Photo by Harold Jay Taylor/Headlocks and Headshots.

Phantom Troublemaker runs a blog called Needless Things that covers wrestling, movies and other aspects of pop culture. He also hosts a Needless Things Podcast (as part of The Earth Station One Network) in which he interviews puppeteers, wrestlers and other interesting people in the entertainment industry. Wrestling fans may recognize him as a member of the DCW Hooligans, a rambunctious group of fans who have found unity in their love of Dragon Con Wrestling, or as the ring announcer for Monstrosity Championship Wrestling, where he’s able to make the otherwise laborious task of raffling off prizes a fun endeavor. Considering my love of DCW and MCW, the fact that I cover many of the same aspects of pop culture with Wrestling with Pop Culture and that I interview wrestlers each week on Georgia Wrestling Now, one might even question if Phantom Troublemaker and I are the same person, especially since we are rarely seen together and he only appears in public while wearing his signature luchador masks. The fact that we both have been avid Dragon Con fans and attendees for a number of years might only strengthen such a claim. But I can assure you we are not the same person and to prove it I’m going to talk to him on the Aug. 4 edition of Georgia Wrestling Now about the numerous Dragon Con panels he will be part of this year (most of which I will also be attending, as further proof that we are just two guys that wear a lot of similar hats, or in his case masks). And with Dragon Con only a few weeks away, I decided to find out more about what the EFF he will be doing this year.

You’ve been attending Dragon Con for many years and have made the transition from attendee to panelist in recent years. But this year marks your first year being officially involved with Dragon Con. Explain this transition from being a fan to being involved with the event.

Ever since I’ve been going I’ve been covering it in one way or another. It started like anybody else, just taking a bunch of pictures and showing them to everybody you know. To an extent, that’s how journalism starts, I think. You just want to share information. That’s what it was for me. I went down there and took a ton of pictures of all the cosplayers, which back then “cosplayers” wasn’t a term. A few years ago, when I started Needless Things and started writing about it, I’d do full recaps afterwards and eventually got to the point where I started doing pre-coverage where I’d write things leading up to Dragon Con. I’d try to interview people involved with the show and, as I got involved with The ESO Network, I started making more connections to the point where I started to know people who actually worked with Dragon Con. Last year I was granted media access and covered it in a professional capacity (I don’t like to use the word professional in relation to myself).

This year, thanks in part to my involvement with MCW, in part to all the work I’ve done on panels for various conventions and in part to people just knowing who I am a little bit more, I’m an attending professional, which is not a guest. I don’t sit in the famous-people room, I don’t necessarily sign things – although if a titty is presented, I will sign it. Or if you want to throw your dong out there, I’ll sign that. I’ve got no standards. Attending professional, which means if somebody says, “Hey, I need a masked dork on my Swamp Thing panel,” I am at their disposal. Currently I’m scheduled for eight panels, including the two late-night specialty panels I’m running.

Before we get to that, when did you first become officially involved with Dragon Con panels?

Photo by Jay Hornsby/Belligerent Monkey.

My first panel was in 2012. I sat in on 1982: Best Movie Year Ever for the American Sci-Fi Classics track. I’d never done anything like it before. I love talking and I love talking about nerd stuff. When I do a good job at something, I’m not shy about saying it. And I did a great job. I blew everybody away. After the panel everybody was like, “Hey. That was fantastic. What else can you do? Come back next year and do more stuff.” Aside from the first real MCW show I did, it’s probably one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever been through in my life.

How did you get to do panels before becoming an attending professional?

This is something a lot of people don’t know. If you go to a panel, the people that are sitting up there talking are also fans. All you have to do is go talk to those guys and be like, “Hey. I love this thing you just talked about. What else are you talking about?” If you go to Dragon Con this year and you see a panel you’d want to speak about, you can go talk to somebody and get on that panel. It happens all the time where they’ll have three or four panelists scheduled and somebody gets too drunk, somebody gets double scheduled on panels, all kinds of things can happen and they may need somebody and that somebody could be you. If you’re a fan and you’re good at talking, you can be on a panel. You just have to have personality and knowledge. You don’t have to have any special connections. Granted, I was with the ESO Network at the time, so I did have kind of an in. But now I know if you’ve got charisma and are at least a little bit entertaining, get in there and ask. Like I say with everything in life, if you don’t ask you don’t know.

You’re doing eight panels this year, one of which can be previewed on Aug. 5 at the Red Light Cafe. What the EFF are you doing this year at Dragon Con?

Until four or five years ago, I was unfamiliar with the concept of erotic fan fiction. Call me naive. I just didn’t know there were such depths to our society. But if you go online you can find stories that fans have written about Wolverine and Jean Grey getting it on – graphic depictions of Wolverine butt sex. But it gets worse than that. There’s stuff out there like Lucius Malfoy skull-fucking his son Draco. There’s a whole spectrum of thoroughly disturbing fiction that fans of different levels of mental sickness have produced on the Internet, usually under false names. I wouldn’t know anything about writing under a false name.

