or even years for me to get everything put back the way it should be. I’ve been writing PopCult for well over fifteen years, and every time it got jerked around the servers at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, more nuts and bolts fell off. It’s going to take time to sweep those all up and figure out where they go.

I do have a few quick thing to mention about more current PopCult happenings, though.

The Governor of West Virginia took time away from his busy pursuit of trying to enact a massive income tax cut that will mostly benefit himself to lift the moratorium on live performances in the state.

I think it’s ill-advised and way too soon, but I’m happy for my friends who are fully-vaccinated and eager to perform in front of fully-vaccinated audiences, who are still wearing masks and practicing safe social distancing.

While many fine folks are chomping at the bit to get back to normal, I am not fully confident that it’s a smart thing to do yet, so I will not be plugging live and local shows in PopCult at this time. I can’t personally take responsibility or be complicit in something that still has the potential to sicken or kill people.

Maybe in a month or two I’ll change my mind, but for now I still don’t feel right telling people to go out and do something which I don’t feel is safe. I hope my readers can respect that. When I start plugging live shows again, I don’t plan to make a big deal about it. I’ll just start doing it.

I still plan to support the local scene on Radio Free Charleston and The AIR, and any responsible way that I can. I’m hopeful that we don’t face a fourth wave of the virus, and things can start to go back to normal. I’d just rather err on the side of caution than possibly send people to their deaths.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about a new episode of MIRRORBALL and talk about The WWE Network’s transition to the Peacock streaming service.

In the meantime, I’ll be re-sizing, restoring and posting old images, like the totally random ones I’ve posted along with this piece…just in case you were wondering what the hell those were.

And I’ll try to figure out why I slapped on a toupee and look like a high school gym teacher in this picture from a dozen or so years ago. You find the damnedest things buried on random old hard drives.

The PopCult Bookshelf

Holly Jolly: Celebrating Christmas Past in Pop Culture
by Mark Voger
TwoMorrows Publishing
ISBN-13 : 978-1605490977
$43.95 (discounted at Amazon)

Before we dive into this review, a little explanation is in order. I had planned to include this book in last year’s PopCult Gift Guide. Unfortunately, the pandemic played hell with everybody’s printing and shipping schedules, and because of this there was a good chance that the book would not make its publication date and be out in time for my readers to order until after Christmas.

With last year’s situation making the PopCult Gift Guide largely a collection of things you could order and have delivered to your home, I had to make the decision to bump this book from the list.

Sure enough, it was February before I got my copy, which had to filter down to me through Diamond Distributors and Westfield Comics. I didn’t get a chance to crack this book open until last week, and when I did I was a little bit surprised.

I think I enjoyed this collection of essays on Christmas and its context in pop culture more now that I would have back when the Christmas season was in full swing. Holly Jolly puts you right in the Christmas spirit no matter what time of the year you read it, and in fact, reading it outside of the traditional holiday season can give you a keener appreciation of how special that time of the year is.

Mark Voger has written a series of wonderful books of pop culture nostalgia for TwoMorrows and Holly Jolly is no different. It’s basically a collection of short, entertaining essays, lavishly illustrated, that celebrate Christmas as a pop culture phenomenon. Sections of the book are dedicated to the history of the holiday, the toys of Christmas, the books, movies, decorations, television and music of Christmas and even holiday memories from celebrities.

Holly Jolly is a brisk, enjoyable survey of fond recollections that doesn’t have to be devoured in one sitting. This is going to punch the nostalgia buttons of readers of a certain age (like yours truly) more than others, but the experiences are universal enough that anyone who grew up enjoying Christmas can identify.

Reading it out from under the pressure of the Christmas rush takes away the distraction of the season and lets you just enjoy the sheer joy of this book. It is indeed a celebration of Christmas as seen through the kaleidoscope of pop culture.

Voger touches on everything from Captain Action to Gumby to “I Love Lucy,” to classic animated Christmas specials to hit holiday songs to beloved movies.

Holly Jolly: Celebrating Christmas Past in Pop Culture is a nice blast of Christmas spirit, and it’s really too much fun to hold off and read only during the holiday season. You should be able to order it from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or get it directly from the publisher, or at a discount, from Amazon.

Tuesday on The AIR we have new three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston and an all-new episode of The Swing Shift.  If you want to hear the audio joyfullness yourself, you simply have to move your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

This week we have three hours of largely brand-new stuff on Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  The show kicks off with brand-new original music from our old pals, The Swivel Rockers. I was working on an RFC documentary on the band last year when the pandemic hit, and once everyone involved is all vaccinated up, we’ll be shooting more material and interviews with the band. Their new five-song EP is available now at Budget Tapes & Records in Kanawha City, and as soon as it’s available online, I’ll let you know.

