The The Adventure Zone Zone: Abnimals Wrap-Up!

[♪ upbeat music playing<|ru|><|zh|><|zh|><|zh|><|zh|><|zh|><|zh|><|zh|><|ru|><|zh|> VND Hi everybody, welcome to The The Adventure Zone Zone, the premier podcast in which we talk about the podcast that we normally do on a different podcast within the podcast feed itself. It's called Gaze Into Our Naval with us. Yeah. We come to the very edge of our navels, our collective navels, and stare into us with them. Don't make us stare into our own navels alone. Join us. Yeah. In our navels. Look, look, look. Climb into our belly button world. Look. You can, you can, you go avalanche in there. There's a little bit of lint in there. We're going to be discussing the season we just wrapped up, animals talking about the next season. And we have lots of great questions here. So let's, let's dive right in from Devin. Were there other animals you considered choosing? If so, what were they? Bonus question for Travis. If you were to make a hero character, what animal would you choose and why? Devin, did you listen to the season because Travis made about 40 hero characters? Yeah, but I don't know that I'd play as any of that. I think if I was going to make a character, it would be like a golden retriever. Yeah. Kind of do, like that was just really, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, ready to do anything here to please happy to be anywhere, do anything. I like the idea of like a himbo, like a Mr. Peanut Butter kind of like himbo. That's your vibe. I mean, that's the vibe. Yeah. That's my vibe in general. Yeah. I never considered another animal because I actually came into Abnol's with the concept of a spy cow already fully formed. I pitched a children's book called Bovine International Cow of Mystery. Well, that was not surprisingly not picked up by a publisher. But they were just too afraid. They were too afraid of how real. Yeah, it was too real. Breaking the mold. So I already had the cow spy thing and the ridiculousness of him trying to be a master of disguise and a dancer and all that stuff. So I was, I was on Roger right away. So in a way, the character was also a funeral for this other. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Living memorial. Kiss that goodbye. But if a publisher wants to pick up the adventures of Roger Muir, give me a call. Navy SEAL was my first thought, best thought. Didn't come up with another one. Got it in one. I think I was the last one to make my character because I wanted a good gag. And this was, I think, soon after our Mubim Bam year where I dressed up as a like a sailor boy. And so I guess I had stolen Valor on the on the on my brain. And that's where Navy SEAL came from. I just know kids like axolotls. Yeah, that's real big. They're big. They're big. So I did that soon. My kids would like me. I mean, like period. I feel like we all kind of have the same thing of like finding our thing and settling on it, because if this specific game and this specific world, I feel like if you look at the full breadth of what, you know, the entirety of the ecosphere offers to you, like it would be impossible to choose to choose just one from Larry, speaking of Roger, Roger Muir's backstory of being an alien is awesome. What inspired that? And will we ever get more stuff about it? I love that this is the question that you picked, Mac. Yeah, it just ran by random. I ran a chance. What cartoons were your biggest inspirations for the season? I think it's all of us. Which do you think? Abdomals ended up resembling the most. Thank you for the great podcast, Mac. What family? I look forward to hearing your answers. Basically, Roger being an alien. Travis said there are three ways that three origin point. It was a three, Traver four, three, three or three. And to be a mutate, to be evolved or to be an alien. Yeah. And Travis said the other guys have kind of taken on mutate and evolve. So why don't you take aliens? And I said, yeah, great. So it was kind of a natural after that. And we really didn't discuss the, I don't know, the major sort of things that that would bring to our characters, the fact that you were an alien and that Justin, I think Axolyle used to be a human and then turned into an axolotl. Is that that is so interesting. Griffin, that has kind of gone back and forth a bit of a moving target there. Yeah. You would think there's some context. Like it would come up in conversation like, by the way, my planet, Boeve lacks nine or whatever. Yeah. I think from what I remember, the can I came up with is that if he was an axolotl before, he does not remember it because it's an axolotl. He wouldn't have formed memories in the sense that we do think of them. So Axolyle only knows himself to be Axolyle. Love that. But I think along those lines to answer the second half of your question, Larry. So the cartoons, I mean, there's a long list of Abnomals cartoons that I pulled from Cowboys, the Moomesa, Biker, Mice from Mars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course, even stuff like Gargoyles, Road Rovers, there's a lot. Right. And one of the things there was, of course, you know, the inspiration of the Abnomal stuff. But also there was a lot of like, yeah, man, there's backstory and justification for things, but it's all very like surface level. Like they don't get into the science of like their street sharks. How do they breathe? Right? Like that's not as important as like we all need you to accept that these are half human, half sharks that like ride motorcycles and stuff and play, you know, street hockey or whatever. And if you can buy into that enough, we're golden. It's great. So like the backstories are pretty malleable within those shows as to like what's going on and why and how they got there. And, you know, it was less about strict factual adherence as much as it was like, yeah, that's fun for this episode. That's great. Yeah. You know, here's a question from Frankie. I'd love to know what writing and creating the theme song for this season was like since it's so unique compared to other seasons. Juice, do you want to I feel like you spearheaded