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……

e183. How to Read All of the Marvels

If you’re a comic book fan, one of the things people often ask you is “I want to get into comics. Where do I start? What should I read?” This is especially true if you’re someone who reads comics for a living. It’s even more true this last decade or so of box office dominance…

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 —…

e180. So, You Say You Wanna Host a Pseudoacademic Pop Culture Analysis Podcast (with Drinking and Swearing)

Oddly enough, for a show that is devoted to talking about pop culture, one of the things we don’t talk about so much is podcasts. In a way, podcasting might very well be the epitome of pop culture in the current cultural moment… and also… we are one! So, on today’s very special meta episode,…

e179. ImproveReality?

Several weeks ago, we did a show on how stand-up comedy works in the middle of a pandemic. We talked about the transition that comedians went through to move a traditionally “in-person” art form to an entirely virtual environment. But what about other art forms? Lots of performances that at least seem to “require” a…

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,…

e177. Deconstructing the Chair

It’s been a while since we devoted a whole episode to one TV show. We’ve done it with a couple of the Marvel shows as well as stuff like Game of Thrones and Watchmen. We did a show on the Queen’s Gambit, and we loved Bridgerton enough to do TWO episodes on it. We talked…

e176. What Was Social Networking?

Instagram recently made an announcement that they were going to be shifting their social networking focus away from “photos”. This decision prompted a collective “WTF?” from the users who saw it. You see, Instagram claims that their primary business isn’t photos (despite having a whole motif from their logo to their name based around polaroid…

e175. Game Studies: Ludology vs. Narratology

We don’t talk about games as much as we should on this show, but arguably they’re one of the most enduring mediums of popular culture. They’re certainly one of the most popular. There’s much comparison of modern video games to movies. This makes sense… if we want people to consider games to be a legitimate…