The rest of this week’s show  features fresh-out-of-the-oven local music from Jim Lange, John Radcliff,  The Settlement, Unmanned, Boldly Go, mediogres and Lady D . We also have new tracks from 3.2 and Tautologic. Stay tuned to PopCult for an interview with Ethan from Chicago’s Tautologic sometime in the next two weeks.  Also in this episode, we have the rather unorthodox set of Jesus music, and a few things to intrigue and/or annoy you.

Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we bring you this week…

RFC V5 046

The Swivel Rockers “Protection”
The Settlement “Departure”
Tautologic “Summer, 1995”
3.2 “Top of the World”
David Synn “Van Gogh’s Awakening”
John Radcliff “Cry”
Lady D “Times Like This (2020)”
Robert Plant “Charlie Patton Highway”
Unmanned “Rose Colored Glasses”
mediogres “Via Video”

hour two
Close The Hatch “Enjoy The Silence”
Boldly Go “Nightmare (Twist of Khan)”
Jay Parade “Machine”
The Jasons “Kill A Commie For Mommy”
The Dollyrots “Come And Get It”
Wolfgang Parker “Bim Bam Baby”
Jerks “You’re So Cool, Brewster”
Sam Cooke “Jesus Gave Me Water”
Todd Burge “Jesus Night Light”
Nina Hagen “Personal Jesus”
Frank Zappa “Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk”
Aaron Fisher, Tres Caldwell & Jeremy Short “Jesus Is From Texas”
Goldfinger “Handjobs For Jesus”
Motorhead “Go To Hell”

hour three
Marc Almond “She Took My Soul In Istanbul”
Jim Lange “Elegy (Extended Mix)”
David Bowie “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”
Paul McCartney & Elvis Costello “So Like Candy”

Of course, as always the show ends with mystery bonus tracks. I could tell you what they are, but that’d defeat the purpose of having mystery bonus tracks in the first place wouldn’t it?

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 11 AM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

1 PM sees an encore of a Sondheim-centric episode of Mel Larch’s Curtain Call.

At 2 PM we offer up a classic episode of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack, loaded with the trippiest music you can imagine.  Psychedelic Shack alternates weeks with NOISE BRIGADE Tuesdays at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 10 PM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 1 PM, Saturday at 8 AM, Sunday at 9 AM and Monday at 7 PM.

At 3 PM we bring to you a new hour of The Swing Shift, which is a mixtape program shining the spotlight on Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. 25 years ago BBVD had a star turn in Jon Favreau’s movie, Swingers, and that helped spark the mid-90s Swing Revival. So we decided to pay tribute to this great Swing band, who are no strangers to Charleston. It’s a mixtape show, so you don’t get a playlist. Just tune in and listen for yourself.

Spoiler alert: It SWINGS!

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesdays at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 2 PM,  Saturday at 5 PM and Sunday at 10 AM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Those are Tuesday’s music shows on The AIR. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Our art this week is a quickie pastel crayon drawing on water color paper, with some actual water color wash over parts of it and a little post-scanning color correction and cropping.  My fingers are working a little better this week, and this is my first piece of physical art for PopCult after a brief switch to digital art due to Myasthenia Gravis.

This is me, still a bit gobsmacked by the fact that I haven’t been able to travel anywhere for more than a year. I decided to do an abstract impression of the view as I remember it coming into Chicago via Amtrak.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday at 9 AM on The AIR, we bring you six  episodes of NOISE BRIGADE, The AIR’s weekly collection of the best Ska/Punk ever, curated and hosted by Steven Allen Adams, who just bought a new bass guitar.  Then you can tune into special episode of  Prognosis at 3 PM that’s devoted to the YES Union tour, which is getting an ultra-deluxe30-disc boxed CD/DVD treatmant soon.

Due to the lockdown in the UK, the Haversham Recording Institute programs will be in rerun mode for the next few weeks.  Luckily we have a pretty extensive library of high-quality repeats to share with you.

You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, Saturday at 10 AM and Sunday at 2 PM.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the world’s most celebrated classical music composers, was born on this day 436 years ago.

As everyone knows, the gift for a 436th anniversay is supposed to be made of metal. So today we’re bringing you Heavy Metal versions of Bach’s greatest hits.

We go back to February, 2015 this week for a full-length episode of Radio Free Charleston that was comprised entirely of file footage shot months and years before.  From 2014, we have Farnsworth and from 2009 we have Hellblinki, both recorded at The Empty Glass in Charleston. You can read the full production notes for this show HERE.