the sort of the coordination on this? Yeah, I wrote it. Yeah, I wrote it. I wrote it is what you meant to say, Griffin. I wrote it. You sort of all by yourself on the baseline. So I wanted to try it and I came up with like sort of a very, very, very loose song idea. And then I went to Eric Nier, who has done a lot of the jingles for us for Backward Family Clubhouse and Eric's also done the music for both the Charlie Burst episodes. And I was like, listen to this. We're kind of messing around with it. See what you think. And then Eric reworked the melody and some of the words. And then we were talking to Jonathan Colton about recording it and he changed some of the lyrics and tweaked some of that and the music and gave a really cool sound. And so it was a very neat kind of collaboration. I just wanted to do. I thought it would be fun to try something to try writing a song or at least like the basis of one. And it was fun. And I think it came out pretty cool. We had a question here. Let's see, from Elle, while some Lamar are somewhat self-explanatory. I was wondering where the inspiration of the names the Greenback Guardians came from. I don't know why Lamar is self-explanatory, but basically I took inspiration from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all being named after I believe Renaissance artists. Yeah. And I like the idea of like a theme to that. So I went with like, AdVentures instead of Artists in a similar line. So Lamar was Hedy Lamar, who along with being an actor, she also basically like developed Wi-Fi and GPS. And she developed frequency hopping technology. And then there's Ada Loveless, who is like the creator of the idea of programming computers. There's Isaac Newton for Newton and George Washington Carver for Carver. Really, the trickiest thing was picking names that worked one as names like Singular. I'm just going to call them this. Right. And like kind of sounded cool as well. Carver is like such a good. Carver Loveless Lamar Newton. And so like I went through, I tried to like I was thinking about Currie in there. Yeah. I just couldn't. It was too hard for me to say repeatedly and not ended up saying Currie a lot. That's a good point. Actually, people don't think about that kind of stuff. That honestly separates us from the answers. When I when I am naming NPCs, I will noodle on it so long. Especially for like major NPCs, say it out loud so many times to find one that I can say repeatedly and not sound dumb doing. As opposed to the early days when we like snatched Tombodette out of the ether. Well, but even Tombodette, you can say over and over again. Tombodette, Tombodette, Tombodette. It's fun to say. It works. Tombodette, Tombodette, Tombodette. Can we do this one from Margaret. Love this season of Taz and have been loving the shorter form goofiness of recent seasons. I have two questions for y'all. One, for Travis, how far in advance did you have the big walrus reveal planned? Was it hard to keep it hidden from your players? Two, for Clint, Justin and Griffin, who was your favorite animal NPC that you encountered? This could be from a pun appreciation standpoint or a narrative one. Travis, do you want to tackle that first? The first one. Right. So I told them right away. There is going to be a character called the walrus and there is going to be an NPC who is half walrus, half man named Walter Ressa. And it will be obvious to you as players that he is the walrus, but it is important that your characters don't make that connection until it's revealed because once again, this is kind of playing on a lot of like the animals TV show tropes of having a person who's very obviously the bad guy to the audience. Like I was thinking about the, I can't remember the character's name. I think it's Magnum or Magnus or something in Gargoyles who is like so obviously bad, but he's the guy who like moves the castle there and the Gargoyles like live on top of his building for a while and the Gargoyles are like working with him while the audience is like, he's the bad guy. Yeah, clearly. He's the bad one. This guy's the problem. And so I like Magnus, get him. Yeah, come on. And not like a cool Magnus like we've seen before. And so like it was kind of a running joke amongst us that it was so obvious and the characters never put it together until he revealed it. There was a fun point in the season, maybe like 10 episodes in or so, where I feel like I was kind of spinning my wheels trying to figure out, trying to piece like some of the clues together that you had given us. And I think my brain was operating in a more, I don't know, abstract sort of fashion. And once you like talk to us very frankly about the walrus of altar, Russell, the pieces kind of fell into place of like, oh, this is, this is a, this is as simple as, you know, the villain arc in a, you know, Saturday morning cartoon would be. Exactly. And I feel like we all really got on board after that. Favorite NPC. Yeah. Mine was E.O. Patrick Harris. Come on. You took mine. That's, yeah, that's the best. Are we just talking name or are we talking characterization? In the question, it specified exactly that. So. Oh, okay. We can do both. Mine is from a narrative perspective. I'm really, I love the sort of like cohesive tone of this world being that of a cartoon and therefore not having dire consequences or much violence to speak of whatsoever. And it is for that reason that I love chlorophyllus because anytime chlorophyllus showed up, like the, all the air in the room got sort of sucked out and it was like, oh my God, there's an actual, actual dangerous killer here in this, in this children's show. And I always found that very, very entertaining. Yeah. I, I don't know. I had a lot of fun with a hairdryer. Yeah. Oh yeah. He was going to. That was fun to play. I liked it. I think maybe hairdryer came first and then the name of the business, Dryeria came second and then I was like, yeah, I'm, I love this guy very, very much. And I had a lot of fun playing him. Artificial as well was really fun. Yeah, Artificial was good. That was a good character too. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Um, from Neil, the end credit song of many action movies becomes culturally synonymous with the movie itself. A Kiss from a Rose, by Seal and Bad Hat Forever. What I've done by Lincoln Park and Transformers and Extreme Ways by Moby and the Jason Bourne movies comes to mind. If you were to pick a licensed rock ballad to play during the live action animals movie in credits, what would it be? For me, again, referring to Chlorophilus, I would say you too, she moves in mysterious ways. That would be such a weird, wild, up like troubling for this show. Probably Kesha's Animal. That would be good. Would be good. I'm not sure the lyrics of it, but yeah. I would say a fallout boy cover of Hungry Like the Wolf. Oh, God, yes. Okay, from Drew Davenport, Justin, were you prepared to evolve Axel if he ever encountered iodine? So interesting question, Drew. There are people who have, one of the things that's interesting about Axelotls, and there's a lot, is that they don't metamorphize in the sense that we think of amphibians doing that, but you can make them. If you give them iodine, they will. That's weird. That's a weird thing that is true. And I thought about that at some point. I think that it's kind of a classic Taz stumbler though, because you invest these sorts of private research times in, and then you just wait for the opportunity to use them to materialize. But if you don't communicate them with the other parties, it's rare that you're just going to organically encounter iodine. It's rare that that just pops up in the story. So it never became salient, if that makes sense. Travis, were you trying to think of how can I slip some iodine into this guy? Because I have to imagine that's got to be a tough improv. Early days? Yes. There was going to be a temptation of iodine, where he could have, because Axelotls, if I remember correctly, one of the reasons he wasn't more ingratiated in the amphibian force was because he didn't evolve into a final form like they all did. And the idea of having an iodine injection presented that he could choose to do to join them. But then that ended up feeling, I don't know, way too heavy. Super heavy, dude. I was like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Seems like too much. There was a question about your favorite fun fact about the animal archetype that you played. And I don't know if the iodine thing qualifies for you, Juse. I worked in a lot of them. The limb thing is really good. I try to work in as many axolotl facts as I could, because I had a, I mean, I had a bookmark that I just recently deleted that was great axolotl facts for kids. A hundred great axolotl facts for kids. And I had that tab open pretty much all the time we were recording. I'll tell you what, man, speaking of working things in, I always had, in the back of my mind, trying to find opportunities to chop axolotl's limbs off. And it came up so infrequently. But I was trying to, I was trying to find opportunities to do it constantly. Well, Travis, I think the tough thing is it's hard to create the stakes of limb removal, but then keep that specifically targeted to one. Just one character. Yeah. So like if you unleashed like limb bore, the limb hating man. Yes. Right. And it's like the one, the one human in the world, it's limb bore, the limb. The limb bore baby would have been it, but go on. Limb bore baby, the limb hating man. And everyone's disgusted by him, right? He's a human being. But if you put him in a room with some of the other turds, dad probably would have like farted on him so hard. He'd cut dad's legs off and like Griffin would have been like stealing Valor. And it turned out that he was in the, the reserves or something. And then he would chop Griffin's limbs off and then he may not even get to my limbs. Yeah. That would be a star on it. It also just didn't fit with the vibe of a lot of like Saturday morning characters. There's really rarely a time where Shredder like rips Donatello's arm off. Well, you know. Despite the name, right? Yeah. He shreds nothing in the entire run. And Lyle didn't really need anybody else. He chopped off his limbs more often than anybody. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. By the way, that question about animal facts came from Sierra. Just wondering about that. Thank you, Sierra. Do you have a fun animal fact about cow, cow must be a tough one, dad, because I feel like cows are pretty, pretty mainstream. As far as animals go. I tell you what I had to stay away from was any reference to beef or steaks or, I mean, that just seemed to be a bit too much. Hell, you're an alien, right? The thought of people eating your meat must be so insane. And, and so, you know, everybody knows they got multiple stomachs. And maybe I leaned a little too heavy into the fart thing, do you guys think? Or not enough. Or not enough. Well, it was interesting, dad, because you leaned so, like that was such a big mechanic you did. But your character was this like debonair, you know, like spy cool dude who just also farted a lot. Well, what all you have as a hammer, this is your farts, your flatulence this season, dad, was you at this, your farts were your give-a-go's projector this season. