The Point Radio: Playing The IDIOTEST And ????

The highly rated series, IDIOTEST, is back for a second season on the Game Show Network. Host Ben Gleib let’s us prove just how bright we are by playing an (unedited) round here plus meet the man that put the first Nike shoe on a big name NBA plater and started a 13 billion dollar a year phenomenon. Meet Sonny Vaccaro, subject of a new ESPN documentary.

NBC is setting up another prime time cross over event and we talk to the shows that will tie it all together.  Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. The idiot test is back for another run of high ratings on the Game Show Network. And this time I'm going to sit down and play the game right here live. We'll see how we do.

Plus he put the first pair of high-end athletic shoes on the first NBA superstar and started an industry that is worth billions. We'll find out who he is coming up. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point.

The Point Radio. The Point Radio. The hit series The Idiot Test is back for another run of episodes on the Game Show Network. And in case you missed those earlier shows, host Ben Gleib is along to explain just what went down.

If you didn't see season one, The Idiot Test is a new model showcase show where we have models competing in body painting competitions. I'm sorry, I'm being told that in the other GSN show. I always confuse them because I wish my show involved in new body painting. It is a visual brain puzzle show where we give you these very creative

and often funny visual tests. And you have to see if you can think, you don't need knowledge or you don't need knowledge, you just how well your brain can figure out what the questions ask you on this cool visual image. And when you get the answer right, you feel great.

When you get it wrong, the answer is always staring you right in the face and it seems so obvious that you feel like an idiot when you get it wrong. And the show makes you laugh as much as it makes you. Any big changes for this new second season? We did. We did. We had one touch screen in the center of the stage last year.

And then we had two touch screens. My wardrobe is different. I think my hair looks better. The comedy on the show is weirder and more fun. The contestants are better looking. The job is important. I can't go on anymore with these rocket scientists and these men.

I look like they've never called them their hair. You want something with good hair, you want a good looking contestant, you get that this season. All right, so having covered the show with Ben for two years now, I decided it was time for me to step up and I would play the idiot test with Ben.

Well, that's great confidence, Mike. I wasn't able to walk the year your confidence is set up to the same level. And that's the idea. I'm going to start you out easy, Mike. Before it was discovered that the earth was round, what shape was it? That would be round.

That's right. People thought the earth was flat, but they were just super dumb dumb. All right, I'm ready for round two. Let's go. Mike, how many times is I mentioned in the traditional alphabet song? Okay, playing it off in my head, and then that would be once, right?

Mike, you're going downhill, buddy. The answer is twice. The end line of the song is now I know my ABCs. That one of your songs is nice. All right, so moving on, let's change the subject just a little bit. You know, Ben does stand up all over the world.

And if you want to find out where he's going to be next, well, here's a little bit of a rundown. Traveling all over this month, I will be in Minnesota and Calgary and Edmonton and Irvine. And in May, I will be in Denver and Shanghai, China, I believe it or not. So, and you can see me in a bunch more cities around the world, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, at bennedy.com slash calendar. And you can follow Idiot Test online at Idiot Test Show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Keep up with our keeping up, you know. Ben is also pretty active in the voiceover business, having been in Jay and Sihla Bob's super groovy cartoon movie, Ice Age Continental Drift, and more. I love doing animation voiceovers. Me and Flux all been a dream while I grew up with kids watching cartoons. You get to be a cartoon, you get to go into a voiceover booth and imagine this fantastical animated scene that's going to be drawn around your voice.

It's just a privilege and it's exciting and it makes you feel like a kid, but like a kid that gets paid to do kid games. So it's pretty fun. All right, your turn to see how you'll do. Play along with the Idiot Test. New episodes every Wednesday on the Game Show Network.

You can see more right now at GSNTV.com. The Flight Radio. Here we go with the latest in pop culture. Not unlike the way they did business back in the 90s, Valiant has announced a new retail incentive companion series that will be tied to their Book of Death summer event. That of course is the one where several Valiant characters will be killed over the summer.

This four issue limited edition series will be available only to retailers whose orders qualify for the Book of Death mini series. It will be called Book of Death Legends of the Geomancer and again be available to retailers in the summer should their orders qualify. If you need to get copies, you need to talk to your retailer more than likely fairly soon. It looks like the Mockingbird character will be the star of the new rather confusing Agents of Shield spinoff project. We told you about a couple of weeks ago.

That project has been announced but not greenlit from ABC and also there's no word on exactly whether it will be a fall series or to bridge the gap over the winter time the way Agent Carter did during the past television season. Adrianne Velucchi will continue as Mockingbird though in the new series which is expected to get more details out in the world between now and Comic Con. Thanks to a little stealth work from WikiLeaks, it looks like we do know there's some serious interest in a Doctor Who movie feature. At least from Sony. Part of those original North Korean emails were reposted by WikiLeaks over the weekend and they do show that at least as early as January 2014, Sony had interest in a Doctor Who feature. However, that feeling is not shared by the showrunners of Doctor Who who said they felt that it would hurt their long run plan for the show.

Basically, that's where the conversation ended. However, since then, the showrunner Steven Moffat has gone on record in saying the fact that he feels the Doctor Who TV series will last another five years for certain. The latest tie-in to the sci-fi phenomenon Sharknado now involves the gang from Riverdale. There'll be an Archie versus Sharknado one shot. It'll coincide with the release of the third Sharknado film on sci-fi coming up this summer. One shot will be written by Anthony Ferranti and there'll be a main cover and interior art by Dan Parent, plus several variant covers as well. Again, the comic will be released on July 22nd, the same day as Sharknado premieres on sci-fi.

