Hoot’n & Holler’n With Matt Mitchell

Remember the pure excitement of finding out the Scholastic Book Fair was coming to your school? That magical time when $10 could make you feel rich, the school library became a shopping mall, and somehow you always came home with more erasers and posters than actual books. This week on Hoot'n & Holler'n, Matt, Eric, Drake, and Joey take a nostalgic trip back to one of the greatest events of th...

We're wrapping up our journey through 1980s horror movies with Sleepaway Camp (1983), a summer camp slasher that somehow manages to make every terrible decision imaginable—and then tops it all off with one of the most shocking endings in horror movie history. This week on Hoot'n & Holler'n, Matt, Joey, Eric, and Drake head to Camp Arawak, where the counselors are questionable, the campers have...

The Slumber Party Massacre: Drilled to Death Our journey through the wonderfully terrible world of '80s horror continues with 1982's The Slumber Party Massacre! This week, Matt, Joey, Eric, and Drake break down a slasher classic featuring a murderous escaped convict armed with a suspiciously powerful drill, the worst basketball team in movie history, a creepy neighbor with questionable boundaries,...

It’s spooky season at Hoot’n & Holler’n, and Joey has subjected the rest of us to the 1986 sci-fi horror masterpiece(?) Chopping Mall. A group of definitely-not-teenagers gets locked inside a mall overnight with three security robots that have been struck by lightning and decided murder is now part of the job description. Naturally, we have questions. We break down killer robots moving two mil...

What are the most overrated and underrated video games of our childhood? This week, Matt, Joey, Eric and Drake each pick a console they grew up with and make the case for one game that deserves more love—and one classic that might not deserve all the love it gets. We’re talking Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Zelda, Mario, Batman, Streets of Rage and plenty more, plus the glory d...

We’re heading back to Disney World for even more wildly unrealistic 90s sitcom magic. In Part 2, we tackle the Disney World episodes of Boy Meets World and Full House where Cory Matthews follows Topanga across multiple theme parks, teenagers apparently sleep on Splash Mountain, Michelle Tanner is granted near-absolute power over Disney World, and a missing six-year-old is somehow handled by Snow W...

Remember when every successful ’90s sitcom eventually found an excuse to send the entire cast to Disney World? This week on Hoot’n & Holler’n, Matt Mitchell, Eric Nix, Drake Pittman, and Joey Prestley revisit the gloriously unhinged Disney World episodes of Family Matters and Roseanne. We break down how Urkel becomes Stefan (its a scam), Laura makes some highly questionable life choices, the C...

What makes a good Southern establishment? Sometimes it’s not the food, the prices, or even the place itself. It’s the people. This week, Matt, Eric, Drake, and Joey break down the essential characters that let you know you’ve found a good one: the Dollar General manager who cares way too much, the longtime meat-and-three waitress, the old man who treats the golf course like his second home, the Wa...

College football is back, so we’re going back to the decade that helped turn the SEC into what it is today. Matt Mitchell, Joey Prestley, Eric Nix and Drake Pittman revisit SEC football in the 1990s, from Steve Spurrier and Gene Stallings to the birth of the SEC Championship Game and the glory days of Jefferson Pilot Sports. We remember 11:00 AM kickoffs, listening to games on the radio, checking...

Remember when downloading one song could take all night, destroy the family computer, or turn out to be something completely different? This week, Matt Mitchell, Joey Prestley, Eric Nix, and Drake Pittman are heading back to the golden age of online music piracy: Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa, burned CDs, dial-up internet, mislabeled MP3s, portable CD players, cassette adapters and the thrill of riskin...

Before you were old enough to suit up on Friday nights, you were out there anyway just running routes on a strip of grass by the bleachers, using whatever you could find (or steal) for a football. This week Matt, Eric, Drake, and Joey rank the unofficial hierarchy of sideline football gear, from the elite stolen-from-the-field-house ball down to the dreaded three-liter Coke bottle stuffed with roc...

A Southerner's Guide to Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Yes, Alabama has beaches — barely enough to earn the plural, but they're ours and we love them. This week the boys take you down to Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, the biggest non-Florida beach on the Gulf Coast and the reigning rival to Panama City. We get into it all: which states send the most tourists down to our sand (Louisiana's got no bea...

