It’s Spooky Season! Halloween is right around the corner. And so we decided we wanted to celebrate by looking at one of the the most enduring tropes of popular culture. The Witch! But unlike many of the spooky Halloween standards, like vampires, ghosts, or goblins, witches have the distinction that they’re undoubtedly real. People have…
Category: Race and Class
e443. Revisiting Hillman: Bridging the Generations of A Different World
Thirty-nine years ago, NBC debuted the sitcom A Different World. Originally a spin-off of the The Cosby Show, following Lisa Bonet’s Denise Huxtable characters, the show slowly evolved into an ensemble program that chronicled life at the fictional HBCU Hillman University for six seasons. Two weeks ago, the show returned as a Netflix dramedy that…
e411. Is The Cannonball Run a Bad Movie? (Ok, we know it is… but does it have to be?)
So every once in a while we like to do an episode of the show called “is this a bad movie?” The funny part is that usually when we pick movie for that series, we know it’s a movie that many consider good, but that we feel like we have a chance to convince people…
e389. Boycotts and their Cultural Impact
So… America is in a weird place right now. Frankly, we could say that just about every week these days. But this last couple of weeks it’s been even more so than our (new) normal level of crazy. A couple of weeks ago, right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered while performing his college campus…
e384. From Vanderbilt Glam to Oscar’s Shades: The Gilded Age Deep Dive
In 2022, a show premiered on HBO that was perhaps tailor made for us. The Gilded Age was a 1880s period drama from the creators of Downton Abbey with sexual and gender politics, racial dynamics and a treatise on the invention of class dynamics, all thrown together with a collection of Broadway’s finest actors in…
Call For Comments: Get Nominally Woke Have Poorly Defined Return on Financial Investment
From Mav: We’ve talked before about the ways in which people complaining that media is “too woke now” are often just not aware that the media they’ve always loved always has been. A few years back I remember when there was an uproar amongst comic fans when Nick Spencer, then writer of Captain America comics…
e358. Monster Crushes: Infatuation with the Unknown
Happy Valentines Day! Yes, we know we’re a few days late, but the show comes out on Mondays, and this was the closest chance we got, so what do you want from us. Anyway, this Valentines Day we want to return to one of our most frequent weird topics, Monster Sex! Well… or perhaps more…
e324. Unpacking Bridgerton Season 3: Penelope, Queerness, and Fandom Reactions
It’s that time again… we’ve had another year of Bridgerton and of course we had to analyze it. Think about it, it’s a show about British regency society. In some ways this might be the most cultured and sophisticated thing we ever do. Also, there’s a lot of sex. On this week’s episode of VoxPopcast,…
e313. PCA2024: Adapting X-Men
On this week’s special epsiode we take one last look at this year’s Popular Culture Association conference in Chicago with a look at papers from one of the panels in the Comics Studies group. Mav is joined by Joseph and John Darowski who will be appearing with him in the upcoming book Adapting X-men from…