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,…
Author: Wayne Wise
e174. The Arthurian Roundtable Roundtable
We live in an era of constant reboots and updates to well known IP franchises. People (including us) like to complain about it, but honestly, well known franchises do very well at the box office… otherwise people wouldn’t keep doing it. But of all the superheroes, transformers, terminators and star wars that keep coming back…
e173. War of the Readings
The Internet has one main purpose: arguing about things that don’t really matter. I’m sure you’ve seen this, people will fight over whether a movie was good or bad, what the significance of a particular scene of a TV show was, what was the hidden theme of a book, or perhaps most notably today… should…
Call for Comments: Podcasting Yankees in King Arthur’s Court
From Hannah: I can trace my first encounters with the King Arthur mythology to two (very different) Disney adaptations: The Sword and the Stone (1963) and A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995). That my interest in King Arthur began with these, er, interpretations of their source material (not to mention the earlier texts) is…
e170. What is Serialization? Tune in next week!
In today’s pop culture landscape, serialization is everything. TV, movies, novels, comics. Addict people to your ongoing series and hope they keep paying for another installment. Somehow, despite the fact that we are 170 episodes into a podcast SERIES about pop culture media, much of which is SERIALIZED, hosted by people who literally study SERIALIZATION…
e168. Time to Stop Wearing Underwear on the Outside
Have you ever noticed how infrequently superheroes in most superhero TV shows and movies actually wear their superhero costumes? It makes sense when you think about it. Superhero costumes are actually kind of silly: wearing underwear on the outside of spandex bodysuits? They’re based on pop culture tropes from nearly a century ago, which honestly…
e167. Considering the Fanboy Gaze
After last week’s primer on the male gaze, we wanted to spend some time thinking about the ways in which it could be complicated. What happens when we try to apply those concepts to characters not normally considered “male gazey”? What happens when a presumed male viewer is asked to identify with a female characters?…
Call For Comments: All of the Marvels
September 15, 2021
From Wayne: As a comics retailer for twenty-three years, one of the questions I was asked most frequently by new readers of Marvel Comics was, ‟Where do I begin?” It’s a fair question. With decades of history, thousands of characters, and tens of thousands of pages of intertwined stories and continuity it can be more…