e313. PCA2024: Adapting X-Men

On this week’s special epsiode we take one last look at this year’s Popular Culture Association conference in Chicago with a look at papers from one of the panels in the Comics Studies group. Mav is joined by Joseph and John Darowski who will be appearing with him in the upcoming book Adapting X-men from…

e312. PCA2024: The AfterParty

Six years ago, this show was birthed out of the aftermath of PCA2018, the annual conference for the Popular Culture Association. As is tradition, we’ve once again returned there. PCA2024 was last week in Chicago, IL and Mav attended. On this episode, he is joined by fellow conference attendees and friends of the show Nicole…

e276. Old Heroes Never Die! (But Do They Even Fade Away?)

There’s a lot of roles for old guys in media these days. Or rather, not just roles for old guys, there’s a lot of roles for characters that we’ve seen grow older in their movies and TV shows. For instance, there’s an Indiana Jones movie floating around theaters at time of recording, as well as…

e243. What’s in a Name? (or Several)

Sometimes we come up with an episode idea that we just completely mean to be filler. We have no real agenda and not as much research as normal, but we need to fill a week before a much more complicated show and so we just decide “lets have a discussion topic and see how it…

e209. PCA2022 Conference Paper Workshop & Preview

This week we’re going to try something a little different on the show. We’ve been mentioning in the past few weeks that we several of the hosts and our most frequent guests are all gearing ups for our big annual pop culture academia conference, PCA. In the past, we’ve had shows where we presented our…

e168. Time to Stop Wearing Underwear on the Outside

Have you ever noticed how infrequently superheroes in most superhero TV shows and movies actually wear their superhero costumes? It makes sense when you think about it. Superhero costumes are actually kind of silly: wearing underwear on the outside of spandex bodysuits? They’re based on pop culture tropes from nearly a century ago, which honestly…

e68. Parallel Media

You ever notice that thing that happens when a movie studio releases a movie and then another studio releases a movie with pretty much the exact same premise at the same time and they’re so close to each other that it seems like neither could have copied from the other? It happens a lot! What…