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In this episode of the Dandy Fun House, I’m going to self-indulge just a bit and pay a bit of homage to the town I live in and love: MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE! And I’m going to do it in the only way that I can actually make it relevant to this show and that’s with a game review! Now for those of you who don’t live in Murfreesboro and couldn’t possibly care less about my town, I know you’re asking yourself right now why you would ever care about a game review involving the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Here’s why: because the company that makes the game I’m about to review also makes this exact same game customized special for individual cities and towns all over the world, most likely including yours and this episode will hopefully give you a sneak peek at what you might expect if you were to purchase this particular game for where YOU LIVE! NOW do I have your attention? I hope so because I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy this game for a long time now for THIS is the game of… MURFREESBORO*OPOLY! Let’s step into the Fun House!
Hello and welcome to the Dandy Fun House! This is where we unwrap the very best in retro pop culture, toys and games and all the fun stuff! I’m your host Neil Dandy and in this year-end extravaganza I’m going to unbox, set up and show you how to play the Monopoly spinoff game – MURFREESBORO*OPOLY! And at the end of the show, I’m going to do a quick rundown of some of the best movies I enjoyed from the year 2023 and ones I’m looking forward to in 2024! Let’s get to it!
This game appears to be made by a company out of Cincinnati, Ohio called Late For The Sky. That’s a pretty odd name for a toy and game manufacturer. But let’s see what we can find out about them.
Looking over their website it appears their entire business model is solely making specialized versions of the game Monopoly and boy do they have a lot of them! They have versions for different colleges, alcoholic beverages, Shark*Opoly, Zombie*Opoly. Educational versions like America*Opoly, Dino*Opoly, Space*Opoly, Bible*Opoly, Boooo*Opoly, Christmas*Opoly, Farm, Fishing, Hunting, Rodeo, Cat, Horse, Ocean, Penguin, and 18 DIFFERENT BREEDS OF DOGS OPOLY! Sheesh!
There was only ONE GAME on their entire website that was not a version of Monopoly that I found and that game was and is THE MAN GAME! Which includes: flick football (you know like that triangular folded piece of paper you would try to flick between your friends’ finger goal posts while you were goofing off in school?), a ball for cup pong, a tape measure to see which guy has the biggest uhhh… bicep! Yes bicep! Rope for sailor knots and a regulation deck of playing cards along with poker chips. No wagering please!
Apparently their business concept started with MIAMI*OPOLY because their founder and president whom they don’t give the name of was a graduate of Miami University. They grew their college line of games to over 80 different titles and just kept going from there. No mention of any licensing deal with the makers of Monopoly although I’m sure there must be one. Just ask the makers of Ghetto*Opoly who got unceremoniously shut down after just a few months on the market. Hey! I just happen to have Ghetto*Opoly right here! I can’t review it on this show because we’re strctly family-friendly but in recent years, I have noticed it for sale again in various places. I don’t believe Late For The Sky has anything to do with the re-release of Ghetto*Opoly however so moving right along….
Apparently, you can hire them to customize a game for you as well. This seems to be more of a corporate offering where companies can have a game created highlighting special details of their business which can be a great marketing tool if used correctly!
Digging in just a little deeper, it appears that Late For The Sky is really big on the environment which is great and I’m not noticing any nutty climate change wackiness or anything like that. Just reasonable and responsible stewardship of the environment which I can get behind. Things like using recycled paper, soy-based inks rather than alcohol although I’m not really sure what the significance of that might be, corn-based shrink-wrap (I’ve never heard of that before!) recycled glass and 100 percent Made in the USA in their very own Cincinnati, Ohio facility! And all parts are manufactured within 50 miles from their operation. NOW THAT’S REALLY COOL!
If you’d like to check out all their awesome stuff, just head on over to http://www.lateforthesky.com and see it all for yourself!
Alright, enough about LATE FOR THE SKY, let’s get into this game of MURFREESBORO*OPOLY here!
Right here we got it Murfreesboroopoly a fun game celebrating the BORO and on the front they give props to MTSU, Main Street Murfreesboro, Cannonsburg Village. Nice nice nice. Good packaging they didn’t completely rip off Monopoly on the front they just kind of paid homage to it. (I mean I guess they did.)
The sides have pretty basic branding, nothing too spectacular. On the back you can see the entire the entire playing field and they got a lot of stuff right here and I’m really looking forward to it.
I don’t want to do reading for the blind I’ll just get the bullet points here. How do you make a game about the great city of Murfreesboro Tennessee? While it’s impossible to ridicule everything we jammed all the Murfreesboro we could into this box.
