240 - Pentathlon

Your Stupid Minds

Your Stupid Minds is back! Did you know it’s the Olympics? We have a special Olympic-size episode for you, with Dolph Lundgren’s 1994 film Pentathlon!

Eric Brogar (Lundgren) is an Olympic pentathlete competing for East Germany in the 1988 Olympics. For those of you who are normal, the pentathlon consists of five events: swimming, shooting, horseback riding, fencing, and running (the modern pentathlon has replaced horseback riding with some Ninja Warrior parkour stuff). Brogar wins the gold to spite his evil and abusive trainer Heinrich Müller (David Soul), who is also a big wig in the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Also to spite him, Brogar defects in the sloppiest way possible at the Seoul airport and runs onto the American team bus.

In retaliation, Müller murders Brogar’s dad, and then the Berlin Wall falls two months later. Brogar is depressed, and spends the next four years in Los Angeles drinking, smoking, and watching a tiny little television while somehow maintaining perfect muscle tone and body fat ratio. He works at a greasy spoon and his boss John Creese (Roger E. Mosley) discovers he’s a gold medalist, and immediately starts training him so he can cash in on endorsement deals. You know, all those million dollar Nike sponsorships pentathletes are known to receive?

Müller is now also a neo-Nazi and travels to LA to raise funds for a terrorist attack on a local Holocaust museum peace rally, but upon arriving he learns that Brogar still exists and lives in town. Since this is the go-go ‘90s and he thinks he can have it all, surely he can perform this grisly terrorist attack and satisfy his personal grudge at the same time, right?

After a bike-by Luger shooting at the beach, Brogar escapes to his girlfriend’s hideaway cabin (possibly the same cabin from the 3 Ninjas movies) but Müller and his goons find him. He’s kidnapped and taken to the Holocaust museum so he can watch a rabbi explode on a tiny TV inside the terrorists’ van. Can Brogar escape and stop the attack, which conceivably is the only possible reason why he would be there? You’ll have to listen to find out!