The fellas are hungry and getting nostalgic about the all-you-can-eat buffet — a dying breed. Matt, Eric, and Joey dig into Golden Corral, Ryan's, Quincy's, Shoney's, and Western Sizzling, stumble into the wild web of Southern restaurant founders behind Captain D's and Shoney's Big Boy, argue the unwritten rules of the buffet line, and remember every gross thing they ever saw at Ryan's. Plus: big...

Bro Country: Who Killed Country Radio? Matt, Eric, Drake, and Joey pour one out for country radio and try to pin down exactly when it all went sideways. What is bro country? A New York Magazine writer coined the term in 2013, but the guys trace the rot back much further — through Kenny Chesney's abs, Jason Aldean's dirt roads, and a fateful night watching Luke Bryan shake it for a tornado benefit...

VBS Fight Club Grab a Dixie cup of watered-down Kool-Aid and pull up a folding chair — this week the boys are digging into Vacation Bible School, that summertime rite of passage for every kid raised in a Southern Baptist stronghold. Matt, Eric, Drake, and Joey trace VBS from its surprising origins (a rented beer hall in New York City, believe it or not) all the way to today's megachurch production...

Go to Church or the Devil'll Get You Pull over, we're stopping. This week the boys are riding shotgun through the South's greatest (and grimmest) roadside attractions — the giant Tin Man outside Demopolis, W.C. Rice's Cross Garden, the chrome bumper chicken, and that peach water tower that looks suspiciously like a butt. We rank the go-to stops (Peach Park cobbler, forever), crown the most overrat...

The gang is playing along at home this week as we run the whole game show gauntlet — from the daytime classics you watched while faking sick to the chaos of late-night Japanese TV. Matt, Eric, Drake, and Joey get into Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune, and the Pat Sajak / Vanna White era, then argue about Steve Harvey's reign on Family Feud (and every host before him — Richard Dawson and that very...

A Southern Guide to the 4th of July The South does Independence Day different, and we've got the receipts to prove it. This episode breaks down why TNT Fireworks (the nation's largest fireworks distributor) calls Alabama home, the unwritten rules of haggling at a firework stand, and exactly when it's socially acceptable to stop shooting off Roman candles in your neighbor's driveway. We also get in...

A vault episode from the early days, back when we were still calling the show Scattered and Covered and recording on location instead of in a studio. This one comes from Gamers Guild, a game shop in Jasper, Alabama, where we sat down in the middle of a Sunday night card tournament and talked to the folks running it. We get into trading cards and the people who collect them, a binder that turned ou...

You don't walk under a ladder, you don't break a mirror, and you sure don't walk on a grave — not because anybody explained why, but because Grandma said so. This week we get into Appalachian superstitions: death coming in threes, black cats, cows lying down before a rain, holding your breath past the graveyard, and eating turnip greens for money on New Year's (still hasn't worked). We don't belie...

Child Labor & Other Fond Memories Everybody's first job was technically a crime scene. This week on Hoot'n & Holler'n, the crew gets into first jobs, worst jobs, and the ones we quit in record time, the gigs the government knew about and the ones it definitely didn't.  From hauling boxes of truckers' trip logs and choking on Bondo dust at a body shop, to practicing golf on company time, su...

For half the South, there's no debate: it's Gatlinburg or nothing. This week we make the great Southern pilgrimage up to G-Berg — Sevier County, Tennessee, a.k.a. the Smokies, a.k.a. the only vacation some families have ever taken. We get into all of it: the saltwater taffy and the fudge, the moonshine that took over the strip, the airbrush tees and glow-in-the-dark mini golf, the great debate ove...

We climbed into machines bolted together by strangers, ate things on sticks that had no business being on sticks, and lived to talk about it. This week on Hoot'n and Holler'n, we're talking carnivals and county fairs. The guys swap stories about the rides that shouldn't have been legal (the Scrambler, the Gravitron, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the one that was just a circle that spun you until you got a han...

Summer in the rural South wasn't a vacation. It was a system. You got dropped off at grandma's in the morning, ate something, went outside, came back in for more food, went back outside, and came in at dark. Every day. For three months. In this episode, the boys break down everything that made a Southern summer in the 80s and 90s what it was. The ice cream truck. The Little Hugs from the deep free...

Most of us remember the 90s NBA as a Chicago story. The Bulls dynasty. The Dream Team. The commercials we still quote at each other thirty years later. But spend a little time digging into the decade and a different picture comes together...one that doesn't get talked about nearly as much. Michael Jordan was from Wilmington, North Carolina. Scottie Pippen grew up in central Arkansas. The teal and...