The PopCulteer
March 19, 2021

In today’s PopCulteer I’m going to provide an annotated index to the coverage that we’ve provided for JoeLanta/ToyLanta in this blog since 2013. Photos are all taken from previous year’s coverage. {Special note: I suspect that this post will be filled with tons of typos–I cranked out almost 3000 words in a very short time. Please excuse the mess.}

ToyLanta began life as JoeLanta, which was originally inspired somewhat by The Official GI Joe Club Convention. Over the years the Official GI Joe Club (which shut down in 2019) shifted their focus from the original 12″ GI Joe from the 1960s and 1970s, to the “Real American Hero” Joe of the 1980s.

This left a lot of collectors of the original GI Joe feeling disenfranchised, so in 2000 they decided to put on their own show, based in Atlanta, that would provide a more intimate and more affordable gathering of collectors of the larger GI Joe, with a focus on custom figures and outfits, and elaborate dioramas.

JoeLanta quickly gained a reputation as the most fun toy convention in the country. JoeLanta eventually became a fundraiser for the non-profit Cody Lane Foundation (named after a young fan who had passed away) and is now focused toward raising money to build a toy diorama museum. In 2017 JoeLanta became ToyLanta.

Longtime PopCult readers may recall that, for the first several years of this blog, I was not able to travel. I’d been a full-time caregiver for my mother until her death in 2006, and rather than get a reprieve from caregiving, I was almost immediately pressed into service managing my uncle’s healthcare, and eventually becoming his chief caregiver.

Because of this, I could not travel to toy shows, despite being fairly well-known for writing about collectible toys since 1996.

By 2009, I had some help taking care of my uncle, and was able to get away for day trips to The Marx Toy Convention and MEGO Meet when both shows were in Wheeling. In 2013, Buddy Finethy, from JoeLanta, got in touch with me and persuaded me to make the trip to Atlanta for my first big toy collectors convention.

I’m always going to be grateful to Buddy for that.

Later in 2013 my caregiver responsibilities ended, and for the first time in over twenty years, I was really free to travel. JoeLanta became an annual trip and Mel and I always have a blast going down there for what became week-long visits that included shooting locations for The Walking Dead and lots of fun shopping in addition to the best toy show in the country. JoeLanta became ToyLanta a few years back, to reflect the expanded interests of the convention-goers.

This year, we have to stay home. Neither of us are vaccinated yet (next week, hopefully) and it would be reckless to travel with my weakened immune system. However, the show is going on starting today,  after a one-year hiatus due to the pandemic. At this point, I’m going to turn the story over to the links below, which will give you a chronological portrait of PopCult going to ToyLanta.

This is not a complete list of every post I’ve made on the subject. Many of them were redundant, just re-posting previous years worth of material to plug an upcoming show, so this index will just focus on the meaty, original content.

You know I’m bringing one of these home with me.

Let’s start in 2013…

I did announce my first trip to JoeLanta in advance. This was risky, since my uncle’s relatives had a nasty habit of trying to create emergencies to disrupt any trip I took out of town, but I did indeed mention my trip to JoeLanta in advance, and it’s in this post, which includes a dead video I need to edit at some point.

We made a short visit that year driving down Friday and back Sunday, but hadn’t quite unpacked on Monday, so I ran this as Monday Morning Art.  The following Friday I had a brief photo essay ready to go. Later that day I posted video of the State of the Hobby Roundtable, which I also participated in. A few days later I finally had my first JoeLanta wrap-up video ready, which included interviews with Buddy Finethy and David Lane, and my old online friend (who I’d met in person for the first time), Dave Matteson.

In 2014, freed from my caregiver obligations, we made a longer trip to JoeLanta, which included our first visit to Senoia. I previewed that year’s show HERE.  I had also prepapred a PopCulteer column to run on the first day of the show in case I didn’t have time to report from the road, but it turned out that I did have time to get some photo essays online. This turned out to be the day with four PopCulteer columns. We covered the Walking Dead tour of Senoia, which took place on the Thursday before the show, and that bus trip also included trips to see the collections of Tim Merrit and Bryan Tatum.  The Sunday of ToyLanta we brought you a Studio Joe video from Tim and Lisa Weedn, who have become good friends and are hilarious filmmakers.

Still in March, 2014, I posted a photo essay of my haul from Joelanta. Someday I’ll get around to unpacking and displaying all this stuff.  Our next post included three videos, two of which are still online. This had a new Studio Joe film and the 2014 Walking dead panel from JoeLanta. We then posted our take of The Walking Dead tour, The “Joe at 50” panel, The 2014 State o the Hobby, The Marx Action Figures Panel with Scott Stewart and Tom Heaton, video of Tim Merrit’s collection, video of Bryan Tatum’s collection, Monday Morning Art based on Mike Gardner’s “Zombie Horde at Yellow Creek” diorama, and our big 2014 JoeLanta wrap-up video.

