After “endless” years in development, the impossible has happened. The Sandman TV show is now streaming on Netflix. Of course we watched it! Remarkably, it appears to be a hit. The show is getting critical buzz as well as doing well with the fans. In fact, its arguably the most popular that the property has…
Category: Podcasts
e226. So… uh… what is a Dissertation? (and why would you do one?)
When we started our little psuedo-academic pop-culture analysis podcast with drinking and swearing, we had a few requirements. One of those was that the show would be smart and would celebrate academia but wouldn’t be overly hung up on it. We specifically didn’t want to be an academic show. And we didn’t want to be…
e225. Can We Talk About Climate Change?
If you line in the United States and follow political news you might have noticed something crazy last week. The Democrats kind of… did something! In fact, they did something potentially huge. On Thursday, July 28th, essentially out of nowhere, senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer announced that they had come to terms on what…
e224. A Filler Episode on Filler Episodes
One of the most important things about academia is being in conversation with other academics. That is to say that the way knowledge happens is one scholar says something and then another scholar builds on it and so on and so on. About a week ago, our friends over at the Protagonist Podcast did an…
e223. The Cultural Impact of Ms. Marvel on Disney+
This Wednesday saw the season finale of Ms. Marvel on Disney+, a show that we have been thoroughly enjoying. However, there’s been a weird bit of reaction to Ms. Marvel and the MCU in general as of late. While the critical reviews of Ms. Marvel are overwhelmingly positive (it currently sits at a 98% on…
e222. So, The World’s On Fire… Everything is Fine…
It’s been a while since we spent the show just talking about the state of the world. Mostly because… well, the state of the world kinda sucks right now… and we sort of didn’t want to deal with it. But this is a show about culture and the culture in the world right now, particularly…
e221. Exploring the World of Stranger Things
It’s always odd when we hit on one of those episode ideas where we feel like “obviously we’ve done like half a dozen shows on this topic over the years” and we stop and we look and it turns out that no, we’ve never really talked about it at all. Stranger Things is one of…
e220. Obi-Wan Kenobi & the Star Wars Legacy
This week saw the end of the Disney+ Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi, a show devoted to… actually it’s really hard to talk about. Arguably, one of the biggest problems with the Kenobi tv show is that it is arguably impossible to talk about without spoilers. But it’s over now… so we’re going to spoil…
e219. Why We Still Love the Jurassic Park Franchise
Somehow, in 2022, there’s a Jurassic Park movie at the top of the box office. Some twenty-nine years after the first film and 32 years after the release of the first novel, this series is still going strong. There are cartoons, video games, Lego sets and other toys. Even though Jurassic World Dominion is theoretically…
e218. Does the Bechdel Test Fail the Bechdel Test?
A funny thing happened last week. The internet got into a minor scuffle about whether Fire Island, a film about gay men, was sexist because it failed the Bechdel Test, by not having substantive roles for women… because it was a movie about gay men. For those who haven’t seen the film… which frankly, is…