A fun and freewheeling look at the many events big and small, famed and forgotten from a single calendar year
Episodes
Monday Feb 07, 2022
Monday Feb 07, 2022
It's time to take a look at the good, the lucrative, and the flops coming from the motion picture industry in 1994, in this cinematic forty-eighth episode! Sarah & Joe's lengthy trip around the film universe covers the biggest box office grossers, the proliferation of unsuccessful sequels & remakes versus the gangbusters industry of today, the Oscar winners and nominees, and the movies they feel stand the test of time and are all-time classics. Dozens of films get a glance, from your Hoop Dreams, Pulp Fiction, and Ed Wood to your Exit to Eden, A Million to Juan, and Cops and Robbersons! Cult faves such as The Crow, Clerks, and Leon: The Professional arise in the same breath as Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow and Nell, as the hosts yet again try to answer the classic It Happened One Year question - why didn't Speed get nominated for Best Picture, and would it have were there ten slots for nominees in '94?
Monday Jan 31, 2022
Monday Jan 31, 2022
Two of the absolute icons of 1994 are featured in this legendary forty-seventh episode of It Happened One Year! Tonya Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and Nicole Simpson's ex-house guest Kato Kaelin had lives of varying success and public interest prior to the events of '94, but afterward they would become household names forever, and for very different reasons. The tribulations of the Gillooly/Harding union are explored, up to and including The Crime of the First Half of the Year, followed by as much as could be unearthed about Gillooly (now Jeff Stone) ever since. The exact circumstances that led Kato to be in O.J.'s guest house on that fateful night are also broken down, plus his acting and celebrity careers before and after. Along the way, Sarah & Joe throw love to Gillooly's favorite Nevada diner, Kato's amazing Cameo performances, the on-field skills of the Milwaukee Brewers in recent years, Sarah's ever-evolving feelings toward Tonya, Kaelin co-stars Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galligan, Malcolm McDowell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Zack Galifianakis, and Gillooly's dynamite sense of humor.
Monday Jan 24, 2022
Monday Jan 24, 2022
This super-sized forty-sixth episode is legitimately way too much - everyone involved would agree. But in order to cover (briefly) the events of the plague on the sub-continent in 1994 and (more expansively) everything personally connected to the COVID pandemic of 2020, 2021, 2022, and so on requires a whole bundle of time! Sarah & Joe take us on a rollercoaster of emotion, swinging from discussions about all the breads and pastries made over the past two years to passionate worry about the end of American democracy as we know it. Many, many topics pop up along the way - the popular TV shows of the lockdown, the Insurrection of January 6th, video games played and quiz/learning websites obsessed over, opinions over the single most destructive person of our lifetime, new and old music discovered with year-end Spotify calculations, puzzles and board games, the villainous manipulations of the GOP, the formulation and continued creation of this show, and the karaoke app Smule, which produces possibly the single best moment in It Happened One Year history. Running the same amount of time as Eegah: The Name Written in Blood and Toy Story 2, this episode falls somewhere between the two as far as linear coherence and sparkling entertainment!
Monday Jan 17, 2022
Monday Jan 17, 2022
It's a special brand of sci-fi suspense this week, as this gelatinous forty-fifth episode tackles the eerie, inexplicable events in Oakville, Washington from August of 1994! Sarah & Joe attempt to concoct theories as to what caused pellets of goo to rain down in unholy terror on the unsuspecting residents of this small northwest town, causing some to fall ill and causing some Fidos and Meow-Meows to go off to that big PetSmart in the sky! Along the way, the hosts try to relate these bizarre goings-on to vintage X-Files episodes, speculate whether something similar on a much larger scale is responsible for the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, and posit their educated guesses as to what really took place the day(s) the blobs crashed down to earth!
Monday Jan 10, 2022
Monday Jan 10, 2022
While an especially bad year for celebrity deaths, 1994 was particularly devastating on the field of comedy, taking a big group of super talented folks from us, and many at far too young an age. Sarah & Joe, in typical fashion befitting longtime death pool participants, focus on the positives, and try to celebrate the joy brought to us all from these major figures in the field. Batman TV actor Cesar Romero, stand-up legend Bill Hicks, beloved star John Candy, SNL trailblazer Danitra Vance, and National Lampoon/SNL writer/performer Michael O'Donoghue all get a piece of the spotlight in this week's forty-fourth side-splitting episode! The lengthy, goofball discussion covers topics such as whether Romero was the most committed or least committed actor on Batman, if Hicks is actually still alive and performing long-form political improv, if Candy's film career ever eclipsed the work he did on SCTV, whether Vance's season of SNL was the worst in the show's history, or if that was reserved for one of O'Donoghue's returns in '80s. Along the way, cameos abound from Shirley Temple, Denis Leary, the JFK Assassination, Phoebe Zeit-Geist, Edith Prickley, Robert Downey Jr., Doug Kenney, Fatty Arbuckle, and many more!