According to actors Victoria Justice, MTV has canceled her series, Eye Candy, after just one season. Justice made the announcement via her Twitter account over the weekend. There's been no official announcement yet from MTV. Sonny Vigaro may not have ever had an NBA championship or even played in the Olympics, but he certainly was part of the basketball world. In fact, he may have been one of the first people to put a name brand shoe on a name-recognized athlete, helping to build the $13 billion a year athletic shoe industry. I asked Sonny how he first got into shoes.

By accident, I had become sort of a pseudo-celebrity in basketball by starting an all-star game a long time ago in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I ran camps and one of my campers told me one day that they ought to do something with the way tennis shoes were designed and they sand a lot of it and all that sort of stuff. I went to a fledgling company called, we called it Nicky, turned out to be Nike, and I gave them some thoughts from the kids and the shoemaker friend of mine had about shoes. Then they became engrossed in my connection to basketball because they were a track company at that time. They only had one basketball team and I was the University of Oregon, which was Phil Knight's alma mater.

So I got involved by accident and I had ideas and Phil Knight allowed me to use my mind and we both did well by that. That's how the birth of me being involved was by accident and then it turned out to be seminal to both of us. It turned my life around and certainly helped Nike's life also. So who was his first big celebrity tie-in? Well, I think a college coach, I think it was Jerry Tarkanian and John Thompson, that era.

You know, college coaches were the first to get their teams to wear the shoes. You know, six years before Michael Jordan was born to Nike, we started out we being Nike on the college level and I signed the college coaches to contract and we get Jimmy Bay Hyman, Cal Oden, Thompson and all these guys who won national championships. So Nike got their foot in basketball. The college, then I went down to high school, then Summer League, but Michael Jordan came after six years of college domination.

Then obviously Michael Jordan changed the world of marketing, the company called Nicky and the rest of the world as we know it today. The millions and millions and billions started flowing then because Michael was that powerful as an endorser. Right now Sonny is the subject of a new ESPN documentary called Soul Man and I asked him what we'd see in the film. You're going to see the evolution of the finances and the marketing of it and you're going to go all the way from the colleges to the pros to summer camps, down to AAU and high school basketball. And then you're going to feel my pain of an organization called the NC Hubaway and how they treat quote unquote amateur athletes which are college athletes who play for them basically.

You know, whatever I'm going to do that, but you'll see the trial called the O'Bannon trial, which has already changed the face of amateurism and the N-Subway. So it runs me through the whole time. I started this when I was 24 years old in Pittsburgh and I'm 75 now and still active in fighting. So, you know, it talks about the LeBron James, the Kobe Bryant's, the Michael Jordan's, the people who made the shoe industry, the marketing composite that it is today. I mean, you see Kevin Duran sign a 30 or 35 million dollar a year deal with Nike after Under Armour, you know, offering a little even a little bit more. You see athletes getting paid, you know, unbelievable amounts of money to market their particular shoes in this case.

I've watched that whole thing. I've been a part of it. And so that's what this movie is going to take. It's going to take you on a step by step in an hour and a half of my life, paralleling what's actually happening. One of Sunday's causes is the antitrust suit led by former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon. Ed O'Bannon suit is, you know, Ed O'Bannon is the most valuable player in the 1995 N-Subway championships. Usually won the championship. Ed O'Bannon was the most valuable player.

He had a short-lived, you know, career in the pros. He bounced around Europe a while when he grew up to be a man. And then one day he looks out there and his face, his body is being used in the EA Sports, you know, video game. And everyone knows the value of the sports, you know, they cost money to buy them a lot. And they were a shining room for whatever heck they were shining for. It was worth a lot of money, you know, what they sold it for. And it was him.

So I was trying to find athletes in the past who would, you know, argue against them because also the athletes were being showed on films, you know, the old Duke North Carolina games, Southern Kelli Usilley football games, Michigan, Ohio State football games. But these were all athletes that they kept selling their, you know, their images off. And I thought that was wrong. So Ed O'Bannon stepped forward with a law firm out of what he's, he named Michael Housefield, the lead attorney. And he basically, we sued to go to court under the antitrust, you know, thing where no one owns you forever.

And that's what O'Bannon is. O'Bannon is about to write all the athletes when they're no longer there. And they keep using them and using them. So that's not they use them while they're in school and, you know, they get hurt and some kids on. But all the monies that are derived from all these, you watch a game today and you watch, you know, Game On TV, an hour later it's on Instagram. It's on your phone. It's somewhere else. I mean, they sold it to another network.

I mean, I mean, it's these kids, the same kids. I mean, so they, the O'Bannon said, we deserve, you figure out a logical way that we can be paid once we leave this school. And that's what O'Bannon is. They're fighting for their rights financially. Catch the unique documentary Soul Man running all this month on ESPN and on ESPN on demand. That's it for the podcast for right now.

But as usual, we're back in a few days and you could always find us on websites like ComicMix.com, michaeldavisworld.com. Get the point radio dot com and the iTunes podcast. All the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram under the point radio and we'll see you in just a few days.