When I first discovered this, I thought it would be really fun to get together at Dragon Con one night with some friends and everybody bring their own selections of fan fiction – whether it was Batman and Robocop having sex or Watson giving Sherlock Holmes an enema – and we read them out loud. It’s challenging to read these without laughing because a lot of the people that write these don’t have the best grammar. They’re not skilled writers, obviously, or they wouldn’t be writing Snorks porn. So I thought it would be fun to just sit around with pals, read these and maybe have an adult beverage or two. After working with the American Sci-Fi Classics track for a couple of years, I pitched the idea to Gary [Mitchel] almost as a joke. “Hey. We should do a game show where people have to read erotic fan fiction.” I figured at best the response would be, “Oh, that’s kind of funny. But we couldn’t do anything like that. That’s gross.” Instead, Gary said, “That’s fucking amazing. Done!” I still kind of didn’t believe it was going to happen. Then Joe [Crowe], who runs the American Sci-Fi Classics track with Gary, said, “Here’s the deal. You want to do your game show. You want to show your movie (I’ll get to that in a moment). Saturday night from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. the room is yours. Whatever you want to do.” That blew my mind. They’re putting a tremendous amount of faith in me to draw people in and run the room.

So I’m doing a game show called Whose EFF Is It Anyway?, co-hosted by Miss Lady Flex of Le Sexoflex, the sexiest band in the mother-fucking world, straight out of Buttlanta, Georgia. Please visit www.lesexoflex.com and download everything you can. They are incredible and they are the band that brought you the eponymous Dragon Con theme song “Marriott Cock Squat”. So it’s basically like The Gong Show: we’re going to bring people up out of the audience. We want it to be right, so we’re doing a dry run of the game show Aug. 5 here in Buttlanta at the Red Light Cafe. Doors open at 7:30, the show begins at 8. Myself and Miss Lady Flex will be on stage, we’ll have three judges and we’ll be drawing members of the audience up on stage to read selections of erotic fan fiction. This event is sponsored by Inserection and Stardust, which are adult-themed stores that have tobacco products, dildos and sexy lingerie of many different forms. We’ll have prizes from Stardust and Belligerent Monkey, my friend Jay Hornsby who is fantastic and does a lot of pop culture stuff, but does not paint penises. The art provided by Belligerent Monkey will be family friendly. We’ll have lots of prizes, we’ll have lots of fun and if you come out on Aug. 5 you’ll get to see the formation of something that I think is going to be pretty spectacular.

Before we started this interview, you told me about some wrestling erotic fan fiction you had come across. What else can you tell me about that?

This is something I’ve been peripherally aware of since I discovered erotic fan fiction. There is a community of folks who write fan fiction about wrestling. There’s the standard portion of this community that just does stories about maybe AJ Lee and John Cena having a romantic relationship and their struggles behind the scenes working for WWE and maybe a love triangle develops with Roman Reigns or something along those lines. There are a lot of female writers of that stuff and they’re just really expanding on the soap opera aspect of professional wrestling.

So this is completely different from fantasy booking?

No, it’s not even fantasy booking. This is like fantasy backstage booking. They barely even cover matches. They’re worried about the drama aspect. It almost makes sense that this kind of thing would be out there. Of course, like anything else, there is a seedy underbelly of wrestling fan fiction and that is wrestling slash fiction, which I found out today, nine out of ten wrestling slash fiction stories star Randy Orton. It’s just a thing. I didn’t even look for Randy Orton stories. My big goal is to find something with Mick Foley and The Rock. Although Hulk Hogan would be good, Macho Man would be good, a pairing of the two would be great. But Randy Orton came up time and time again. My favorite story that I found today, and I’m still in the midst of research, is one where John Cena gets Roman Reigns pregnant. It was enlightening, really. The reason I’m looking for wrestling-oriented fan fiction is for a very special surprise that I don’t want to announce here, but I can tell you if you’re a fan of Georgia Wrestling Now you know these guys and you’ll be very excited when they show up Saturday night at Dragon Con. We have surprises planned for the Aug. 5 show as well, but the Dragon Con show is the one where we’re going to blow it the fuck out of the water.

Well, I’ll let you wait until the Aug. 4 edition of Georgia Wrestling Now to reveal some of those secrets. Tell me more about the movie screening that will follow your gameshow.

