The Internet has one main purpose: arguing about things that don’t really matter. I’m sure you’ve seen this, people will fight over whether a movie was good or bad, what the significance of a particular scene of a TV show was, what was the hidden theme of a book, or perhaps most notably today… should…
Category: Podcasts
e172. (More Drinking Than Swearing…) The Culture Of Alcohol
We’ve always had a tag on our show of “the weekly pseudo-academic roundtable with drinking and swearing” but honestly, it’s usually more of the latter. We might be drinking while we record the show, but it really has no bearing on the listener Honestly, the alcohol is usually incidental. Not this week! This week we…
e171. Summertime! Time to Kick Back and Unwind
Somehow, summertime media is special. Or at least, we seem to think it is. We have summertime blockbusters. We have summertime beach reads. We have summer TV specials and songs of the summer. It definitely FEELS like there is something that makes pop culture media “summery.” But we’re hard pressed to say exactly what it…
e170. What is Serialization? Tune in next week!
In today’s pop culture landscape, serialization is everything. TV, movies, novels, comics. Addict people to your ongoing series and hope they keep paying for another installment. Somehow, despite the fact that we are 170 episodes into a podcast SERIES about pop culture media, much of which is SERIALIZED, hosted by people who literally study SERIALIZATION…
e169. The Subtle & Sophisticated Highbrow Culture of The Fast & The Furious
Movies are back! After a year and a half of almost total dormancy, movies came back to the American box office, and filmgoers were welcome with the very sophisticated and cultured experience of F9: The Fast Saga, the latest installment of Fast & Furious franchise. Many are joking about it, but many others are just…
e168. Time to Stop Wearing Underwear on the Outside
Have you ever noticed how infrequently superheroes in most superhero TV shows and movies actually wear their superhero costumes? It makes sense when you think about it. Superhero costumes are actually kind of silly: wearing underwear on the outside of spandex bodysuits? They’re based on pop culture tropes from nearly a century ago, which honestly…
e167. Considering the Fanboy Gaze
After last week’s primer on the male gaze, we wanted to spend some time thinking about the ways in which it could be complicated. What happens when we try to apply those concepts to characters not normally considered “male gazey”? What happens when a presumed male viewer is asked to identify with a female characters?…
e165. PCA-2021 Recap
It’s the PCA-2021 recap show! In many ways, Popular Culture Association(PCA) national conference is responsible for this show. One of the things we’ve always strived for is to have the kind of wide variety of cultural scholarship that is found there as well as the open and inclusive vibe and ideology that the organization and…
e164. Why Do We Love Plot Twists?
On today’s episode we reveal that secretly this geeky little pop culture show was always actually about education and academic all along. Did you pick up on the clues we’ve been laying out for three years? Ok, maybe that one isn’t much of a plot twist, but what about the fact that one of Hannah…