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. There was a lot of, but the good thing is you can fit a fart through a round hole, no matter what. And so that's what that is one good thing. Can you say this sentence again? You can fit a fart through a round hole very easily. You don't have to force it. Yeah. Maybe the only good thing. I couldn't find a ton about Ross Seals, or at least not before I did just the zoo of us, where I learned a lot about Ross Seals. I think that the like crazy siren calls that they do is the most biggest standout thing. That was fun. But the like the fact that they are so solitary and so territorial, I feel like influenced a lot of the, I don't know, character choices, certainly between Navy Seal and Golden Seal. So that was a bit more coded, I guess, and not as silly. I'm a big boy. I need tempo. Hey everyone, welcome to the advertisements here on the adventure zone. I'd like to tell you about tempo. And with us is special guest, JK Simmons. That's not my tempo. It's not my tempo. I'm a big boy. I'm a big boy. I'm a big boy. I'm a big boy. It's not my tempo. Have him say like that is my tempo. That is my tempo. Now make him say, make him say, Griffin's the best. Griffin's the best. Get me pictures of Spider-Man. You didn't tell him to say that. He's on the headphones. He's got his own cans. He brought him from home. He's a professional. Can you just do a normal advertisement? Can you do like a normal, just do a normal ad? Okay, so yeah, I'm a busy guy. And so is Travis. He knows JK Simmons. So when you're busy and you're on the go and you want to eat good food, but you only have like two minutes to heat it up, you can still have really yummy stuff. Thanks to tempo. This is my tempo. I'm talking about Tuscan bacon mushroom chicken. I'm talking about five spice glazed chicken thighs. Yeah, he is. They got seafood options. They got chili shrimp rice bowl. They got so many stuff. They got protein packed stuff. They're always swapping around the menu. So you can always like try out new stuff and it all tastes really good. And you can get it ready like really, really fast. And even JK Simmons like that. He's the biggest eater I know. Yeah, that's true. He has really specific tastes. And there is a special JK Simmons only menu on tempo. Yeah. I eat pictures of Spider-Man. So yeah, if you go to TempoMeals.com you'll see an option that'll be like the special JK Simmons menu. And when you click on it, it says are you JK Simmons? It's like a captcha. Are you JK Simmons? And it tests you and if it's not, then it'll be like get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here. This is for JK only, it says. So for a limited time, Tempo is offering my listeners 60% off your first box. Go to TempoMeals.com slash adventure. That's TempoMeals.com Guys, I got a mattress from Lisa, the luxury hybrid, and it is changing my life. First, I'm just going to tell you, first of all, it lays flat like this. Yeah. A lot of beds that I have had in the past are at a 45 degree angle or worse Dracula style. 180. So the Lisa mattress is flat, which we love. That is 180. I do just want to say that the flat is 180. So I'm going to go with the flat. I'm going to go with the flat. I'm going to go with the flat. I just want to say that the flat is 180. It's way longer than my body. 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Support our show and let them know we set you after checkout. Lisa.com promo code ADVENTURE. And check this out. Thanks. Cool things. Whatever. All right. Back to the show. Yeah. That's pretty classic. Both of us just killed off each other's answers and went with Pretzel Rod, which is clearly not the best. No, that is a terrible Pretzel. As our member of the month, you have a parking spot at Maximum Fun headquarters as well as a $25 gift card to the Maximum Fun store. We said at the end of the episode we wouldn't do it without you and we couldn't do it without you, so thank you for that. You're welcome. Become a Maxfun member now at maximumfun.org slash join. Hello. Hello, I'm calling on behalf of the Beef and Dairy Network podcast. No, no, I'm sorry. No sales calls. Goodbye. It's a multi-award-winning podcast featuring guests such as Ted Danson, Nick Offerman, Josie Long. I don't know what a Josie Long is and anyway, I'm about to take my mother into town to see Phantom of the Opera at last. You are wasting my time She only has so much time left. She's 98 years old. She's only expected to live for another 20 or 30 years. Mother, get your shoes on. Yes, the orthopedic ones. I don't want that to carry you home again, do I? Right, well, if you were looking for a podcast... Mother, you're not wearing that, are you? It's very revealing, Mother. This is a musical theatre, not a Parisian bordello. Simply go to maximumfun.org. I'm reaching for my Samsung Galaxy 4 as we speak. Mother, not that hat! Liz the Wiz Liz the Wiz asks for the players how did using a custom system affect your ability to inhabit the characters in the world? And for me, how did using your own system affect preparation for each session compared to urban shadows or D&D? Liz also asks, are there any plans to release the system publicly? Yeah, we're going to put that out. It's very bare bones. Yeah. So it's not like this is going to be the one that sweeps the TTRPG nation, but it's a good starting point, I think, if you want to build on it and stuff like that. I feel like games come at this question in different ways. There are some games like Blades in the Dark where the tone and the world and the setting are so ingrained in the game and its mechanics and maps and all that stuff. And then there are games where the aesthetic is pretty well defined just by the genre and so it kind of stays out of your way for the most part. And I felt that way about this game. When we made our characters Travis it was like come up with your own special moves. So like there's a lot of... I enjoyed that process a lot and it made me feel a lot of ownership over my character rather than like I'm trying to pick a power off of a list of powers and trying to make it fit in what the character was that I had envisioned. That was my goal in the character creation aspect was I wanted it to be play these characters the way you want to play them so that they feel very unique to you and to the animal you've picked and the style you want to approach it with and everything. Instead of just being like here's a rogue choose a rogue archetype that you want to do. But we did still fill archetype like I do think there is a temptation there that is hard to resist of like I'll be the tank and Roger will be sort of the infiltrator and Axelisle will be sort of the brawler and I think that's just natural. And I like the flexibility of the system too. I mean it you could and the fact that you could fail and it would still benefit you in some ways with the different points you could build up and everything else. I think it's also cool that it's sort