This is the second portion of my Saturday-night activities at Dragon Con. Honestly I think I’m going to be spent after Whose Eff Is It Anyway?. But I will struggle through in order to share one of my most beloved movies of all time. It’s a Canadian masterpiece called THINGS. No, not The Thing. THINGS: All caps, all red, always. It is a very, very low-budget movie. It’s the most incompetently-produced movie I’ve ever seen in my life. Your life will literally be changed after you see it. I know a lot of movies make that claim. Citizen Kane, supposedly the greatest movie of all time. It will change the way you look a the world; Schindler’s List, enlightening and will show you a whole different side of things; The Passion of the Christ. I will put THINGS up against any of those movies as a life-altering experience. I’ve shown THINGS to people over the last 15 years time and again and I’ve had people leave the room, I’ve had people leave my home, because of watching THINGS. It’s an experience like nothing else and Joe and Gary, sweet, innocent fellows that they are, are letting me expose Dragon Con to THINGS. I’m very excited about the possibility of ruining so many lives in one night. First is going to be the fan fiction, which I guarantee people are going to be upset about that, then THINGS afterwards. I might put myself out of business, quite frankly. It’s going to be interesting to see if Phantom Troublemaker has to make a heel turn after Dragon Con.

Before all that, of course, is Dragon Con Wrestling and the DCW Hooligans.

The DCW Hooligans will be in full effect once again at Dragon Con Wrestling Friday night at 7 o’clock in the Hyatt Centennial Ballroom. We will be representing in our purple T-shirts. You will see all 430 of us now. Something like that.

Are you a founding member of the DCW Hooligans?

This has never been stated before. Technically I am not. While I had been enjoying Dragon Con Wrestling for a couple of years, it wasn’t until I hooked up with my buddies Ryan, Jay and Pete – they had been attending together for a while and I reconnected with those guys. While I am certainly the catalyst for us becoming the group that we are now, those guys were watching DCW as a group for a couple of years before I was around. Then I started writing my recaps of it and we started really making a concerted effort and making the T-shirts and everything. I put the name on it, but those guys were the heart of it. We take up a whole section now. You’ve been there with us the last couple of years, you’ve seen how ridiculous it is. And you’ve seen that the guys that actually run the DCW show fucking love us. It’s a great experience.

When does your official Dragon Con attending professional experience begin?

Saturday is the beginning of my official panel presence. I don’t have my full schedule, but I can tell you right now – and this is the first time that this has been announced – Saturday morning (and this is probably a terrible mistake) I’m going to be part of a panel called D20. What that is is the American Sci-Fi Classics track is creating an enormous pair of 20-sided dice. One die will have topics on it, the other one will have panelists on it. All of the panelists that work with the Dragon Con American Sci-Fi Classics track are going to be in the room, they’re going to roll the dice and pick panelists and topics. Then we’re going to do five-minute speed panels. It’s going to be ridiculous because chances are most of us are going to be hungover and it’s entirely possible that I’m going to get a topic that I don’t know jack shit about and have to talk about it. So this is one of those random chance things and this is what makes the Sci-Fi Classics track so great is that they’re willing to take chances like that. This could be terrible. It may not be entertaining at all. But at the same time it could be an entertaining train wreck. It’s going to be memorable regardless of the quality. These guys are willing to take chances like that and Whose EFF Is It Anyway and they’re letting me show THINGS. They’re willing to do things for the sake of fun and that’s what makes the track so great.

Immediately after that I’m doing a Transformers panel where we’re going to be talking about the 1984 movie and the toy line in general. Then I’m doing a She-Ra panel because this is, in some weird way, the 30th anniversary of She-Ra even though She-Ra didn’t come out until 1985. Mattel is calling this the 30th anniversary. I don’t get it, but Mattel owns her so I guess that’s what they’re going to do. So I’ve got three panels in a row in that room right after my biggest night of drinking. It’s going to be rough. Whose EFF Is It Anyway? is Saturday night in the same room, then we’ll start the showing of THINGS. Sunday morning is my big panel on ’80s toys where I’m going to be discussing how important gimmicks were to toys in the ’80s. I’ll be sponsored by Billy’s Toys and we’ll have a shit ton of toys there not only for display but for sale. So if you’re looking for Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Air Raiders, StarCom, Inhumanoids, we’re going to have all that stuff sitting there on the panel table for you to look at. We’re going to have a great time. Last year it was one of the highest-rated panels at Dragon Con, five out of five stars. It was a really, really great time, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Last year I hosted a panel about Masters of the Universe, the 1987 live-action film and the guys kind of surprised me by having William Stout on the panel, who is a very well-renowned artist who did design on the movie. He was absolutely fantastic, a wonderful talker and had lots of great stories about the movie. You can find the podcast of that and my other panels if you go to www.needlessthingssite.com and search for Dragon Con. William Stout is coming back this year and I get to work with him again on Sunday night. We’re going to be sitting down and talking about Conan the Destroyer, which he worked on in the same capacity as he did on Masters of the Universe as a production designer. Just like Masters of the Universe, lots of people malign Conan the Destroyer as being inferior, but the production design is beautiful. The castles, the sets, everything is just gorgeous. William Stout is a fascinating guy and this is another panel that was a surprise to me. I guess he had a good time last year and wanted to work with me again, which is very rewarding. 

www.needlessthingssite.com