Here’s a quick idea of how to play. They’ve got the full version of Monopoly where you sit there and play for hours until everybody gets frustrated and quits because the game is never gonna freaking end! And there’s a one hour condensed version as well. Let’s unwrap this rascal!
UNBOXING !
Get my corn based shrink wrap off the box here. Is this really corn based?
(sniff)
Doesn’t smell like corn. Here we have it and let’s go ahead and lift the lid.
And it’s a box with nothing special showing right away. We’ve got the the game board right here. I’m going to save that for just a moment and we’re going to look over the pieces.
Oh looks like we got some of that soy based paper there. Um how do I unwrap this? I have no fingernails I’m a guitar player. So let’s very odd. A couple odd things. A couple loose pieces that kind of seem to have popped out of their bags. Hmm but let’s see if I can open this with my teeth…
This is all the money and they are a little bit different than the game of Monopoly. Same denominations but they did apparently go for their own designs. I don’t know how much licensing they needed to purchase from the makers of Monopoly or if they needed to purchase it all. Did it just become did it just become part of the public domain? I do not have a clue.
And then you get a 500 dollar bill there. All the denominations that you would normally have in a game of Monopoly is included in Murfreesboroopoly and I do not expect them to make a different design for every town they do.
Here are all the uh the cards. They don’t have question marks on them, they have exclamation points and thumbs up on them. And then we have the properties and the properties are all just what’s on the board.
THE GAME BOARD! Let’s see how good they did for the town of Murfreesboro!
Besides forgetting about Premiere Six Theater. (Maybe they asked who wanted to be on here and maybe Premiere 6 just said we’re too cool.) By the way I’m wearing my Premier Six Theater shirt today in homage because I knew they weren’t on here. Oh and there was one other drastic oversight that they left out of the game… City Cafe. It’s been here over a hundred years and it’s right off the square. How could they leave that out of Murfreesboro-opoly?
Okay you got Batey Farms right there. That’s the place where you go and pick your own strawberries in the springtime.
The world’s largest cedar bucket in Cannonsburg Village which is an old timey village which they were talking about ripping out and replacing with a AAA baseball park and got a bunch of people up in arms about this year.
Mercury Boulevard which has been renamed Martin Luther King. So that’s actually outdated now.
Boro Beach. The most crowded swimming hole ever.
Lanes Trains and Automobiles. That’s a cool one. That’s a bowling alley and arcade with great food and fun. We love them.
Discovery Center. That’s sort of like an adventure science center kind of thing.
Traffic Jam. Yeah we’re getting more of those with the way Nashville’s been blowing up. (Murfreesboro is 30 minutes outside of Nashville).
Slick Pig Barbecue. Home of the famous Smoked Wings.
MTSU Student Film Festival. They they appear to be very enamored with MTSU here. I mean it’s a big part of our community. We love them. I like to take in a baseball game over at MTSU especially on two dollar Tuesdays because I’m cheap like that, but there’s much more to Murfreesboro than just MTSU.
Main Street Saturday Market. Where you go around the square and visit all the farmers.
Mayday Brewery. A crown jewel of the city!
Memorial Boulevard... Barfield Crescent Park. That’s a wonderful park we have with trail heads and and a nature center that you can go learn about turtles and stuff.
Cannonsburg Village like we talked about earlier.
Stones River Greenway.
Here’s MTSU, Johnnie Red Floyd Stadium which is in MTSU. Murphy Center also in MTSU. Come on guys enough with the MTSU.
Northwest Broad Street.
Oaklands Mansion which is a Civil War era mansion that we have here and they’ll give you guided tours and ghost tours too!
Bradley Academy Museum.
Main Street Jazz Fest. That’s the big event every year out on the square.
Museum of Natural History. That’s a good one and that’s kind of on a little side street that we have here. You kind of kind of go looking for that one but it’s a very cool place.
Stone’s River National Battlefield. We had a very large Civil War battle here in Murfreesboro and you can go get into the history of that right there on the battlefield. It’s an amazing day trip!
Center for the Arts.
The Square where you got the jazz fest and the neighborhood market.
And finally… Main Street.
And the big main graphic for the game is actually the dome of the courthouse in the middle of the downtown square, Pre-Civil War era.
Center of Tennessee. Yes we have an obelisk. Murfreesboro is the geographical center of the state of Tennessee and we have a pile of pointy rocks to prove it. Actually it used to be the capital of Tennessee at one point.
