From Wayne: Wow, there’s a lot of fantasy on TV these days! Given my addiction to comics I wasn’t completely oblivious to fantasy as a genre. I’m sure I read something with knights and dragons in it when I was a kid. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons around tenth grade, but was oblivious to a lot of the source material beyond a general familiarity. But, like a lot of people, Lord of the Rings was really the first major fantasy series I read. I had seen the Rankin-Bass animated Hobbit on TV in 1977, but I’m not sure if I even knew it was based on a book at the the time. One of my high school teachers turned me onto the Tolkien books – thanks, Mr. Hunter! –...
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e228. Investigating the Style Cycle
We’ve all heard complaints that the current pop-culture fad du jour is getting repetitive. For instance, right now, it’s superhero movies. People are constantly complaining about “the MCU formula” where “all the movies look the same, they all have the same plot, and they all make all the same jokes.” Whenever some other company makes…
Call for Comments: She-Hulk is Sensational… you just don’t know it yet!
From Monica: I know….we’ve only had one episode air so far and usually over at VoxPop we wait on this kinda thing. We’re also usually big champions of “adaptations don’t need to hold a deep reverence for adhering to their source materials.” But this time around, I think we should do things a little backwards.…
e227. the Endless Culture of the Sandman
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…
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…
Call for Comments: Mr. Sandman Bring Me a Dream
From Mav: Well, today is the day that I don’t think I ever believed would happen. There’s a Sandman TV series premiering on Netflix. It’s not that I’m surprised that there COULD be a Sandman TV series or even that someone would want there to be a Sandman TV series. Quite the contrary, it seems…
Call For Comments: Styles and Cycles (or, a funny thing happened on the way to Ragnarok)
From Wayne: So the biggest complaint I’ve heard about Thor: Love and Thunder is that is too silly. It’s a Taika Watiti movie, so I’m not really surprised by this, but the complaint seems to center around the idea that this change in the basic character of Thor from the comics is a bridge too…
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…
Call for Comments: Dissertations, what the hell are they?
From Katya: You know us as the pseudo-academic podcast with drinking and swearing. We also lied about that (very openly, in all fairness.) All of us have Ivory Tower experiences through teaching, conferences, independent scholarship, and the occasional long-winded degree. I left academic research a few years ago and the transition from being surrounding by…
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…
Call For Comments: Fill-in and Bottle episodes
From Mav: I was recently listening to our friends over at the Protagonist Podcast and they gave us a shout out of sorts. They mentioned that a great idea for a podcast episode might be to spend a show talking about fill-in and bottle episodes. Then, Joe mentioned that maybe instead of doing the show…