BASEketball (1998)

BASEketball hit theaters in July 1998, about a month after Steve and Nic graduated high school, and promptly became the kind of pre-party background movie where, as Nic confesses, you're ultra familiar with the first twelve minutes and mildly surprised to learn there's a plot. It's Steve's pick to close out the penultimate year of 2 Dads 2 Decades (penultimate means second to last, as he likes to remind people), and both dads burned actual college hours trying to play the game in real life. The fatal flaw, they agree: psych-outs do not survive contact with reality.

What the South Park guys and David Zucker actually built is a rapid-fire joke machine, and there are receipts from a vintage Parker and Stone interview claiming only about ten percent of the screenplay made it to screen. The dads also make the case that Matt Stone's "derp" here is the first derp in recorded media. A star is born. Then there's the money: a $25 million budget and an $18 million loss make this the biggest flop in show history, for a movie that cost more than the last five or six pod entries combined. The wall-to-wall athlete cameos produce a unified theory too: David Zucker simply has dirt on every '70s sports MVP. It really came out on O.J.

Elsewhere, both dads reveal they independently wrote down every fake team name and compare lists like absolute dorks (Beers, Felons, Informants, Lemons). A locker room scene makes it two straight weeks of giant prosthetics on this podcast, prompting a sober review of the circulatory logistics; the phrase "dialysis erection" is used, and a CamelBak of blood is proposed. Nic recommends an Unsolved Mysteries episode for reasons that are, once again, hog-related, and Steve notes the pattern. And a full Xennial taxonomy session sorts the Steve Perry psych-out people from the Noonan people, settled by the Uncle Jesse test (Dukes of Hazzard or Full House, choose carefully).

Twenty-eight years later, the game still doesn't work in real life. The Steve Perry psych-out? Undefeated.