e346: Over the Rainbow: Examining Wicked, Oz, and their Cultural Impact

Did you know there was a movie adaptation of the film Wicked released this week? If not then we assume you must not see any commercials or advertisements in your life ever, because the marketing is PERSISTENT. And by all accounts it’s doing fairly well at the box office. That’s to be expected; the play…

Call for Comments: Wicked and the Wonderful (?) World of OZ

From Hannah: In our next show, we’re tackling populism, propaganda, and resistance — through Wicked (the film, the musical, the book series) and its source material the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. The world of Oz has always been political (especially in terms of American politics) since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first appeared…

e240. Reality Twitter? (and Politics)

Running a pop culture podcast isn’t easy. One of the biggest problems is that popular culture is a moving target. There’s just… always stuff happening! We can’t really get to it all. Every once in a while rather than pick a stable topic, we like to get together and just do a sort of free…

e236. Is The Rocky Horror Picture Show a Bad Movie?

If you’ve been following the show the last several weeks then you know we’ve started a series where we have been looking at some of our favorite controversial movies and trying to convince you of the value of them as great films. It’s also October, so we wanted to get some Halloween content in for…

e213. Everything Everywhere in the Multiverse of VoxPopcast

If you follow the American movie landscape then you probably know that this weekend the box office has been set on fire by Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. You might also we aware that the last few weeks, we another multiverse movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, has been making huge waves as…

Call for Comments: Unintentional Group Synchrony and the Madness of Crowds

From Wayne: I’ve had several conversations with people about their experience in crowds at various events. For me this was primarily a function of my experience at concerts. I can verily easily just get caught up in the music and the moment, losing a certain amount of a sense of self and ‟becoming one with…

e195. 34 Great Things You Missed in 2021!

2021 is over! It’s hard to believe that because in a lot of ways it still feels like it’s 2020. But somehow, a whole year went by nonetheless. And, since the year is done, it’s time that we do what every podcast does… a year in review! But, if you’ve been listening the last couple…

e185. The Wicked, the Witches and the Witch-ish

Halloween season continues and so it’s time for another special episode. One of the most enduring pop culture figure is probably the witch. Witches appear through the ages in media. From the Weird Sisters of MacBeth to the good and bad witches of Oz to to Arthur Miller’s the Crucible, to Samantha of Bewitched to…

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……

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 —…