Call For Comments: Publishing the Public Domain

From Mav: So if you don’t live in the tiny corner of the internet that follows creators rights within the comic book publishing world, you probably missed a story a couple weeks ago that few of us who do live in that corner were obsessed with. Bill Willingham, creator of the comic Fables, decided to…

e82. Love, Politics and Jane Austen

Usually our show looks at pop culture produced in the relatively recent past. However, that’s not what “popular culture” really means. Really, what this show is about is looking at massive cultural influences and analyzing how and why they happened. And some of that media was produced at longer periods in the past. And some…

Call for Comments: The Legacy of Jane Austen

From Hannah: This show is, according to our tagline, “a podcast about pop culture discussion, critique and analysis with beer and swearing.” For the most part, in our seventy-something episodes, we’ve covered contemporary topics because that’s what most of us think popular culture is. As the co-host whose main periods of study are the eighteenth…

e61. Narrative REMIX!

We seem to like stories we already know. Not just rereading or rewatching an old favorite. We seem to derive some sort of pleasure in seeing a new version of an old story… a version with a “twist.” What if Superman was a horror story? Well, lets explore that in Brightburn! What if Lizzie Bennet…

Call For Comments: Head Canon Shipping

From Mav: Since Valentines Day is coming up we wanted to try a little game for one episode. We want to have an episode where we talk about the idea of “shipping” in popular media. But we don’t want to just talk about why we do it. I think that’s pretty obvious. We already talked…

Call for Comments: Mystery Boxes, Spoilers, and Fandoms

From Hannah: Before I was on the show, we received a suggestion for a show topic on how popular culture fandoms react to spoilers from listener Jessi Bencloski. Spoilers are tricky, especially in big fandoms such as Harry Potter, Lost, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Part of what drives (or drove) those fandoms, especially once fan communities emerged online,…

e30. Monster Mash 2: Breaking Twilight

Way back in August we recorded our first Monster Mash episode where we discussed the place of the Monster and the Monster Hunter in popular culture. That was a great conversation that went all over the place and we swore right then that we would pick it up at a later time. For our final…

Call for Comments: Generation X and Coming of Age Movies

From Mav: If you know me, you know I love movies. It’s one of the reasons I do this. If you know me, then you might also know that maybe my favorite movie last year was Lady Bird (I even wrote a review about it… cheap plug for my other site). Wayne watched it recently and we…