Way too often, when we talk about “pop culture” in 2022, we focus on superheroes, space cowboys with laser swords, and maybe a couple fantasy epics. And in fact, if you were to look at the top of the streaming charts this month, those are sort of the biggest things on the pop culture horizon…
Author: Hannah Lee Rogers
Call for Comments: A League of Their Own
From Hannah: I love baseball. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, A League of Their Own (the 1992 film) means a lot to me — and I’m not alone in this. But as much as I think the 1992 film is one of those “great films,” Amazon Prime’s new television version may be just as important. The new…
e228. Investigating the Style Cycle
We’ve all heard complaints that the current pop-culture fad du jour is getting repetitive. For instance, right now, it’s superhero movies. People are constantly complaining about “the MCU formula” where “all the movies look the same, they all have the same plot, and they all make all the same jokes.” Whenever some other company makes…
e226. So… uh… what is a Dissertation? (and why would you do one?)
When we started our little psuedo-academic pop-culture analysis podcast with drinking and swearing, we had a few requirements. One of those was that the show would be smart and would celebrate academia but wouldn’t be overly hung up on it. We specifically didn’t want to be an academic show. And we didn’t want to be…
e224. A Filler Episode on Filler Episodes
One of the most important things about academia is being in conversation with other academics. That is to say that the way knowledge happens is one scholar says something and then another scholar builds on it and so on and so on. About a week ago, our friends over at the Protagonist Podcast did an…
e221. Exploring the World of Stranger Things
It’s always odd when we hit on one of those episode ideas where we feel like “obviously we’ve done like half a dozen shows on this topic over the years” and we stop and we look and it turns out that no, we’ve never really talked about it at all. Stranger Things is one of…
e220. Obi-Wan Kenobi & the Star Wars Legacy
This week saw the end of the Disney+ Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi, a show devoted to… actually it’s really hard to talk about. Arguably, one of the biggest problems with the Kenobi tv show is that it is arguably impossible to talk about without spoilers. But it’s over now… so we’re going to spoil…
CFC: So, who wants to talk about Stranger Things?
From Hannah: I have no idea why we haven’t done an episode on Stranger Things. But with Volume 1 of Season 4 currently released on Netflix (and breaking ratings records … such that they are things), and Volume 2 about to drop next weekend, I thought it was time. Besides, as a podcast with connections…
e219. Why We Still Love the Jurassic Park Franchise
Somehow, in 2022, there’s a Jurassic Park movie at the top of the box office. Some twenty-nine years after the first film and 32 years after the release of the first novel, this series is still going strong. There are cartoons, video games, Lego sets and other toys. Even though Jurassic World Dominion is theoretically…
CFC: We CAN do an episode about Jurassic Park; does that mean we SHOULD?
From Hannah: It’s been almost thirty years since we first were welcomed to Jurassic Park on the silver screen. And this weekend, the sixth movie in the franchise (which, uh, many of might say never should have had one sequel much less this many) Jurassic World: Dominion will premiere on North American screens. I’ve been…