Parking ticket pay $75. Well… our parking tickets downtown, it’s kind of cute. They’re more like $3.
And… I’m back to start.
Okay there is the board! You put your money. Someone’s got to be the banker. Contingency and big fun. I’m going to assume that the exclamation points are the contingency cards and the thumbs up are the big fun.
GAME PIECES
I’m going to assume that the game pieces are going to be the same for any town. They’re not molding special pieces for your town. You got a couple of die here.As far as the player pieces go you’ve got the big smile, a heart. These are all metal! Oh that’s quality. It’s not plastic junk. You actually have real metal pieces here. A pretzel, a hand for slapping someone who gets silly with you, the boot and the little doggy. So they kept some of the old. You don’t have the car, thimble, iron or anything like that.
PROPERTIES
Boy you can’t even call these houses. Instead of houses and hotels you have little gray boxes which unfortunately is pretty much all they’re building for housing these days. And you have golden keys because you have to pretty much be made of gold in order to afford one of these little gray boxes they build in these subdivisions which is all the new construction around here. That’s the only thing bad I’ve got to say about Murfreesboro. It’s getting overdeveloped because Nashville has gone crazy and with a huge boom over the last 10 years and all the surrounding areas outside of Nashville have been going up with it and the housing prices have been going through the roof. The people who can’t afford to live to Nashville all come here and drive up our cost of living.
I’m glad we bought our house before it got too crazy! And here we are here at the Dandy Fun House Studios as a result and very happy to be here by the way.
All right well that’s the layout! I’m not really going to show you how to play the game of Monopoly which this basically is because I don’t want to insult your intelligence. Everybody knows how to play Monopoly and if you don’t I’m sure somewhere around your house you probably have a game of Monopoly sitting around.
FINAL THOUGHTS AND RANKING
Murfreesboro*Opoly! What can I say? It’s just really cool. I’ve wanted to get this thing for the past three years and finally got my hands on it and I’m glad I did. It’s just really cool to have a board game about your own hometown and a really good gift that you can share with your friends and family who might not live in your town to help them learn more about it.
This hits the mark in a lot of ways. They didn’t really go too deep into our local culture here but they got the major high points and I’ll give them props for that. Late for the sky I think you did a great job on this and I’m just I’m loving this and I can’t wait to play it with my family!
My rating for Murfreesboro*Opoly… I will give it an eight out of ten and I almost never give anyone a ten so that’s a pretty darn good rating!
MOVIES!
MY FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2023!
GODZILLA MINUS ONE!
I will say hands down my favorite movie of 2023 is without a doubt GODZILLA MINUS ONE! If you haven’t seen it, go! Just go! Why did I love this movie? For me, it felt exactly like a classic Godzilla movie from back in the days when they took time to build a good story and characters you actually care about rather than what most movies do these days which is write a flimsy story and just get to the action. A movie is just so much more impactful when you actually care about what’s going on and what happens to the people in it.
The story is about a Japanese kamikaze pilot at the end of World War II who gets cold feet and aborts his mission under the guise of a plane malfunction and lands on an island where the Japanese military had a repair facility. While on the island, they get attacked by a smaller Godzilla before he grew to full size and power. The kamikaze pilot is presented with an opportunity to kill this smaller version of Godzilla (which was still pretty large and fearsome) but once again gets cold feet.
The monster proceeds to kill everyone on the island except for the pilot with cold feet and one mechanic who holds the pilot responsible. For the rest of the movie, the kamikaze pilot struggles with his guilt and shame throughout various attacks on Japan as the creature gets larger and larger until he finally figures out a way to supposedly kill Godzilla and summons up the courage to place his own life on the line to carry out the plan.
The entire movie is in Japanese and has English subtitles, but for me that only made everything even more authentic, unique and enjoyable.
WONKA
I’ll admit I was very skeptical going into this one. In fact, the only reason I went was because my family was going so I tagged along. How in the world can you even try to recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the original? Good thing they didn’t try. Instead they cleverly imagined and quite successfully captured what a young Willy Wonka might be like just starting out on his chocolate career. I’m not a guy who’s big into musicals, but in my opinion, this was good. Real good and the people who made this movie just did an excellent job. Great film for the whole family, I highly recommend it!
MOVIES I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2024!
