Super Nuclear Presents

Season three introduces its big new gimmick: Waelita (that's our name for Evil Aelita - we're trying to make it happen) and her penchant for deleting Lyoko one sector at a time. If only it hadn't done it in one of the lamest episodes since season one! The puns fly as fast as the ancient memes and Homestuck references as Mary, Ben, and David once again attempt to grapple with their feelings towards...

This may not come as a surprise to any of you, but watching the start of Season 3 for the first time in a decade has confirmed for Mary and Ben that yes, they were in fact remembering it through the eyes of bitter angry teens. (David has well and proper gotten his revenge for "firmly grasp it.") So we've come at Straight to Heart again with fresh new eyes, and in the process we've discovered more...

Jess joins us yet again to discuss the second half of the much-debated prequel. Who will change their mind? Who will change their ground? Who will embarrassingly fail to remember where "firmly grasp it in your hand" comes from? (It's David. The third one is David.) This is probably our fastest time from starting the episode to getting into the meats, but don't you think for a second that we are no...

Friend of the show and Bigfoot enthusiast Jess - co-host of the Lupin Lottery and The Spooky Spot podcasts - joins us for the first time to geek about cryptids and Rod Serling with David. Meanwhile, the adults in the room, Mary and Ben, talk about the infamous Code Lyoko prequel (as adults are wont to do). No one seems to agree on this thing - we're not even sure if it's the first episode of the s...

Our season break continues with a return to Fanfiction Theater, featuring the show's first unofficial official unofficial Halloween special. William cosplays as Michael Jackson in this one - the sort of thing the show was always missing, if you ask us. We also go over some spreadsheets, content that we are told is popular with today's savvy teens (don't ask us, we're just sad adults) and take an e...

This episode of Code Lyoko carries a content warning for attempted suicide from 5:38-5:57 and from 6:50 to 7:20 in the Youtube edition. This episode of Return to the Past carries a content warning for discussion of attempted suicide throughout, primarily between 44:00 and 1:00:00. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA): 1-800-273-8255 Trans Lifeline:  US:  (877) 565-8860  CANADA:  (877) 330-63...

We return to our regularly scheduled programming this week with part one of the non-two-parter two-part finale. Here, you'll finally learn the Big Secret we've been spoiling relentlessly since we started this whole ridiculous enterprise, so please act surprised! As our first post-McElboy episode, we have an extra hefty mailbag to sift through, as well as ridiculously cool fight scenes, awful looki...

Note before we start: We are experimenting with making the Rec Rooms explicit-rated which in this case just means we don't bleep out the swears. Be on the lookout for some HECKIN ROUGH LANGUAGE. It's time to take a break from high-octane (for a certain value of "high-octane") Lyoko action and just shoot the breeze for a little while. Call it the calm before the storm that the two-part season final...

!si tahw sseug reven ll'ouY .sretcarahc dna ecneidua eht morf noitamrofni edih ot rehpyc revelc a esu sretirw eht ,edosipe siht nI Nah, but we kid, this episode is good. The plot keeps thickening and the characters keep making the same kind of nonsensical, boneheaded decisions we've come to love them for. We poke a lot of fun at them, but there was a point in our lives when this was as serious as...

Note: You may notice some audio echo in this episode. I did my best to get rid of it, but if any remains, let me know! ===== A weird old guy shows up in the factory, and despite the fact that he doesn't appear to eat, sleep, or get out of his cahir, he's totally not a XANA attack, you guys.  He's here to fix absolutely everything that's ever gone wrong for the Lyoko Warriors, convince Yumi that sh...

Who's ready to get heckin' spoopy? Our second kind-of-but-not-really quasi-Halloween special reveals that ghosts exist in the Code Lyoko universe! I mean, it doesn't make much of a difference, if any at all, but it's there. They canon'd it; they can't un-canon it. Oh and also Sissi's into witchcraft apparently. This episode is special because it's the only one penned by guest writers Neil Gaiman a...

Note: No new episode next week! Ben is on vacation and we decided we wanted to be too. :P Tune in the week after that for Is Anybody Out There! === Good news for rubbernecks: this episode is a slow-motion train wreck, a veritable cavalcade of characters making baffling decisions and generally acting like total dicks. Do we like it anyway? Of course we do, because we're absolute sheep for Code Lyok...

