Bonus: We'll Ray Charles It with Mark Robinson

Ode (@thatsod.e / @thatsod_e) and Mo "Kid" Licorish (@licorishislegit) sit down with advertising veteran and author Mark Robinson to discuss his book Pitch Black: The Best Black Ads of the Past Fifty Plus Years. Robinson explains how he assembled a panel of Black creative directors, each assigned a specific decade, to select the ads that shaped the book rather than choosing them himself.

The conversation traces a three-decade evolution in Black consumer advertising, from 1950s ad-buy inclusion that funded publications like Ebony and Jet, through 1960s representation demands, into the 1970s Black pride movement that gave rise to Black-owned agencies such as Procter and Gardner. Robinson also shares his hopes for the book's future, including an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and a possible PBS documentary, and mentions that historian Henry Louis Gates has read and supported the project.

The trivia round covers Pepsi-Cola's 1940 Negro Markets Department, the surprising role of Black-owned VJ Records in bringing the Beatles' music to America ahead of Capitol Records, Coca-Cola's "Hilltop" commercial and its songwriter Roquel "Billy" Davis, and the real woman behind Aunt Jemima, Nancy Green. That trivia leads into a broader discussion of how platforms like Disney Plus handle older, racially outdated content such as Song of the South and Aristocats.

They also run a Star Trek-themed matchup covering Benjamin Sisko, Michael Burnham, Nyota Uhura, Guinan, Geordi La Forge, B'Elanna Torres, Worf, and Tuvok, weighing each character's place in the franchise's history of representation. The episode closes with a candid Big Mad segment touching on ICE and immigration coverage, before Robinson points people toward his book and his website, .

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