DUNE 2
I remember last year around this time I was talking about how much I’m looking forward to DUNE 2 coming out. Did this thing ever come out? Did I miss it? Nope, it’s scheduled for theatrical release March 1st. This time with twice as much Zendaya! Which will mean about TEN minutes…
GHOSTBUSTERS FROZEN EMPIRE
Man they brought this franchise back with a bang didn’t they? The last one was so good and recaptured the spirit (no pun intended) of what Ghostbusters is all about. I can’t wait to see Frozen Empire! Who you gonna call? It’d better be me if you’re headed to the theater to see Ghostbusters Frozen Empire! Slated to hit theatres March 29th!
KUNG FU PANDA 4
Umm… Sure why not!
GODZILLA X KONG
Ok, what’s the X all about? Is it Godzilla VERSUS Kong or Godzilla AND Kong as in teaming up and fighting a giant space worm or something? I have no idea but we’ve already had a recent Godzilla and Kong movie and it was pretty decent. Not nearly as good as Godzilla Minus One, but pretty good. Is there anything new to do with these guys together or are we just milking the money cow here? Will I go see it? Yes I will! There’s your answer I suppose!
DEADPOOL 3
I guess Ryan Reynolds got some free time away from Mint Mobile to rehash another Deadpool movie. Always entertaining, always fun, never for the kids. Parents be advised.
KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
YES! YES! YES! YES! I’m sorta looking forward to this one…
THE GARFIELD MOVIE
Ok, I guess this is going to be sort of an origins story of how Garfield and Jon connected because it’s labeled as a reboot. I hope it does well, but I’m not sure kids these days even know who Garfield is anymore. It’ll be interesting to see how this does.
BAD BOYS 4
Ok you can stop it with this one already.
DESPICABLE ME 4
Something to take the kids to I guess
MUFASA: THE LION KING
This one is going to be a prequel and I think it’s a great idea. Mufasa definitely has an interesting story to dig into and since he was killed off very early in The Lion King, I think giving this character his own feature is a great move by a cheese-eating empire (which I do not mention on this program) that has made nothing but stupid, family-unfriendly moves over the past decade. I’ll support this one and hope they don’t ruin it which they hopefully won’t but probably will.
VENOM 3
Venom 1 was great. Venom 2 not so much. Hopefully they get this train back on track here because when Venom is good, Venom is real good! Don’t let me down guys!
CAPTAIN AMERICA – BRAVE NEW WORLD
Ok, I love me some Captain America! The superhero movies have been a bit overbaked and it seems the entire world has superhero fatigue. But if there is one out there who can reignite the flame, I’ll put my money down on the Captain America horse every time!
HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON
This one is going to be awesome for the little ones! How can you go wrong!?
BEETLEJUICE 2
Alright! Strap yourselves in! First Michael Keaton reprises his role in Batman and now Beetlejuice!? I’m pretty sure Wynona Rider is signed on for this. Not sure if they managed to get Gina Davis and Alec Baldwin. Might want to pat down Alec before he comes on the set though.
TRANSFORMERS ONE
I liked the last Transformers movie. I’ll admit I never really got into the whole Transformers thing but the flicks are enjoyable. I’ll check this one out!
SAW XI
Been there. Saw that. What are we doing here guys?
JOKER: Folie à DEUX
The talent is certainly there with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga teaming up. I’m just really happy to not be seeing Margot Robbie doing Harley Quinn anymore and she’s probably happy not to be doing Harley Quinn anymore. It’s the voice. I can’t take the voice. Make it stop! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAKE IT STOP!!!!!
SMILE 2
Why in the world are they making another one of this?
WOLF MAN
Ok, I can get behind this! A classic Universal Monster that hasn’t had a refresh in decades. Long overdue in my opinion. Starring Liz Cheney Jr.!
GLADIATOR 2
Wait… Didn’t he die at the end of the first one. Went to Valhalla after defeating the emporer in the colosseum and was reunited with his family? What are they going to do? Drag him to the Roman doctor and revive him?
LORD OF THE RINGS: WAR OF ROHIRRIM
For you rabid LOTR fans who just can’t get enough, I can’t count myself amongst you but… respect! Here you go! A new bone! Chew my doggies! Chew!
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3
Does Jim Carrey really need the work this badly?
Ad that pretty much Christmas wraps it for 2023! I’ve been very blessed by God that the following for this show has seen healthy growth over the past year and I think that can be attributed to a clearer vision for the type of content I produce, freshening up the branding to make it better-reflect that and also the production of a series of under-one-minute short videos for each episode which appears to be supercharging the reach of the show.
A big thank you to all of you who take the time to hang out with me here when you can.
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Are you ready for 2024??? I know I am! Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon and I’m going to be bringing it to you right here at the Dandy Fun House! So come on back soon where everything is always… FUN AND DANDY!