of mixed for like team play like combat is balanced I think for like to make sense in a group context like it's not it doesn't incentivize going off on your own and utilizing your own individual goals which feels in step with the sort of like you know TV that it's in conversation with. Yeah as far as using the system to like prepare for sessions and stuff I think that like combat is a great example where I tried to look at it once again from the perspective of like the TV shows that we were basing it off of so the idea of like you know these four ninja turtles that are like the the the danger isn't like the damage that's gonna be done to you know the ninja turtle so much as it is the sheer number that they have to deal with. Yeah and so trying to balance things that way where there was a lot more like swarms of enemies are descending and you need to make it easier on yourself by figuring out like ways to use your abilities and the environment and stuff to try to disable them for a couple rounds so that you can find room to maneuver and breathe and everything. There's a fun byproduct of like this model where you're not killing characters there's not like a pre-determined finish line for a fight which is you killed all the guys instead I feel like most combat scenarios we got into were while we were trying to accomplish something else and I think that that is like I don't know the optimal way to do combat in any role-playing game is to have it not just be a unless it's like you know you have your boss fights your Walter Russell's if you will but for the most part like I don't know I enjoy when combat is just kind of a thing you have to do so you can do the thing that you you know that your your mission objective or whatever. Yeah and once again I mean once again that's source material thing you know like you never the street sharks weren't like let's just go out and kill a monster. It was they they were very much trying to stop something or you know intervene in something else that was going on it's why I really like I think one of my favorite like encounter things was the first time we met artificial with like the robots smashing up. That was my favorite too. You know that that was just a fun like environmental use of things and all the stuff going on in different rooms. Well and that the babies sorry the house-sitting adventure it was my favorite of all of them just because that was great. The combat there was sort of just sort of preventative like trying to stop the house from getting messy and trying to clean up the house while the combat was still happening was was a real highlight of the season for me. Here's one from Poppy. I had a blast listening to animals and appreciated that it felt like a very tight narrative that explored each of the characters without losing the plot. Were there any story beats you wanted to explore but weren't able to for whatever reason and if at liberty to say what were they looking forward to the next series on the horizon. For what it's worth I feel like I got everything I kind of wanted like once we sort of found that a lot of navy stuff was about his family I don't know I feel like I got good. I was very satisfied by the kind of closure of that situation with the standoff in in the tower. I'm not sure there was much meat left on the bones that I wanted to get to. I would have liked to spend more time with Nicole Squidman and Navy Seals burgeoning relationship I always get so uncomfortable about about in-game relationships I don't know that that's a thing I'll ever see. Obvious reasons. Yeah, fair fair fair. Yeah. From the GM side I guess I do have a history of being comfortable with it. On the player side I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Telling. I think I maybe like I would have liked to spend more time with like Roger Moore and the All Stars and like sports related stuff once again it just didn't really come up all that often but the idea of like Roger Moore was from you know a planet of like all sports stars and that kind of being their main focus and his thing was like competitive ballroom dancing so wait he didn't come from actually because that you didn't come from a cow planet you came from a planet of sports Oh yeah. Well they were I was all barnyard is the barnyard all stars so the planet of all barnyard sports barnyard. A fish and auto. Yeah. I didn't put that together that's great. Yeah I wanted to go I want to go to the sports planet too. Season two sports planet. We didn't get off planet. I think that's something I would have liked to do and then there were like the dragon riders who were dragon animals who rode dragons that we didn't get time to explore that kind of stuff. I think there was just hat file. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that was the thing right of like I had ideas for all these other animals teams that you guys would like encounter and occasionally like go toe to toe with and that kind of thing just ended up feeling too crammed in. Yeah. And like I was I found myself trying to manufacture like and then you have run in with these people and I was like well then I'm kind of forcing them into that. I really thought your restraint this season was really on point Trev and not sort of like overloading us and I what I really liked about it was that you would have some moments where you had to kind of rip the valve off and let some steam out and then we would get nine characters named after celebrities with fish based puns snuck into their names and I saw those and I was like that's a lot of fish based celebrity puns but I know that he has to get this out of his system that has to come out somehow or else he'll die. Better out than in. He'll burst. Yeah. And then we started doing our own puns too for catch phrases and I still had people I didn't get to use like do you feel like I feel and but so dad you say a catch phrase but that's not a catch like I can't see that. You don't know what's going to catch on bud. That's fair. Yeah. That's fair. Along those lines there's a question here. Let's see from Mitch we know you had an entire list of celebrity animal names who didn't get around to using let's hear them. My brain doesn't work. I don't I didn't have a bunch prepared so much as I think I could come up with them easily on the spot like Lion Reynolds Ryan Gosling was that one you don't even have to change. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to use that one. I got to use the Mark Buffalo and talk about him. I think at the sports gala which I enjoyed though one of my favorites Oh now I'm blanking on his name. Who's the guy who did West Wing Sorkan Oh, Heron Sorkan. Heron Sorkan actually came that was from Paul Foxcroft who voiced Krillium in the like phone call voice messages and stuff and I had him help me punch up that intro thing. He came up with Heron Sorkan sponsoring the West Wing Wing of the museum. That's cool. And it's a great joke. It's one of my favorite jokes in the thing because it's just like a weird little flavor thing. And I also like Dr. Schneider Arden Fields aka Snarf. That was a tough one because incorporating an animal cat when so many animal cats exist Right. Right. And I was trying to be very choosy. So I decided to go with the thundercat that was least animal like and went with Snarf voice. So that was fun as well. Good. I'm glad you get that out of your system. Thank you. Um, duck also asked to address this. How does it feel once again at DM a season where you have to come up with clever episode titles? Uh, our editor Rachel was was in charge of that and I was merely there refining them and helping with them. But I think that those clever titles Rachel absolutely knocked it out of the park and did an amazing job with the editing, the sound design everything. It was really fun this season. Let's let's get to what people really want to hear about, which is the cussing. Can we get into the, can we crack open the data? We had some questions a lot of questions about the profanity. Mel said, so let's be real how often did you all get unfamily friendly aka how hard did you make Rachel work? Um, and I don't know who pulled this data, but it is exhaustive. I believe it was Rachel. Rachel Rachel and Amanda, I would bet. There were 65 total censored swears throughout the season, which I don't think is that bad for out of what like 28 episodes? Yeah. And that the results are surprising to me knowing the breakdown on the Bim Bam. Yeah. Try to you want to read. I yeah, Justin had the most at 22. I have to say that's absolutely fair. Yeah. I think you think I'd have a defense. I don't have a defense. No, I think that there was a lot about Axel Lyle that would have made him a prime cusser in a different show. Yeah, sure. Well, part, you know, that's for sure, Trav. And the other thing is I cuss in front of my kids all the time. Yeah. So I don't really have a setting for, I don't have a kids. I got it really. I should. I don't have one. Right. I have a, I should have pretended I was doing solvones, but I would have asked you guys too many questions about blood. Yeah, that's fair. And I thought you did a really good job keeping the questions about blood to a minimum. Thank you. I got a lot of feedback. I had 20 curses, which I think what I found surprising was apparently my descriptions and like emotional states of people tended I that's when I tended to curse not like in character, but rather like I'd be describing how upset someone was and and I would just default to a curse word. Yeah. Or how messed up like a room was when you walked in and I would curse in there and I'm like, ah, darn it. The takeaway here is I had 18 the least of the brothers, which is that at the inverse ratio of Mbem-Bam because I try not to cuss in front of my kids. That only cuss four times. Four times. Because a boy scout. Well, okay. Well, now we do need to get that one. So that's up to five now. Speaking of while recording Griffin caught and called out 28 of those curses. I caught 12. Justin caught eight. Dad caught none. And I love that. He doesn't either a user nor a noticer be. Judge the and judge not and be not judge. We missed 17 in the process that Rachel, Sharon, Amanda had to catch. And how many did they miss? Good question. They didn't include that in their stats, did they? Episode one had the most swears of the 11. Next was episode two, six, and then we got better after that. Only four episodes out of 28 had zero swears. 12, 16, 21 and 22. Now, there's also some data here for who said baby the most times. Okay, now tell me, I didn't know we had a baby jar. Yeah, this was you sort of made the baby jar a thing because in episode zero you kept saying baby like a lot. Like, yeah baby. You had four babies throughout the whole season. Three of them were in episode zero. Which is where the baby jar came up with. Okay. I found it so repugnant and yet somehow I had the most babies throughout the season. 13. There are 35 total babies. I had 13. Travis had 12. Six from Justin and four from Dad. So I do want to apologize. That's not an energy that I feel comfortable sitting in. So the fact that I created it is a, I don't know, a reason for deep reflection. Very shameful. Yeah. Max asked have your kids been listening to this season? My girls love the my girls love the theme song so much. And they will ask me out of nowhere to pull up the like video we did with like character artwork and stuff over and over again. And they, they're not, they don't really listen to podcast in general but they have asked me about every episode what happens in it and I've like shown them the prep for it and everything. And when I was telling Bibi about the like fight in Walter Russell's office, she started telling me things that I should do with like the water rising. So great. And the aquarium and stuff. And I was like, oh, okay. I wasn't planning on doing it. And she's like, why not do the thing I'm saying? The Charlie verse episodes have really turned our kids into all tours. Yes. And I wish it would, I wish it would stop. Daddy's working. This is serious. No, that's not, that's not true. My kids don't listen to my things. The only, the only content of mine that they enjoy is the interest of