Mike Gardner’s epic diorama was so huge that it took two more photo essays, posted almost a month later, to cover them. Here is part one and part two.

We kicked off our 2015 JoeLanta coverage with a preview post that included Tim and Lisa Weedn’s preview video for the show.  We managed to get a photo essay online for day one of the show that year. We also got a photo essay of dioramas and custom figures posted while we were still on the road, too. After we got back home, I had a photo essay of the dealer’s room for everyone to see. Later on, we revisted the diormas with another photo essay.

2015 was the year we really went overboard on the videos, preserving many panels from the convention. Larry Hama gave a detailed breakdown of his famous GI Joe comic book story, “Silent Interlude.” There was The 2015 State of the Hobby.  The Phantom Trouble maker from The Needless Things podcast and Ricky Zhero from Radio Cult hosted a panel on character toys.  There was a panel devoted to Monster High.  Speaking of Radio Cult, we featured the band, performing at JoeLanta, on The RFC MINI SHOW. Don Teems joined Mel Larch and Mike Gardner on The Walking Dead panel.  Almost two weeks after the show, I was able to finish the big 2015 JoeLanta wrap-up video.  A post that compiled other 2015 JoeLanta videos also included a musical tour of the dealers rooms, set to the music of Chuck Biel. A few days later I posted raw video of the dioramas, set to more music by Chuck Biel, along with an extra photo essay. Then, from our extended trip, we had Mel’s video of Senoia, and The Walking Dead Shoppe. Filmed on the floor of the convention, our next RFC MINI SHOW showcased The Possum Kingdom Ramblers.

2016 was a bit of a strange year for your PopCulteer. For the second year in a row, Mel and I had gone to New York for the International Toy Fair just a few weeks before JoeLanta. I had tons of photos and video from Toy Fair to edit and post, and didn’t get it all done before it was time to leave for JoeLanta. At the same time, my hands were getting increasingly weaker, and I was having trouble keeping my eyes focused. We took Lee Harrah with us to JoeLanta, and he was a huge help, because by this point, I couldn’t even open a water bottle by myself. I managed to keep my weakness fairly well-hidden, but I knew something serious was going on with me. A month after we got back from JoeLanta, I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis, which was a life-changing revelation, but was also a huge relief, just having a diagnosis.

Still, we managed a lot of coverage that year. Our preview post kicked things off. After we got back, I managed this first recap post, before diving head-first into coverage. We offered up The 2016 State of the Hobby panel a few days later. In 2016 we had two panels from Larry Hama, one just of the artist/writer doing a Q&A session, and one talking about his experience storyboarding Boardwalk Empire.   Mike Gardner’s diner diorama was featured in a photo essay. We also had video and more photos of the 2016 dioramas HERE. Lee Harrah was a guest on the Needless Things podcast’s Toy Stories panel. We crossed over with the other “RFC” and presented the Radio Free Cybertron Transformers panel.  We also caught up with the Earth Station One podcast for a Star Wars panel. We also had a panel devoted to Big Jim, and a revival of the classic action figure that, sadly, did not happen. In happier news, we decided to do a video devoted to The JoeLanta parachute drop.

2016 was also the year that, due to my diagnosis and the lovely hurricane of meds that followed, I didn’t get the wrap-up video finished until November. I was appropriately mortified by this.

To make up for that, in 2017 I went a bit overboard and ran previews for two weeks ahead of the event. I’m not going to post links to all of those, because most of the previews just re-posted stuff that you can see in the links above. However, the first one is filled with pertinent new info. Our first post durng the convention that year covered the name change from JoeLanta to Toylanta. and sprinkled in a few early photos.  I also managed to post photos of Mike Gardner building his epic Avengers diorama.  As soon as we got back, I posted photos of my haul from the show.  Photo essays from the show were posted HERE,  HERE, HERE and HERE.

A word essay with photos was posted HERE.  Having learned my lesson the previous year, I made it a point to do the wrap-up video first in 2017. Then we had panels with Felipe, from Louco  Por Bonecos and James Wozniak from Classic Recasts.  We also posted panels devoted to Monster Toys, The Walking Dead, MEGO and The Needless Things Podcast’s Playing With Toys.  In addition, we had a panel devoted to Super Joe, and this was the year that  Larry Hama, having exhausted much of his GI Joe material, spoke at large about his experience creating a role in a Sondheim musical.  I have a feeling he got the idea for this topic from a conversation he had with Mel when we first met him a few years earlier.

