If anything has characterized pop culture in the year 2020, it’s streaming media. From Hamilton to Tiger King, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the essential elimination of out-of-the-home entertainment, we as a people have been absorbing a great deal of content from our couches through the magic of streaming. This is a world made for…
Author: Christopher "Mav" Maverick
A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Chris Maverick, drifter searching to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have…
e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…
Call for Comments: What did we miss this time?
From Mav: Way back at the end of 2019… you know, so like 47 years ago, we did a year in review show that we called “what did you miss?”. The idea was, rather than just reviewing the year and talking about the huge things in pop culture, we would cover the things that we…
e140. Why Do We Suddenly Love Musicals?
From Broadway to London, music has been a part of the history of drama for over a thousand years. The genre is enough of a part of American pop culture that it’s major award, the Tony, has become part of the EGOT, the grand slam of acting. And yet somehow, it has always seemed somehow…
e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID
It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…
Call for Comments: Do we really like holidays anyway?
From Mav: As I finished teaching one of my Friday only classes, one of my students wished me a “Have a Happy Thanksgiving… or whatever” on his way out the door. It struck me that he was not just trying to be nice; as he was finishing the statement he realized the relative futility of…
e136. Describing 14 Films We Haven’t Seen
In a world where four podcasters are exhausted from the never ended horrific news cycle of politics, racial tensions, pestilence and death that has been the year 2020, these weary souls decide to take one week away from serious pseudo academic pop culture analysis with drinking and swearing and do… goofy pseudo academic pop culture…