e352. The 2025 Box Office Fantasy Draft

Happy New Year. And with the new year comes one of our longest running traditions. It’s time for the annual box office draft! Every year, we play a game where all of the hosts compete to draft the best slate of films from the upcoming year. First things first, we have to catch up on…

e343. 2024 US Election Special

Well, here we are. There’s only one day from the time this episode drops until the US Election. It’s not really a secret how we fall on presidential politics on this show, so obviously we’re going to endorse Kamala Harris. However, we wanted to take a chance to just really talk about the state of…

e339. Why Do Smart People Like Trashy Reality Shows?

Do you watch reality shows? No really. You can admit it. We won’t tell. We want to let you in on a secret. We actually watch some. In fact, we watch a bunch of them. And like… we’re smart! in fact, being smart is sort of the entire point of this show. And yet, we…

e336. So, Why Pop Culture?

In all the years we’ve been doing this show we’ve worked under a very basic assumption: Everyone involved as a host, guest, or listener presumes that the pseudo academic discussion of popular culture (with drinking and swearing) is an important activity. We certainly feel that way, and chances are if you’re a regular listener you…

e329. Biographies, Blockbusters, And Biden! What a Week!

It’s been a hell of a week. Ok, let’s face it… it’s been a hell of a summer. This is a pop culture show and so we try to stay current on what’s happening, but the world has been moving so fast that we have been trouble keeping up, so on this week’s show, Mav…

e328. What’s the Deal with Presidential Assassinations?

It’s been a weird week of American politics. And we can’t really keep up. Yeah, we know something big happened this week (the whole shakeup of the democratic nomination) but we recorded this episode last week after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. It oddly feels like old news now. But the thing is, we’re…

e322. 4 Killer Out-of-the-Box X-men Movie Pitches for the MCU

It’s somehow been five years since Disney’s acquisition of Fox and the impending promise therein of having the X-men added into the MCU. While we have … let’s just say feelings… about the idea of a single global megacorportation essentially owning the movie landscape in the US, that is perhaps a show for another day.…

e321. The All-Time Best All-Time Best Albums List of All Time

A couple weeks ago, Apple Music released their list of the 100 Best Albums of all time. This isn’t really new. People do it all the time. In fact, Rolling Stone publishes a top 500 Albums of all time list fairly regularly. More than anything, these lists serve to create arguments amongst the readers about…

e320. Adrenaline and Affection: Exploring the Action Romance Genre

What do you do if you’re in couple that was designed on an 80s sitcom so you have extremely traditional gender roles of a feminine partner who loves lovey dovey chick flicks and a masculine partner violent ‘splosiony dude movies. You go to an action romance of course! So it turns out that we don’t…

e311. From Original to Ovation: Tracing the Threads of Musical Covers

Have you ever done that thing where you hear a song that’s a cover of another song you like, only to find out later that you have it backwards and the song you thought was the cover was the original and vice versa? That was actually one of the first arguments that Mav and his…