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…

e308. 2024 Oscars Predictions!

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been exactly a year since our last Oscar show. It’s kind of funny how that works out! Years being annual and all of that! In any case, the Academy Awards are next weekend and we’re a show celebrating popular culture so it seems like now would be a…

e307. Madame Web, Morbius, and Movies of Obligation

It seems silly to ask if you’ve seen Madame Web. We can see the box office returns and we know that you probably didn’t. BUT, if you’re listening to our show you almost certainly have heard of Madame Web. And we’re absolutely sure that you’ve heard of Morbius. And you probably didn’t watch that either.…

e304. Barbie, the Oscars & Leavisism (What’s That Now?)

Last week the Oscar nominations came out and if you were hanging around the internet, you might have heard one story in particular… Barbie was snubbed. Everyone was talking about it… but was it? At the end of the day, it was nominated for eight awards and while Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie weren’t nominated…

e302. So, A.I. George Carlin… WHY?!?!?

We’ve done shows on AI before and our feelings on how it is being used in art and creative endeavors. We’ve tried to not just be reactionary and alarmist about it the way the cultural zeitgeist can tend to be. In fact, we’ve made it clear that there are some really good positive uses for…

e300. The 2024 Box Office Draft

Somehow we’ve been making this show for 300 episodes! We can’t believe it either! And what better way to celebrate that than doing one of our very favorite regular episodes? It’s time for our annual Box Office Draft! But first we have to deal with the results of last year’s box office game. So, on…

e294. Black Friday and Toy Riots!

It’s Black Friday week. There’s simply no way you don’t know that. Even if you’re not from the United States, where we just had Thanksgiving, if you’re on the Internet and listening to our show you are at least aware of the Black Friday sales that have just become pervasive throughout the world. But how…

e290. Figuring Out Fall & Analyzing Autumn

Fall may be the weirdest season for pop culture. Think about it, we have celebrations based around the winter holidays… not just Christmas… but the whole season is just full of movies and media celebrating the very concept of winter. Summer is much the same. We have summer blockbusters and beach reads. We have the…

e285. The Legend of Hercule Poirot

Some fandoms just claw their way into pop culture and steadily grow. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot may have never been the largest pop culture figure, but he’s been in the zeitgeist for more than 100 years. While not as well known as Sherlock Holmes, he’s arguably just as important to the mystery genre and arguably…