the McRoy Family Club House and they had absolutely nothing to do with. So, same. That's it for me. Juice, what about Charlie and Cooper? They are not fans of mine. Broadly speaking, no, they, they, they, honestly, they only like Greaking Out which is a podcast about Greek mythology and anytime I would say, do you want to listen to my podcast? They would ask if we had listened to all of Greaking Out yet and I would say no, we had not and then we started to do Greaking Out. So that is how it's been at my house. That's, that's my and I would like to amend my answer when I said yes, have your kids been listening this season. I think they have but it was only in that one hour before we were getting ready to record the next episode. I think that's when we, at two times speed. Yeah. You can't get high on your own supply man. I can't, I can't be entertained by us. I'll, I feel no. That was from Max, right? Yeah. Say that. This was from Lex now that you have done a few more silly leaning lighthearted seasons. Do you think you'll ever give larger, more dramatic narratives another go? I personally think you do an amazing job of either. They each shine in their own specific ways. I will say to kind of pre-answer that question, I think one of the things that as we discussed you know, like post-mortem stuff after seasons and everything. One of the things we found is what at least, correct me if I'm wrong, but what we find we like doing best and what works best is to start the season not with, not with the intention of like telling you know, these like dramatic narratives and stuff and if they develop, they develop. Yeah. If it happens, it happens. But like if we set out to do it it will often feel kind of manufactured. And so I think maybe animals well definitely animals and like Taz versus maybe weren't as conducive an environment for those. Yeah. But I don't think we said like and there won't be any no dramatic narrative. No, but I would rather do a season where we have like a lot of fun. Record it is a lot of fun to record this show knowing that you don't like it is not the goal to tie together some like grand narrative. It is easier to run a season like that and I feel like it's more organic like that's kind of how that's kind of how balance went. And I think that is sort of where our heads are at now. There's one I wanted to talk about real quick. Sure from Jacob is there any aspect of the animal theme you wish you could have done more with? We had talked early on about like kind of a toxic Avenger kind of thing where there would be like a character made of ooze that had been like a former member of the like three, you know, the Axelio Roger and Navy's team that like he had to get a real job because it wasn't taking off and wasn't doing anything and not having I think if we had continued or if the opportunity had arisen having like kind of gross out mutant characters would have been fun as like another hallmark of like 90s and early 2000s your garbage pail kids your creepy crawlies your that kind of thing toxic Avengers I think that would have been fun to play with you keep lumping toxic Avenger in there with the other stuff and I don't know the toxic Avenger well there was an animated toxic Avenger Oh yeah I forgot about that yeah was it toxic Crusader toxic Crusader that was it the anime the toxic Avenger's the movie I think toxic Crusader was the because it's like sounds better for kids to have a Crusader rather than an Avenger the toxic Crusader yes because toxic Avenger was a much different property but I feel like there is a theme that's kind of in the questions and answers it's worth mentioning like when we talk about things that we like wish we had gotten to or whatever it's worth noting that like that that is the game for a lot of this it is how much you prepare because if you like the discarding a lot of the stuff you prepare is just kind of par for the course right because if you only prepare the stuff that you get to then what you're doing is like railroading yourself and trying to steer moments into the stuff you've prepared yeah but if you don't have stuff for any of it then you know you're kind of working with that in net so it's it's really always kind of a balance of how much stuff do you have on hand you know thinking about I I when I was DMing I thought a lot about the backpack full of little toys and crayons and notebooks that I take for my kids on vacation like when we're just like it's stuck in airports or whatever I have this bag that's like snacks and wipes and you know I might not need everything but I have all of this yeah you know that's kind of the process yeah because that's the thing is really like another version of this question would be like what do you wish your players had been interested in that you threw out at different points and like I don't know man like I was just trying to say like and here's a character and here's a care and if they'd been like I want to hang out with that guy it would have been a different scene or different story like a lot yeah we I mean from the beginning the first episode I think when you guys were on the bus and you're like what other people are here and I was like there's a koala man yeah named Dean and that and then that became a thing like the way you guys reacted to chlorophyllis is a great example of like yeah I wanted her to be kind of like a blown out poison IV of like not only does she care more about plants than humanity she's a psychopath right when it comes to that kind of thing and if you guys have been like we want to party with her okay cool though would have gone differently you know what I mean so I definitely did not party with her no definitely not too scary so I don't know that there were like gasha with Darnett could have been kind of a Casey Jones-esque character but ended up being a bit of like a doofus and so that went a different direction you know stuff like that is also hard I think when the characters have such goofy names it's really hard to lend them a lot of interiority there's nothing about the name goshwood whatever it was that makes goshwood Darnett