Monday Jan 03, 2022
Monday Jan 03, 2022
It may be a new year for the world, but it's still 1994 around these parts! Sarah & Joe take a quick look at the life and times of famed actor and pitchman Telly Savalas, who left behind quite the body of interesting work 28 years ago! Almost certainly best remembered for his massive hit detective show of the 1970's Kojak, Savalas' lengthy career before and after is explored, through discussions of his one-shot as James Bond nemesis Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, landing the role of Pontius Pilate in The Greatest Story Every Told, and his status as a legendary bald sex symbol. Along the way, much time is given to his very brief appearance in The Muppet Movie, the who's who that attended his funeral, speculation about whether the Sesame Street character is named for him, who the hell the other Muppets are named after, the best joke from the British sitcom Only Fools and Horses, and how much Kevin Sorbo sucks. Brief, frenetic, and scattershot forty-third episode!
Monday Dec 20, 2021
Monday Dec 20, 2021
It is the eve of the Major League Baseball strike - August 11th, 1994 - and acting commissioner Bud Selig sits alone in his offices, as solitary as an oyster. With the work stoppage looming and the season in jeopardy, he is visited by the ghost of former commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, warning him that the only chance of averting this crisis comes in the form of three spirits, who hope to inform him about the past, present, and future of the state of baseball...
The biggest It Happened One Year episode yet transforms into radio comedy/drama with this fully scripted, full cast forty-second entry! With a generous assist from the long defunct Petri Wine Company of California, A Baseball Humbug vaults through time with a phantasmagoric adaptation of A Christmas Carol, done in that inimitable IHOY style. Celebrate the holidays and gather the family around the audio machine as in days of yore for this crazy intersection of history, sports, and full-throated acting in podcasting!
Monday Dec 13, 2021
Monday Dec 13, 2021
It wasn't all hand-over-fist success stories back in 1994, no sir! There were also ego driven flights of fancy and wild money-making schemes that backfired royally! Sarah & Joe dive deep into this pack of '94 boondoggles, including the Steven Spielberg theme restaurant Dive!, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 sequel Closing Time, the Canadian Football League's ill-advised expansion into America, and Fox's abortive live-action Krusty the Clown spin-off from The Simpsons. The restaurant industries of Los Angeles and Las Vegas get a glance, plus the fanbases and appetites for foreign football in places like Sacramento, Shreveport, Baltimore, and Memphis, random spin-off football leagues like the XFL and the Lingerie Football League, and what the ramifications could've been had Krusty the Clown actually aired. Are three-decade-plus sequels a good idea in any medium? Should they give the CFL another shot in the U.S.? Will The Simpsons ever actually end? There is plenty speculated about in this information packed, quixotic forty-first episode!
Monday Dec 06, 2021
Monday Dec 06, 2021
A show centered squarely in 1994 shouldn't often try to influence modern decision making, but the ongoing Supreme Court crisis cannot be ignored here at It Happened One Year! Sarah & Joe take us along separate, parallel journeys through court history, as Sarah details the life and times of '94 appointee Stephen Breyer, his early life, education, judicial career, and opinions opposite Joe's journey back through history, highlighting the other dozen men to occupy this Supreme Court seat. Finally, the hosts contemplate modern America's rolling conservative nightmare, with its minor public support and the crooked dealings that brought us to this point. Cameos abound from throughout American history, including George Washington, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oliver Wendell Holmes, JFK, FDR, LBJ, the worst president in history, the historic Jewish seat of the court, and speculation about Breyer's '80s action hero style one-liners while he was in the army reserves. It might just be gallows humor, but interspersed with bon mots about copyright law, in this legislative fortieth episode!
Monday Nov 29, 2021
Monday Nov 29, 2021
It's further adventures in audio chaos as It Happened One Year looks at the life and career of 1994 baby Saoirse Ronan! From her near-miss casting in the Harry Potter series to her many Academy Award nominations, Ronan's place as darling of the indie circuit is discussed, along with Sarah & Joe's speculation as to if/when she will finally land in a major Hollywood franchise and make that sweet franchise money. Along the way, much discussion is given to potential future Oscar winners, the best strategies for taking home the top film honor, lesbian period dramas, recent Muppet films, Wes Anderson, the Titanic, and the fleeting value of pre-intro banter. It could be called unconventional, but let's face it, so many IHOY episodes fit this description lately that it has probably become the norm. Tune in!