I’ve seen people on the Internet talking about Marvel Snap a lot over the last few months, so I felt like I should check it out. It’s pretty neat. I like a simplistic, quick-to-play card game, and the fact I can’t communicate with the other players makes me forget they are real people. All good. But there is one glaring mistake that I have already said in the title of this post: they managed to make this whole game and they haven’t put Rocket Racer in it!

Well, what am I here for if not to fix problems like that? I found a website that allows one to make custom Marvel Snap cards to do the hard part of making it look like is should (though I added a Rocket Racer logo image as it appeared in a comic I talked about a few posts back). And then I used my extensive knowledge of the character and passable knowledge of the game to come up with:

What you see here is Rocket Racer. He’s a mere 1 Power card, which means he is quite weak, sure, but that’s in keeping with Bob’s track record. I don’t think anyone will argue with that.

He’s also a 1 Cost card, which means he could be played on the first turn if you happen to draw him. Appropriate for a speed-based character, but not as good as, for example, Quicksilver who is guaranteed to be in your starting hand. Bob is fast, but not the fastest.

But what I like most if the power I’ve identified for him. When you draw him from your deck and put him in your hand, you get +1 Energy (or whatever the thing you use to pay a card’s Cost is called). I like this because it means you could use that Energy to play Bob right away, again emphasizing the speed with which he’d enter the field, or you could use that Energy to do something else, which is evocative of his being useful as perhaps a tech guy and helping the team to do other things. This card treats Rocket Racer as someone slightly useful. That’s exactly the right space for him.

I think you will all agree that this is a flawless Rocket Racer Marvel Snap card. It’s so perfect that I can legally state that if this card showed up in the game with these exact mechanics I couldn’t even claim to have created it, because anyone who was trying to make a Rocket Racer card would have come up with the same thing. Legally.

Anyway, I will leave it to the multitude of Marvel Snap players and Rocket Racer fans who visit my website to start the petitions to get this card into the game.

What’s difficult about this Beekeeper Review is that even though he appears in the Wait Till Your Father Gets Home episode that is entitled “The Beekeeper” we never actually get to see Bumbles do any Beekeeping.

The Boyles, the show’s protagonist family, have bees in their house. They check the phone book and see a big ad: “Charles Bumbles Johnson: If you’ve got bees give me a buzz – 851-6181”. Bumbles Johnson, voiced by Don Knotts, comes in exuding confidence, using his radio to stay in contact with his “Bumble Base” headquarters. He seems to have a supernatural ability to smell bees (“You can tell a bee man by his nostrils”) and shows no fear of being stung (“When you’re in bees, you learn to leave fear behind”). He seems like an ideal beekeeper, except that the comedic conceit of the episode is that he’s not good at his job and he’s kind of a jerk on top of it.

His attempts to get rid of the bees are unsuccessful. He causes chaos and destruction in the household. He flirts with the women and tells (presumably fictional) stories in which he name-drops celebrities he has supposedly worked for (“Bumbles Johnson, Sprayer to the Stars”). Eventually he insists that the only way to beat the bees is if he moves in with the family full time, naturally making of a nuisance of himself while he’s there. He eats all their food and tries to do non-Beekeeping-related tasks around the house, which he does badly as he does his attempted bee removal.

It’s a perfectly normal thing for a beekeeper to be called in to help with. So far so good. But he doesn’t do it. Also, we’re never shown that he has a hive or anything. He does state his intent to take care of the bees without killing them, but that is the only check in the positive column that Bumbles earns. It’s not enough.

One Honeycomb out of Five. It pains me to add another low-scoring review that bring the Average Beekeeper Rating down, but if I’m to remain the world’s foremost reviewer of fictional beekeepers, then I need to commit to the truth, not to raising the ABR.