e185. The Wicked, the Witches and the Witch-ish

Halloween season continues and so it’s time for another special episode. One of the most enduring pop culture figure is probably the witch. Witches appear through the ages in media. From the Weird Sisters of MacBeth to the good and bad witches of Oz to to Arthur Miller’s the Crucible, to Samantha of Bewitched to…

e184. Bram Stoker’s Dracula & the Draculi that Followed

It’s Halloween season and time to do some spooky theme shows! Of course, we’ve tackled monsters several times on the show before, but we’ve never devoted the whole show to just one monster. Until now! Dracula, is one of the most adapted novels of all time and with movies, TV shows, comics, video games and……

Call for Comments: Something Wicked This Way Comes…

From Hannah: October is here, meaning spooky season is here, meaning VoxPopcast once again bring you vaguely Halloween-related episodes! In October 2018, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix and the Charmed reboot on the CW premiered. The Magicians was still on air, and some streaming service really wanted me to start watching The Good…

Call for Comments: All the Draculas, er, All the Draculi

From Hannah: Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker) is a novel about reproduction. (And not just the reproduction of the heteronormative family/biological reproduction or the reproduction of the nation-state or even those disruptions through the infiltration of and reproduction of the vampire. Although, yes that, and so much more. But I’ll save that for the actual episode.)…

e182. I Fixed That for You, Now GTFO!

If the internet is good at anything, it’s dumping on asked for criticism at other people. Everyone does it. In fact, in a very real way, that’s pretty much what this whole show is. We’re cultural critics. This is cultural criticism. But is there a point when that criticism can go too far? Are there…

e181. Entertainment and Other Unions — IATSE Solidarity

Over the past year, our viewing consumption habits have changed a lot. We spent months indoors streaming everything — including new release films — largely through new media platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus. These new production models have drastically changed box office results, profit models, and production budgets that reverberate across the industry —…

Call For Comments: Let’s Talk About Film Unions

From Monica: When a movie ends, do you stay for the credits?  Not the cutscene at the end, Marvel.  But do you actually read the scroll of names that represent the hundreds of people who worked to bring that project to theaters? Or, if you tuned in at home, the nature of television flow means…

e178. Pop History vs. Public History

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,…

CFC: Pop vs. Public History — Why Do We Love Nonfiction?

From Monica: I want to talk about Seabiscuit.  Being an archetypal precocious horse girl, at age 9 Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit (1999) was the first nonfiction book I remember reading. It was the first time I was conscious of the popular weight attributed to the New York Times bestseller list, and for once my childhood interests…

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…