Being a nerd of a certain age, from the general Philadelphia region, I of course love The Goldbergs. Since I barely have cable, I watch it twice a day in over the air syndication. But watching it so often really highlights its fall from grace. While Adam F. was still involved, everything was based on his real life. But after he left after the sixth season, the Flanderization of everyone started in kind. Barry is a bully and treats the entire JTP like utter garbage and thinks entirely of himself and no one else while also dating Geoff’s sister for some reason. Erica mainly exists to treat Geoff like shit while he follows her around like a puppy doing everything she says and her only character growth is that she has bangs now for some reason. Adam is there for The Big Bang Theory style nerd references of “look at this old toy/movie!”. Beverly can’t stop herself from being a monster. Murray eventually becomes an actual monster. It’s a mess. Thankfully, the show has finally limped its way to an underwhelming finish line in one of the most lackluster finale episodes ever. But over the course of the show, there are a bunch of more major character changes than just a haircut they expected us all to just glance over: that several people got replaced with different actors, just like Darren in Bewitched.

I have been holding onto this list for like 5 years. It’s always been in the hopper, it just never got done. But with Christmas being on a Sunday this year, I don’t think I’m ever going to get a better year to actually pull the trigger and do the damn thing, so here we go. And because I’m indecisive and that’s part of why this took so long, I just went ahead and made it supersized, like an old school episode of The Office, and bumped it up from 6 songs to 7. As you can see, my concept of Christmas was formed watching MTV in about 1987.

Now I don’t know if you follow me over on the Facebook, but a while ago I did a bit of a thing. I made a post about getting some transphobe so upset on a comment in a Star Trek group about Jesse James Kietel that he flew off the handle and deleted his entire post then got banned from the group. Keitel was the guest Trans actress on an episode of Strange New Worlds a few weeks ago, and someone in the group uploaded a photo of her and asked if they should post more content about her, and someone else just responded with “Ummm. . . No thank you”. I responded simply with “This is Star Trek. Do Better.” and he took it as a personal attack. He went all Proud Boys about how I didn’t have all the facts about him or his opinions, and he was allowed to be contrarian because that’s what Star Trek is all about, and everyone is allowed to have whatever opinion they want, and that his daughter’s friend was trans so how can he hate them. You know, standard boomer incel shit and missing the point of my comment, and Star Trek in general, entirely. He didn’t want to hear anything about him being a transphobe, he just kept retorting “I was nothing but polite. I only said four words!” but I was like “Yeah, but the implication behind those four words is ‘Ew, no. Trans people are gross and weird me out’. It’s really the ‘Um’ part that makes it so much worse”.

As we were discussing that, someone mentioned that it’s a shame people still think like that, to which I replied “All the dinosaurs will die out eventually”. That got responded to with the image above, of Littlefoot and his friends from The Land Before Time. It reminded me about how sad and fucked up that scene of his mom just dying and leaving him alone after fighting that T-Rex was, that I couldn’t believe it was targeted at kids. And that’s the very long winded story of how I got to thinking about things that make me cry.

So, we’re gonna revisit this again, as it’s been over nine years since the last time, and I’ve thought of some new ones (enough for two lists even!), and there are some glaring omissions from last time. There’s still the same ground rules of The Iron Giant and “Jurassic Bark” are always assumed unless you are some sort of inhuman robot. As you can see, I still cry like a bitch whenever a soundtrack swells, or pretty much when the protagonist does his thing, whatever, shut up! So here we go, in no particular order.

It’s only taken two and a half years between volumes, but in this edition, in honor of the most Stupendous WrestleMania happening this weekend, I’m going to go over a list of people who have graduated from putting on $5 shows for me and 12 other people to showing off their skills by making it up to THE major league wrestling promotion, WWE. Even so, only two are currently active in the WWE, most have moved on to other pastures, either AEW or Impact. But you can’t take away from them the time they spent at the top of the mountain. No wait, that was a weird TNA reverse battle royale. You know what I mean.

In honor of last weekend’s Bound For Glory results, I’m going to go over a list of people who have graduated from putting on $5 shows for me and 12 other people to showing off their skills on a major national television show. So for this week, I’m including Impact (regardless of the fact that for a long time they were a joke of a competitor, now they are on AXS and have been killing it), AEW, and while they may be failing of late, I’m also gonna include Ring of Honor. Next week is reserved for those who graduated to WWE. I’m also throwing in an extra one this week, mostly to justify the banner image.

This past Saturday was the “It’s a Toy Show” at Farpoint Toys. Me and The Hunters drove half way to the shore on Memorial Day weekend like a bunch of lunatics to buy old toys. Here is how I decided to spend $55 by buying sealed boxes of ancient non sports cards no one else in their right mind would ever actually want.

Sorry it’s been awhile since I’ve had one of these. I haven’t had a good idea in a while. This one was suggested to me, and it’s kind of hard to explain. Basically, this is a list of songs that when you hear them you go “Oh yeah, that’s that song from [fill in the blank]”. I think you’ll get it once you see the list.

This past week was probably the biggest week in wrestling in Philadelphia history since WrestleMania 15. There was a CZW/WSU doubleheader, two Ring of Honor/New Japan Pro Wrestling shows, and two NXT shows. That’s a shit-ton a wrestling. In trying to get prepared for all of these shows, and get caught back up to what I missed while in Japan, I noticed something while doing my research. Sure, WWE has always kind of been at the forefront of reality TV, what with the Divas Searches, the original NXT, Legend’s House, and now the return of Tough Enough. But what I found was that a lot of wrestlers were involved in reality shows before they were ever on the WWE map. While I’m sure most people know that Chris Jericho and Stacy Keibler were on Dancing with the Stars, odds are you don’t know about the rest of these reality show appearances.