It’s Spooky Season! Halloween is right around the corner. And so we decided we wanted to celebrate by looking at one of the the most enduring tropes of popular culture. The Witch! But unlike many of the spooky Halloween standards, like vampires, ghosts, or goblins, witches have the distinction that they’re undoubtedly real. People have…
Author: Monica Geraffo
e444. Space Capitalism: The Final Economy
Space is a very popular concept in pop culture media. From sci-fi novels to epic star-faring film franchises, there’s no shortage of space stories. But space is becoming even more popular than ever in real life as well. In fact, there are several commercial companies that are all-too-happy to toss a regular average Joe into…
e439. Legal Dramas and Pop Culture: Unpacking Courtroom Fantasies
Something occurred to us last week with the release of the very funny Coyote vs. Acme. There sure are a lot of movies, TV shows, and other properties that star lawyers. In fact, it seems like it’s one of pop cultures favorite professions. Why is that? Obviously, it can be an interesting job, but so…
e438. Vertical MicroDramas: Fad or the Dawning of a New Age?
Have you ever seen those ads for those over the top melodramatic drama movies on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram Reels or Youtube shorts? And by ads, we mean basically… 2-5 minutes of the movie in an attempt to hook you into watching the rest of it? If you have, did you click on it?…
e435. Zines! Where Art Meets Activism
Let’s talk about zines! Why? Because in many ways, they are one of the oldest and most revered artifacts of grassroots pop culture. Also, it turns out that pretty much the entire cadre of VoxPopcast hosts has a history with them. So, on this week’s episode, Mav, Hannah, Wayne, Katya and Maybe get together to…
e433. Spider-Man: Masks, Myths, and Media
Spider-Man, Spider-Man does whatever a spider can… So if you’re the kind of person who listens to this show, you no doubt know that a new Spider-man movie, Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Probably many of the podcasts you listen to are even talking about it. Well, we don’t want to spoil it, so rather than…
e431. Henchmen, Heavies, Minions & Muscle: Narrative Dynamics of the Hired Goon
Behind every great villain is… frankly, well, often there’s another bigger villain pulling the strings. But the truth is, while we often celebrate “the big bad” some of the most interesting villainy comes from the lieutenants that the hero meets along the way to facing the big bad. Sometimes, these henchmen might even eclipse the…
e429. Out of this World: Alien Archetypes in Pop Culture
Aliens are one of the most enduring concepts in popular culture. It makes sense really. If we know there are other planets then it stands to reason that we might wonder what’s on them. There’s no shortage of books, films, TV shows and video games that explore this. So it’s kind of weird that we…
e426. Narrative & Technology (& Narrative) Syllabus Special
A few weeks ago, Mav was talking with friend of the show Joe Darowski about a new class Joe is teaching at Bringham Young University called “Technology & Narrative”. Joe asked if Mav had any suggestions for the course since it seemed up his alley. Well, as it turns out, Mav regularly teaches a course…