e185. The Wicked, the Witches and the Witch-ish

Halloween season continues and so it’s time for another special episode. One of the most enduring pop culture figure is probably the witch. Witches appear through the ages in media. From the Weird Sisters of MacBeth to the good and bad witches of Oz to to Arthur Miller’s the Crucible, to Samantha of Bewitched to…

CFC: A Funny Thing Happened When I Talked About Mixtapes

https://twitter.com/chrismaverick/status/1447466435828228097?s=21 From Mav: So funny story. Last week, I was having trouble sleeping, and I was listening to a podcast and someone said “we should make a playlist for this episode” and because neurons are weird and it was 3am, the mention of the word “playlist” made me think of “mixtapes” and I had a…

e184. Bram Stoker’s Dracula & the Draculi that Followed

It’s Halloween season and time to do some spooky theme shows! Of course, we’ve tackled monsters several times on the show before, but we’ve never devoted the whole show to just one monster. Until now! Dracula, is one of the most adapted novels of all time and with movies, TV shows, comics, video games and……

e183. How to Read All of the Marvels

If you’re a comic book fan, one of the things people often ask you is “I want to get into comics. Where do I start? What should I read?” This is especially true if you’re someone who reads comics for a living. It’s even more true this last decade or so of box office dominance…

Call for Comments: Something Wicked This Way Comes…

From Hannah: October is here, meaning spooky season is here, meaning VoxPopcast once again bring you vaguely Halloween-related episodes! In October 2018, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix and the Charmed reboot on the CW premiered. The Magicians was still on air, and some streaming service really wanted me to start watching The Good…

e182. I Fixed That for You, Now GTFO!

If the internet is good at anything, it’s dumping on asked for criticism at other people. Everyone does it. In fact, in a very real way, that’s pretty much what this whole show is. We’re cultural critics. This is cultural criticism. But is there a point when that criticism can go too far? Are there…

e180. So, You Say You Wanna Host a Pseudoacademic Pop Culture Analysis Podcast (with Drinking and Swearing)

Oddly enough, for a show that is devoted to talking about pop culture, one of the things we don’t talk about so much is podcasts. In a way, podcasting might very well be the epitome of pop culture in the current cultural moment… and also… we are one! So, on today’s very special meta episode,…

e179. ImproveReality?

Several weeks ago, we did a show on how stand-up comedy works in the middle of a pandemic. We talked about the transition that comedians went through to move a traditionally “in-person” art form to an entirely virtual environment. But what about other art forms? Lots of performances that at least seem to “require” a…

e178. Pop History vs. Public History

How do we learn history? The easy answer is to say we learn it from history books, but is that true? How many of us ever read a history book after 10th grade? It’s more likely that we get the majority of our history either from museums or from historic entertainment… things like Hamilton… or,…

CFC: Improv in the Living Room

From Mav: Way back in April — which granted, wasn’t actually that long ago, but in the world of COVID, feels like a lifetime — we did a show about how stand-up comedy works in a world where everyone’s socialization is socially distant. Since that time, the world got a little better and then a…