e98. Experience vs. Consumer Culture

We have a weird question for you. Which would you rather have a free Ferrari or an all expenses paid, one month trip around the world staying in luxury hotels? Ok, what about this one? Would you rather have every 5000 albums or front row tickets to see your favorite band perform at a sold…

Call for Comments: Content Ratings and Parental Ratings Guides

From Mav: I’ve gotten into a couple conversations recently with different people about movie ratings. Not the kind of whether they’re good and bad… stars… thumbs up and down and all that. I mean MPAA ratings: G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17… or at least here in the United States, that’s what they are. Curiously, it…

e97. Fictional & Celebrity Crushes

Happy (Belated) Valentines Day! You know what that means? It means time to do a “very special episode” where we somehow try to tie in the holiday concept to the kinds of stuff we normally do. Academic cultural analysis of popular culture… but with beer! Last year we talked about the “shipping” and the secret…

Call for Comments: Fictional and Celebrity Crushes

From Mav: Last year we did a special Valentine’s Day show about romantic shipping in our favorite fictional universes. It was so great celebrating Valentine’s Day by explaining to everyone in final decisive detail exactly how I am 100% positive that Hermoine and Harry totally absolutely and without a doubt totally “did it” behind the…

Call For Comments: Mask Theory

From Mav: Back when we started the podcast we made a list of stuff we thought we might want to talk about one day. One of the things that was on both my list and Wayne’s was doing a show on “mask theory.” It’s a topic that we both have an interest in because of……

e92: 2010s Decade in Review

Somehow it’s 2020. I don’t get how that happened. 2020 isn’t a year… 2020 is what you make up if you’re setting some science fiction story in the future and you’re too lazy to pick an interesting sound year like 2027 or something. But somehow it actually is 2020, which means the start of a…

e90. 30 Good Things You Missed!!! 2019 Year in Review

Happy New Year! It’s the end of 2019, and that means it’s time for all good podcasts to do a year in review episode. The thing about a show focused on pop culture like ours is that we have already devoted episodes to all of the biggest pop culture events of the year. We know…

Call For Comments: So, what did we miss?

It’s the end of the year. And now is the time when all good podcasts start compiling their year in review “Best of” episodes. We wanted to do something a little different here at VoxPopcast. Since we talk about pop culture every week, rather than just say what our favorite things are, we’d like to…

e87. Sentimentalism: Punching Them in the Feels

As we move toward the holiday season, there is one thing for certain that we will see: more and more cheesy Christmas movies. You know the type… they’re on Lifetime, Hallmark Channel, and Netflix. Romantic stories about someone giving something up but then discovering the true meaning of Christmas is family or love or something……

e85. Digital Acting (and Deep Fakery)

(Repost! This is a repost of an earlier posted blog that was lost in a server crash and upgrade) We live in the future. We live in a world where we carry supercomputers in our pocket, we have cars that talk, and we can bring long dead actors back to life to star in movies.…