Note: At a few point during this episode, David's audio will cut out for a split second for some reason, and it's left a few jokes without punchlines. x.x My apologies! Can you believe that absolutely NO ONE saw the twist about the meaning of Aelita's visions coming at the time? Or maybe we did, and we didn't want to see it? Either way, new mysteries are afoot, new tensions are a-brewin', and afte...

Sporky and Shin Garrett of Going Digital join us once again to talk about Code Lyoko, but this time, we'll be discussing an actually good episode! (We're not saying we ate Davide for talking too much crap about Rock Bottom?, but we're not NOT saying it, either.) This episode is about as dark as Code Lyoko gets, putting its teenage characters in the sort of peril you don't normally see in cartoons....

If you're the kind of viewer who feels that Code Lyoko circles around its problems but never actually address them, we have some good news: this episode invents a brand-new lifelong phobia for one of the main characters and sees him overcome it in the span of twenty-two minutes. Executives at Cartoon Network tried to put a stop to that madness, alleging that it would be unappealing to boys ages si...

Things are getting hot and heavy in the Super Nuclear group's hypothetical recording studio, and not just because Mary and David are being shmoopy again (though there is also that). Thrill as Xana attempts to divide and conquer the Lyoko Warriors through the power of cuckoldry. You into that? We bet you are. Go ahead and give us a click already! Do you like jokes about croissants wherein the crois...

Who's ready to cringe? Today's episode is one of those nameless treasures: the mid-2000s cartoon about a boy and a girl swapping bodies and somehow managing to (almost) never address the fact that they now have different bits. Can Ben, Mary, and David milk that premise for jokes? Will Ben and Mary literally collapse under the weight of their secondhand embarrassment? If you're asking that question...

WARNING: Mary was recording on the wrong mic for the first five minutes, and the end result is just about the worst and most grating audio this podcast has ever experienced. I have tried to fix it as best I can, but feel free to skip ahead to where I turn my real mic on and everything is fine. We are ALL over the place on this episode, folks. Is it because this episode is ridiculously buck wild? I...

It's the episode you've been waiting for, maybe! Mary, Ben, and David finally answer their email and give a six-Pokémon team to every Lyoko Warrior. If a trio of bumbling dorks awkwardly mispronouncing Pokémon names is your idea of fun, give us a click and let the good times roll! If you still get flashbacks to that one commercial where Zack and Cody overemphasize the é in Pokémon (you know the on...

Folklorists speculate that zombies are popular because they let us indulge in guilt-free fantasies about inflicting violence on the people around us. Code Lyoko decided that that's as good an excuse as any to finally show us cartoon children beating the snot out of each other. The Super Nuclear group concludes that that is actually kind of hilarious. But that's not all! In addition to the violence...

At the end of most episodes of Return to the Past, your humble hosts ask themselves this question: are we going to give this episode a perfect ten, or merely a nine point five? This time, however, there's a radical difference of opinion! Are you on #TeamDavidAndMary, or are you on #TeamBen? As is so often the case, your answer probably depends on your feelings toward Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Are...

Okay, so remember how I said all that stuff about Common Interest and how it took the show's subject matter to a new level but ultimately didn't follow through in the way it should have? Imagine another Common Interest, but with a plot that DOES follow through from start to finish. Mostly. Meet Temptation, the most thought-provoking episode of Code Lyoko yet. At least for Mary, aka me, for whom th...

  More than any other episode, Common Interest really hammers home how BOLD Code Lyoko was willing to be. Even after 13 years we're still stunned that we saw Aelita almost succumb to heart failure three times in one day, or Jeremie handling raw uranium as he struggled to keep the supercomputer alive, or XANA facing off against a military transport armed with very present and realistic guns. Still...

For the first time in possibly ever, the Super Nuclear group disagrees about the content of an episode! Is it the greatest thing ever, or just pretty darn great? Do the surprisingly off-model designs undercut the shipping possibilities? Come listen to your favorite trio of childish dingbats argue about cartoons for an hour and a half! The Homestuck references have never come at you faster. Plus, a...

Hey-yo! It's the Super Nuclear group, making up for our absence last week with an extra-long episode aimed directly at your eager faces. And what an episode it is! We're finally at the 'Going back in time to win the lottery' storyline, which gives us a surprising amount of insight into several characters' personalities, including Ulrich, Yumi, and your personal favorite,* Yumi's dad. We also dive...