After we got back, an installment of Monday Morning Art was inspired by the custom figure and Bryan Tatum’s cool cave diorama piece.

In 2018 I did another week of preview posts for the show that used material from previous years, but among those posts I also had a new GI Joe-centric Monday Morning Art, with a digital painting that I had printed on canvas and donated to the ToyLanta auction. I had a placeholder post set to publish on the first day of the show, but I also managed to sneak in a quick set of photos of the pre-show trip and activities. I also edited a quick trailer for the show on the road, just to see if the laptop was capable of rendering video.

The reason I wanted to see how well the laptop handled video was because I got the crazy idea to do a video each day while I was there, so that I wouldn’t have so much video editing to do once we got home. This didn’t work out too well because people watched the first day, then didn’t bother watching anything else.  Also, I didn’t get a chance to start on the video until after midnight, and wrapped it up and posted it about six hours later, which meant that I was operating with about 90 minutes of sleep on the second, very long and busy, day of the convention. I was too wiped out to do any more videos while we were on the road. In fact, I spent much of Saturday hallucinated that I was being followed by cows.

2018 was also the year that…SURPRISE…the hotel was being renovated AND a water-main break meant that nobody could drink tap water or take a shower.  I whined a bit about it in this post. However we did manage to have a good time despite all that, and I brought you a taste of the ToyLanta Film Festival from Tim and Lisa Weedn.  I also showed off my toy haul from 2018, but you have to scroll down past a depressing essay about Toys R Us first. I re-edited much of the “Day One” video and combined with everything else I’d shot to put together a longer wrap-up video.

My allergies took a real beating on this trip, and we returned home to Arctic weather, and that combined with audio issues due to the renovations and breaking news about Toys R Us, meant that a lot of stuff from ToyLanta 2018 didn’t get posted for quite some time. To be honest, I still have a ton of stuff from 2018 sitting unused on one of my external drives. However, I did manage to get two panel videos done…just in time to promote ToyLanta 2019!

First I put together two short promos for ToyLanta, 2019, using footage from previous years. You can see those HERE. Then I posted toy designer, Greg Autore, and his panel on GI Joe toys he designed that never made it to retailers. After that, I posted the 2018 Space Toys panel, with Carlos Morrison, Clay Sayre, Terry Stair Jr. and George Felix. Tim and Lisa Weedn also made a cool trailer for the 2019 show, even though they couldn’t make it that year.  Another preview for 2019 was another GI Joe-inspired Monday Morning Art piece that I had printed and donated to the annualy ToyLanta auction for the Cody Lane Foundation.

2019 was a bit of an unusual ToyLanta for your PopCulteer because we made plans to do something on the trip for Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch, who is a huge fan of The Walking Dead.  For a very brief and limited time, the studio where they shoot TWD was giving tours of all the places that are normally forbidden for the general public. I told Mel to book us on a tour during the trip, and the only day they had open was Sunday, the last day of ToyLanta. My plan was to shoot tons of video and photos on Friday and Saturday, pull an all-nighter on Satuday night (after the Radio Cult show, which ran really late that year) and get up Sunday and check out and head to Senoia.  In previous years, the only thing happening on Sunday was great last-minute deals from dealers who didn’t want to have to carry stuff back home.

However, after we booked the tour, we discovered that every single one of the GI Joe panels had been moved to Sunday. So I didn’t shoot any video of the panels that year.

But, I did have the wrap-up video posted before the convention was over…so there was that. After we got back, I posted a photo diary of our trip  down and then the show itself.

Amid another MG flare-up, I posted the raw video of the dioramas from 2019, and photos of my toy haul from that year.  Much later, I was able to post photos of the diorama and custom figures HERE, HERE and HERE. I also snuck in an abstract painting of Bambie and Ricky from Radio Cult jamming at Buddy Finethy’s restaurant, Hawg ‘n’ Ale.

Last year there was no ToyLanta. I covered its cancellation in real time HERE.  I was able to bring you last year’s planned Film Festival, compiled by Tim and Lisa, HERE.

This year I pointed you to where you can get updates from vendors and attendees during the show. After the show’s over, more content will posted officially by the ToyLanta crew. Speaking from experience, I know that it’d take a full-time crew working like crazy to run a toy convention and post live updates at the same time.

That is our PopCulteer this week. I hope you enjoy this handy index to our ToyLanta coverage to date. Keep your fingers crossed, because our plan is to return to ToyLanta next year and cover it out the wazoo.  I hope to cover some of this year’s show remotely next week, but no wazoos will be harmed in the production of those posts. In the meantime, check PopCult every day for fresh content.