that makes me think like I bet there's a rich tapas I want to dig through see I have a sense that there was a rich tapestry and we were willfully choosing not to explore it which I and that's fine liked a lot that was actually I chose that name there's no joke as a tribute to dad's darn tootin from dust season two that he didn't get to use and so I went with gosh darn it for a character God Travis didn't even put that together until you just said that right now as a nod to when dad didn't get to use darn tootin wonderful for dust that I was like well here's gosh darn it I'm as a tribute to darn tootin let's talk about the next season of the adventure zone if we if we may so for the next season I'm gonna be running it we're gonna be playing Dungeons and Dragons both of them both of them this time the fifth fifth edition of it and you know a lot of the feedback that we get on our D&D seasons and a big problem that people run into when they play D&D you know with their friends is that there's maybe like one wizard or two or two wizards and it's like but there's no way of fixing that unfortunately it's one of the great unsolved problems of yeah what could you even do well my bold vision is this what if there were 64 wizards okay and what if those wizards were competing in a sort of battle royale style high stakes death game for the ultimate magical power in the world this is feeling less and less hypothetical no it is feeling quite material because we've already recorded in an episode of it it's called Taz Royale and it's gonna debut on June 5th and it is a battle royale inspired season more in the squid game style than the all out deathmatch battle royale winner take all winner take all series of trials with survivors and not survivors and which one will our heroes be I don't know they're wizards and so are the other characters there's lots and lots of these filthy with wizards this season filthy way you'll be spoiled for wizards and it's gonna be a lot of fun and one thing we are going to for this season we are going to switch back to bi-weekly schedule and there's a lot of reasons for that a big one is just that we kind of felt pretty rushed both on the production side and the scheduling side I want to speak on that real quick because like episodes were shorter in Avnimals 1 because attention span for kids was kind of part of the goal but also like prep time doing that sound design stuff doing the post production doing all of that we didn't maybe get to spend as much time on it as we would have liked I made no music for the entire season which you know there's still some incredible sound work done by Rachel in there but a great theme song an amazing theme song just Justin and Eric and Jonathan really took it to the hoop on that one but that's like a part of the that's a part of the show that I really enjoy doing and doing it every week there is just not any time for it and also we also got some feedback that like some folks had a hard time keeping up with you know a weekly release schedule for a narrative podcast like this so there's a lot of reasons why we're going to jump back to bi-weekly so that we can you know spend a little bit more time on on this season Tas Royale and somewhat longer episodes yes the the episodes will be will be a bit longer so that's that's the next season June 5th is when it starts and we hope you'll join us and September 14th is when it stops and we can't tell you why but I just decided that's wild I hope not that's a short that's a pretty short season for me that's an actual long season yeah um but yeah that's what's next thanks for listening to it and if you're a kid or you let your kid listen thanks for the trust yeah we appreciate that this next season is not going to be kid focused I will if you couldn't say it's not going to be family friendly there will be 65 swears in the first episode wow well and also if all things go according to plan 63 character deaths which is significantly more than Tas animals so um yeah we but I will say as a final thing along those lines that the family friendly kind of theme for animals was inspired by how many um like while we were doing meet and greets and convention appearances and stuff how many like families came up of kids you know with kids that said that they listened with their parents and you know 12 year olds and stuff who their parents would share the show with them and that's just wonderful it feels really good when you know you find out that kids have gotten inspired to get into role playing games and get into this kind of stuff because the stuff we do um so to the parents who have shared that with their kids and felt you know uh the trust in us to share stuff with their kids it means a lot it really does and we really appreciate it I would not make any promises to this effect but I do feel like this season Tas animals has moved me a little bit closer to the light of Christ in terms of not necessarily weaving a tapestry of profanity uh every other every other sentence um and so I hopefully it will be it was fun to listen to with some kids but not it's not explicitly made for for them as Tas animals was so and and proved that we can do it well except for the 65 times that we blew it and yeah but think of how many words we say in the course of a 28 episodes that's true dad and I think about the curse words we didn't say we've saved them all up for right now yeah here we go who well this has been a lot of fun and thank you so much for listening we really appreciate it and stick around for the next season and we hope you enjoyed all the live shows um that were saved up those were a lot of fun we have more live shows coming up um so uh we've put out the Tas versus Robin Hood and Tas versus uh Hamlet that were two uh Tas versus live shows and if you enjoyed those you can uh come see them live uh coming up all the tour dates and information is at bit.ly forward slash McElroy tours uh all those tickets are on sale now go get yours as well as the my brother my brother and me shows everything like that uh so make sure you check those out bye everybody thanks bye you you