e281. Saying Goodbye to Riverdale, the Best Show on Television

Riverdale has been a constant for this podcast since almost the very beginning. We devoted our sixth episode to talking about it. Calling it “the best show on television” has become a long running joke in the DNA of our show. However, last week, the CW aired the final episode of Riverdale, closing the door…

CFC: No Country For Old Men

From Wayne: I had been noticing a trend in a lot of recent media that hadn’t really fully formed in my mind until a couple of weeks ago when we recorded our Indiana Jones episode. Dial of Destiny was very much a movie about an old man, facing the ravages of time. Indy is o…

e272. Why Are So Many Superhero Adaptations So Very, Very, Bad?

There certainly are a lot of superheroes adaptations. In fact, some people would say there’s too many. And yet, they just keep coming and coming. In fact, one of them, The Flash, is bombing at the box office right now, all while Across Spider-verse is getting constant acclaim? What makes a superhero adaptation good and…

Call From Comments: Thoughts on Adapting Superheroes

(From Mav: This is a guest blog for an upcoming episode. We’re recording it soon, so give us your thoughts really quick! Take it away, John!) From John: Like most genres, adaptation has been the key to the superhero’s popularity and longevity, spreading across multiple media to capture as wide an audience as possible.  While the…

e271. Crossing The Spider-Verse

Have we done a show about multiversal superhero movies? It feels like it’s come up before… as though this were just a thing that we feel the need to talk about a lot. Oh well. Certainly we haven’t done this talking about Spider-man movies specifically? Or maybe we have! In any case, it’s time to…

e270. Why Do Fans Hate Things They Love?

If you ever talk to a big fan of Star Wars you’ll probably quickly find that they hate just about as much about Star Wars as they love. The same can be said of Star Trek fans, comic fans, Disney fans and frankly pretty much any fandom that you can imagine. As much of fandom…

e267. Ages of Superhero Movies!

On previous episodes we have discussed the ages of comic book superheroes and the ages of Disney movies, but recently we started questioning if perhaps movie superheroes followed different structures than comic book superheroes… even if that’s where they are adapted from. This seemed like the kind of thing that we might want to discuss…

e264. Do You Remember Nostalgia? Do You Want To?

We’ve talked about nostalgia on the show before. In fact, we did it all the way back on our second ever episode. Remember that? The thing is, when we usually talk about nostalgia, we’re usually talking about media that is aimed at tickling our appreciation for the familiar and giving us more of something we’ve…

e261. PCA2023 After Dark!

After two years being held virtually, and a cancelled conference in 2020, the Popular Culture Association returned to in person conferences for PCA2023. There were some good notes (Mav won a major award for his doctoral dissertation) and some bad notes (Mav ended up catching COVID during the trip) but along the way there was…

e258. A Primer on the Ages of Disney

A few weeks ago we did a show all about the “Ages of Comics” and why comics scholars and fans broke things down the way they do. It was a lot of fun and it got us and got us thinking about how it isn’t quite as intuitive or even universally nailed down as people…